Freyr

Freyr ("Lord") rules over rain, sunshine, and the fruitfulness of the earth, and "it is good to call on him for peace and plenty." The Swedish royal house of the Ynglings claimed descent from him as Yngvi-Freyr, and his great temple at Uppsala was one of the last strongholds of the old religion.

His treasures are the ship Skíðblaðnir, which always finds fair wind and folds up like cloth, and the gold-bristled boar Gullinbursti. His great myth is a love story with a cost: spying the giantess Gerðr from Odin's high seat, he fell into lovesickness and sent his servant Skírnir to woo her — paying with his sword, which fought by itself. At Ragnarök, weaponless, he falls to the fire-giant Surtr.

Lord of peace and plenty

Freyr is the son of the sea-god Njörðr and twin brother of Freyja, and like them he came to Asgard from the Vanir as a hostage sealing the peace after the Æsir–Vanir war. Snorri, in Gylfaginning, gives him the grandest possible billing: Freyr is the most glorious of the Æsir; he rules over rain and the shining of the sun, and thereby the produce of the earth, and it is good to call on him for peaceful seasons and prosperity — he also governs the wealth of men. In skaldic verse he is "god of the world" (veraldar goð), a title no other deity carries. Where Odin rules the choosing of the slain and Thor the defence of the borders, Freyr rules the reason anyone bothers: the harvest, the herd, the good year, the peace in which to enjoy them.

Grímnismál records that the gods gave him Álfheimr, home of the elves, as a tooth-gift — the present given an infant when its first tooth comes in. What lordship over the elves meant is never explained; it is one of the mythology's dangling threads, though the elves' own links to fertility and the ancestral dead suit him. His servants Skírnir, Byggvir, and Beyla attend him — Byggvir and Beyla, "Barley" and (perhaps) "Bee" or "Cow," a god of plenty's fitting household.

The wooing of Gerðr

Freyr's one full-length myth, told in the Eddic poem Skírnismál and retold by Snorri, begins with a transgression: Freyr climbs into Hliðskjálf, Odin's high seat, from which all worlds are seen. Looking north into Jötunheimr, he sees a woman walk from her father's hall to her bower, and as she raises her arms, air and sea shine with the light of them. She is Gerðr, daughter of the giant Gymir. Freyr walks away sick with a love so heavy he will not speak, sleep, or drink; the sorrow, Snorri notes drily, was his punishment for sitting in the holy seat.

His page Skírnir ("Shining") agrees to make the journey and names his price: Freyr's sword, the best of weapons, which fights by itself if the one who holds it is wise. Freyr hands it over — the god of the world's peace disarming himself for desire. What follows in Skírnismál is startling: Gerðr refuses gold, refuses eleven apples, refuses the ring Draupnir, and yields only when Skírnir unsheathes threats — the sword, and then a curse of runes promising her madness, monstrous marriage, and lifelong barren misery. She consents to meet Freyr after nine nights in the grove Barri. The poem ends not with the meeting but with Freyr's groan that a single night is long, and three unbearable. Whether the poem celebrates the sun-god warming the frozen earth into spring, as older scholarship liked to read it, or stares unblinking at coercion dressed as courtship, it is the most disturbing love story in the Eddas — and it costs Freyr the sword he will die for lacking. Their son, in the Yngling tradition, is Fjölnir, first of the line of Swedish kings.

Why did Freyr give away his sword?

Because the myth demands that the god of peace be weaponless, and love is the mechanism the poets chose. Lokasenna twists the knife: Loki sneers that Freyr bought Gymir's daughter with gold and gave away his sword, "and when Muspell's sons ride over Myrkviðr, you'll not know, wretch, what you'll fight with." Even without it Freyr is fearsome — Snorri records that he killed the giant Beli with a stag's antler, and says he could have slain him with his fist — but the last battle allows no substitutions. The sword's fate is never told; some readers, ancient and modern, have wondered whether the flaming blade Surtr carries out of Muspelheim is the same weapon come back around, but no source says so.

The god of Uppsala

Outside the Eddas, Freyr was one of the most worshipped gods of the North. Adam of Bremen, writing in the 1070s, describes the great temple at Uppsala with three idols: Thor enthroned in the middle, Wodan armed on one side, and "Fricco" — Freyr — on the other, ordained with an immense phallus, receiving sacrifice for weddings and fertility. Ynglinga saga in Heimskringla makes him a euhemerised king of the Swedes under the name Yngvi, whose reign brought such peace and good seasons — the "peace of Fróði" — that when he died his men hid his death, sealed him in a mound, and kept paying taxes in through three openings for three years, and the good years held. The Ynglings, ancestors of Norway's kings, counted themselves his seed. Sacred horses were kept for him at his sanctuaries (the saga of Hrafnkell, "Freyr's priest," turns on one), the boar was his animal, and the first-listed settler-oaths of Iceland were sworn by Freyr, Njörðr and "the almighty god." Place-names — Frösön, Frøysland, Frøyshov — carpet Scandinavia.

At Ragnarök

When Surtr rides from the south with fire, Freyr meets him on the plain of Vígríðr. Völuspá calls Freyr "Beli's bane" in that hour and gives the outcome without ceremony: he falls to Surtr's blade. Snorri adds the epitaph the whole myth has been building toward — Freyr fights hard, but dies because he lacks the good sword he gave to Skírnir for Gerðr's sake. The god of the world falls with the world, disarmed by his own longing, and the fire that takes him takes everything.

In the primary sources

Skírnismál is his poem; Lokasenna shows him at the feast, praised even by Loki's enemies as "best of all bold riders" who makes no girl or man's wife weep, and needled for the sword; Völuspá gives his death. Gylfaginning in the Prose Edda carries his portrait, treasures, wooing, and fall, and Skáldskaparmál explains how the dwarves made Gullinbursti and Skíðblaðnir among the six great treasures. Heimskringla's Ynglinga saga gives the euhemerised king; Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis describes his Uppsala cult; and Gesta Danorum's Saxo mentions his sacrifices at Uppsala with distaste.

Legacy

Freyr's cult wrote itself into the map of Scandinavia more densely than almost any god's, and into dynasties: Yngvi-Freyr heads the Yngling genealogy from which Norwegian and Swedish kings traced descent, and the name-element Ing- (Ingvar, Ingrid, Ingibjörg) carries his older name Yngvi/Ing through a thousand years of Scandinavian christenings. The golden boar, the folded ship, and the god who traded his sword for a summer meeting in a grove remain among the most evocative images the North left behind.