Nanna

Nanna's myth is almost entirely one scene, and it is devastating: at Baldr's funeral, as his body was carried to the ship Hringhorni, her heart burst with grief and she was laid on the pyre beside her husband. The gentlest god and his wife left the world on one fire.

When Hermóðr rode to Hel to ransom Baldr, he found the couple seated together in the hall of the dead — death did not part them, it just relocated them. Nanna sent gifts back with the messenger: a linen robe for Frigg, a gold ring for Fulla. In Saxo's Latin telling she is instead a human princess fought over by Balderus and Høtherus — the same name, an utterly different woman.

The funeral on Hringhorni

To understand Nanna's scene, it helps to see the whole terrible pageant around it. Baldr, the shining god, lies dead of a mistletoe dart thrown by his blind brother Höðr and aimed by Loki. The gods carry his body to his ship Hringhorni, "greatest of all ships" — and cannot launch it; they must send for the giantess Hyrrokkin, who arrives riding a wolf bridled with vipers and shoves the ship out so hard that fire springs from the rollers and the earth shakes.

Then, says Snorri in Gylfaginning: when Baldr's body was borne out onto the ship, "his wife Nanna, daughter of Nep, saw it, and her heart burst with grief, and she died. She was carried onto the pyre, and fire was put to it." Thor hallowed the flames with Mjölnir; Odin laid the ring Draupnir on the fire and whispered something in his dead son's ear that no one has ever learned. All the worlds attended — Æsir, valkyries, elves, dwarves, even frost-giants. And in the middle of that cosmic assembly is one entirely human death: a wife who sees her husband's body carried past and simply does not survive the sight. The sources give her no speech, no lament. Her heart "burst with grief," and that is her whole biography, and it is enough.

The gifts sent back from Hel

Snorri gives Nanna one more scene, and it may be the stranger of the two. When Hermóðr made his nine-night ride to Hel to ransom Baldr, he found his brother sitting in the high seat of the hall of the dead — with Nanna beside him. Death had not parted the couple; it had merely changed their address. Hermóðr stayed the night, and when he rode back with Hel's conditional answer, he carried gifts: Baldr sent the ring Draupnir back to Odin, returning what had been laid on the pyre; and Nanna sent Frigg a linen robe "and more gifts besides," and to Fulla a gold finger-ring.

It is a tiny detail with a long reach. The dead sending presents to the living reverses the whole logic of grave-goods — the funeral had loaded the pyre with treasures for the dead, and the dead courteously reciprocate. Nanna's choice of recipients is a map of the goddesses' inner circle: Frigg, the grieving mother-in-law; Fulla, Frigg's confidante, whose gold ring from a dead woman the sources remember as a mark of her rank. In her one scene among the dead, Nanna behaves with perfect, heartbreaking normality: settled in, keeping house, sending things home.

Who was Nanna's family?

Snorri calls her Nanna Nepsdóttir — daughter of Nep, of whom nothing else is known; he appears in a list of Odin's sons in some manuscripts, but the name is otherwise a blank. Her son is Forseti, the god of justice whose hall settles every dispute — the child of the mythology's gentlest marriage becoming its judge. Etymologists disagree about her name: some derive it from nenna, "to dare or strive," others see an old nursery word for "mother." A connection with the Mesopotamian Nanna/Inanna, sometimes met in older books, is rejected by modern scholarship — the resemblance is coincidence.

Nanna in Saxo Grammaticus

The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, writing his Gesta Danorum around 1200, tells a version of the Baldr story in which almost everything is transformed. His Nanna is a human princess, daughter of King Gevarus, and she is not Balderus's wife but the object of a war between rivals: the demigod Balderus, son of Othinus, burns with desire for her after seeing her bathe, while the human hero Høtherus — her foster-brother — loves her and wins her. Nanna herself, given actual dialogue in Saxo as she never is in the Eddas, rejects Balderus with cool good sense: a mortal woman and a demigod make a poor match, she argues, for such unions break. Wars follow; Balderus is eventually killed by Høtherus with a magic sword. Whether Saxo preserves an older variant, a Danish heroic reworking, or his own learned invention is debated — but his Nanna, the woman who chooses, is a fascinating shadow of the Eddic Nanna, the woman who grieves.

In the primary sources

Nanna appears in the Prose Edda (Gylfaginning: the funeral, and the scene in Hel; Skáldskaparmál lists her among the Ásynjur and in kennings for Baldr), and at length in Book III of Saxo's Gesta Danorum in her transformed role. In the Poetic Edda she is nearly invisible: Hyndluljóð names a Nanna as daughter of Nökkvi in a genealogy (possibly a different figure), and she is conspicuously absent from Völuspá's account of Baldr's death. The tenth-century skaldic poem Húsdrápa, describing the funeral carved on Icelandic wall-panels, confirms the scene's antiquity. She has no known cult or place-names.

Legacy

Nanna's afterlife is quiet, like her. Her name remains a common female name across Scandinavia, especially in Denmark. In the history of scholarship she has served as a touchstone for the debate about how much Saxo can be trusted as a source for genuine pagan myth. And in retellings of the Baldr story from the Romantics onward, her death of grief — the only such death in Norse mythology — is regularly the moment that undoes readers, the small human catastrophe inside the cosmic one.