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Scandinavian bards, story-tellers and learned men have spoken less of the goddesses than of the gods. This is perhaps because Teutonic literature was made more for men than women. It was above all at the end of banquets, when warriors reposed after battle or distant campaigns, that the bards recited their poems filled with mythological allusions. The wives of the gods remain practically always in the background. The number of goddesses seems to have been great enough, but of many of them we know scarcely more than the name. Their cult, moreover, was rarely practiced by the majority of the Germanic peoples. Only one seems to have been revered by all the tribes: she who in old German was called Frija.

Indeed the very name Frija is only a former adjective, raised little by little to the dignity of a proper name. It meant the ‘well-beloved’, or ‘spouse’. This meaning was undoubtedly known to the Romans since they identified Frija with Venus.

The Scandinavians show Frigg taking part in various adventures. The wife of Wotan, she shared his wisdom and foresight. It would seem that she did not always agree in all matters with her husband. Sometimes she protected warriors whom Wotan tried to harm; and in the resulting quarrels it was not always she who got the worst of it. Her stratagems often succeeded in defeating Wotan’s will.

She protected men’s marriage and made them fruitful. But she personally did not always remain faithful to her own marriage vows, and from time to time, through coquetry or self-interest, she bestowed her favors on various gods, not to mention personages of inferior rank.

Frigg is often confused with Frija whose origin is, however, different, in spite of the similarity of their names. Originally Frija did not belong to the race of the Aesir but to that of their rivals, the Vanir. She was the sister of the god Frey and certain Norwegian and Icelandic writers have taken great care to distinguish her from Frigg. But in many cases she was completely confused with Frigg and like her is described as Wotan’s wife. In the sky she had a rich dwelling, called Folkvang. There she received deceased heroes and assigned them seats in her great banqueting hall. For every time she accompanied Wotan to a field of battle she had the right to bring back to her palace half the warriors who had fallen, weapon in hand. She was in fact, the first of the Valkyries and their supreme commander. Sometimes it even happened that in Valhalla she would pour out the beer and the mead for Wotan’s warriors, like an ordinary Valkyrie.

Like Frigg, Freyja loved ornaments and jewelry. Not far from her palace, in a grotto which served as their workshop, lived four dwarfs, celebrated for their skill in workshop, lived four dwarfs, celebrated for their skills in working metal. One day when she was visiting them she noticed on their table a marvelous golden necklace which they were on the point of finishing. She was seized with an irresistible desire to possess it and offered the dwarfs gold, silver and other precious objects. But the dwarfs, lords of all metals buried in the earth, merely laughed at her offer. To obtain the trinket, they said, she must pay a quite different price: in brief, she must pass one night with each of them. The goddess did not hesitate and did as the dwarfs desired. The necklace then belonged to her.

But the treacherous Loki lost no time in reporting to Wotan what had occurred. Wotan ordered him to steal the necklace so ill-acquired. Loki then proceeded towards Freyja’s bed-chamber, but the door was locked. He turned himself into a fly and buzzed around for some time seeking a crack through which he could slip. Finally in the roof he perceived a hole, the size of the eye of a needle. By this hole he entered the bed-chamber. Freyja, wearing the necklace, was asleep, but she was lying in such a position that it was impossible to reach the clasp. Loki changed himself from a fly into a flea and bit the goddess on the cheek. Freyja stirred in her sleep and turned over so that Loki was finally able to steal the necklace. He then unlatched the door and walked calmly away. When she woke up Freyja discovered the theft and easily guessed who had committed it. She went to Wotan and demanded that he return her property. Wotan reproached her bitterly for the manner in which she had obtained it and only consented to give her back the necklace on strict conditions.

To obtain his pardon Wotan insisted that Freyja should provoke a war between two kings, each of whom commanded twenty kings less powerful than himself. At nightfall all the heroes who had fallen in the battle must be resuscitated in order to renew the struggle on the following day. Freyja gave her promise to arrange this and regained possession of her necklace.

Freyja was so lovely that often the giants tried to obtain her favors freely or by force. We have already seen how the giant Thrym demanded her from Loki as the price of returning Thor’s hammer. The following story was also told: a giant promised to build the gods a magnificent palace in the course of a single winter. The only condition he imposed was that they give him Freyja for a wife and, into the bargain, present him with the sun and moon. The gods agreed. He would have finished the palace just in time had not Loki intervened. Loki turned himself into a mare and in this guise lured away the stallion on which the giant relied for transport of his building materials. Freyja was thus narrowly saved from the humiliating fate which awaited her.

It is sometimes difficult to tell the Germanic goddesses apart. Freyja, who is often confused with Frigg, is also frequently identified with Gefjon, ‘the Giver’. Gefjon was a fertility goddess who was particularly honored in the island of Seeland. A legend explains the origin of the cult which she enjoyed on this island. In olden days there reigned over the land which to-day is called Sweden a king named Gylfi.’ An unknown woman who wandered about the country gave the king such pleasure by magic arts of which she knew the secrets that he offered to give her as much land as she could mark out in the space of a day and night with a plough drawn by four bullocks. Now this unknown woman was the goddess Gefjon and she had learned her magic from the Vanir. The four bullocks with which she harnessed the plough were in reality her four sons whom she had had by a giant who lived far off in the icy regions of the North. Drawn by these giant bullocks the plough-share dug so deeply into the ground that it wore away the entire crust of the earth. The bullocks dragged the immense amount of earth thus detached from its native habitat as far as the sea, where, filling in the sea-bottom, it became the island of Shetland. In the place where Gefjons bullocks had torn away the soil there remained a vast stretch of water, to-day known in Sweden as Lake Malar.

The Scandinavian poets often cite the names of the wives of the great gods, but they rarely make them the chief characters in their poems. These are — apart from Freyja — Sif, the wife of Thor; Idun, the wife of Bragi; Skadi, the wife of Njord; Gerda, the wife of Frey.

The ancestors of the Germans revered, in addition to Frija, the goddess Nerthus of whom Tacitus gives a few details. She was perhaps the personified Earth or a fertility goddess. Her festival was celebrated in the spring. On an island in the Ocean a grove was sacred to her; here was preserved her chariot which only the priest could approach. By mysterious signs the priest could recognize the moment when the goddess was present in her sanctuary. Oxen were then hitched to her chariot and, with solemn ritual, the invisible goddess was carried around the whole island. When Nerthus was in this way present in the midst of her people all swords remained in their scabbards and no one dared to break the peace. It continued thus until the moment when the priest, advised that the goddess no longer cared to sojourn among men, reconducted her to her sanctuary. The chariot, the veils which adorned it and the goddess herself were then plunged into the sea water to purify them. Immediately afterwards the slaves who had taken part in the ceremony of purification were drowned; for no living person, the priest excepted, must be able to boast that he had penetrated the mysteries of the sanctuary.

Now Nerthus, who among the Germans was of the feminine sex, became among the Scandinavians a masculine divinity; namely, Njord. It is possible that the deity who preceded both Nerthus and Njord was considered among the primitive Germanic tribes as possessing both sexes. The ancient divinity, whom we can only glimpse, probably personified fecundity.

As well as the goddess who inhabited the luminous regions of the sky, there was the goddess of the underworld. Like the Greeks and the Romans the Germanic peoples believed in the existence of a subterranean world where the souls of the dead dwelt after separation from their bodies. They called it by a word which corresponds to the modern German Holle and to which they early gave the sense of the ‘infernal regions’. The Teutons, however, at least before their conversion to Christianity, did not consider this underworld to be a place of punishment; it was simply the residence of those who had ceased to live.

We do not know whether the Germans personified the underworld in the form of a god or goddess. But we do know that the Scandinavians accomplished the personification. Their word Hel, which at first merely meant the place where the dead went, finally became the name of a goddess who was considered to be the sovereign of the underworld.

Legends about the goddess Hel are few. They date from a time when the northern countries were already converted and bear the evident imprint of Christianity. As Lucifer, for the Christians, was inseperable from Hell and Loki was often identified with Lucifer, it was said that Hel was the daughter of Loki. The tendency was to make her the companion of fearful monsters. She was said to have been brought up in the land of the giants with the wolf Fenrir and the great serpent of Midgard. She was even made the sister of these evil demons. It was told that in her subterranean kingdom she offered asylum to the monster Nidhogg who night and day gnawed at the roots of the ash tree Yggdrasil. She was not supposed to be, however, a divinity of perverse or malevolent character. It was Wotan himself who had assigned her to Niflheim; he gave her power over nine different worlds so that she could fix in each the place of her abode. About her appearance there was something strange and even terrifying. Her head hung forward. Half of her face was like that of a human being, but the other half was totally black. In the depths of Niflheim she possessed a vast palace where she received, each according to his rank, the heroes and the gods who descended into her kingdom. There life was not very different from that led in the great houses of the Scandinavian chieftains. It was a sort of underground replica of Wotan’s celestial palace, Valhalla. When the god Baldur, after being killed by Hod, appeared before the goddess of the underworld the great reception hall was resplendent with gold, and servants hastened to put cups of bright mead on the other tables for Baldur and his retinue.

Hel herself had scarcely any other role except to preside at these receptions. She was much more the creation of erudite poets than the object of a feminine popular cult. She never took part in the lives of the other gods and, queen of the shadows, remained herself a vague and shadowy figure.

From the book “Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology”, via Ron McVan