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Updated: September 2, 2025
I never saw a bride make such a hearty meal, nor a maid drink so deep of mead." The prudent handmaid sat near, and she found answer to the Giant's words: "Eight nights has Freyja eaten nothing, so eager was she to be in Jötunheim." He looked under the veil, he longed to kiss the bride, but he started back the length of the hall: "Why are Freyja's eyes so terrible?
But they, too, forgot me, and said that it was Freyja who had taught them. Then I showed men how to read the mystic runes aright, and how to make the sweet beverage of poetry, that charms all hearts, and enlightens the world. But they say now that they had these gifts from Odin.
Fire seems to burn from her eyes." The prudent handmaid sat near, and she found answer to the Giant's speech: "Eight nights has Freyja had no sleep, so eager was she to be in Jötunheim." In came the Giants' wretched sister, she dared to ask for a bridal gift: "Take from thine arms the red rings, if thou wouldst gain my love, my love and all my favour."
Like her father and brother, she comes into connexion with the giants; she is the beautiful Goddess, and coveted by them. Sir G.W. Dasent notices in the folk-tales the eagerness of trolls and giants to learn the details of the agricultural processes, and this is probably the clue to the desire of the Frost-Giants in the Edda for the possession of Freyja.
So Loki borrowed the falcon-plumage of Freyja, the goddess of love, and with it flew to the country of the giants. When he reached Old Winter's castle, he found the good dame Idun shut up in the prison-tower, and bound with fetters of ice; but the giant himself was on the frozen sea, herding old Hymer's cows.
A very short investigation will serve to identify the two ancient goddesses Frigga and Freyja with all these leaders of a midnight host. Just as Odin was banished from day to darkness, so the two great heathen goddesses, fused into one 'uncanny' shape, were supposed to ride the air at night.
Idunn, the wife of Bragi, and a purely Norse creation, seems to be a double of Freyja; she, too, according to Snorri, is carried away by the giants and rescued by Loki. The golden apples which she is to keep till Ragnarök remind us of those which Frey offered to Gerd; and the gift of eternal youth, of which they are the symbols, would be appropriate enough to Freyja as an agricultural deity.
Most curious of all is the way in which all these traditions from different countries insist on the third part of the earth, the third child born, the third soul as belonging to the 'good lady', who leads the revel; for this right of a third, or even of a half, was one which Freyja possessed. 'But Freyja is most famous of the Asynjor.
According to the old notion, those who were not Odin's guests went either to Thor's house, who had all the thralls, or to Freyja, who even claimed a third part of the slain on every battle-field with Odin, or to Hel, the cold comfortless goddess already mentioned, who was still no tormentor, though she ruled over nine worlds, and though her walls were high, and her bolts and bars huge; traits which come out in 'the Master-Smith', No. xvi, when the Devil, who here assumes Hel's place, orders the watch to go back and lock up all the nine locks on the gates of Hell a lock for each of the goddesses nine worlds and to put a padlock on besides.
They were the deities, probably agricultural, of an earlier age, whose adoption by the later Northmen was explained by the story of the compact between Aesir and Vanir. Then their places were usurped by Frey and Freyja, who were possibly created out of epithets originally applied to the older pair; Njörd was retained with lessened importance, Nerthus passed out altogether.
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