The most beautiful piece of jewellery in the world belongs to the most beautiful of the goddesses: Brísingamen, the golden necklace of Freyja. No other treasure binds beauty, desire and power so closely – and none has a story of so many layers.
The name Brísingamen is made up of men (“neck-ornament, necklace”) and brísingr – perhaps “the flaming, the glowing”, or the name of the dwarf kin of the Brísingar. Literally, then: “the neck-ornament of the Brísingar” or “the flaming adornment”. In poetry it is the very image of Freyja’s radiant beauty.
The fullest account stands in the Sörla þáttr (a late tale of the Flateyjarbók). According to it, Freyja saw a necklace of incomparable beauty being made by four dwarves – Alfrigg, Dvalinn, Berlingr and Grér. She offered gold and silver, but the dwarves wanted a different price: that Freyja spend one night with each of them. And so she won Brísingamen. This late, moralising Christian version deliberately paints the heathen goddess in a dubious light – a point worth bearing in mind as one reads.
Brísingamen is the most famous jewel of the goddess Freyja – a precious necklace of incomparable radiance, symbol of her beauty and her power. No piece of jewellery of Norse mythology is better known.
According to tradition four dwarves created the Brísingamen. Freyja won it – so the Sörla þáttr tells – at a high price. The jewel is thus a work of the best craftsmen of the nine worlds, worthy of a goddess.
Loki, the eternal troublemaker, stole the Brísingamen. Heimdall confronted him – in a story in which both turned into seals and fought over the jewel. Thus the necklace is also the occasion of one of the most peculiar duels of the gods.
Brísingamen stands for beauty, desire and the value of precious craft. For a house that makes jewellery and engraving it is a fine symbol – the jewel that took the breath even of gods.
Like almost every treasure, Brísingamen too draws the envy of Loki. In one tradition Loki steals the necklace; the watchman Heimdall confronts him. The two turn into seals and fight over the treasure on a cliff in the sea, until Heimdall wins it back for the goddess. This image – two gods as seals, wrestling over a piece of gold – is one of the most idiosyncratic of the whole mythology, and is already named by the skald Úlfr Uggason in the Húsdrápa (10th c.).
The necklace makes a cheerful appearance in the Þrymskviða: when Thor disguises himself as Freyja to fetch back his stolen hammer from the giant Þrym, Brísingamen is put on him too – part of the bridal costume. That of all beings the bearded thunder-god should be adorned with Freyja’s famous necklace is one of the funniest moments of the Edda.
All the treasures of the Edda in overview · Freyja · Heimdall · Loki · Draupnir.
Sörla þáttr (Flateyjarbók, 14th c.: acquisition of the necklace). Poetic Edda: Þrymskviða (bridal journey). Úlfr Uggason, Húsdrápa (10th c.: Heimdall and Loki as seals). Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, c. 1220. English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).
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