Freyja is far more than the „Norse goddess of love" she is often reduced to. She is a war-mistress, a master of magic and the most desired figure in all the mythology – and she takes the half of the glorious dead, before Odin.
Freyja („Lady") comes from the Vanir, the divine kin of fertility, and joined the Æsir as a hostage after the war of the gods. Daughter of the sea-god Njörðr, sister of Freyr, she dwells in the hall Sessrúmnir on the field Fólkvangr. Scarcely a being – god, giant or dwarf – does not desire her; her tales turn again and again on wooing, theft and cunning.
A detail that surprises many: Odin is not the only one who gathers the brave dead – and when we hear „goddess of death", most people think at once of Hel. Yet Freyja is just as truly a mistress of death. Hers is the field Fólkvangr („people-field" or „field of the hosts") with her hall Sessrúmnir, „rich in seats" – a counterpart to Odin’s Valhalla, where fallen warriors find a place of honour.
And more: Freyja has the first claim. Every day she chooses half of those slain on the battlefield for her hall, the other half remaining Odin’s. That a Vanir goddess of all beings – a goddess of love and fertility – disposes of the glorious dead even before the All-father is one of the most astonishing statements of the Edda, and shows how high her rank truly was.
“The ninth is Fólkvang, where Freyja decrees / who shall have seats in the hall; / the half of the dead each day does she choose, / and half does Othin have.”— Grímnismál 14, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
The Norse afterlife knew not a single realm of the dead but many destinations – and where you went depended on how you died. That is the key to telling Freyja and Hel apart.
Hel, Loki’s daughter, rules the realm of the same name deep beneath the roots of the world-tree. To her come most people: all who die a „straw death" – of old age, sickness or mishap. Hel is no place of glory and no punishment, but the quiet, neutral realm of the ordinary dead.
Freyja, by contrast – exactly like Odin – is a goddess of the honoured dead, a chooser of the slain. She picks her company herself, just like the valkyries, whose name means „choosers of the slain" – and whom some sources place in Freyja’s own retinue. This moves Freyja into the role of a psychopomp, a guide of souls to the other world.
And her link to death reaches beyond the battlefield. In Egils saga, Egil’s daughter Þorgerðr refuses to eat in order to die – saying she will take no food „until I am with Freyja". For her, a woman, Freyja’s hall is the hoped-for afterlife. Many scholars conclude that Freyja received above all the dead women – as Odin received the warriors. It fits her chief tool, seiðr: a magic that deals with fate, spirits and the dead. In Freyja, love, magic and death are not a contradiction but one and the same weave.
Freyja commands seiðr, the ecstatic magic by which one reaches into fate and the future. According to Snorri it was she who first brought this art to the Æsir – and who taught it even to Odin. That is remarkable, for seiðr was held to be unmanly; that the highest god learns it from Freyja shows her rank.
Freyja’s chariot is drawn by two cats; she owns a falcon cloak with which she (and, borrowed, Loki) flies through the worlds, and rides the boar Hildisvíni. Her most precious treasure is the necklace Brísingamen, won from the dwarves. For her vanished husband Óðr she weeps tears of red gold – an image that moves readers to this day.
As a Vanir goddess Freyja embodies life itself: growth, desire, wealth. That she of all beings also rules over the fallen is no contradiction but Norse world-view – love and death, fertility and battle, lie close together.
Hel · Valkyries · Freyr · The Vanir · Valhalla · The Norse pantheon.
Grímnismál, Hyndluljóð, Völuspá (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál, Ynglinga saga. Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001); Britt-Mari Näsström, Freyja – the Great Goddess of the North (1995).