Freyr is the god the Vikings offered to for good weather, rich harvest and peace – the „foremost of the Æsir", as Snorri says, though he truly comes from the Vanir. And he is the god who stands without a sword at Ragnarök, because he once gave it away for love.
Freyr („Lord") came, like his sister Freyja, to the Æsir as a hostage after the war of the gods. Son of the sea-god Njörðr, he rules over rain, sunshine and the fertility of the earth – and is held to be the ancestor of the Swedish royal line of the Ynglingar.
Whoever called on Freyr asked for growth: for grain, for cattle, for children, for frið (peace) and ár (a good year). His great sanctuary stood, according to Adam of Bremen, in the temple at Uppsala, where his idol with its mighty phallus embodied procreative power. Freyr is thus one of the oldest and most popular of all the gods.
Freyr owns two of the most famous treasures of the gods: the golden-bristled boar Gullinbursti, who runs faster than any horse through air and water and lights up the night, and the ship Skíðblaðnir, which always has a fair wind and folds up like a cloth. Both were forged for him by the dwarves – in the very wager that also produced Thor’s hammer.
Freyr’s most famous story is his most tragic: from the high seat Hliðskjálf he glimpses the giant’s daughter Gerðr and falls for her on the spot. He sends his servant Skírnir to woo her – and gives him for the task his self-wielding sword. He wins Gerðr, but the price is high: the blade is lost forever.
“Long is one night, long is the next; / how can I bear three? / A month has often seemed less to me / than this half night of longing.”— Skírnismál 42, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
This love becomes his undoing: at Ragnarök Freyr must face the fire-giant Surtr – without his weapon. He fights with a stag’s antler and falls. The god of life and fertility dies because he once set wooing above fighting – a deeply Norse thought.
Freyja · The Vanir · Vanaheim · Ragnarök · The Norse pantheon.
Skírnismál, Grímnismál, Völuspá, Lokasenna (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál, Ynglinga saga. Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis. Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).