Apart from Asgard, in a world whose location the sources leave vague, dwell the Vanir – the other family of gods. Vanaheim is the home of the deities of fertility and wealth: Njörd, Freyr and Freyja. From here they once came as hostages to the Æsir – and stayed.
The Vanir stand for sea and wind, harvest and riches, love and the seer's art. The Æsir, by contrast, for rule, war and law. At the beginning of time the two families faced one another in the first war of the world.
The war between Æsir and Vanir ended not with a victor but with an exchange of hostages: Njörd and his children Freyr and Freyja went to Asgard, the Æsir Hönir and Mimir to Vanaheim. So the two divine worlds fused. Freyr became ‘lord of Álfheim’, Freyja taught the Æsir seiðr, the sorcery of the Vanir. Vanaheim itself stays distant and shadowy in the tales – its children are better known than the land.
“In the home of the Wanes did the wise ones create him, / and gave him as pledge to the gods.”Vafþrúðnismál 39, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
Freyr · Æsir & Vanir – the pantheon · The Nine Worlds · Midgard · Helheim.
Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, Ynglinga saga. Vafþrúðnismál, Völuspá (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Scholarship: Georges Dumézil; Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology.