Think of Norse gods and you think of the Aesir: Odin, Thor, Tyr. But the sources know a second divine family – the Vanir. They stand for everything that actually kept farms and kindreds alive: fertile land, fair winds at sea, wealth, peace – and a kind of magic that made even the Aesir uneasy.
The name sounds vast, the list is short: The sources explicitly count only Njord, lord of coasts, sailing winds and riches, and his children Freyr and Freyja among the Vanir. Freyr grants harvest, sunshine and peace – the old sacrificial formula til árs ok friðar, “for a good year and peace”, is his programme. Freyja rules love and desire, and she commands an art we shall hear more of. In the Ynglinga saga Snorri adds Njord’s unnamed sister-wife and wise Kvasir. Every other attribution – Heimdall, Ullr – is modern guesswork without a source.
How present this trio was in daily life is shown by Iceland of all places: the old oath formula of the Úlfljót law made men swear on the temple ring – “so help me Freyr and Njord and the almighty As”. Of all the gods, only the two Vanir are named. And Njord’s wealth became proverbial: auðigr sem Njörðr, “rich as Njord”, says the Vatnsdæla saga.
At the beginning of time, Aesir and Vanir face each other in the first war of the world. The Völuspá tells of mysterious Gullveig, burned three times in the hall of the High One and three times reborn – then Odin’s spear flies over the host, and murder first came into the world. The Vanir prove themselves equals: they stamp the field, the rampart of the Aesir breaks. In the end there is no victory but a treaty – and an exchange of hostages that changes the world of the gods forever.
“In the home of the Wanes did the wise ones create him,
And gave him as pledge to the gods;
At the fall of the world shall he fare once more
Home to the Wanes so wise.”
— Vafthruthnismol 39 (on Njord), translation Henry Adams Bellows (1923, public domain)
The Vanir send their best to the Aesir: Njord and Freyr – thus the great fertility gods come to Asgard. The Aesir give stately Hönir and wise Mimir. But the trade goes sour: Hönir shines only while Mimir whispers in his ear; to every hard question he merely answers “let others decide”. The Vanir feel cheated, behead Mimir and send the head to Odin – who preserves it with herbs and consults it ever after. So one of the eeriest traditions about Odin’s wisdom hangs, of all things, on the Vanir war.
The peace itself brought forth a being. To seal it, Aesir and Vanir stepped to a vessel and both spat into it – an ancient ritual of fellowship. So that the pledge should not be lost, the gods shaped from it Kvasir, wisest of all beings: no one could ask him a question he could not answer. Kvasir wandered the world teaching – until two dwarfs killed him and brewed from his blood, mixed with honey, the mead of poetry. They told the gods he had “choked on his own wisdom”, because no one was clever enough to ask him empty. From the peace between Aesir and Vanir, then, springs the art of poetry itself – every skaldic stanza carries a drop of Vanir peace. (Snorri, by the way, hands down two versions: in the Ynglinga saga Kvasir is no spittle-being but the wisest of the Vanir, given as a hostage – the traditions could no longer be smoothed out even in the thirteenth century.)
The loveliest Vanir poem of the Edda is a love story with a dark undertow. In the Skirnismol, Freyr seats himself unbidden on Odin’s high seat Hlidskjalf, gazes into Jötunheim and sees the giant-daughter Gerd – as she raises her arms, air and sea shine with her light. Freyr falls love-sick. His servant Skirnir undertakes the wooing ride, but demands Freyr’s horse and his wonder-sword, which fights by itself. Gerd refuses golden apples and the ring Draupnir; only Skirnir’s rune-curse forces her to meet Freyr after nine nights in the grove of Barri. The lovesick god groans: “Long is one night, longer are two; how then shall I bear three?” But the price is paid – the sword is gone. Loki jeers in the Lokasenna: “When Muspell’s sons through Myrkwood ride, thou shalt weaponless wait, poor wretch.” Freyr still slays the giant Beli with a stag’s antler – but at Ragnarök he faces Surt unarmed, and falls. The fertility of the world disarmed itself for love: a myth like a writing on the wall.
The second Vanir marriage, too, tells of the price of compromise. The giantess Skadi, huntress on skis, may choose a husband as amends for her slain father – but only by the feet. She picks the fairest feet and gets, instead of Balder, the sea-god Njord. They agree to commute: nine nights in Skadi’s mountain home Thrymheim, then Njord’s harbour hall Nóatún. It fails magnificently. Njord laments the mountains – instead of the song of swans, only the howling of wolves; Skadi cannot sleep by the sea for the screaming of birds. They part – coast and high fell cannot be wed. Hardly any myth tells so drily that two worlds may love each other and still not share a life.
The Vanir were no minor gods – they made kings. Snorri has Freyr rule at Uppsala under the name Yngvi; from him the oldest royal line of the North took its name, the Ynglings, from whom the rulers of Sweden and Norway traced their descent. The name is ancient: Tacitus already knows the Ingaevones, the “sea-nearest” of the Germanic peoples; the Ing rune ᛜ carries it; and the Old English rune poem tells how Ing “was first seen among the East-Danes”, till he departed over the wave – “his wagon ran after”. Exactly this image lives in the cult: an Icelandic tale (Gunnars þáttr helmings) describes Freyr’s image being driven in a wagon from farm to farm through Sweden, attended by a priestess who counts as the god’s wife – and Adam of Bremen reports around 1075 of the temple at Uppsala, where beside Thor and Wodan stood “Fricco”, giver of “peace and pleasure”, depicted cum ingenti priapo – with an enormous phallus. That the report comes from a Christian pen and deserves caution is part of the truth; that dozens of place names like Frösön (“Freyr’s island”), Fröslunda or Närtuna (Njord) still speckle the map of Scandinavia is hard evidence: the Vanir cult had street addresses.
Perhaps the strangest Vanir trail leads to the dead. When Freyr dies, the Ynglinga saga tells, his men conceal his death for three years: they pour the tribute through three holes into his burial mound – gold, silver, copper – and peace and good harvests continue. When the Swedes discover it, they do not burn him but name him veraldargoð, “god of the world”, and go on sacrificing at the mound. It fits that Freyr, according to the Grimnismol, is lord of Alfheim – the gods gave it to him “in days of old as a tooth-gift” – and that people still secretly held the autumn álfablót for the elves, the beings of the mounds, deep into Christian times. In this way of thinking, fertility comes from below: from the ancestor in the mound who goes on blessing. Scholars see here the meeting point of Vanir, elf and ancestor cult – though spelling that out, admittedly, was their work, not the sources’.
The Vanir have customs of their own, and the sources make no secret of them. In Vanaheim marriage between siblings was allowed: Njord’s wife was his own sister, Freyr and Freyja are their children – “but among the Aesir it was forbidden to marry so near a kin”, Snorri notes drily. Loki sneers about precisely this in the Lokasenna. And with Freyja, seidr comes to the Aesir, the sorcery and prophecy of the Vanir – so potent that even Odin learns it, though it carried the stain of unmanliness. Three times the poems call the Vanir “wise” and foreknowing: whoever wants to know the future asks the Vanir.
Some 1,100 years before the Edda, Tacitus (Germania, ch. 40) describes among the tribes of the North – including the Angles between the North Sea and the Baltic – the cult of Nerthus, “that is, Mother Earth”: a goddess driven about in a veiled wagon from place to place, and while she travels, all weapons rest. Linguistically, Nerthus is exactly the older form of Njord. The earth mother of the continental Germanic peoples became a sea god in the North – or it was a divine pair from the start, like Freyr and Freyja later. The same veiled wagon that rolls across northern German fields in Tacitus rolls through Sweden with Freyr’s image a thousand years later: hardly any Germanic cult can be traced across such a span of time.
Vanaheim – world of the Vanir · Freyja · Freyr · Mead · The Norse pantheon · The gods overview in our library.
Völuspá 21–24, Vafthruthnismol 38–39, Grimnismol 5, Skirnismol, Lokasenna 32/36/42, Thrymskvitha 15 (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning 23/35/37/51, Skáldskaparmál; Ynglinga saga ch. 1, 4, 7, 10. Landnámabók (oath formula), Vatnsdæla saga 47, Gísla saga 18, Gunnars þáttr helmings. Tacitus, Germania 2 and 40; Adam of Bremen, Gesta IV 26–27; Old English Rune Poem (Ing). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (2007); id., “The Vanir: An Obituary” (2010); Frog/Roper, “Verses versus the Vanir” (2011); Clive Tolley, “In Defence of the Vanir” (2011); Jens Peter Schjødt (2014); Terry Gunnell, “Oral Memories of the Religion(s) of the Vanir” (2017); Olof Sundqvist, Freyr’s Offspring (2002); Per Vikstrand, Gudarnas platser (2001); Richard North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (1997); Gro Steinsland, Det hellige bryllup (1991); Georges Dumézil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen (1973); Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (1956/57).