edda-for-dummies:

norsesuggestions:

edda-for-dummies:

This is one of those overlapping truths again.

Talking about folk beliefs from before common written record-keeping
(stone carvings don’t count here, since viking didn’t write their own
stories down in such grat detail) is a bit difficult, because all that
we have is folkloristic debates and old stories that had already mutated time and time again to suit the needs of each storyteller and community.

I think it’s very likely that Freyja & the mysterious Od character are meant to be the same couple as Frigg and Odin are. It’s also very likely that Freyja and Freyr are their own pair of fertility deities. I would say it’s also true Freyja is more of a “princess” than the “queen” Frigg is in the hierarchy of the collective narrative of the Eddas. And still, at the same time, Freyja is linked to some very primal creation myths within the Norse lore where Frigg gets no mention.

If I had to throw in a not-that-well-educated guess, I would say that the religious roots for Freyja and Frigg are very strongly tangled together. Freyja and Frigg as we know them now might be two versions of one (or several combined) older fertility goddess(es).
Their names are sometimes used somewhat interchangeably in folklore and toponymy, and Freyja as a ruler of her own great hall in Asgard definitely sounds more like what a chieftain’s wife should be doing instead of some random girl.

Story-wise, talking about late Viking Age and Early Medieval period in Scandinavia and Iceland, Frigg and Freyja fill two very different roles in the belief system and pop culture of the end of Viking Age. That’s just as authentic, just as “original”, it just depends on the time and place.
I haven’t read Saxo’s Gesta Daneorum, but at least judging by the different local variants of Thrymskvitha, Freyja is very clearly a young unmarried maiden. In a Danish version she’s mentioned as Thor and Loki’s little sister who doesn’t want to marry a big ugly troll.
Frigg on the other hand has a completely different role in those late stories she stars in. She’s sometimes pitted directly against the father figure Odin is and never pops up in marriage stories. Frigg is a wise and knowing mother type, with gifts of knowledge and divination and who experiences maybe the biggest tragedy of the god-stories over Baldr’s death. (Hero tales are a thing of their own.)

Tl;dr: I think that if you want to study religion history, Freyja and Frigg can represent a double-incarnated goddess of womanhood whose attributes range from those of a maid to those of a mother.
If you want to read the Eddas as their contemporaries would have understood them and as the stories were told during the final hurrah of what we consider “viking culture”, then Freyja and Frigg are definitely separate characters.

Good points!

A other thing about Freya and Frey, is that their lots of theories among archeologists that these two gods are partly “ pre norse – mythology” (vague concept eh. Don’t originally belong to the pantheon we can read about in the medieval norse sagas) as such

Because of this, this theory say, Freya and Frey can be a bit confusing in the sagas, cause they are sometimes “shoe horned” into myths were they dont quite “fit” to say. One if the supports of this idea, is that they are literal hostages in asgård, from the vaner, in one tale (which was written down in the medieval age tbc, but it’s one of the foundation of that explanation of these two gods)

Freya and Frey are sometimes themselves a actual couple. Yes incestous twin gods. And their parents too, are that. But then, they are married to other gods at the same time?? (more signs of that suspects merging of two different tradition of gods)

On the piecing togheter sagas and historical records side, it’s fascinating how the mälardalen kings claim their descend from frey. They be like. Fuck Odin, all we care for are frey, frey!

(snorri portrays freys as Odin son in his story, tbf but)

Anyway, the point is that the first mythological kings of swedens actually claim they are the “the house of frey” (=ynglingätten). I mean ynglingätten did not actually exist BUT, someone in the medieval age apperntly thought this a very important point to make

I was told in a history of religion class, that it might be so, that “all” people of a particular region considered themselves the descended of frey (that is, that was their creation tale) but then the king tried to hoard this story of creation for just their royal family. This theory was not just about the house of frey in mälardalen, but about several those kings in medieval North Europe, that had that on the surface very illogical claim of “being a Christian king whose claim to the throne is supported by my descend from ‘local non Christian deity’”

PS. Just thinking aloud. I am a tired person today, so everything I said here might not be a 100% up date academic wise. But, I thought some would be perhaps be interested in hearing these thoughts from my brain haha.

Yeah, this is exactly the geographical variation I mean! A good addition.

I remember reading at some point that Ullr, Skadi, Freyr and Freyja could have been more popular in what is now Sweden, where maybe Odin and Frigg and Njörd could have been more Norwegian and Icelandic favourites (?) but I don’t have any receipts now.
Still, technically they could all fill the “same roles” in stories told in different places. And those stories would have big similarities, but then again they all can also be very different from each other. And sometimes they’re combined into one.

Folk religions didn’t have theology, they didn’t have a governing pan-Nordic church or anything. They were a way to understand and explain the world. Edda is really just a collection of Icelandic stories at one point in time. So that’s not a revised religious codex either!

So I think it’s not even really helpful to TRY and make one clear truth of the whole mass of stories and different layers of history.