Freyja

Freyja belongs to the Vanir, the lineage of gods of fertility and prosperity, and is the daughter of Njörð, the god of the sea and wealth. After the war between the Aesir and the Vanir, which ended in a truce and exchange of hostages, Freyja arrived in Asgard together with her father and her twin brother Freyr, integrating into the main pantheon. Snorri Sturluson presents her in his Edda as the most glorious of the goddesses (ásynjur), owner of the mansion Fólkvangr and the hall Sessrúmnir. Her name simply means «lady» and is related to the Germanic title Frau. She is often confused with Frigg, Odin's wife, due to shared traits and functions, to the point that both are associated with the origin of the name of Friday; modern criticism debates whether in remote times they were a single divinity.

Freyja rules love, desire, beauty, fertility and also war and death. According to the Grímnismál, each day she shares with Odin the fallen in combat: half march to her dwelling of Fólkvangr and the other half to Valhalla. She is, above all, the great teacher of seiðr, the prophetic and shamanic magic of the Vanir; and it is the sources that specify the direction of that teaching: Snorri's Ynglinga saga affirms that it was Freyja who introduced seiðr among the Aesir and taught it to Odin, not the other way around. She travels in a chariot pulled by two large cats and possesses a mantle of hawk feathers that allows flying between the worlds, a garment that in several myths she lends to Loki. Her weeping for the absence of her husband Óðr turns into tears of red gold, an image that also links her with wealth.

The most famous object of Freyja is the Brísingamen, a collar of gold of dazzling beauty. The late tale of the Sörla þáttr recounts that she did not forge it, but four dwarves, and that Freyja obtained it by spending one night with each of them; later Loki steals it by order of Odin. In another myth, when a giant builder demands Freyja as payment for walling Asgard, the gods again resort to Loki's tricks to avoid delivering her. Her hawk mantle reappears in the recovery of Thor's hammer and in the rescue of Idun. These tales show a goddess at once desired and powerful, whose body, magic and treasures become objects of dispute between gods and giants, without her ever losing her sovereign rank.

Freyja embodies like few divinities the union of apparently opposite forces: love and war, life and death, pleasure and magic. Her figure survived with strength in Scandinavian folklore long after Christianization, associated with the fertility of the fields and livestock, and in modern times she has become a central divinity of neopaganism and contemporary witchcraft currents (Wicca, Ásatrú). Studied as one of the clearest examples of the complex goddess of the Germanic world, Freyja endures as a symbol of feminine power that integrates seduction, sovereignty and dominion of the sacred.