Of all the Norse goddesses, Freya is the most prominent, the most beautiful, and the most powerful. She is a goddess of love and fertility, of war and death, of gold and magic. She is the head of the Vanir, the older gods of fertility, and after the Aesir-Vanir War she came to live among the Aesir, where she became one of the most important figures in the Norse cosmos. She is the chooser of half the slain, the mistress of the Valkyries, the practitioner of the magic called seiðr, and the owner of some of the most beautiful and most contested objects in the Eddas.
In many ways, Freya is the Norse equivalent of the Greek Aphrodite combined with the war-goddess Athena and the death-goddess Persephone. She is at once the most desirable and the most dangerous of women. Her name, preserved in Old Norse as Freya and related to the Old English Frēo, gives us the English day-name Friday, which is also named for her in the German Freitag, the Dutch vrijdag, the Romance viernes/vendredi/venerdì (the last derived from Venus rather than Freya, but the underlying mythic image is similar).
Origin Among the Vanir
Freya was a member of the Vanir, the older gods of fertility, prosperity, and the magic of the earth. They are in some sense the chthonic gods, the ones tied to the soil, the harvest, the marriage bed, the gold of the earth, and the fertility of the fields. The Vanir include Freya’s twin brother Freyr, the god of fertility, the sun, the weather, and the kingship; their father Njörðr, the god of the sea, the winds, and the wealth of sailors; and the goddess Gefjon, among others.
The Vanir and the Aesir fought a long war — the Aesir-Vanir War — in which neither side could defeat the other. Both sides eventually grew tired of the slaughter, and they made peace through an exchange of hostages. The Vanir sent Njörðr, Freyr, and Freya to the Aesir, and the Aesir gave in return Hoenir and Mímir. Freya, the most beautiful of the Vanir, became the most prominent goddess of the Aesir court as well.
Fólkvangr and the Slain
Freya rules a great hall called Fólkvangr (“the host-field” or “the people’s field”), in which she receives half of the slain in battle. The other half go to Odin’s Valhalla. The Gylfaginning describes how Freya rides out to the battle to choose her share, and her chosen warriors join her in her hall Sessrúmnir (“the roomy-seated”).
In some accounts, Freya leads the Valkyries — the choosers of the slain — and in some traditions, she is the chief of the Valkyries. In other accounts, Odin’s Valkyries are separate from Freya’s host, but they all serve the same general function. In any case, the image of Freya as a goddess of war, not only of love, is established in the earliest sources. She is a woman whose name appears in the war-kennings of the skaldic poets: “the battle-maid” who chooses the slain, the gold-haired one who rides through the air.
In some later folklore, Freya is said to ride out with her cats to lead the Wild Hunt — the spectral procession of the dead through the winter sky. The leader of the Wild Hunt is sometimes Odin, sometimes the Norse kings, and sometimes Freya.
The Brísingamen Necklace
The most famous object associated with Freya is the necklace Brísingamen, a piece of gold so beautiful that it radiates light and is described as the finest work of the dwarves. According to the Sörla þáttr (a later saga), the necklace was forged by four dwarves — Alfrigg, Dvalinn, Grer, and Dáinn — and Freya paid for it with a night of her love to each of the four dwarves. In other versions, she paid with a night of her body to each of the dwarves in succession, going to each in turn over four nights. The story is brief, but it is also a striking piece of mythic gossip: the goddess of love and fertility, the most beautiful of women, paid for the necklace with her own body.
Brísingamen is the object of the central myth of the Skáldskaparmál: when Loki, at Odin’s command, steals the necklace from Freya, the goddess weeps golden tears (since her tears have always been gold), and her weeping is said to bring forth the loss of her jewelry. Loki, the trickster, hides the necklace under the sea, and Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, is sent to retrieve it. The story of the theft and recovery is one of the most beautiful and most mysterious pieces of Norse myth.
The Falcon Cloak
Freya possesses a cloak of falcon feathers that allows her to take the form of a falcon and fly through the air. In this form, she is described as flying to other worlds, and the cloak is one of the most potent items of Norse magic.
The most famous use of the cloak is in the Þrymskviða, when Thor and Loki go to Jötunheimr to retrieve the stolen hammer of Mjölnir. Loki borrows Freya’s falcon cloak, flies to the giants’ hall, and discovers the hammer in the possession of the giant Thrym. The cloak is also a sign of Freya’s shamanic power — the ability to move between the worlds of form, the world of humans, the world of the gods, and the world of the dead.
The Chariot and the Cats
Freya’s chariot is pulled through the air by two cats — a strikingly unusual feature in a pantheon otherwise dominated by wolves, horses, and goats. The cats are not named in the Eddas, but the fact that a goddess of Freya’s stature is associated with cats is one of the most distinctive features of her cult.
The cats are sometimes identified with the lynx of the Scandinavian forests, and the most common folk-etymology of the German Luchs (“lynx”) connects it to a name of the god Loki, who in the medieval German tradition has become a kind of cat-and-fox figure. Whatever the source, the cats are part of Freya’s iconography, and they appear in a number of Old Norse poems as her mode of transport. (The Norse belief that the cats of the household belong to Freya is also the source of the still-current folk-tradition that cats in heat are visited by the goddess.)
Seiðr and the Magic of Freya
Freya is the principal practitioner of seiðr — a form of Norse magic associated with fate, the seeing of the future, the manipulation of the weather, the sending of sickness, and the mastery of the dead. Seiðr is described in Norse sources as a kind of shamanic magic, often performed by women, and its practice is associated with social disorder: the practitioner enters a trance, and the participants of the rite sit around him or her on a platform, chanting.
In the Younger Edda, Freya is the teacher of seiðr to the gods, and she taught it to Odin — which is why Odin is the only male god associated with the magic. In the eyes of the Norse poets, seiðr was a feminine magic, and the male gods who practiced it were sometimes seen as unmanly for doing so. Yet Freya’s practice of it is portrayed as a mark of her power, and Odin, by learning it from her, is honoring her as the master of the magic.
Seiðr is a chthonic magic: it is the magic of the earth, the dead, the future, the fertility of the soil. Its association with the Vanir is therefore natural, and Freya is the principal Vanic figure who brings the magic to Asgard.
Tears of Gold
Freya’s tears are gold. When she weeps, the gold falls from her eyes onto the surface of the world, and the gold of the earth is said to come from her tears. The image is one of the most beautiful in Norse literature: a goddess of love and war, weeping gold as she mourns her husband Óðr, who has gone on a long journey. In the Völuspá, the seeress asks where Óðr has gone, and she answers that he has left her for a long journey, and that she weeps for him.
The image of the weeping Freya also gives a Norse context for the central myth of the death of Baldr the Beautiful, whose death was so great a sorrow that the world itself broke.
The Husband Óðr
Freya is described in the Prose Edda as married to a god named Óðr, who is otherwise unattested. The name is sometimes connected to the Old Norse word for “fury” or “poetry” (óðr), and it is sometimes connected to the Old Norse Óðinn — that is, the goddess’s husband may be a kind of “lost Odin” or a hypostasis of Odin. The identity of Óðr is one of the most debated questions of Norse mythology.
The myth of Óðr tells that he left Freya and went on a long journey, and that she weeps gold for him. She searches for him throughout the worlds, and her search is the source of the gold of the earth. This is the image preserved in the Völuspá and the Gylfaginning.
Freya and Frigg
One of the most debated questions in Norse studies is the relationship between Freya and Frigg. Both are goddesses of the highest rank, both are associated with fertility and the household, and in some ways they seem interchangeable. Some scholars — most prominently the German philologist Jacob Grimm in the 19th century — argued that the two are in fact the same goddess under different names, with Freya being the Vanic form and Frigg the Aesir form.
Other scholars argue that the two are distinct. Frigg is the wife of Odin, the queen of the Aesir, the mother of Baldr — a goddess primarily associated with the household, the loom, and the high seat of the gods. Freya is the goddess of the Vanir, the mistress of the magic, the chooser of the slain — a goddess of a more powerful, more independent, and more ancient type. In any case, the Gylfaginning and the Skáldskaparmál treat the two as distinct, and the Eddas include stories that distinguish them — most notably, the myth of the theft of Brísingamen, which is told about Freya, not about Frigg.
Freya and the Vikings
Freya was one of the most popular of the Norse deities in the Viking Age. Place-names in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic are full of her name: Frövi, Fröslunda, Freysnes, and the like. The Friday day-name is named for her, just as Thursday is named for Thor and Wednesday for Odin. She was a goddess of fertility and of the household, and her favor was sought for marriages, for births, and for the safe return of loved ones.
The medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus describes a temple of Freya in the city of Uppsala in Sweden, where she was honored with a great festival in the spring. The temple at Uppsala, also described by Adam of Bremen in his History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen (c. 1075), was one of the great centers of pre-Christian Norse religion, and Freya, along with Thor and Odin, was one of the chief deities honored there.
Cultural Influence
Freya has been one of the most influential Norse goddesses in the modern imagination. In Wagner’s Ring cycle, the goddess Fricka is in some ways a Frigg-Freya figure, and the role of the Valkyrie (in the Norns and the Brünnhilde) preserves much of Freya’s war-magic. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the elf-lady Galadriel has a Freya-like quality — a beautiful, powerful, magical woman who holds a mirror, a phial, and a magical ring. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Freya (Frigga) is the mother of Thor and the wife of Odin, and the films have made her one of the central figures of the Norse mythological revival.
In the modern revival of Heathenry, Freya is venerated as one of the chief goddesses, and the Icelandic Ásatrúarfélagið lists her as one of the principal gods of the religion. The image of Freya — the beautiful, the war-magical, the magical, the chooser of the slain — has been one of the most powerful images of modern European mythology.
The Goddess of Many Things
Freya is the goddess of love, of fertility, of war, of death, of magic, of gold, of cats, of the slain. She is the most beautiful of the Norse goddesses, the chooser of half the slain, the mistress of seiðr, the wearer of the Brísingamen. Her cult survived the conversion of Scandinavia in the folklore of Friday, of cats, of the hidden people, of the Wild Hunt. To read Freya is to meet a goddess at once ancient and modern, gentle and terrible, loved and feared — and that, perhaps, is the mark of a true goddess.
Last reviewed: June 2026.