Freyr

Freyr (Old Norse Freyr, the Lord) is the foremost of the Vanir, the family of gods associated with fertility, wealth and peace, who came to live among the Aesir as hostages after the war between the two divine families. He governs the fruitfulness of the fields, sunshine and rain, prosperity and sacral kingship, and the Swedish kings of the Ynglingar line traced their descent from him. Adam of Bremen, writing about 1070, describes a great temple at Uppsala in Sweden where an image of the god he calls Fricco, evidently Freyr, stood with an enormous phallus, marking him as the god invoked for marriage and good harvests, a rare outside notice of Norse cult, to be read with the caution due a Christian churchman describing a rival religion.

Snorri's Ynglinga saga, treating Freyr as an early deified king of Sweden rather than purely a myth-time god, tells that when Freyr died his followers concealed the fact for three years, placing his body in a great mound with three window-like openings and continuing to bring taxes of gold, silver and copper as though he still lived, since the land's peace and prosperity were believed to depend on the king's presence; only when the corpse could no longer be hidden was he formally buried, and even then the Swedes are said to have called the practice proof that peace and good harvests came from Freyr's enduring presence in his howe rather than merely from his living rule.

Freyr's central myth, told in the poem Skirnismal, is a story of desire and its cost. Catching sight of the giantess Gerd from Odin's high seat, he falls sick with love and sends his servant Skirnir to win her, giving up his own marvellous sword, which fights of its own accord, as part of the bargain. The loss proves fatal in the long run: at Ragnarok, the doom of the gods, Freyr must face the fire-giant Surt without his weapon and falls, having traded his defence for love. The tale is often read as a myth of the sky or sun wooing the earth into fertility, but its emotional core is the god who chooses longing over safety. His attributes, the ship Skidbladnir that folds into a pouch, the golden boar Gullinbursti, mark him as a giver of abundance and swift blessing.

A small Viking Age bronze figurine found at Rallinge in Sweden, showing a bearded, seated male figure with a pointed cap, crossed legs and an erect phallus, is widely identified by archaeologists as an image of Freyr, offering rare physical confirmation of the fertility-god imagery Adam of Bremen describes at Uppsala; now held in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, it remains one of the very few surviving three-dimensional pre-Christian Scandinavian cult figures that can be linked with reasonable confidence to a specific named god rather than identified only generically.