I was going to do a post on whether Frigg and Freyja are the same goddess, but it seems that this is a much-rehashed controversy. So I decided to provide links to some of the more interesting pages I found, and let readers see for themselves. I’ve added some links on Friday and folklore to keep up the alliteration and for interest.
Are Frigg and Freyja the same goddess?
Wikipedia on the common origin hypothesis (as they grandly call it)
Yes:
Squirrel Edda
Norse Mythology for Smart People
Brit-Marie Näsström – sees them as originally identical
No:
Stephen Grundy – says no given current evidence
Ingunn Ásdísardottir (pdf) also says no, and like Grundy thinks they may have merged over time
Frigging Goddesses
Fuck Yeah Norse Mythology
What Frigg Knew – paper by Judy Quinn notes that Freyja reveals what she knows, as a seidkona, but Frigg does not speak about her knowledge of the future
Schmoop on Frigg: points out that the Baldr myth is specific to Frigg.
Frigg and Friday
Online Etymological Dictionary
Jacob Grimm also says Frigg, although he thinks that Frigg and Freyja were the same goddess, under different names
LiveScience makes no commitments on the Frigg/Freyja issue
Days of the Week in German – for the modern version
Early Germanic Names for the Days
Frigg and Folklore
Orion’s Belt called Frigg’s Distaff (although sometimes called Freyja’s Girdle)
Galium verum or Lady’s Bedstraw associated with Frigg. Apparently it was used as a sedative in childbirth. (The Eddic poem Oddrunargratur or Oddrun’s Lament features a prayer to Frigg and Freyja for help in childbirth.)
I like getting access to lots of POVs like this! Thanks! Even if both names come from the proto-Indo-European Goddess name priya, beloved, so many Goddesses’ names derived from priya (beloved) which may easily be a title, it’s quite feasible that different people who became the speakers of Germanic languages knew different Goddesses who received similar titles. As an interesting side note, the way Indo -European language changed about 4,000 years ago around the current Czech Republic redefined the meaning of priya to mean “free person” ie not slave. This group would split into the Germanic tribes, Celtic tribes and Finnish tribes, with very similar religious rites and terms for those practices coming from that time period.
I find it frustrating when Heathens want to narrow our pantheon as if less deities are better. I’ve read completely illogical and unscholarly posts on blogs trying to make 1st century CE deities into the “Norse pantheon” which is even more odd when we remember how rural and bioregionally isolated most Norse people were and had no Bible or Sunday school. If the Norwegian nobles fought against the unification of Norway, settled briefly in Scotland, and moved to Iceland, why would the mythology have been exactly the same in different regions of Norway? Finnmark has blatant Jotun worship. That Sweden, Norway, Gotland, Denmark, Iceland, England and traveling Vikings would even need the exact same deities and myths is hard to imagine – especially for the 1/4-1/3 of the Norwegian population who were slaves.
Thank you for sharing with easy links access to different research.
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No doubt there’s a more diverse group of goddesses in the Germanic past than we know of, and we’ll all have to start thinking more regionally about religion.
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