Freyja, the Goddess of Love
Freya (Freyja in the Old Norse), her name meaning “the lady,” was derived from the Proto-Germanic frawjon, an honorific title used for a mature woman of high social standing. As one of the principal deities of the Norse pantheon, the lovely and enchanting Freya was a goddess of blessings, love, lust, and fertility. A member of the Vanir tribe of deities, Freya shared her people’s penchant for the magical arts of divination. It was Freya who introduced the gods to seidr, a form of magic that allowed practitioners to know and change the future.
While many people believe that she could have been prayed to so that she would bestow eternal love upon the worshipper, this is a debated topic. Vikings had a different relationship with the gods than what we would think today. The Viking gods did not seem to be “big” gods by today’s standards. They lacked many attributes that world deities possess, such as immortality, omnipotence, and they weren’t the original beings. Norse mythology holds that the deities were fated to die in a cataclysm called Ragnarök. According to the Prose Edda, Odin and his brothers were born of the first man (licked out of a salty ice block by a cow) and the daughter of a frost giant. And, morally speaking, they were kind of a mess. So while there is a lot of very interesting mythology surrounding Freyja and the other gods, it doesn’t seem like the gods influenced society as much as we see in other cultures.