Goddesses Unknown I: Njǫrun and the Sister-Wife of Njǫrðr

RMN Newsletter, 2014

The goddess Ilmr, attested only in Icelandic sources, has been almost completely neglected by scholarship. This article offers a comprehensive review of the evidence and discusses the possible interpretations. It proposes that ecological conditions in Iceland could be a factor in why this name seems to become increasingly obscure following the settlement period.

Scandia, 2022

Freyja, one of the most popular goddesses of the Norse pantheon among Viking age women. Here we investigate how she is the only goddess to have her own poem in the Poetic Edda, and possibly the only god or goddess to have any reference to receiving cult in the poems. We compare her mythological role within the poems, with her role as Vanadís within the disir, and how that relates to the private, household, and women's sphere of worship. We investigate the cult of Freyja through the material world finds, and her strong connections to seiðr. We investigate the practice of seiðr and Freyja. Finally, we look at archaeology of women's finds to uncover whether there are any connections with the worship of Freyja.

RMN Newsletter, 2017

Like previous entries in the Goddesses Unknown series, the present article focuses on heretofore little-studied goddesses in the Germanic corpus, in this case the obscure Old Norse goddess Hlín and her association with the widely attested Germanic goddess Frigg.

‘What Frigg Knew: The Goddess as Prophetess in Old Norse Mythology’, in Dee, profetesse, regine e altre figure femminili nel Medioevo germanico, Atti del XL Convegno dell’Associazione Italiana di Filologia Germanica, ed. Maria Elena Ruggerini e Veronka Szőke (Cagliari: CUEC, 2015), pp. 67-88

Cambridge University 3 Quotations of eddic verse are from Hans Kuhn's revision of Gustav Neckel's edition (NECKEL -KUHN 1962 4 ), but with normalised orthography. Translations, while my own, are informed by the translations of the poems by Carolyne Larrington (1997). 4 I quote here the manuscript text (Gl. kg. sml. 2365, 4 o ) and not the unnecessarily emended text of the Neckel -Kuhn edition; see further QUINN 2001: 82-83. 5 For a survey of the sources on norns, see BEK-PEDERSEN 2011.

An examination of the worship of the Old Norse gods, Freyr and Freyja, in the wider context of ancient Germanic culture.

While masculine archetypes like the brave warrior or the wise leader were retained in polytheistic Norse lore even after Christianization, feminine archetypes in similar veins did not fit into the new model of society and therefore needed to be downplayed. This paper explores two notable exceptions to this marginalization of female characters in this body of work.

In Res, artes et religio: Essays in Honour of Rudolf Simek. Ed. Sabine Heidi Walther, Regina Jucknies, Judith Meurer-Bongardt & Jens Eike Schnall, in collaboration with Brigitta Jaroschek & Sarah Onkels. Leeds: Kismet Press. Pp. 141–175. , 2021

This paper is a contribution to the Vanir Debate that shows the 'Æsir' as a race of gods to be a modern construct and that the Old Norse word áss, æsir, was a poetic and elevated word for 'god, gods'. The study also points out that use of the word vanir in mentions of the cosmogonic war is not contrasted with æsir but with goð 'gods', which provides further evidence that the modern concept of 'Vanir' as a race of gods and thus subcategory of goð is incorrect. The long-held view of two races of Scandinavian gods called the 'Æsir' and the 'Vanir' is not an accurate representation of the religion. Rejecting current usage of these terms does not, however, require rejecting the view that Njǫrðr, Freyr and Freyja form a distinct group among the Old Norse gods, only that they were not collectively referred to as 'vanir' while other gods were referred to as 'æsir'. A better term for collectively referring to these gods would be masculine singular Njǫrðungr, neuter pl. Njǫrðung (i.e. including Freyja), masculine plural Njǫrðungar (i.e. not including Freyja).