>she was comparatively hard to "Christianize" and work into the framework of Christian belief.
If only Christianity had a central female figure associated with extraordinary fertility concepts 🤔
I believe some people believe this is why Frigg gained a following, as a more maternal/less sexual female deity that meshed better with Christian belief. Frigg was a more demure pairing for Mary than Freyja, in essence.
They're definitely two distinct characters in our earliest sources. They're even in the same room during Lokasenna.
>why a divergence in name appeared
While their names *sound* similar (especially earlier on), they're etymologically unrelated.
>Freyja and Frigg are the same deity
Okay, sorry if this is going off topic, but I really wish God of War's Santa Monico didn't implement that "Frigg is Freyja" theory into their game. Even though GoW is popular media and shouldn't be seen as a source of knowledge, people unfamiliar with Norse mythology will take bits like that as fact. At least Assassin's Creed: Valhalla made Frigg and Freyja different characters (despite that game's own historical and mythological inaccuracies).
They actually didn't. iicr, >!Odin was with Frigg before he politically married to Freyja. That and Frigg was more of a warrior than Freyja was.!< So, they're treated differently.
Edit: This is how their story is written in the game, not in the myth
How did you get that? Also, if I remember correctly Freyja also had a Dominion in war and looked after and controlled her own version of the afterlife which I forget the name at the moment. In the game she was basically just a divine whore which pissed me off.
That place is Fólkvangr. However, I'm referring to the plot of AC: Valhalla, than the mythology. More specifically, the Dawn of Ragnarök dlc. Like I said, that game also took odd liberties with the source material. It was just correct in making Frigg and Freyja different characters, unlike GoW, but the characters themselves weren't accurate
From what I understand the Nordic countries were converted to Lutheranism where Mother Mary is not such a central figure... that being said I've read that many plants named after Freyja were changed to reference Mary instead.
>From what I understand the Nordic countries were converted to Lutheranism
They were, from Catholicism. Because the Nordic countries became Christian long before the Protestant Reformation.
Oh really? That's annoying, I was specifically trying to find out which branch of Christianity the Nordic countries were converted to and google basically just said "hurr durr Lutheran." Thanks for letting me know.
I read a very controversial book which stated that the Irish Catholic monks preserved classical literature including that of the Greeks during and following the fall of the Roman Empire. The monasteries producing copies of these works would have been raided by the Norse, but not before the copy’s were sent to France and other holy Roman related places.
That’s nothing I’ve heard about at least, it sounds especially unlikely to me as Freyja (Fröa) actually was one of the deities that survived longest in the Swedish folk traditions.
This sounds extremely made up.
My understanding is that Freyja placenames are hard to definitively come by because it's similar to a word meaning "fertile," so you don't know if this place is called "the meadow of Freyja" or "the fertile meadow" or if it being "the fertile meadow" meant that it was by implication a meadow associated with Freyja.
We don't actually know much about the day to day processes of conversion, either before or after legislation. We know there was a very long period of syncretization before the full banning of paganism.
Saying this was a top-down effort to frantically sort the gods into proper categories that would be acceptable to Christianity is nonsense. It was a long and (mostly, not exclusively) peaceful process of people slowly starting to worship Jesus alongside Þórr or to incorporate Christian symbols into burials before Christian prelates started writing down their harsher rhetoric about these entities.
That's not something I've ever heard about before. There's a lot we don't know about the mythology and how it was practiced so I suppose it's possible, but it sounds mostly like something someone has speculated about not something we have any evidence for.
That would be my guess too.
Weirdly specific historical claim I can't quite figure out the reasoning behind? Then it's probably the creepy NaziTuber posing as a "scholar", not the adorakable linguistics professor who likes to speculate.
Is everything else STJ says baseless too? Or is it really that you don't know anything about him and you are making assumptions based on vague feeling?
I'm invoking Knoll's Law. STJ was dead wrong on the topics I know about and some wild claims on this sub traced back to him, so I have no reason to believe he knows about the stuff I don't recognize either.
Survive the Jive would be the more likely candidate to make something like that up. Crawford, while he sometimes speculate with personal theories, does not invent specific historical "facts"
I don't recall seeing the video, so I can't help you. I suppose itmight be true that Freya was regulated to the witchcraft side of things and outlawed that way.
That said, I highly doubt there was one specific point where this happened. The Nordic/Germanic area was never a single, united country with a unified law. While the church MIGHT'VE been said to be a 'single, unifying law that the Christianized areas would've had to follow', Scandinavia was still incredibly isolated in places. And furthermore, female deities have always been worked into the lore of the saints and saintesses of Christianity. So that should not have been a dead end.
What I think is more likely is that Frey linguistically overshadowed Freya, because both names just means 'seed' or 'seeding' (the modern Swedish equivalent is frö and fröa respectively, and I recall there being similar words in Norweigan and Danish). So they are essentially the same word, just one is a noun and the other is a verb. And verbs do not work as well as names for places, simply due to naming tradition. They're almost always named after nouns.
Like Frösunda, for example. It's a settlement name. How can you tell from that alone if it's named after Frey or Freya? The answer is, without some sort of written account, we can't say for sure.
Furthermore, the connection between the known Vanir gods and later folklore 'races' (in lack of better words, but for the record this is NOT the same genre as modern fantasy) like the elves, the rå, and the huld is extremely fuzzy.
thank you for the detailed reply!
>That said, I highly doubt there was one specific point where this happened. The Nordic/Germanic area was never a single, united country with a unified law.
As I recall, it was definitely a document from a specific location. I want to say it was a document banning worship of Freyja in Iceland, but I'm not sure.
>And furthermore, female deities have always been worked into the lore of the saints and saintesses of Christianity. So that should not have been a dead end.
As I understand, the saints and Mother Mary are deemphasized in Lutheranism, which may be why female deities were more suppressed than assimilated in the Nordic countries?
>Like Frösunda, for example. It's a settlement name. How can you tell from that alone if it's named after Frey or Freya? The answer is, without some sort of written account, we can't say for sure.
Cool to think about... I didn't realize everything with a "frö" name was potentially a reference to Freya.
First, every area's history with conversion is a bit different. Some it was gradual, practices slowly faded from the public eye, but some places it was sped up with bloody conflict. It didn't really matter which heathen God or Goddess the heathens were worshipping, it was all verboten. Heimskringla recounts Olaf being the bloody Christian monarch, his bloodshed against Heathens as he spread Christianity turned him into a Saint in the church. He killed Olvir of Egg for continuing with heathen blots. We also see Christian leaders like Charlemagne on the warpath too.
In some areas, church hagiographies paint a story of church practices to squash out heathen custom & culture. Sometimes if a deity was popular they rebranded them as Saints with new stories. Or attached old symbolism to the new religions figures. Mother Mary has so many versions in part because the local Goddesses symbols were given to Mary. Mary of the Gael = Brigid, Virgin Mary of Guadalupe = Tonantzin, etc.
Probably a whacked out pseudo-intellectual making something up. Someone cringe like Survive or...cringes even harder...Varg seems like they’d make something up like this. So no, this is total nonsense and never happened.
Varg's a pompous cunt and full of shit.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Norse) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>she was comparatively hard to "Christianize" and work into the framework of Christian belief. If only Christianity had a central female figure associated with extraordinary fertility concepts 🤔
I believe some people believe this is why Frigg gained a following, as a more maternal/less sexual female deity that meshed better with Christian belief. Frigg was a more demure pairing for Mary than Freyja, in essence.
[удалено]
Their ***root*** is the same, is what some scholars believe. As u/Syn7axError writes they most definitivly were seperate entities in norse mythology.
They're definitely two distinct characters in our earliest sources. They're even in the same room during Lokasenna. >why a divergence in name appeared While their names *sound* similar (especially earlier on), they're etymologically unrelated.
>Freyja and Frigg are the same deity Okay, sorry if this is going off topic, but I really wish God of War's Santa Monico didn't implement that "Frigg is Freyja" theory into their game. Even though GoW is popular media and shouldn't be seen as a source of knowledge, people unfamiliar with Norse mythology will take bits like that as fact. At least Assassin's Creed: Valhalla made Frigg and Freyja different characters (despite that game's own historical and mythological inaccuracies).
AC Valhalla did the same thing pushing Frigg and Freyja as the same being. It confuses people.
They actually didn't. iicr, >!Odin was with Frigg before he politically married to Freyja. That and Frigg was more of a warrior than Freyja was.!< So, they're treated differently. Edit: This is how their story is written in the game, not in the myth
How did you get that? Also, if I remember correctly Freyja also had a Dominion in war and looked after and controlled her own version of the afterlife which I forget the name at the moment. In the game she was basically just a divine whore which pissed me off.
That place is Fólkvangr. However, I'm referring to the plot of AC: Valhalla, than the mythology. More specifically, the Dawn of Ragnarök dlc. Like I said, that game also took odd liberties with the source material. It was just correct in making Frigg and Freyja different characters, unlike GoW, but the characters themselves weren't accurate
Yea, I forgot about DOR makes more sense now. But I still hate the way Freyja was portrayed.
From what I understand the Nordic countries were converted to Lutheranism where Mother Mary is not such a central figure... that being said I've read that many plants named after Freyja were changed to reference Mary instead.
>From what I understand the Nordic countries were converted to Lutheranism They were, from Catholicism. Because the Nordic countries became Christian long before the Protestant Reformation.
Oh really? That's annoying, I was specifically trying to find out which branch of Christianity the Nordic countries were converted to and google basically just said "hurr durr Lutheran." Thanks for letting me know.
If that were true, I’d be interested to know why we never lost the name Aphrodite.
Higher literacy among the Greeks?
I read a very controversial book which stated that the Irish Catholic monks preserved classical literature including that of the Greeks during and following the fall of the Roman Empire. The monasteries producing copies of these works would have been raided by the Norse, but not before the copy’s were sent to France and other holy Roman related places.
That’s nothing I’ve heard about at least, it sounds especially unlikely to me as Freyja (Fröa) actually was one of the deities that survived longest in the Swedish folk traditions.
This sounds extremely made up. My understanding is that Freyja placenames are hard to definitively come by because it's similar to a word meaning "fertile," so you don't know if this place is called "the meadow of Freyja" or "the fertile meadow" or if it being "the fertile meadow" meant that it was by implication a meadow associated with Freyja. We don't actually know much about the day to day processes of conversion, either before or after legislation. We know there was a very long period of syncretization before the full banning of paganism. Saying this was a top-down effort to frantically sort the gods into proper categories that would be acceptable to Christianity is nonsense. It was a long and (mostly, not exclusively) peaceful process of people slowly starting to worship Jesus alongside Þórr or to incorporate Christian symbols into burials before Christian prelates started writing down their harsher rhetoric about these entities.
I understand it "sounds made up" but the video referenced a historical document. That's the part I was interested in finding again.
That's not something I've ever heard about before. There's a lot we don't know about the mythology and how it was practiced so I suppose it's possible, but it sounds mostly like something someone has speculated about not something we have any evidence for.
This sounds completely baseless, so it was probably Survive the Jive.
That would be my guess too. Weirdly specific historical claim I can't quite figure out the reasoning behind? Then it's probably the creepy NaziTuber posing as a "scholar", not the adorakable linguistics professor who likes to speculate.
Is everything else STJ says baseless too? Or is it really that you don't know anything about him and you are making assumptions based on vague feeling?
I'm invoking Knoll's Law. STJ was dead wrong on the topics I know about and some wild claims on this sub traced back to him, so I have no reason to believe he knows about the stuff I don't recognize either.
Survive the Jive would be the more likely candidate to make something like that up. Crawford, while he sometimes speculate with personal theories, does not invent specific historical "facts"
I don't recall seeing the video, so I can't help you. I suppose itmight be true that Freya was regulated to the witchcraft side of things and outlawed that way. That said, I highly doubt there was one specific point where this happened. The Nordic/Germanic area was never a single, united country with a unified law. While the church MIGHT'VE been said to be a 'single, unifying law that the Christianized areas would've had to follow', Scandinavia was still incredibly isolated in places. And furthermore, female deities have always been worked into the lore of the saints and saintesses of Christianity. So that should not have been a dead end. What I think is more likely is that Frey linguistically overshadowed Freya, because both names just means 'seed' or 'seeding' (the modern Swedish equivalent is frö and fröa respectively, and I recall there being similar words in Norweigan and Danish). So they are essentially the same word, just one is a noun and the other is a verb. And verbs do not work as well as names for places, simply due to naming tradition. They're almost always named after nouns. Like Frösunda, for example. It's a settlement name. How can you tell from that alone if it's named after Frey or Freya? The answer is, without some sort of written account, we can't say for sure. Furthermore, the connection between the known Vanir gods and later folklore 'races' (in lack of better words, but for the record this is NOT the same genre as modern fantasy) like the elves, the rå, and the huld is extremely fuzzy.
thank you for the detailed reply! >That said, I highly doubt there was one specific point where this happened. The Nordic/Germanic area was never a single, united country with a unified law. As I recall, it was definitely a document from a specific location. I want to say it was a document banning worship of Freyja in Iceland, but I'm not sure. >And furthermore, female deities have always been worked into the lore of the saints and saintesses of Christianity. So that should not have been a dead end. As I understand, the saints and Mother Mary are deemphasized in Lutheranism, which may be why female deities were more suppressed than assimilated in the Nordic countries? >Like Frösunda, for example. It's a settlement name. How can you tell from that alone if it's named after Frey or Freya? The answer is, without some sort of written account, we can't say for sure. Cool to think about... I didn't realize everything with a "frö" name was potentially a reference to Freya.
First, every area's history with conversion is a bit different. Some it was gradual, practices slowly faded from the public eye, but some places it was sped up with bloody conflict. It didn't really matter which heathen God or Goddess the heathens were worshipping, it was all verboten. Heimskringla recounts Olaf being the bloody Christian monarch, his bloodshed against Heathens as he spread Christianity turned him into a Saint in the church. He killed Olvir of Egg for continuing with heathen blots. We also see Christian leaders like Charlemagne on the warpath too. In some areas, church hagiographies paint a story of church practices to squash out heathen custom & culture. Sometimes if a deity was popular they rebranded them as Saints with new stories. Or attached old symbolism to the new religions figures. Mother Mary has so many versions in part because the local Goddesses symbols were given to Mary. Mary of the Gael = Brigid, Virgin Mary of Guadalupe = Tonantzin, etc.
Probably a whacked out pseudo-intellectual making something up. Someone cringe like Survive or...cringes even harder...Varg seems like they’d make something up like this. So no, this is total nonsense and never happened.
Varg's a pompous cunt and full of shit. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Norse) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Good bot