Frey
Frey EuropeMost famous of the vanir were the twin deities, Frey and Freya, the son and daughter of Njord, the handsome sea god. In Germanic mythology the brother-sister gods were instrumental in bringing together the two divine races, the aesir and the vanir, so that Frey became assimilated with Frigg, the wife of Odin.
Frey means ‘lord’ and Freya ‘lady’, a circumstance suggesting connections with the cult of the sacred marriage in ancient West Asia. In the Uppsala temple, according to Adam of Bremen, there was about 1200 an image of Frey with a pronounced phallus; the priests actually called him Fricco, ‘the lover’, and his Roman counterpart was Priapus, the son of Dionysus, and Aphrodite. Just as Frey was the most handsome of the gods, having authority over rain, sunshine, and natural fruitfulness, so Freya was the most beautiful of the goddesses, sharing with Odin one half of the slain. On her journeys she used a trap driven by a pair...
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