The Informed Pagan

24th February 2018

Anonymous asked: Are Frigg and Freya the same goddess? I read in some books that frigg and Freya are like the same person and that they were split into two goddesses later

thorraborinn:

answersfromvanaheim:
wrathfulclam:
That is just about the million dollar question, ain’t it? The immediate personal answer I would give that is my opinion: no, they are unique goddesses. Now is that because originally they were separate or that after centuries of being considered two they became so, I cannot say and it does not negatively affect my worship of either majestic goddess.
I don’t have any immediate resources to share with you on the issue, perhaps a follower or other can help with that part?
@thorraborinn wrote a post on the subject that is worth a read. His opinion is that while there is evidence for both, the evidence pointing to “separate goddesses” is stronger. Obviously, others disagree.
I am, of course, biased. but I feel as if even if they were the same deity at one point, they’ve since been acknowledged as separate deities and honored as such. A popular theory is that Njord and Nerthus were once the same deity, but I’ve never seen anyone argue that we should go back to thinking of them as the same. Some people feel like Frigg’s handmaidens are actually just Frigg, but there are others who say the handmaidens are very definitely separate goddesses. Is Lytir a local version of Freyr, or a separate god? Is he identical to Lóðurr and, if so, that would mean Lóðurr is not Loki.
My point is that Heathenry is kind of a mess and we don’t have the written records that our Hellenic friends do. So we all sort of have to figure out what we’re going to believe and how we’re going to act based on those beliefs. I personally don’t believe in a literal Ragnarok, my creation myth doesn’t look like the one in Voluspa, and I’m okay with possibly none of my beliefs or practices having historical precedent. It’s why I don’t call myself a reconstructionist.
I stand by what I said in the post that @answersfromvanaheim linked to in which I answered from a historical/mythological perspective. I’d like to also add some notes on the interrelation between this sort of philological take on divinity with the lived experience of religious people.
Under the influence of early researchers into Germanic mythology who were influenced heavily by the comparative method and linguistic reconstruction, we seem to have inherited a belief that things that are older are more “true.” So my question is: if they were originally the same, and split around the, say, ninth century, would you be prepared to tell a ninth century Norse person that they are wrong? (This sounds like a rhetorical question. It isn’t. I think telling them they’re wrong is a position that could be validated, though it has different implications than not doing so).
The old school of Germanic studies attempted to restore an unaltered, complete mythical and religious tradition that was believed to have later broken up. Fragments of that old belief in descendant cultures were like puzzle pieces that could be put back together, much like the daughters of a dead language can be used to triangulate a proto-language (side-note: it’s often forgotten that a proto-language is not real language. What it really is is a network of relations between linguistic units in actually attested language. This is why attested language cannot be proto-language, and why Proto-Norse is not a true proto-language, since it is attested). In order to do this, deities that seemed to have some overlap in attributes had to be merged, which resulted in a sort of chain reaction of all or most of the goddesses collapsing into one (usually the Earth Mother, Frigg-Freyja-Jǫrð-Sif-Nerþuz-Holda-Perchta-Hludana). Sometimes, though less often, this was done to the male gods too (the Sky Father). This view is represented in contemporary scholarship by “Great Goddess” theory which is strongly associated with Marija Gimbutas but specifically within Scandinavian studies by Britt-Mari Näsström. It’s important to note that Great Goddess theory usually pertains not to any attested religion directly, but rather to European substratum religion – the religion of the people who inhabited Europe before Indo-Europeans came in with their masculine warrior gods. This is not frequently taken seriously anymore.
But more contemporary research acknowledges that no such monolithic, cohesive religious/cultural tradition ever existed. This is visible for example in studies of Norse religion that emphasize its status not as an Indo-European religion but as a circumpolar one (e.g. studies by Thomas A. Dubois and Neil Price), or in studies of development over time as observed in archaeology (e.g. studies by Anders Andrén, especially Tracing Old Norse Cosmology).
This leads us to questions that recur in heathenry like: are even Óðinn and Wōden the “same?” From a purely philological perspective, I think we have to treat them as if they are not. In fact, various attestations of Óðinn even just within Norse literature should be treated as distinct phenomena linked together by a tradition of identification. But we are not just philologists, we’re also living religious people and the question of how we relate to these phenomena is not something that can be determined by these same methods.
(In fact we could just as easily frame the Frigg-Freyja single-origin hypothesis as: “though Germanic people once believed them to be the same, it was later discovered that they are in fact distinct”).
So the point is that we’re used to trying to solve this problems using philological methods like researchers, which is great, but it’s only one system of signification. We also have to rely on our own personal theologies to sort these things out. If someone concludes that all our sources point toward them having been considered separate from their inception through to Christianization of Scandinavia, but their personal theology says they’re the same anyway, I really don’t see how I can say that they’re “wrong” (even as I disagree).
One last this is that, yeah, West Germanic Frīa, Frīġ, etc. do look and sound more like Freyja than they do like Frigg which may well have led to some folk-etymological equivalence even in the middle ages (e.g. Freyjudagr ‘Friday’ really is attested for Old Norse, if rarely, in place of the West Germanic loan Frjádagr), but it also is pure coincidence of the way these languages developed differently. Within any one given language the two names would have been clearly distinguishable (from PGmc. *Frijjō ‘Frigg’ and *Fraujōn- ‘Freyja’). Old Norse people did know their language was related to English but they didn’t know the rules of how they’re related (see: First Grammatical Treatise, Snorri’s Prologus).