the magician // temperance

Do you have any thoughts on freyr and liminality?

So this one’s been languishing fragmentarily in my drafts for a good few days, sorry about that.

It’s actually kind of a big question, and a lot of it is just UPG, but you did ask for my thoughts, so here you go, have a very messy UPG dump (trouble is, Freyr and Odin come as a matched set for me, and I can’t always quite tell them apart, so this is necessarily going to have at least a little bit of Odiny goodness mixed in).

Barrow Freyr is the short and long of it. The side of Freyr I usually deal with isn’t the sunshiny, happy harvest and love side that he’s more popularly known for, but a deep dark, chthonic, death-like and, yes, liminal side of him.A lot of it is about the overlap between things that seem like opposites; contradictions that are in themselves a solid thing; death from life from death.

Flowering plants growing from soil that was once flowering plants.The changing of seasons.That we all live by means of death; even animals who don’t eat dead animals still live on dead plants.Life after death, both as an afterlife and as a cyclic thing.

The whole ribcages-full-of-flowers thing is a good visual shorthand.

A road as a place to be rather than just a passage (ok, this is starting to sound like Wanderer Odin).Actually, a good deal of it (whatever it is; Deerkult, or Freyr himself, or the Odin/Freyr Them tagteam, or my personal practice as a whole, or who knows what) is about finding some place liminal, and then staying there and making it a place in and of itself instead of just a passing through.

Even the contradiction between the popular conception of Freyr and the more chthonic side I get is itself one of these immensely potent intersections.

There’s also the whole #drowny goodness thing (though goodness knows why this pings Freyr for me). It’s downing itself, not having drowned. Liminality, as in the passage is the place.

Wetlands are very Freyr-y to me, too, and they’re generally considered pretty darn liminal. This one’s harder to catch and pin down in language, it’s a slippery, elusive concept that’s always just out of reach, but bogs and marshes and swamps are neither bodies of water nor solid land (cf the stanza for the Iar rune in the AS Rune Poem); between places, all potential no actuality, full of tangible emptiness.

And bog bodies – mummies – preservation by means of decay (that one’s equally Odin and Freyr).

Something about fog and mist; not as an obscuring element, but as a thing of itself which permeates everything and cannot be caught.

And Faerie places; little hidden, secret, verdant spots that remain unchangeddespite the world around them changing rapidly or drastically.

I don’t even know what Alfheim even is, but it seems to be a very lively sort of afterlife, and Freyr as King of Alfheim (that is, as some sort of faerie king and thus leader of Wild Hunts) is something I get a lot of.

I made a post a while back about needing a word for things that aren’t exactly literal, but aren’t entirely metaphorical either. That idea, that solid between-ness, is exceedingly Freyr-y.

King of the unreal, denizen of betweens, not-which-is. That’s Barrow Freyr.