freia

They always tell the story as if she was weak—as if Freia, most powerful of the Vanir, goddess of magic itself, somehow debased herself by sleeping with four dwarves to obtain the necklace Brisingamen. They frame it as a moral failing, a cautionary tale about female desire and the "costs" of vanity.

Let me tell you the truth they couldn't bear.

Freia saw the necklace Brisingamen glowing in the dwarves' forge—gold wrought with such skill it seemed alive with fire. And she wanted it. Not because she was vain, but because she recognized power when she saw it. The dwarves were master crafters, and Brisingamen was no ordinary ornament—it was a torc of sovereignty, a amplifier of magic, a declaration of self-possession.

When the dwarves said the price was a night with each of them, Freia did not bargain or beg. She did not seek Odin's approval or ask her brother Freyr to intervene. She understood immediately what the dwarves understood: that a woman's desire—both for the necklace and expressed through her sexuality—was the exact equivalent exchange for master craftsmanship. Her pleasure was not diminishment. It was currency equal to gold.

She spent four nights in the forge, one with each dwarf, and took pleasure in each encounter on her own terms. Then she claimed Brisingamen and wore it as her own. Not a gift from a man. Not an inheritance from a father. Not a prize for being chosen. Something she wanted and claimed through her own agency and the conscious use of her power.

But patriarchy cannot tolerate a woman who owns her desire and pays her own prices. So they sent Loki—trickster, shape-shifter, agent of diminishment—to steal the necklace while she slept. And when Odin held Brisingamen hostage, he demanded that Freia "earn it back" by starting a war between two human kings, an endless battle where the dead would rise each night to fight again.

Here's what they miss: Freia agreed not because Odin had power over her, but because she understood that retrieving what is yours sometimes requires you to work within unjust systems while maintaining your sovereignty. She started the war—but she also claimed half the battle-dead for her hall, Sessrúmnir. While Odin got his Valhalla warriors, Freia got her choice of the slain, taking the first pick before All-Father himself.

This is the secret they tried to bury: Freia was as much a goddess of war and death as of love and fertility. She rode a boar into battle. She wore a falcon-feather cloak that allowed her to fly between worlds. She practiced seiðr, the magic of fate-weaving, which even Odin had to beg her to teach him—and which he could never master as she did, because seiðr required a surrender to ecstasy and transformation that masculine rigidity could not accommodate.

Freia understood what patriarchy fears most: that desire and death are intimately linked, that sexuality is power, that magic requires surrender, that a woman who owns her choices is unstoppable. She wept tears of gold—not because she was sad, but because her very essence was valuable. Even her grief was wealth.

They tried to diminish her into maiden or fertility goddess, to make her safe and palatable. But Freia remained herself: fierce, magical, sexual, deadly, sovereign. She chose her lovers and her battles. She wore her necklace as a declaration. She flew between worlds in her falcon cloak, bound by nothing, belonging only to herself.

When the gods needed the walls of Asgard rebuilt, they offered Freia as payment to the giant builder—casually, as if she were property. But Freia was never property. Even when systems tried to claim her, she remained unclaimed, her magic too wild, her sovereignty too absolute, her pleasure too much her own.