Norse gods, worshiped by the Vikings, were divided into two factions: the Aesir and the Vanir. Stories often pit them against each other and against the Jötnar (giants). In some stories, “Aesir” refers to the entire pantheon of Norse gods and goddesses, Aesir and Vanir alike.
In short, the Aesir live in Asgard and hold the world in order. The Vanir are gods of fertility, wealth, and the sea, and their home is Vanaheim. The Jötnar, whom we usually call giants, live in Jötunheim and are both their rivals and their kin.
The Aesir
Many of the Aesir are the Norse gods people know best: Odin, Thor, Heimdall, Baldur, Frigg and Tyr, some of them familiar from the movies. They live in Asgard and work to hold the world in order against the forces of chaos, often personified by the Jötnar. (Loki lives among them too, though his family tree is complicated. More on that below.) The three biggest names have their own post: Thor, Odin, and Loki.
The Vanir and the War with the Aesir
The Vanir are more mysterious, gods of fertility, wealth, and the sea, whose home is Vanaheim. They practiced seiðr, a form of magic used to see and shape fate. After a war between the two tribes ended in a truce, the two sides exchanged hostages. The Vanir sent the sea-god Njord and his son Freyr to Asgard, and Njord’s daughter Freyja came too. The Aesir sent Honir and Mimir the other way; our post Mimir, Head of Wisdom tells how that went wrong.
Freyja was the great mistress of seiðr, and Snorri’s Ynglinga saga says it was she who first taught it to the Aesir. Her status was enormous. According to the Eddic poem Grímnismál, she chooses half of the slain for her hall in Fólkvangr, and Odin takes the other half for Valhalla.
The Jötnar
The Jötnar live in Jötunheim. The word is usually translated ‘giants,’ but that’s misleading. Many are no bigger than gods, and some, like Skadi and Gerd, marry into the Aesir. The line between god and giant was blurry. Odin’s mother Bestla was a giantess, and so, in most accounts, was Thor’s mother Jörð. The first giant of all, Ymir, came before the gods and was the raw material of the world they built.
Loki’s father, Fárbauti, was a giant. His mother, Laufey (also called Nál), is harder to place, and the sources never clearly say what she was. Unusually, Loki is often named after his mother, “Loki Laufeyjarson.” Scholars have debated why.
Do you have a Norse topic or question about Viking history that you’d like to learn more about? Leave us a comment below and we’ll write about some of the more popular ideas in an upcoming post. The names in this post are all in our Norse Mythology Vocabulary.
Keep reading: Valkyries, Women of War and Yggdrasil, the Terrible One’s Steed.
Sources
- Life in Norway, A Beginner’s Guide to Norse Mythology
- Scandinavia Facts, Freyja: The Norse Goddess of Love, Witchcraft, and War
- Life in Norway, Loki: The Story of the Trickster God
- Norse Mythology for Smart People, The Aesir Gods and Goddesses
- New World Encyclopedia, Aesir
