Frigg

Frigg is Odin’s wife and Baldr’s mother in Norse myth, the foremost of the goddesses, who knows the fate of all but tells it to no one. Her signs today are the key and the spindle, which modern Heathens give her.

Norse gods and their symbols. Also called frea, frigga, frigg goddess, frigg norse mythology, frigg symbol, frigg symbols.

Meaning

Frigg (said to rhyme with “big”) is the first of the goddesses in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which gives her the hall Fensalir and says “she knows all the fates of men, though she speaks no prophecy”. Store norske leksikon calls her wise and knowing, keeping what she knows of the fate of gods and men to herself; her name comes from the Old Norse verb frjá, “to love”, she protects mothers, and with Odin she rules over marriage. Lex sees her above all as the goddess of love and marriage and as the mother who mourns her son’s death. She is known from the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda (written down about 1230, Lex says), which the National Museum of Denmark notes were the work of Christian writers. She is worshipped today: The Troth, the American Heathen organisation, counts her among the gods Heathens most commonly worship.

Origin and history

Friday may carry her name. Store norske leksikon explains that the southern Germanic peoples turned the Latin dies Veneris, the day of Venus, into Frigg’s day, and that the Old Norse forms of the word recall both Frigg and Freyja; the National Museum of Denmark gives Friday as either Frigg’s day or Freyja’s. In the German lands she was Frîja, the wife of Wotan (Store norske leksikon), and in the Old High German Second Merseburg Charm, The Troth points out, “Frija, Folla’s sister” works a spell for Balder’s injured foal. A place in Västergötland, Sweden, is named Friggeråker, “Frigg’s grain field” (The Troth). One object may show her: the silver figure from Lejre, usually read as Odin, has also been read as Frigg from the feminine features of its dress (Lex).

Fensalir and the oath for Baldr

Frigg’s great story is the death of her son Baldr. In the Prose Edda she takes oaths that fire and water should spare him, and iron and every metal, stones, earth, trees, sicknesses, beasts, birds, venom and serpents. Loki, in the likeness of a woman, comes to her at Fensalir and learns the one exception: “There grows a tree-sprout alone westward of Valhall: it is called Mistletoe; I thought it too young to ask the oath of.” When Baldr is dead, it is Frigg who asks for someone to ride to Hel and ransom him. The Eddic poem Voluspo leaves her grieving: “But in Fensalir did Frigg weep sore”. Lex explains the name Fensalir as “marsh halls”, and reports that some researchers take it to mean Frigg was once a goddess of springs; Store norske leksikon ties it to the offerings made in bogs and lakes.

The goddess who knows fate

Both Eddas say Frigg knows what is coming. In Henry Adams Bellows’s translation of the Eddic poem Lokasenna, Freyja silences Loki: “The fate of all does Frigg know well, / Though herself she says it not.” Snorri quotes the same lines, but as Odin’s words. In the prose that opens Grimnismol, Odin and Frigg sit in Hlithskjolf and look over all the worlds, then make a wager about the two boys they brought up, and Frigg sends her maid Fulla to King Geirröth with a warning.

Often confused with Freyja

Frigg and Freyja are easily mixed up, and the sources blur them too. In a note to Grimnismol, Bellows cites the scholar Mogk: the Freyja who takes half the slain is “a confusion between two originally distinct divinities: the wife of Othin (Frigg) and the northern goddess of love”. The Troth sets out the case for one original goddess: continental forms of Frigg’s name, Langobardic Frea and Old High German Frija, look like Freyja, and Freyja’s husband Óðr has the same root as Odin. It adds that most Heathens today hold them to be two goddesses, and that the single-goddess view “is decidedly the minority view in modern Norse Paganism”. Friday shows the overlap: Ásatrúarfélagið in Iceland calls it freyjudagur, Freyja’s day.

Keys and the spindle

Frigg’s signs are modern ones, and The Troth says so. It names the key as Frigg’s commonest symbol in modern times, the sign of the right to manage a household’s resources, and points to the brides who wear keys in the Eddic poems Rígsþula and Thrymskvitha. Spindles, distaffs and looms are her emblems too, for providing for a household and for shaping wyrd, or fate, although she “is never explicitly demonstrated” spinning in the old texts. Some Heathens spin with a drop spindle as a meditation on Frigg, The Troth writes, and it recalls that Rod Landreth called her the “CEO of Asgard”.

Sources

Frigg (Store norske leksikon), Ellen Næss, Store norske leksikon
Frigg (Lex), Finn Stefánsson, Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon
Fensale (Lex), Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon
Odin-figuren fra Lejre, ca. 950 (Lex), Kasper H. Andersen and Tom Christensen, Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon
Fredag (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon
The old religion, National Museum of Denmark
The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation), Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (trans.), 1916, American-Scandinavian Foundation (Internet Archive), Gylfaginning, chapters XX, XXXV and XLIX
The Poetic Edda (Bellows translation), Henry Adams Bellows (trans.), 1923, American-Scandinavian Foundation (Project Gutenberg), Voluspo, stanza 34; Lokasenna, stanza 29; Grimnismol, introductory prose and note to stanza 14
Frigg (The Troth), The Troth
Balder (The Troth), The Troth, the Second Merseburg Charm
The Gods (The Troth), The Troth, table
Vor siður (Ásatrúarfélagið), Ásatrúarfélagið
Frigg (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com

The same shape elsewhere

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research

Added October 10, 2026.

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