Æsir

Three times they ran her through with spears, and three times they burned her in the hall of Har, and three times she stood up out of the ash. The seeress who remembers it never explains what Gullveig had done to deserve it. She says only what came next: Odin hurling his spear out over the assembled host, the plank wall of the gods’ stronghold coming down, and the Vanir walking across a field they had no right to be walking across. That was the first war in the world. It is also the moment the Æsir stop being a loose word for gods and become a side.

The word itself is much older than any story told about them. Old Norse has áss in the singular and æsir in the plural, with ásynja and ásynjur for the women. Old English has the same word worn down to ós, plural ése. The Goths had it too. Jordanes, writing their history in the sixth century, says that after one great victory they stopped calling their commanders men and began calling them anses, which he glosses as demigods. Around the year 200 somebody dropped a belt buckle into the bog at Vimose on Funen, in among a great mass of deliberately ruined weapons, and the runes cut into it have been read as a dedication to an áss.

Where the word came from before that is not settled. One line traces it to a root shared with Sanskrit asura and Avestan ahura, lord. Another traces it to a word meaning beam or post, which would make the oldest Germanic god a length of shaped timber standing upright in wet ground, and the carved wooden figures hauled out of northern peat over the last two centuries make that harder to laugh off than it sounds. Nobody ever describes the Æsir as a group. They are only ever described one at a time, and the flat possibility that their collective name once meant a row of posts is the closest thing to a portrait of them that survives.

The war with the Vanir ended in an exchange of people rather than a victory. Njord came to the gods’ stronghold with his son Freyr, both of them reckoned the best the other side had. Going the other way went Hoenir, who was tall and handsome and looked exactly like a man who should be leading something, and Mimir, who was clever. The Vanir made Hoenir their chief. He was a fine chief for as long as Mimir was standing next to him. Whenever Mimir was called away, every question put to Hoenir got the same answer: let others decide. The Vanir worked out what they had been sold, cut Mimir’s head off and sent it back. Odin took the head, packed it in herbs so it would not rot, and sang over it until it spoke, and after that it told him things nobody else knew.

There is a softer account of the same peace. Snorri, explaining where poetry comes from, says both sides spat into a single vat, and afterwards decided the vat should not be emptied but kept, and made a man out of what was in it. They called him Kvasir. The gods sealed their treaty by spitting into a bucket. Kvasir turned out to be the wisest creature alive and was murdered almost at once for his blood, which became the mead of poetry, so the settlement worked out roughly as well as most things the Æsir arranged.

Counting them is harder than it looks. Snorri lists twelve of the men: Odin, Thor, Njord, Freyr, Tyr, Heimdallr, Bragi, Vidar, Vali, Ullr, Forseti and Loki. Then the women, running to sixteen or more, among them Frigg, Saga, Eir, Gefjon, Fulla, Freyja, Sjofn, Lofn, Var, Vor, Syn, Hlin, Snotra, Gna, and the sun herself. Two of the men on that list and one of the women were supposed to have been born on the losing side. The old poetic name lists do the same thing, filing Njord and Freyr under words meaning áss and Freyja under words meaning ásynja. Some of that is simple craft, since áss alliterates in places where the ordinary word for god will not fit, and a poet reaching for a sound is not making a theological ruling. The rest of it suggests the hostages were absorbed so completely that the distinction stopped mattering to anyone but scholars.

Snorri also had a theory about the name, and it was wrong. He derived Æsir from Asiamenn, men of Asia, and had the gods migrate north out of Troy; Saxo Grammaticus went the same way. It was a thirteenth-century Christian’s method of giving the north a classical pedigree and a safely human origin, and no modern account of the word accepts it. Terry Gunnell has made the sharper point that Snorri’s neat household of gods, all living in one walled town under one ruling father, reads like the religion of a warrior elite who were partial to Odin, and not necessarily like anything a farmer in Norway believed was living in his own field.

Because there were smaller Æsir. A ninth-century whalebone pin from Engstad carries an inscription read as gardáss, the áss of the enclosure, a god belonging to one farmstead. Egil Skallagrimsson, cursing a king, calls on the landáss, the land’s own áss. A saga preserves an insult built on the Svinfellsáss, the god of Svinfell. A man called Bard picked up the name Snæfellsáss because the people living under that mountain gave him worship and he came when they needed him. In England the word had drifted somewhere else entirely: a remedy against sudden stabbing pain names the shot of the ése alongside the shot of elves and of hags, three kinds of unseen archer to be charmed out of a body. Swedish still keeps a fossil of them in aska, thunder, which began life as the driving of the áss across the sky.

What the Æsir do, taken together, is settle things. They killed the first giant and built the world out of him. Three of them found two pieces of driftwood on a shore and gave them breath, wit and warm colour, and left them standing as the first man and woman, though the sources cannot agree on which three. They set the sun and moon walking and gave the seasons their names. They keep the judgment seats, bind oaths, fix what things are called. Thor spends a great deal of his existence killing the giants who would otherwise be inside the wall by evening.

They also age. This is the strangest thing about them, and the sources are entirely matter of fact about it. When Loki lured Idunn out of the stronghold and Thjazi carried her off in eagle feathers, the gods went grey and slack within days, hunting for a woman with a basket of apples. They break their word. When a builder nearly finished their wall inside the agreed season and stood to collect Freyja, the sun and the moon, they simply revoked the oaths and sent Thor to pay him with a hammer, and the verse Snorri quotes about it says flatly that oaths were broken then, and pledges, and every sacred bond that had passed between them. And they die. At Ragnarok the wolf takes Odin, Thor kills the world serpent and walks nine steps before the venom drops him, Freyr goes down before a fire giant with no sword in his hand because he gave his away, and Tyr and Heimdallr each kill the thing that kills them. Afterwards the land comes up out of the sea again, and Vidar and Vali are there, and Modi and Magni carrying their father’s hammer, and Baldr back from the dead, and in the new grass they find the golden gaming pieces the old gods had owned, lying where they were dropped.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Æsir in Norse mythology?

The Æsir are the main family of gods in the Norse sources, including Odin, Thor, Frigg, Tyr, Heimdallr, Bragi and Loki. Snorri Sturluson counts twelve male Æsir and sixteen or more ásynjur, the female Æsir. The word is also used more loosely to mean the gods in general, which is why Njord, Freyr and Freyja are sometimes counted among them despite being born Vanir.

What is the difference between the Æsir and the Vanir?

The Vanir are a second group of gods who fought the Æsir in the first war in the world and were afterwards absorbed into them through an exchange of hostages. The old distinction is often described as war and rulership on the Æsir side against fertility and prosperity on the Vanir side, but the surviving texts do not divide the roles that cleanly, and the poetic name lists file Njord, Freyr and Freyja under Æsir words.

What does the word Æsir mean?

Æsir is the plural of Old Norse áss, from Proto-Germanic *ansuz, with cognates in Old English ése and Gothic anses. Its deeper origin is disputed: it may share a root with Sanskrit asura and Avestan ahura, meaning lord, or it may come from a word meaning beam or post, which would connect the gods to carved wooden cult figures. Snorri’s own explanation, that Æsir means men of Asia, is a medieval invention and is not accepted.

Can the Æsir die?

Yes. The Æsir stay young only through Idunn’s apples, and when she was carried off by the giant Thjazi they turned grey and old within days. At Ragnarok most of them are killed, including Odin, Thor, Freyr, Tyr and Heimdallr, though Vidar, Vali, Modi, Magni and a returning Baldr survive into the world that follows.

Where did the Æsir live?

The Norse sources place the Æsir in a walled stronghold reached by a bridge, which they defend constantly against giants. Individual Æsir could also be far more local: runic and saga evidence records an áss belonging to a single farmyard, an áss of the land itself, and a man named Bard who became the áss of a particular mountain because the people beneath it worshipped him.

Related Entries

Odin, Thor, Freyja, Freyr (Frey), Njord, Tyr, Heimdallr, Balder, Loki, Vanir, Jötunn, Ymir, Yggdrasil, Einherjar, Norns