Brísingamen

Also Known As: also Brísinga men, the Brisings’ necklace; Old English Brosinga mene; second element Old Norse men, a neck-ring of precious metal
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: No surviving source credits it with a single power, which makes it the rarest kind of treasure, one that works entirely on the people who want it.
Role in Mythos: It is the possession that identifies Freyja, the theft that identifies Loki, and the recovery that identifies Heimdallr, so that three gods are named in the old poetry by their relation to one piece of gold.
Relation to Humans: Mortals never wear it and never touch it, but one of them pays for it, because the ransom Odin sets on its return is an everlasting battle between two human kings. Two hundred men rise every night on a Scottish island to settle a debt owed for a goddess’s jewellery.

The fly came up under the gable in the cold and could find no way in. Every lock was sound, every joint was tight, and Freyja’s bower had been built so that nobody crossed its threshold without her leave. Then it found the gap, no wider than a needle would make, and squeezed through into the warm dark. Inside, everyone was asleep. The goddess lay with the gold at her neck and the clasp turned down underneath her, which is how a careful woman sleeps in a collar she does not intend to lose. The fly became a flea, settled on her cheek and bit her. She stirred, turned over, and went back under. By the time she woke the doors stood open, unbroken, and the collar was gone.

That is the theft, and it is the most vivid scene the tradition has. What was stolen is harder to pin down. The second half of the name is solid ground: Old Norse men is a neck-ring of precious metal, a torc, the kind of heavy twisted gold that turns up in Viking Age hoards. The first half is a fight that has never been settled. Brísingr appears in the verse word-lists tacked onto manuscripts of the Prose Edda as a poetic term for fire, which would make the thing a gleaming or burning torc. It can equally be read as the name of a people, the Brísingar, which would make it their torc rather than a description of it. Henry Adams Bellows, glossing the poem where it first bursts, took the Brisings for dwarfs and rendered the word “Twiners”. Nobody knows who they were.

The story everyone tells about where it came from rests on one manuscript. Sörla þáttr survives only in Flateyjarbók, compiled in Iceland between 1387 and 1394 by two Christian priests, and it opens with Freyja walking past a rock that stands open. Four dwarfs are inside finishing a golden collar: Alfrigg, Dvalin, Berling and Grerr. She wants it. They do not want silver or gold, having plenty, and each names the same price, one night. She pays it, four nights running, and carries the collar home and says nothing about how she got it. It is a good scene, and it is late, and it comes wrapped in a frame that has already demoted the goddess to a king’s concubine in a euhemerised Asia. The tale never once calls the collar Brísingamen. It says “a golden collar”, and every retelling since has supplied the famous name from elsewhere.

Elsewhere is four hundred years earlier and considerably stranger. Around the 980s the skald Úlfr Uggason composed the Húsdrápa for Óláfr pái’s new hall at Hjarðarholt, a praise poem describing the mythological scenes carved into its panels. One surviving stanza has Heimdallr, the famous defender of the powers’ way, contending at Singasteinn with the terribly sly son of Fárbauti, and the son of nine mothers gets hold first of the hafnýra fǫgru, the beautiful sea-kidney. Snorri Sturluson, quoting the verse two and a half centuries later, states flatly that the object was Brísingamen and that the two gods fought in the shape of seals. Úlfr’s own stanza mentions no necklace and no seals. What it gives is a kenning for a stone, contested on a skerry, and scholars have been arguing about it ever since. Richard North reads Singasteinn as a kenning for the sun, with Heimdallr taking seal form to save the sinking light. Clive Tolley, following Edith Marold, Jan de Vries and Kurt Schier, reads the sea-kidney as an island and the whole episode as a creation myth about hauling land up out of the water. The reader in the firelit hall at Hjarðarholt presumably knew which it was. We have Snorri’s word for it and a carved panel that rotted centuries ago.

Snorri’s own Edda makes the necklace load-bearing in a way no summary quite conveys. In the list of ways to name Freyja she is possessor of the slain, of Sessrúmnir, of the gib-cats and of Brísingamen. In the list for Loki he is thief of the giants, of the goat, of Brísingamen and of Idunn’s apples. In the list for Heimdallr he is white god, foe of Loki, seeker of Freyja’s necklace, frequenter of Vágasker and Singasteinn. A skald could say “seeker of Freyja’s necklace” and every listener would supply Heimdallr without hesitation. The gold is a hinge the whole vocabulary swings on.

It also breaks. In Þrymskvitha, one of the oldest poems in the collection, Thor’s hammer has been stolen and the giant Thrym will trade it only for Freyja. The gods go to her house and tell her to put on the bridal veil. Her answer is not verbal. She snorts with rage, the great dwelling of the gods shakes, and the mighty Brisings’ necklace bursts apart on her. Then Heimdall, of all people, has the idea: bind the veil on Thor instead, and let him wear the necklace. So the strongest of the gods goes into Jötunheim in a woman’s dress with keys rattling at his belt, broad gems on his chest and a stolen goddess’s torc at his throat, eats an ox and eight salmon, and kills everyone at the wedding.

The name is older than any of the Norse texts that carry it. Beowulf, in Old English, remembers a hoard-gem beyond compare “since Hama bore to his bright-built burg the Brosings’ necklace, jewel and gem casket”, fleeing the malice of Eormenric and choosing eternal reward. There is no goddess in that passage, no dwarfs and no seal fight, only a hero, a stolen treasure and a flight to a shining city. Whatever the Brísings’ torc was, it was circulating in Germanic heroic legend before anyone wrote down that Freyja owned it.

For an object so fought over, its powers are conspicuously absent. It grants nothing. It heals no one, hides no one, wins no battles and confers no fertility, whatever later writers have wished onto it. Its entire force is what people will do to have it, and on that measure it is the most powerful object in the north. Its limits are the limits of any beautiful thing: it can shatter when its owner loses her temper, it can be lifted off a sleeping neck by anyone patient enough to become an insect, and it can be held to ransom. When Freyja came to Odin demanding it back, he named his price. She was to set two kings against each other, each served by twenty kings, under a spell that raised them again as fast as they fell, and only a Christian man of great fortune could ever end it. She agreed, and got her collar back. On the island of Hoy the dead men of Högni and Heðinn went on rising and fighting for a hundred and forty-three years, watched by a woman in a grove, until one of Óláfr Tryggvason’s watchmen came ashore with a sword and cut them out of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Brísingamen?

Brísingamen is the golden neck-torc of the Norse goddess Freyja. The second half of the name, Old Norse men, means a neck-ring of precious metal; the first half is disputed and may mean fire or may be the name of a people called the Brísings. No surviving source describes what it looked like beyond the fact that it was gold and had a clasp.

How did Freyja get Brísingamen?

According to Sörla þáttr, a tale preserved only in the late fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbók, Freyja found four dwarfs named Alfrigg, Dvalin, Berling and Grerr finishing a golden collar in their rock. They refused money and each demanded a night with her instead, and she paid the price over four nights. That tale is the sole source for the story, it is roughly four hundred years later than the earliest mention of the necklace, and it never actually uses the name Brísingamen.

Who stole Brísingamen and who got it back?

Loki stole it, and Heimdallr recovered it. Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda lists “thief of Brísingamen” among Loki’s standard bynames and “seeker of Freyja’s necklace” among Heimdallr’s, and says the two gods contended for it at Singasteinn in the shape of seals. The tenth-century skaldic poem Húsdrápa, Snorri’s own source, describes the contest but calls the object a “beautiful sea-kidney” and does not name the necklace.

What powers does Brísingamen have?

None that any surviving text records. No Norse source credits Brísingamen with magic, protection, fertility or any other property; it is simply the most desirable object in the mythology. Its effect on the story comes entirely from what gods are willing to do to acquire, steal, ransom or recover it.

Is Brísingamen mentioned outside Norse mythology?

Yes. The Old English poem Beowulf refers to the Brosinga mene, the Brosings’ necklace, which the hero Hama carried off to his bright city while fleeing Eormenric’s malice. That passage contains no goddess and no dwarfs, and it suggests the treasure was known across Germanic heroic legend independently of the Freyja story.