Vanir

A spear went up over the heads of an assembly, and the world learned what war was. Odin threw it. The poem that records the moment gives no speech and no reason, only the flight of the shaft and what followed, which was that the wall around the stronghold of the Æsir came down and the Vanir came through the gap, unbroken, treading the field.

Before the spear there was a woman in Odin’s hall. Her name was Gullveig. The Æsir ran spears through her and burned her three times, and three times she stepped back out of the fire, and afterwards she walked among people as Heiðr, a seeress with a wand, always welcome in a wicked house. Völuspá never says she was one of the Vanir. It simply sets her down before the war and leaves the arithmetic to the reader, which readers have been doing confidently and badly ever since.

The Vanir of the surviving stories are three. Njörðr owns harbours and ship-keels and the wind that decides whether a crew comes home. His son Freyr owns rain on barley, the fat of the herd, and the peace of a good year. His daughter Freyja owns desire, gold, half of everyone who falls in battle, and seiðr, the trance-sorcery she is said to have brought to the Æsir herself. Their power smells of salt, tar, wet grain and boar. Freyja’s by-names place her before anything else does: Vanadís, the Vanir woman, and Vanabrúðr, the Vanir bride.

What this family does when nobody is fighting looks like a slow procession. A covered wagon stands in a grove on an island in a lake, and no one enters the grove. Priests yoke oxen, and the cart goes out through the settlements with cloth over it, and for as long as it travels nobody carries iron and nobody quarrels. Tacitus wrote that down in the first century about a goddess he called Nerthus, and Nerthus is, by regular sound change, the same name as Njörðr, though the deity in the wagon is female and the Norse god is not. A thousand years later Adam of Bremen described a statue of Freyr at Uppsala equipped with an enormous phallus, and reported that the rites around it involved things he preferred not to write down.

Where they come from is stated plainly and only once. In Vafþrúðnismál a giant tells Odin that Njörðr was made in Vanaheim by wise powers and given to the gods as a hostage, and that at the doom of the gods he will go home again to the wise Vanir. Snorri, writing history rather than poetry, put Vanaland east of the river Tanais and made the whole affair a border war between two peoples, with a marriage law as the sharpest difference between them: among the Vanir a man might marry his sister, and among the Æsir he might not. Freyr and Freyja, in that telling, are the children of such a marriage.

The peace was a swap. Njörðr and Freyr went east to west as hostages, along with Kvasir, the wisest of their side. The Æsir sent back the tall and handsome Hœnir and, with him, Mímir, who knew everything. The Vanir made Hœnir a chieftain on the strength of his bearing. Then they noticed that at every assembly where Mímir was not standing at his shoulder, Hœnir said the same thing, which was that others had better decide. They cut off Mímir’s head and sent it back over the border. Odin took the head, treated it with herbs so it would not rot, and sang charms over it until it spoke, and it went on advising him for the rest of the world’s life.

The other seal on the truce was stranger and better. Both sides spat into a single vat, and from the mingled spittle they shaped a man called Kvasir, so wise that no question could be put to him that he could not answer. He was later murdered by two dwarfs who drained his blood into three vessels and brewed it with honey, and that is where poetry comes from.

The neat division does not survive close reading. In Þrymskviða the god Heimdallr, an Áss, is said to see far ahead like the other Vanir. Sigrdrífumál scatters runes among the Æsir, the elves and the wise Vanir as though they are three parallel kinds. Alvíssmál has a dwarf recite the private names that gods, men, giants, elves, dwarfs and Vanir each use for the same sky and the same sea, which puts the Vanir in a list of separate races and nowhere near the Æsir. And the word itself is rare, clustering in verse and in kennings, doing very little work outside them.

That thinness is now an argument. In 2010 Rudolf Simek published a paper titled “The Vanir: An Obituary”, arguing that a distinct divine family called the Vanir is largely a construction running from Snorri’s thirteenth-century systematising through to twentieth-century handbooks, and that the poems show no real difference in kind between these gods and the rest. Clive Tolley and Jens Peter Schjødt answered him, pointing at holes in the method and insisting that the group has a genuine functional tendency of its own. Georges Dumézil had already read the war as an Indo-European inheritance, with the Vanir as the third function of fertility and wealth being violently admitted to a divine society that had begun with only sovereignty and force. Nobody has settled it. The debate is live, and it is one of the few places in Norse studies where a familiar textbook fact is openly on trial.

Their gifts are the ones people actually needed. Good weather, full nets, a calm crossing, a child, gold, and the ability to know what is coming, which is the power the Æsir seem most consistently to lack. Their sorcery breaks walls and outlasts burning. Set against that, they cannot hold ground politically. They win the field and lose the settlement, and the price of peace is that their best three go and live in someone else’s hall for the rest of time, worshipped under Æsir management. Freyr gives away his sword to get a wife and will face the fire-giant Surt without it. Njörðr’s return to Vanaheim is scheduled for the end of everything, which is a long wait. And every word about them comes through Christian Icelanders writing centuries after the last wagon went round the fields, which means the Vanir are visible only in the negative, as the shape the other gods had to make room for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Vanir in Norse mythology?

The Vanir are a group of Norse gods associated with fertility, wealth, the sea, prophecy and the sorcery called seiðr. The three named members are Njörðr and his children Freyr and Freyja. They are presented in the sources as distinct from the Æsir, the group that includes Odin and Thor, until a war and a hostage exchange merged them.

What caused the Æsir-Vanir War?

The Poetic Edda gives no explicit cause. Völuspá describes the burning of a figure called Gullveig in Odin’s hall, then Odin flinging a spear over an assembly to begin the first war in the world, and readers have connected the two events ever since without the poem doing it for them. The fighting ended in stalemate, with the Vanir breaking the wall of the Æsir stronghold.

How did the war between the Æsir and the Vanir end?

It ended with an exchange of hostages and a shared oath. Njörðr, Freyr and Kvasir went to the Æsir, while the Æsir sent Hœnir and Mímir to the Vanir. When the Vanir realised Hœnir could not make a decision without Mímir prompting him, they beheaded Mímir and returned the head to Odin, who preserved it and made it speak. Both sides also spat into one vat, and from that spittle the wise being Kvasir was formed.

Did the Vanir really exist as a separate family of gods?

This is disputed. In 2010 Rudolf Simek argued in “The Vanir: An Obituary” that the idea of a separate Vanir family is largely a construct built by Snorri Sturluson and later scholars, since the word is rare and mostly poetic. Clive Tolley and Jens Peter Schjødt argued back that the group has a real functional identity, and the question remains open in current scholarship.

What is Vanaheim?

Vanaheim, Old Norse Vanaheimr, is the home of the Vanir. It is named in Vafþrúðnismál, where a giant says Njörðr was made there by wise powers and given to the gods as a hostage, and that he will return there when the gods meet their end. Snorri later relocated it to a region east of the river Tanais and treated it as an earthly country called Vanaland.

Related Entries

Njord, Freyr (Frey), Freyja, Æsir, Odin, Heimdallr, Loki, Thor, Balder, Tyr, Freyja’s Cats, Norns, Ran, Yggdrasil