Vanir

A woman stood in the hall of the High One with spears in her, and the gods set her on fire. She burned and was born again. They burned her a second time and a third, and each time she came back, and when she walked out among people afterwards she called herself Heiðr and went from house to house as a seeress, working the trance-magic called seiðr, always the delight of a wicked woman. The poem that tells this, Völuspá, names her Gullveig and never says whose side she was on. It sets her down immediately before a war and leaves the reader to draw the line, which readers have been doing, confidently and in every direction, since the nineteenth century.

What comes next is a council. The gods go to their judgement-seats and argue over whether the Æsir should pay a penalty or whether all the gods should share in the offerings. Then Odin lets fly into the host. The verb is a throw and a shot, and translators have long supplied the spear. That, the poem says, was the first war in the world. The plank wall of the Æsir’s stronghold was broken, and the Vanir, with war-spells, trod the field. Two lines. They are nearly all the war the poetry has.

The word itself is rare. Outside the dwarf’s word-lists in Alvíssmál, it turns up only a handful of times in the eddic poems, and almost always in the same alliterating pair, *vísir vanir*, “the wise Vanir”. The runes, says Sigrdrífumál, are among the Æsir, among the elves, among the wise Vanir, and among the sons of men. Heimdallr in Þrymskviða foresees how to get Thor’s hammer back, “like the other Vanir”, and Heimdallr is an Áss. In Alvíssmál the Vanir have their own word for the sky and for the sea, set in a column beside the words of gods, giants, elves and dwarfs, as if they were a separate people with a separate tongue.

Only one poem says where any of them came from. In Vafþrúðnismál the giant tells Odin that Njörðr was shaped in Vanaheim by wise powers and handed to the gods as a hostage, and that at the doom of the ages he will go home again among the wise Vanir. That is the whole of it. Everything else, the peace terms, the names of the hostages, the country and the customs, is Snorri Sturluson, writing in Iceland in the thirteenth century.

Snorri tells it twice, differently each time. In the Ynglinga saga he writes it as history. The land along the river Tanais, which he says was once called Vanakvísl, was Vanaland or Vanaheim, and Odin led an army against it. The Vanir defended well, both sides won and lost, both sides burned the other’s farms, and when they tired of it they met and swapped hostages. The Vanir gave their best men, Njörðr the Rich and his son Freyr. The Æsir gave Hœnir, a big and very handsome man they thought well suited to be a chieftain, and sent Mímir, the wisest of men, along with him. The Vanir made Hœnir a chief at once. Then they noticed that whenever Mímir was not standing near him at an assembly, and something hard came before him, Hœnir said the same thing every time: “Let others decide.” The Vanir concluded they had been cheated. They cut off Mímir’s head and sent it to the Æsir, and Odin smeared it with herbs so it would not rot and sang charms over it until it spoke to him and told him hidden things. In that telling the Vanir also sent Kvasir, the wisest of their own number.

In the Edda the same Kvasir has a different birth. The gods had a quarrel with the people called Vanir, and to seal the peace both sides went up to one vat and spat into it. From the spittle the gods made a man, Kvasir, so wise that no one could ask him anything he could not answer. Two dwarfs, Fjalar and Galar, killed him and let his blood run into three vessels, Óðrerir, Són and Boðn, and mixed it with honey, and that mead makes a poet of whoever drinks it. The peace between two kinds of god ended, one way or another, in a drink.

The saga adds the rest. Odin made Njörðr and Freyr priests of the sacrifices, and Njörðr’s daughter Freyja was a priestess, and she first taught the Æsir seiðr, which was the custom among the Vanir. While Njörðr lived among the Vanir he had married his own sister, since their law allowed it, and Freyr and Freyja were their children. Among the Æsir it was forbidden to marry so near. That is the only law of the Vanir anyone ever wrote down.

Almost nothing is said of them as a body. Snorri gives each of the three Vanir by-names in his handbook for poets: Njörðr and Freyr are each Vanaguð, “god of the Vanir”, and Vananiðr, “kinsman of the Vanir”; Freyja is Vanadís, “lady of the Vanir”, and Vanabrúðr, “bride of the Vanir”. In the Edda’s own descriptions, Njörðr rules the course of the wind and calms sea and fire, and Freyr rules rain and sunshine and what the earth grows, and is the one to pray to for a good year and for peace. Freyja owns the necklace Brísingamen, and Grímnismál gives her half of the slain, every day, in her hall at Fólkvangr.

Older and stranger evidence sits at the edges. In the first century Tacitus described a goddess he called Nerthus, Mother Earth, kept in a grove on an island in the ocean. When she came among the people her covered wagon was drawn by heifers, weapons were locked away and nobody went to war, and afterwards the wagon, the cloth and the goddess were washed in a hidden lake by slaves whom the lake then swallowed. The name Nerthus is, by regular sound change, the ancestor of the name Njörðr, and the goddess is female where the god is not, which nobody has ever satisfactorily explained. A thousand years on, Adam of Bremen described three idols in the temple at Uppsala, one of them a god he called Fricco, with an enormous phallus, who received libations when weddings were held. The songs sung at those rites, he added, were many and indecent and better left unsaid.

Whether the Vanir existed at all is now an argument. In 2010 Rudolf Simek published “The Vanir: An Obituary” in the RMN Newsletter. He argued that *vanir* was only a rare poetic word for gods in general, and that Snorri built a second divine tribe out of it, drawing on the name of a legendary king, Vanlandi, and on a learned pun that turned the river Tanais into Vanakvísl. He ended by bidding the Vanir, as a family of gods, to rest in peace. Clive Tolley answered the next year with “In Defence of the Vanir”, arguing that the poems already treat them as a distinct class of divine being before Snorri, and Frog and Jonathan Roper answered from the verse itself. Long before either, Georges Dumézil in *Tarpeia* (1947) had set the war beside Rome’s war with the Sabines: in both, a woman stands for the corrupting power of gold, and the gods of wealth and fertility are admitted, after a hard fight, into a society of sovereigns and warriors. None of these readings has carried the field.

What the Vanir do is what the living actually needed: wind for a ship, rain on the barley, sun, peace, a marriage, and the knowledge of what is coming. Their magic breaks walls. Heiðr’s seiðr turned minds. Their weakness is the peace itself. They won the fight and gave up their best three, who lived out their time in someone else’s hall, and the one Vanr whose return is promised, Njörðr, goes home only at the doom of the gods. Freyr gave away his sword to win a wife and will meet the fire-giant Surtr at the end without it. Every surviving word that names them was set down by Christians, most of it by one man, centuries after the last wagon went round the fields.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Vanir in Norse mythology?

The Vanir are a group of Norse gods who fought a war against the Æsir and then joined them through an exchange of hostages. The three gods usually counted as Vanir are Njörðr and his children Freyr and Freyja. Snorri Sturluson associates them with wind, sea, rain, sunshine, the harvest, peace and the magic called seiðr.

What caused the Æsir-Vanir War?

The poem Völuspá gives no direct cause. It describes a woman called Gullveig being speared and burned three times in Odin’s hall, a council of the gods over whether to pay a penalty, and then Odin shooting into the enemy host to start the first war in the world. Readers have linked Gullveig to the war ever since, but the poem never says she belonged to the Vanir.

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

According to Snorri Sturluson’s Ynglinga saga, the war ended with a peace meeting and an exchange of hostages. The Vanir sent Njörðr, Freyr and Kvasir, and the Æsir sent Hœnir and Mímir. When the Vanir found that Hœnir could not decide anything without Mímir, they beheaded Mímir and sent his head to Odin, who preserved it and made it speak.

Where did Kvasir come from?

Snorri Sturluson gives two different accounts of Kvasir. In the Ynglinga saga he is the wisest of the Vanir, sent to the Æsir as a hostage. In the Prose Edda both sides seal the peace by spitting into one vat, and the gods make Kvasir from that spittle; he is later killed by the dwarfs Fjalar and Galar, and his blood becomes the mead of poetry.

Were the Vanir really a separate family of gods?

This is disputed. In 2010 Rudolf Simek argued in “The Vanir: An Obituary” that the Vanir as a separate family were largely Snorri Sturluson’s creation from a rare poetic word for gods. Clive Tolley and the team of Frog and Jonathan Roper published replies in 2011, and the question has not been settled.

Related Entries

Njord, Freyr (Frey), Freyja, Æsir, Odin, Mímir, Mead of Poetry (Óðrerir), Völva, Heimdallr, Skadi, Brísingamen, Surtr, Balder, Ragnarök, Ljósálfar