Difference between Var and Vor?
My ladies! love them both!
[TL;DR: Vár is thought to be associated with oaths and promise-making, Vǫr is thought to be associated with awareness and wisdom. Because our main source for this information is Snorra Edda, we don’t know for certain how much, if any, of the information we have on these goddesses actually traces back to pre-Christian myth or belief]
What we know about Vár and Vǫr is murky, made all the murkier by the eternal Old Norse literature question: “how much of this is authentic, and how much is post-conversion bullshit?” In “Gylfaginning”, the first major chunk of Snorra Edda (The Prose Edda), Snorri Sturluson has this to say about them both (with my translation to follow)
Níunda Vár: hon hlýðir á eiða manna ok einkamál er veita sín á milli konur ok karlar. Því heita þau mál várar. Hon hefnir ok þeim er brigða. Tíunda Vǫr: hon er ok vitr ok spurul, svá at engi hlut má hana leyna. Þat er orðtak at kona verði vǫr þess er hon verðr vís.
Ninth, Vár: she listens to people’s oaths, and private agreements which people make between one another, men and women. For this reason they are called várar, “contracts”. She also punishes those who break them. Tenth, Vǫr: she is so wise and inquisitive, so that nothing may be concealed from her. That is why it is said that a woman knows something when she is made vǫrr, aware of it.
Many scholars have used the similarity of these two goddesses’ names to discredit the authenticity, in earlier myth or cult activity, of said goddesses. In the Uppsala Edda (a Snorra Edda manuscript), both names are spelled “Vaur”, because medieval spelling conventions are delightful and non-existent. Vár is named in the poem “Þrymskviða”, called upon by Þrymr to bless his marriage to Freyja (who is really Þórr in disguise), Vǫr does not appear in the Eddic poems. Vǫr does appear in a þula, a list of names, called “kvenna heiti okend”, a list in which many other goddess names appear, but Vár’s does not. It’s common for one or both goddesses to be written off in this book or that article. The general arguments are: 1) that we know nothing about Vǫr, actually, and that Snorri made her “Gylfaginning” entry up based solely on a folk etymological play on her name and 2) that Vár is a goddess who deals with wedding vows and other romance-related promises, based upon her name being brought up in “Þrymskviða” and the antiquated notion that goddesses must all deal with love and other “feminine” domains only. While the phrasing of “konur ok karlar” in the Codex Regius (our main source for Snorra Edda) could theoretically point to vows men and women make to each other, romantically, in the Uppsala Edda, the line instead has an extra “menn”, so it’s oaths made “between people, men and women”, which would instead imply that she oversees the vows sworn by individuals of all genders, not just romantic vows between women and men. I think it is possible that Vǫr could have a past as a deity of wisdom, as Snorri would have us believe, and I think this is possible in part because of the overlap between Vǫr and the goddess Snotra— there are lots of “wisdom pairs” in Old Norse myth, why not a pair of wisdom ladies? But that’s just speculation on my part.
And that’s the general rundown on all things Vǫr and Vár :)
