So there’s this story in Norse mythology, Þrymskviða. Compressed down, it goes like this: A Jotun steal Thor’s hammer Mjolnir and says he’ll only give it back if he’s given Freyja to marry, as she is the most beautiful goddess in all of existence. The gods argue over what to do for a while before Heimdall suggests they stick a bridal veil on Thor, says he’s Freyja, and pretend they’re giving Freyja (Thor) to the Jotun to marry so Thor can get close enough to the Jotun to steal Mjolnir back.
Now typically when people talk about this story, it’s with an element of disbelieving comedy. “Oh my god, who would believe Thor was a woman, let alone Freyja, the most beautiful goddess in the world?”
But I propose a different way to look at the story.
See, different cultures have different beauty standards. Modern western beauty standards may be a delicate hourglass supermodel, but that’s not always been the case. Greece, for instance, depicted Aphrodite like this:
Yeah. A Greek sculptor was told “sculpt the goddess of beauty” and they thought “alright, fat rolls, that’s where beauty is at, let’s do this”. And everybody else apparently agreed with them, because up went the statue. Beauty is a malleable concept is what I’m getting at.
Now this is where it becomes relevant that Freyja is not just the goddess of love, sex, and beauty. She’s also the goddess of war. And the righteous dead. Goddess of war in the same Viking warrior culture that gave us shield maidens, women who wielded seven fucking kilogram (15 lbs) shields in combat.
Sooooo … when the Norse storytellers said, “This is Freyja, goddess of war and the righteous dead, who rode giant murder cats into battle, she is the most beautiful goddess in the world”, I’m guessing they weren’t thinking of her as some willowy waif. No, I’m guessing they probably thought more along the lines of:
190 cm (6′3″), broad shoulders, built like a brick shithouse, with a jawline like whoa, and fully capable of murdering everything in her path.
Put in that context, the story of Thor dressing up as Freyja sounds less like a punchline about “how could anyone ever mistake Thor in a veil for Freyja?” and becomes more a case of “ohhhhhhhhhhh, no wonder all the gods thought this plan would work”.
It did, by the way. The plan totally worked.
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