The Marriage of Freyja: An Oddity of the Gods
Tonight I was reading a fairly dated (1982) academic essay called CONCENTRIC DUALISM AS TRANSITION BETWEEN A LINEAL AND CYCLIC REPRESENTATION OF LIFE AND DEATH IN SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY by H. A. MOLENAAR which I found to be seriously lacking on several points, but I digress. The essay is concerned mostly with Scandinavian cycles of death and its opposition to life, and it explores various ideals of the underworld presented in the myths. What I found most interesting about the essay was its short discussion of marriage as an opposite force to that of death, ie marriage as "life-giving" versus death as well, death.The author explored several examples of marriages and proposed marriages within the myths, the majority of which, no surprise, centered on the Vanir gods. There was some discussion in the paper of the inability of giants to secure goddesses as brides and bring them and their powers into their own world, yet it is common for male gods to bring giantess brides into t...