A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

She was the protectress of those who sailed the seas, and the care of
children as they came into the world was also hers. Hers, too, was the
happy task of bringing together after death, lovers whom Death had
parted, and to her belonged the glorious task of going down to the
fields of battle where the slain lay strewn like leaves in autumn and
leading to Valhalla the half of the warriors who, as heroes, had died.
Her vision enabled her to look over all the earth, and she could see into
the Future, but she held her knowledge as a profound secret that none
could prevail upon her to betray.
"Of me the gods are sprung; And all that is to come I know, but lock In
my own breast, and have to none reveal'd."
Matthew Arnold.
[Illustration: FREYA SAT SPINNING THE CLOUDS]
Thus she came to be pictured crowned with heron plumes, the symbol
of silence--the silence of the lonely marshes where the heron stands in
mutest contemplation--a tall, very stately, very queenly, wholly
beautiful woman, with a bunch of keys at her girdle--symbol of her
protection of the Northern housewife--sometimes clad in snow-white
robes, sometimes in robes of sombre black. And because her care was
for the anxious, weary housewife, for the mother and her new-born
babe, for the storm-tossed mariner, fighting the billows of a hungry sea,
for those whose true and pure love had suffered the crucifixion of death,
and for the glorious dead on the field of battle, it is very easy to see
Freya as her worshippers saw her--an ideal of perfect womanhood.
But the gods of the Norsemen were never wholly gods. Always they,
like the gods of Greece, endeared themselves to humanity by
possessing some little, or big, human weakness. And Freya is none the
less lovable to the descendants of her worshippers because she
possessed the so-called "feminine weakness" of love of dress. Jewels,
too, she loved, and knowing the wondrous skill of the dwarfs in
fashioning exquisite ornaments, she broke off a piece of gold from the
statue of Odin, her husband, and gave it to them to make into a
necklace--the marvellous jewelled necklace Brisingamen, that in time