A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

And Odin, seeing himself outwitted and knowing that honour bade him
follow the Northern custom and give the people he had named a gift,
bestowed on the Longbeards and their men the victory that Freya
craved. Nor was the gift of Odin one for that day alone, for to him the
Langobarden attributed the many victories that led them at last to find a
home in the sunny land of Italy, where beautiful Lombardy still
commemorates by its name the stratagem of Freya, the queen.
With the coming of Christianity, Freya, the Beloved, was cast out along
with all the other old forgotten gods. The people who had loved and
worshipped her were taught that she was an evil thing and that to
worship her was sin. Thus she was banished to the lonely peaks of the
mountains of Norway and of Sweden and to the Brocken in Germany,
no longer a goddess to be loved, but transformed into a malignant
power, full of horror and of wickedness. On Walpurgis Night she led
the witches' revels on the Brocken, and the cats who were said to draw
her car while still she was regarded as a beneficent protectress of the
weak and needy, ceased to be the gentle creatures of Freya the Good,
and came under the ban of religion as the satanic companions of
witches by habit and repute.
One gentle thing only was her memory allowed to keep. When, not as
an omnipotent goddess but as a heart-broken mother, she wept the
death of her dearly-loved son, Baldur the Beautiful, the tears that she
shed were turned, as they fell, into pure gold that is found in the beds of
lonely mountain streams. And we who claim descent from the peoples
who worshipped her--
"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we"--
can surely cleanse her memory from all the ugly impurities of
superstition and remember only the pure gold of the fact that our
warrior ancestors did not only pray to a fierce and mighty god of battles,
but to a woman who was "loving and giving"--the little child's
deification of the mother whom it loves and who holds it very dear.