Nerthus: the Vanir queen killed by the sons of Thor

Nerthus was a goddess of the Vanir, born in Vanaheim and queen of that realm as the wife of Njörd. She was the mother of Freya and Freyr and the grandmother of Baldur, which placed her at the head of the family whose choices shaped the rest of Norse history. She did not live to see any of it. Nerthus went to war against Asgard with the rest of her kin and was killed on the field by Magni and Modi, the sons of Thor, long before Odin ever set eyes on her daughter.

Queen of Vanaheim#

Nerthus was a goddess of the earth. The titles set against her name run through the whole domain of growing things, fertility and vegetation, nature and ceremony, and beyond them magic itself, which among the Vanir was less a separate art than the medium everything else was worked in. She was styled Queen of Vanaheim and Queen of the Vanir, a rank she held beside Njörd, who was called the legendary ruler of the realm and god of the sea, of seafaring, wind, wealth and the crop.

Like her kin she practised Seiðr, though the extent of her skill was never set down. Being a goddess she was ageless and could not be worn away by time, but that was never the same as being unkillable. The Vanir were immortal in the sense that nothing ordinary would end them, and Nerthus proved the limit of that immunity herself.

The mother of the twins#

Nerthus and Njörd had two children, Freya and Freyr, born as twins with Freya the elder. That single fact carries most of Vanaheim's later history. Freya became the goddess of love, war, death and magic, was made Queen of the Valkyries after her marriage into Asgard, and bore Baldur. Freyr became the god of rain and fertility, the most revered of the Vanir leaders, and eventually the head of the resistance against the Aesir occupation of his own realm.

Their mother is close to absent from their own accounts of their childhood. What Freya said of her family dwelt on her father, who was a mostly absent presence to both children and whose wanderlust she claimed her brother had inherited. Of Nerthus nothing of that kind survives. Njörd later took Skaði to wife, who became stepmother to the twins, and the household that Nerthus had headed was reassembled without her.

The war that began with a burning#

The Aesir-Vanir War was called the First Great War and the Long War, and its causes had been building for centuries out of the murder of Ymir and the hostility that followed it. What finally lit it was an attempt at peace. Freyr travelled to Asgard and taught the Aesir the ways of the harvest and the spellcraft that went with it, enough to feed the whole realm. The Aesir were charmed and delighted, and then impatient, and their undisciplined handling of Vanir magic turned the work wrong. Rather than blame themselves they blamed Freyr, accused him of sabotage, tied him up and burned him alive. He survived, escaped, and fled home to Vanaheim, carrying an injury he never entirely recovered from.

His family met that with fury. The Vanir swore revenge against Asgard, and the skirmishing that followed ran on for centuries before Odin assembled the largest army ever seen and marched it at Vanaheim. The Aesir came in on brute force and the Allfather's generalship and made ground at first, but they had never met so many Vanir casting Seiðr at once, and for every advance they fell back two steps. Nerthus fought in that defence alongside the rest of her people.

Killed by Magni and Modi#

In one of the battles of that campaign the queen of the Vanir met Magni and Modi, the demigod sons of Thor. Neither of them was her equal alone. Working together they were able to defeat her and kill her, and Nerthus was gone.

The brothers were remembered for very little else. Their careers ran to errands at their grandfather's behest and to the pursuit of a tattooed man and his son, and against Nerthus's name in the ledger of their deeds there is almost nothing but an ogre. Killing a goddess of her rank was the greatest thing either of them ever did, and both were dead at Kratos' hands generations later without adding to it.

For Vanaheim, her death was one loss among an endless run of them. The war produced casualties on a scale nobody counted, and the queen went into that number with the rest.

Njörd's answer#

Njörd did not let the killing pass. Gathering his Vanir council, the god of the sea and wind summoned fierce hurricane winds and drove them at the Asgardian warriors' fleet until it sank. It was the response of a husband rather than a strategist, and it did not shorten the war by a day.

The fighting ground down instead into stalemate, with both Asgard and Vanaheim ravaged and no end in sight. Mimir, then Odin's advisor, was appointed arbiter between the warring gods and settled on a marriage. Odin would take Freya, and the two peoples would be joined through her. Freya still hated the Aesir for what they had done to her brother and to her people, but she agreed, believing the union would hold the realms at peace.

Odin then turned the settlement into an injury. He tricked the Vanir into believing Freya had abandoned them, and what had been a sacrifice was read instead as desertion and a cowardly dodge of judgement for her own actions. At the wedding, held at a Vanir shrine in Vanaheim, her own people wrote the word for traitor across it. Nerthus was not there to see her daughter married off to the enemy who had widowed her, or to see the same daughter denounced by the realm she had done it for.

What outlived her#

The peace her death helped force did not last. Odin's paranoia about the Jötnar and their foreknowledge of Ragnarök set Thor loose with Mjölnir on the giants of every realm, Freya's marriage collapsed, and Odin stripped her wings and her fighting spirit and trapped her in Midgard. With her gone the Aesir invaded Vanaheim a second time and broke it, obliterating most of its settlements and posting Einherjar in the ruins.

Nerthus left two children who inherited a war rather than a realm, a grandson in Baldur who was born under a curse and died of it, and a husband who spent the rest of his long life somewhere out on the sea. She herself remained what she had been at the end, a queen killed early in a fight her people were never going to win outright, remembered less for how she ruled than for the two young Aesir who managed, between them, to bring her down.