Nerthus: the Vanir goddess killed by the sons of Thor

Nerthus was a goddess of the Vanir, one of the many who went to war against Asgard and never came home. She was killed on the field by Magni and Modi, the sons of Thor, long before Odin ever set eyes on Freya. The games give her little more than that. Most of what fills out her story comes from the old myths, which link her to Njörd and so to Freya and Freyr, the family whose choices shaped the rest of Norse history. (God of War (2018))

The goddess of the old sources#

Outside the games Nerthus is very old. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote of a goddess Nerthus worshipped by Germanic tribes as Mother Earth, carried among her people in a sacred cart, and scholars generally take her name to be an early form of Njörd's own. The games give her no titles of their own, and they never say whether she ruled anything. (Germania)

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. (God of War (2018))

The mother of the twins#

Njörd was the father of the twins Freya and Freyr. In one old account he had them by his own sister while he still lived among the Vanir, and Nerthus is often taken to be that unnamed sister-wife. The games never confirm it, but if so, 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 homeland. (Heimskringla (Ynglinga saga); God of War (2018); God of War Ragnarök)

Their mother, whoever she was, 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. In myth Njörd later married Skaði, and the household the twins grew up in was reassembled without their mother. (God of War Ragnarök; Prose Edda)

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 them all. 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. (God of War Ragnarök)

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. (God of War Ragnarök)

Killed by Magni and Modi#

In one of the battles of that campaign Nerthus 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. (God of War (2018))

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 long afterwards, Magni at Kratos' hands and Modi at Atreus', without adding to it. (God of War (2018))

For Vanaheim, her death was one loss among an endless run of them. The war produced casualties on a scale nobody counted, and Nerthus went into that number with the rest. (God of War (2018); God of War Ragnarök)

Njörd's answer#

After Nerthus fell, Njörd gathered his Vanir council, and the god of the sea and wind summoned fierce hurricane winds and drove them at the Asgardian warriors' fleet until it sank. It did not shorten the war by a day. (God of War (2018))

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. (God of War Ragnarök)

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 it. If the myths are right and Freya was her daughter, she missed both the marriage to the enemy whose sons had killed her and the denunciation that followed. (God of War Ragnarök)

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 the Nine Realms, 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. (God of War (2018); God of War Ragnarök)

If she was their mother, Nerthus left two children who inherited a war rather than a kingdom and a grandson in Baldur who was born under a curse and died of it. She herself remained what she had been at the end, a goddess killed early in a fight her people were never going to win outright, remembered less for anything she did than for the two young Aesir who managed, between them, to bring her down. (God of War (2018); God of War Ragnarök)