Honey, Grain, and Gold: Three Aspects of Frey
by Jack Roe
Green his eyes as garden’s yield,
Gold his hair as blowing field,
Bright his laugh as summer’s lands,
Brave his heart and empty hands.
Honey, grain, and gold. These three substances, to me, define Frey’s faces and attributes to the world. One could also call them Love, Sacrifice, and Light … or Sex, Food, and Magic, if you prefer the more straightforward. They are all so beautiful, and all valuable. There’s a reason why they are intertwined.
Honey on the fingertip,
Gold to pass from hand to lip.
Food of flower, toil of hives,
Work of all the tiny lives.
The first aspect of Frey that I encountered was that of Frey, the God of Love. People talk a lot about Love Goddesses, but they never mention Love Gods (with the possible exception of arrow-flinging Eros and the Hindu Krishna). Lust Gods, yes. Lots of those, with huge phalluses, flinging themselves onto anything that passed. Emblematic of the overriding sexual urge, said scholars. When I first saw a figure of Frey, it was the one with the enormous cock, and of course I thought that he would be just another sexually aggressive figure. I was surprised to find out, later, that the huge-cocked god of the Germanic peoples was actually gentle, light-bringing, open to sacrifice. In my ignorance, I thought that given the macho-warrior depiction of their culture, that any god with a dick that size was going to have to be a rapist … yet Frey is the God who gives up his (phallic symbol) sword for Love. He goes to his beloved, without whom the world is not worth living for him, with no aggression in him.
Frey, like his sister, has many ephemeral encounters with both women and men, indiscriminately. At the same time, however, he is indelibly married to Gerda, his giantess-bride. This is unlike Freya, who apparently did get married once but her husband went away and never came back. It is almost as if she is so much more tied to the ephemerality of love that any permanent marriage was doomed; no man could keep that much of her. One is reminded of Venus and Adonis, or Ishtar and Tammuz. On the other hand, Frey’s marriage is as solid as the earth beneath him, yet he can still give himself in ephemeral moments of pleasure. Frey and Gerda reliefs were apparently given out as wedding charms, so Frey is as much a god of the marriage bed as of the Maypole festivals. He is the male sexual and emotional responses at their most broad, able to do both roles cleanly and bring only joy.
Honey has been a symbol for love deities in many different cultures. It is the sexual fluids of flowers, it is sweet, it is the color of the sun that warms. From Aphrodite to Oshun, honey or its derivatives were offered to the Ladies of Love. (Mead, however, became an all-around offering to any god in the northlands.) According to legend, Frey is served by an elven couple, one of whom is named Beyla, or Bee. She is Frey’s Beekeeper, the provider of his sacred honey, fluid of love.
Grain that waves and falls and feeds,
Scythed and ground for hunger’s needs,
Blood and steel upon the sheaf,
Praise and revere each gathered leaf.
Frey’s most well-known role is that of a god of food. He is one of the most physically-centered gods I know—sex and food, what can I say? The two most powerful urges in human nature. He is known as the God of the World, in the sense of the physical world that nourishes us, the world of the body. He is the soul of the plants and animals that die to feed us, a mystery that modern humans miss and would do well to turn to again. How would the modern chain of food production change if we revered the taking of all life for food, plant and animal, as a sacred act? We don’t think about food or where it came from, and this is one of the great sins in our culture.
Frey’s other servant is Byggvir, Beyla’s husband, who is his miller for his sacred grain. Honey and grain, sweetener and malt, are also simple components for beer, along with yeast. Like all the Vanir, he is not a god of wilderness. As Kerenyi said of Demeter, he is a “deity of all that is grown for the benefit of mankind”. Frey as Grain God is God of contentment, keeping our bellies full and our relaxation moments pleasurable. He is also the Sacrificed One who willingly gives himself for our survival, over and over. One thinks of a sacrificial God as being a solemn thing, yet he is golden and laughing to the end. This is also reflected in his sexuality; he goes to every encounter with a smile and open arms, even if it will end in his death. If you don’t want him, he simply doesn’t come.
I remember how, decades ago at a Pagan gathering, a man talked about how he saw the male version of the Triple Goddess—maiden, mother, crone—in his own genitals. He spoke of the first ephemeral stirrings of erection as the dallying Green Man, playful rather than serious; the full erection that gives its all in a great spurt was the Corn King, or Sun King at his height, giving everything for life. The limp, withered, wrinkled, quiescent flesh afterwards was the Sage, or Wise Man, whom he hoped someday to be. When I learned about Frey many years later, I remembered this parable of the erection. It isn’t that the aggressive phallus isn’t a part of male sexuality—it is; the assaultive Gods are part and parcel of the ambivalent package that is testosterone-based sex (and I would point out that female sexuality also has differing and ambivalent parts to it, all of which are true and sacred in their own way), but it is not the only possibility, nor the only thing going on. Frey’s sexuality is another aspect of male sexuality, enthusiastic and giving, willing to be the phallus-as-vulnerable. He is the bread marked with the rune of sacrifice, to remind us all. Of the Futhark runes, although many are associated with different Gods, only two actually bear the names of Gods themselves—Teiwaz and Inguz, Tyr and Frey. In a sense, these represent the two contrasting sides of male sexuality—the warrior, whose aggression is controlled only by his honor, and the giving Grain God.
Yearly yet his glory fell,
Dark he walks the road to Hel,
Open gate and leave one spark,
Touch of gold in endless dark.
Golden One. Frey is a light-bringer, and that is one of his mysteries. He is not the Sun itself—that’s Sunna/Sol—but he is, as someone once eloquently put it, “the one who guides the rays of light to the leaves of the growing plant.” Sunna shines down on everyone and everything indiscriminately, and while she can be benevolent, it’s not her job to make sure that everything gets its share of growth-producing rays. When the sunlight comes within reach of the Earth, in a place where food-producing plants or animals live, it becomes Frey’s. He captures that golden light and infuses our crops with it, and our animals, and our bodies.
Frey is sacrificed every year and walks the Hel Road, but instead of staying, he is turned away and comes back—some say in three days, some claim it takes months and see him slowly making his way back up through the soil during the dark time of the year. He is the light that descends to the darkness and rises again. Gold, the metal of the Sun, is also his. His sister Freya loves amber, which is said to be her solidified tears, and so does Frey, but as someone I know put it, “Frey likes gold and amber, Freya likes amber and gold.”
This is Frey as Sacred King. While we think of Odin as the All-Father of Asgard, and Njord as the King of the Vanir, Frey’s kingship is of the other sort. It recalls the stories of the political Kings who didn’t want to give up their thrones and be sacrificed after seven years, so they chose someone else to take care of that part of the Kingship for them. Frey is Sacred King as Golden One, he who dies and arises in triumph, not to rule politically but to inspire gloriously. I’ve always felt that the golden torc was his symbol here, of the earthly (meaning of the Earth itself, not the society of people who live on it) kingship. His connection with Freya shows through here; the Sacred Twins were linked with land rulership in Indo-European tradition.
Frey is the spark of light that survives the Underworld, survives sorrow and loss, and can inspire one not necessarily to great deeds—that’s more Odin’s work—but to go on living in the face of all despair. That’s his greatest gift. When one is in such a bad place that even getting out of bed is an ambivalent option, Frey is the voice that coaxes you to get up, make yourself breakfast, eat it, wash your body, care for your flesh. He reminds us that there is still a little joy to be had in life, somewhere, if we just hold on and keep living.
When the Reformation broke apart western Christianity into Catholic and Protestant, one of the pivotal arguments was transubstantiation—whether the bread and wine given out during the Mass magically and literally became the Body and Blood of Christ through some act of divine magic, or whether it was all just symbolic. In the Mass itself, we see the echoes of an ancient ritual honoring the original Sacrificed Gods, who were Gods of earth and field and grain and grape, borrowed for the Christian’s Sacrificed God. With Gods like Frey, such communion is obvious. There’s no contradiction; it is both symbolic and quite literally the flesh of the Grain God. I expect that the stain of Christianity has ruined the concept of such a communion ritual for Pagans, which is really too bad. I can imagine such a thing done with Frey’s loaves marked with the Inguz rune and spread with honey, tiny sips of some liquor like Goldschlager or, for the less profligate, cups of beer or mead. I would kneel for such communion, and find no contradiction at all.
Wooden bowl and wooden cup,
Pour the gold and drink it up,
Taste the gold that Joy can give,
We need no other gold to live.