From Viktor Rydberg’s Investigations into Germanic Mythology, Vol. II, Part 2. 
Translated by William P. Reaves. © 2004

    The life-producing, fruit-bearing earth’s female representative among the powers, the goddess Frigg, has, as I shall demonstrate below, mythological prerequisites that go back to the Indo-European time of unity; but, as a pronounced epic personality, she belongs to the same period that gave rise to Njörd, Frey, and Freyja. In order not to perpetuate an error that lies close at hand with reference to the name Frigg, we ought to carefully distinguish between this epithet, which is merely one among the many she bore, and the personality of the goddess. It is by no means certain that the name Frigg and its German equivalent Friia were fixed on her at all times and by all Germanic tribes. On the contrary, there are reasons to assume that this was not the case. Friia, which stands in etymological connection to the proto-Germanic frija and Sanskrit priya, dear, friendly, is an epithet that can easily be applied to Freyja and actually seems to have been used of her in the German designations for Friday, Frîatac, Frîgetac, which correspond to the Latin dies Veneris, the goddess of love’s day, Freyja’s day. The name Friia, Frigg (compare Anglo-Saxon frigu, love) originally was, and among certain Germanic tribes presumably always has been, an epithet applied to Odin’s wife as well as Frey’s sister, on the matronly queen of the world and on the young goddess of love, who however, in other respects, are as completely different from one another in personality as Hera-Juno and Aphrodite-Venus. To draw the conclusion that these goddesses did not appear as different personalities in the Germanic imagination because the epithet friias was common to Odin’s wife and Frey’s sister is logically unjustified and meets with psychological impossibilities. Older designations of Odin’s wife and Thor’s mother, exclusively applied to her, are Fjörgyn, Hlóðyn, Jörð, and Nirdu-Nerthus. Thor is mögr Hlóðynjar (“Hlóðyn's boy”), Jarðar burr (“Earth's son”), and Fjörgynjar burr (“Fjörgyn's son”). One learns with certainty from the Nordic sources (Lokasenna, Saxo, Prose Edda) that the Scandinavians ultimately fixed the name Frigg on this Fjörgyn.

    The name Nerthus (*Nirdu) is an older feminine form of the name Njörd. Njörd is, as mentioned, the god of the Ocean and navigation; Fjörgyn-Frigg is the goddess of the life-producing earth. In the Germanic theology, the Ocean and the Earth have been regarded as siblings, both born of the mother of the gods, Night-Aditi. The memory of this is still preserved in Gylfaginning. The commonality of names between the siblings Njörd and Nirdu has its parallel in the commonality of names between the siblings Frey and Freyja and therefore ought not come as a surprise.

    In Norse mythology, the goddess Jörd appears with the character she has had as far back as one can trace a distinguishing narrative about her. Tacitus (Germania 40) clearly identifies Nerthus with her: Nerthum, id est, Terram matrem (“Nerthus, who is Mother Earth”). He relates that the Longobardians and some of their neighbors worship her in common and believe that she “intervenes in matters that touch human affairs and the fate of nations”. The History of the Longobardians explains why the Longobardians specifically devoted their foremost adoration to her and believed her to intervene in their nation’s fate when it says that the god of heaven’s wife, Wodan’s wife, Frea, persuaded Wodan in a cunning manner to give the Longobardians victory over their opponents, the Vandals. This tale is an illustration of Tacitus’ statement, and Tacitus’ statement explains it. The connection of both sources to one and the same mythic episode is obvious. Of no Germanic goddess, with the exception of Frigg, is anything similar related. And because Tacitus collected a great part of his mythic information regarding the Teutons from sources that went back to Christ’s birth and the era surrounding it, we thus have evidence as far back as that time that Nerthus, Njörd’s relative, is identical with Mother Earth and Wodan’s wife, Frea-Frigg. The description Tacitus provides in the same chapter of Germania regarding the ceremony with which she was worshipped corresponds to a Swedish ceremony described in Ögmundar þáttur dytts, (Flateyjarbók I, 335) in which Frey, her brother’s son, was worshipped.  Since both gods are Vanir divinities and, in regard to the natural phenomena they represent, both stand in the same relationship to one another as the nourishing earth to the harvest, a mutual similarity can be presumed about these ceremonies. The identity of Terra Mater and Frigg is additionally confirmed in the 2nd chapter of Germania, where it says that Terra Mater was mother to Tuisco, the son of Tívi. In the first part of this work I have demonstrated that Tuisco is the same as Frigg’s son, Jarðar burr (“Earth’s son”).

    In Vedic mythology, Mother Earth, Prithivî, is the wife of the sky god Dyâus, like Mother Earth, Frigg, is wife of the sky-god, Vodan-Odin. In Rigveda, we have already encountered another name of heaven and another sky-god, Varuna, “encompasser”, “enveloper” (Uranus). In him, the sky is so completely personified as an ethical connector of worlds, defender of right, and punisher of sin, that his character as a nature being thereby vanishes in comparison. It has already been pointed out above that his evolution into a personality belonged to the time after the Indo-European dispersal and he has no parallel in the European Indo-European mythologies. The designation Dyâus refers to the sky. There can be no doubt that in the Indo-European time of unity it was already an object of veneration, since we discover Dyâus-pitar, “Father Dyâus”, in the Greek Zeus pater, in the Roman Diespeter, Jupiter, in the Germanic Tiu, Zio. And it is equally obvious that in the Indo-European time of unity this veneration viewed the sky as a natural object, “the vault of heaven”. The kind of personification that this natural object received from its designation as father and its marriage to Mother Earth, at that time, still had not evolved into an anthropomorphic construct and had not extended into a concrete personality that would give him a fixed character and a fixed place or role among the fully personified gods appearing in the epic. Among the Indo-Iranians, Dyâus never held such a position. In the Rigveda, he never appears as a living personality. He never takes part in epic events and, although he and Prithivî are often named in personal hymns, he does not hold an important place in the cult. His and Mother Earth’s position to the remaining gods and goddesses is a riddle to the singers of the hymns themselves. When the white Yagurveda reckons all 33 divinities divided into 3 established clans or classes, the pair Dyavâ-Prithivî receives a separate place outside of these clans; the remaining places in the Vedic documents that reckon the 33 divinities exclude Dyâus and Prithivî altogether. In the many places in the Rigveda where the word dyâus appears, it means nothing more than the natural object, the sky.

    The Dyâus myth was found in this undeveloped state at the time the Asiatic Indo-Europeans separated from the European Indo-Europeans. The name and the natural phenomena it designated were worshipped. The epithet “father” was associated with it and the union with “Mother Earth” was a complete fact. That was the limit. This uncertainty allowed independent hands to develop the Dyâus myth further after the separation of the Indo-European tribes. Two names of heaven, one that corresponded to varuna and one that corresponded to dyâus, existed for mythic treatment. The Asiatic Indo-Europeans chose the name Varuna and in the process fixed it on an ethical all-ruling personality. The European Indo-European tribes chose Father Dyâus, which in the beginning was only an epithet, and fixed his name on a personally fully developed god, namely the god of the atmosphere and the regions of the wind, Vâta (Vâya), who, as such, stood closest to the conception of a sky-god.

    For the European Indo-Europeans, Diaus patar of the Indo-European time of unity thus was identical to the old storm- and wind-god, Vâta, who, in a fixed position, still occupies the foremost place among the ruling gods.  Presumably, his name, Vâta, was preserved throughout the European Indo-European time of unity; in any event, it was the case among the Northern tribes from which the Germanic branch later emerged. In other words, during this period, Vâta became the god’s proper name, at least among a portion of the European Indo-Europeans, and Diavaspater, Diupater was used only as an epithet for him, which however became his common designation, because “father sky” expressed his ruling position among the gods better than “wind”. It is then easily explained that, since the Greek and the Roman forefathers split themselves from the remaining European Indo-Europeans, the name Vâta fell out of use among them, replaced by the spoken epithet, that, if the Greeks and Romans shared a common language for a time, would take the form Dieuspater among them, and thereafter Zeus pater among the Greeks, and Diespiter and Jupiter among the Romans. The word vâta lost its mythological meaning among them and only retained its objective meaning, in the form Üçôçò, wind, among the Greeks. Among the Teutons, on the other hand, the old Vâta was preserved in the form Vôdana (Voden, Wuotan, Óðinn) and was never replaced by the epithet “Father Sky”, in proto-Germanic form Fadar Tiva. By degrees, the word tiva’s meaning of sky was lost to them, replaced in this sense by hemina, hemila, hefina; but the word Tiva itself was retained as the name of a god and found again in the form Zio, Týr.

    Since the expression “Father Sky” originated in the Indo-European time of unity and thereafter is found again among two of the European Indo-European branches, the Greeks and the Romans, we can assume with great probability that it was also common among the proto-Teutons, so that, as an epithet of Vôdana, Father Tiva among them formed a parallel to the Greek Father Zeus and the Roman Diespiter. Thus it is understandable that the name Tiva in its later form Ziu, Týr, could be given to a son of Odin, the war-god or the god of soldiers, who does not originate from the Indo-European time of unity, but is the creation of a later time. Had Odin ever borne the epithet Tiva alone without the addition of father, the transfer of this epithet from him to his son would hardly have been possible in a mythology such as the Germanic where the continuity never seems to have been broken, and where no practice could have arisen and no edict proclaimed that stripped one god of a name, under which he was commonly known and worshipped, in order to give it to another. If, on the other hand, Odin was called Fader Tiva, it is entirely natural that one of his sons could, as the son of this father, be called Tiva, Ziu, Týr alone. Perhaps from the expression Fader Tiva also originated the usage to call Odin allföðr (“All-father”), aldaföðr (“Father of mankind”), an epithet in which the designation father was preserved moreover with the concept of an all-enveloping power of space and time that originally could only have belonged to a god representing the all-enveloping sky.

    Because Father Sky was regarded as the husband of Mother Earth in the Indo-European time of unity, among the Teutons, their Father Sky, namely Fader Tiva=Vôdana, was also regarded as the husband of the earth-goddess, and so too among the Greeks and the Romans. It is consequently a parallel originating from the proto Indo-European time that Odin is married to the goddess Jörd, Father Zeus to the earth-goddess Dione, and Jupiter to the earth-goddess Juno. Zeus appears with all of the old attributes of Vâta and Dyâus combined. He is the god of the wind and the god of the sky at the same time, and his oldest oracle among the Greeks was pronounced through the rush of the wind in Dodona’s sacred oaks. His place in Greek theology is also the same as Odin’s in the Norse. Two generations, Uranus and Kronos, go before Zeus; two generations, Buri and Bor go before Odin. With the third generation, the branch expands threefold: among the Greeks, with the brothers Zeus, Poseidon and Hades; among the Teutons, with the brothers Odin, Hoenir and Lodur. Zeus corresponds to Odin, since Zeus originally was Vâta; Poseidon, the lord of the watery element corresponds to Hoenir, who is also placed in connection with the same element. Lodur is a god of the underworld, like Pluto, and likewise is placed in connection with underworld fire.

    Zeus and Jupiter are bearers of lightning; likewise, Odin has been. His glittering spear Gungnir, cast at the enemies of the gods, was originally the lightning bolt. Here it should be noted that in the Indo-European time of unity, as in the Rigveda, lightning was not the exclusive privilege of any one god. Vâta, Parganya, Indra, the Maruts, and Tvashtar all threw lightning bolts as weapons. It was the same in Germanic mythology as well, as I already pointed out in the previous volume of this work. That Thor ultimately was the actual thunder god does not mean that he was portrayed as such from the beginning, but only that, as the Aesir’s greatest hero in their continuous battle with the giants, he used this weapon more often than the other gods. Through this constant use, it finally became characteristic of him. Thor is not really a nature god, but a hero god, a heroic ideal, who received the thunder’s name, the thunder wagon, and the lightning as attributes, because he used them so unflaggingly. But still, in the Rigveda, Parganya rather than Indra-Thor is the actual god of the electrical storm, if one can be spoken of as such. In Greek mythology, Indra-Thor corresponds to Zeus’ son Herakles and his weapon not to the lightning bolt, but to the club. The remainder of the Hercules myth was strongly transformed through the adoption of Semitic elements.