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The amount of times I see this shit frustrates me to no end. It makes me cringe so much and makes me sad that it’s hard to find drawn pr0n with internal shots without cringing in agony at the sight of this trope.

“Besides, we all know I’m the perfect one”

In the 400s BCE, Athens forbade anyone to die or to give birth on the island of Delos, to render it fit for the proper worship of the gods. Since 1878, no births or deaths have been permitted near Japan’s Itsukushima Shrine, a sacred site in Shinto belief.

Death is still outlawed in some places today, but for more prosaic reasons. In 1999 the mayor of the Spanish town of Lanjarón outlawed death, again because of an overcrowded cemetery. His edict ordered residents “to take utmost care of their health so they do not die until town hall takes the necessary steps to acquire land suitable for our deceased to rest in glory.”

So there’s this story in Norse mythology, Þrymskviða. Compressed down, it goes like this: A Jotun steal Thor’s hammer Mjolnir and says he’ll only give it back if he’s given Freyja to marry, as she is the most beautiful goddess in all of existence. The gods argue over what to do for a while before Heimdall suggests they stick a bridal veil on Thor, says he’s Freyja, and pretend they’re giving Freyja (Thor) to the Jotun to marry so Thor can get close enough to the Jotun to steal Mjolnir back. 

Now typically when people talk about this story, it’s with an element of disbelieving comedy. “Oh my god, who would believe Thor was a woman, let alone Freyja, the most beautiful goddess in the world?” 

But I propose a different way to look at the story. 

See, different cultures have different beauty standards. Modern western beauty standards may be a delicate hourglass supermodel, but that’s not always been the case. Greece, for instance, depicted Aphrodite like this: 

Yeah. A Greek sculptor was told “sculpt the goddess of beauty” and they thought “alright, fat rolls, that’s where beauty is at, let’s do this”. And everybody else apparently agreed with them, because up went the statue. Beauty is a malleable concept is what I’m getting at. 

Now this is where it becomes relevant that Freyja is not just the goddess of love, sex, and beauty. She’s also the goddess of war. And the righteous dead. Goddess of war in the same Viking warrior culture that gave us shield maidens, women who wielded seven fucking kilogram (15 lbs) shields in combat. 

Sooooo … when the Norse storytellers said, “This is Freyja, goddess of war and the righteous dead, who rode giant murder cats into battle, she is the most beautiful goddess in the world”, I’m guessing they weren’t thinking of her as some willowy waif. No, I’m guessing they probably thought more along the lines of:

190 cm (6′3″), broad shoulders, built like a brick shithouse, with a jawline like whoa, and fully capable of murdering everything in her path.

Put in that context, the story of Thor dressing up as Freyja sounds less like a punchline about “how could anyone ever mistake Thor in a veil for Freyja?” and becomes more a case of “ohhhhhhhhhhh, no wonder all the gods thought this plan would work”. 

Loki and Thor; “Hey Freyja, so funny story…”

Freyja, flexing; “I will crush both your heads like eggs.”

And everybody just KNOWS that well duh of course Freyr is this big ol’ farm boy. What are you thinking??? Why wouldn’t he be?? It’s the only thing that makes SENSE, ok?

And people just… like… pass over the fact that they’re twins? And a lot of twins don’t really resemble each other, but a lot of them really, REALLY do. And a lot of the families that have been generations on generations of farm folk and hard labor working class folk… uh… don’t always pass on the “little dainty girl” type of genetics. Unless they also get passed on to the boys.

Nah.

Instead you get both BIG BEEFY FARM BOY and OMG THAT ONE BABUSHKA COULD PUT PAUL BUNYAN TO SHAME coming from the same source.

You know the ones I’m talking about.

They had no concept of what flavors tasted good together so they tried everything. The biggest ideas that were latched on to were things like loafs with layers that compose your entire meal and the suspension of basically anything/everything in jello (jello actually helped food last longer, because the gelatin sheltered whatever ingredients were used from bacteria. So, naturally, you put a fish in it).

Radiolab did a piece on this story (Link). It’s actually kind of sad because the researcher (Donald Rusk Currey) had to change fields and never talked about it again, because he felt so bad for killing such an old tree.