The King Who Would Not Die: Freyr as Yngvi in the Ynglinga Saga

The existing description already covers Freyr as the Vanir god of fertility and sacral kingship who gives away his sword for love of the giantess Gerd. The Ynglinga Saga, the first section of Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, tells a different kind of Freyr story, one that treats him not as a myth set among the gods but as a real, euhemerized king of Sweden, called Yngvi Freyr in this telling and named as the ancestor of the Yngling dynasty of Swedish kings. The saga credits King Freyr's reign with sustained peace and abundant harvests across Sweden, and when he eventually died of a long illness his own retainers concealed the death rather than announce it, telling the people their king still lived. According to the saga they carried him into a great burial mound with three openings, and for three years the Swedes continued paying their royal tribute directly into the mound through those openings, gold in the first year, silver in the second, copper coin in the third, still believing Freyr received it. When the truth of his death finally came out, the Swedes did not treat it as reason to stop. Peace and good harvests had continued after his death exactly as they had during his life, so the people concluded Freyr himself remained present in the land, declared him a god of this world, and began offering him regular sacrifices for peace and good seasons from that point on.