Freyr

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.

The atlas records Freyr's veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult, and the fullest concrete account of that historic worship comes from Adam of Bremen, an eleventh century German chronicler who describes an actual temple at Uppsala in Sweden, its interior decked in gold, housing three carved idols together, Thor at the center, Odin armed for war beside him, and Freyr, whom Adam calls by the Latinized name Fricco, shown with an enormous phallus as a mark of the fertility and peace he was asked to grant. Adam records that a major sacrificial festival was held there at nine year intervals, drawing worshippers from every Swedish province, with offerings of nine males of each kind of living creature, humans among them, their bodies afterward hung in a sacred grove beside the temple, and he records too that a libation was poured to Freyr's own idol at weddings. Adam wrote as a Christian cleric describing a pagan rite he had not personally witnessed, and modern scholars read parts of his account with real caution, including the exact death count and the interval between festivals. What is not seriously disputed is that a real cult site stood at Uppsala and that Freyr was one of its three central gods. Nineteenth century excavation of the mounds near the site found nothing that could be tied conclusively to the temple, and no worship of any kind continues there today.