Folkvangr

Folkvangr, Old Norse for the "Field of the People" or "Field of the Host", is the afterlife meadow of the goddess Freyja in Norse mythology, and it complicates the popular assumption that all the battle-slain go to Odin. The Poetic Edda (in the poem Grimnismal) and Snorri's Prose Edda both state plainly that Freyja rides to every battle and claims half of the slain, the other half going to Odin in Valhalla; within Folkvangr stands her own hall, Sessrumnir. This division is one of the intriguing puzzles of Norse religion, because the sources say almost nothing about what her half of the dead do there or why the fallen are split between two deities, an obscurity that has generated much scholarly speculation about Freyja's archaic role as a goddess of death as well as of love, fertility, and the seer's magic (seidr). Folkvangr is a reminder that the Norse afterlife was more various than the Valhalla-centred picture suggests: a warrior might as readily be gathered to the goddess's field as to the god's feasting-hall, and the great female deity of the Vanir held a claim on the dead equal to Odin's own.

The claim is made once, in a single stanza of Grimnismal, and it is startling in its brevity: Folkvangr is the ninth, and there Freyja decides the seating in the hall, choosing half of the slain each day while Odin has the other half. Her hall is named Sessrumnir, the roomy-seated. That is very nearly all the corpus says.

Everything a reader wants to know is absent. Whether Freyja chooses first, whether her half are chosen by different criteria, what they do there, and whether they fight at the end as Odin's do, are all unanswered. Later prose adds little. The silence is conspicuous because Valhalla is described at length, repeatedly, with its doors and its boar and its daily fighting.

Scholars have proposed that the two halls represent competing traditions imperfectly merged, or that Freyja's claim is connected to her role in receiving the dead more generally, and neither can be established. Some have suggested the ship-shaped stone settings found in Scandinavian burial fields relate to the name Sessrumnir, which can be read as a term for a ship, but this remains a proposal.

The entry is here as it stands in the sources, which is a strong claim with nothing built on it. Filling the gap would mean inventing, and the gap is itself informative about how much of this material has been lost.