Winifred Hodge Rose
Snorri Sturlason in his (Prose) Edda tells us about the Goddesses of Asgard, explaining that “Tenth is Vor: she is wise and enquiring, so that nothing can be concealed from her. There is a saying that a woman becomes aware (vor) of something when she finds it out.” (Gylfaginning 35, p. 30.) This is the extent of what we are told about the Goddess Vor. The name Vor is used in a very few poetic synonyms or kennings, and other than that, there is no evidence that I know of that indicates any additional status or worship of Vor. This is very little upon which to build an awareness of the Goddess of Awareness! But, that is the case only if we were to look at Vor in isolation. If we envision her as being an aspect of Frigg, and/or as part of a “team” of Goddesses who work together with Frigg, then Vor can be brought into much clearer focus.
Awareness is a great part of Frigg’s own powers. Freya tells us that Frigg “knows all wyrds, though she herself does not speak out.” (Lokasenna 29, Poetic Edda.) Every appearance Frigg makes in our myths shows that she has her wits about her and has the presence of mind to respond very effectively to challenges that face her. She is aware of people’s prayers and needs, both directly and indirectly from her messenger-Goddess Gna, and responds to them. Her skills and powers within the social domains of the family and society at large require as a basis a clear awareness and understanding of people and situations, of societal rules and customs, and of the natures of humans and Holy Ones. Her role as a mother-figure for Gods and folk requires, again, the same kind of deep awareness that all good mothers have about their children’s natures, lives, and well-being.
Awareness is also a necessity for the functions of other Asynjur (Aesir Goddesses) described by Snorri in Gylfaginning 35. Eir as physician, Saga as skald and historian, Var as the warder and enforcer of oaths and contracts, Syn as the one who denies entry to those who should be denied: the work of these and the other Goddesses would be meaningless without a foundation of awareness to direct their efforts appropriately. Vor, or the function of awareness, is fundamental to Frigg’s nature and to all her “handmaidens,” companions or aspects of herself.
This being the case, one way of understanding Vor’s existence and nature is to postulate that Frigg’s power of awareness is so great that it begins to take on its own independent existence in the person of the Goddess Vor. This idea forms the basis of a mythic tale that I will present shortly, after a little more discussion on the nature of “awareness.”
Awareness encompasses and goes beyond “information”and even “knowledge.” Explanation is created to satisfy the need of our rational minds for information and knowledge. To discuss awareness at its deepest level, however, one must delve beneath these phenomena. Awareness is based upon knowledge, but it must incorporate also experience and intuition, and the ability to interpret knowledge in the light of these gifts. Awareness, Understanding, Wisdom: these go far below the surface, reaching places where logical explanation cannot fully enlighten nor satisfy.
Communicating this kind of understanding requires perception of the trans-rational domains, and appropriate forms of expression in order to explore them: forms such as myth, poetry, and all of the representational and performing arts. These are the reasons why, in discussing my understanding of the Goddess of Awareness, I will turn to personal experience, runic meditation and mythic tale-spinning to try to illustrate my perceptions about her, rather than relying on an abundance of expository prose!
I have felt strongly called for many years to try to know Vor or the Vor-face of Frigg. For me, she has been an elusive Goddess–one whom I know is there, whom I can perceive out of the corner of my eye, whose presence I can sense by an increase of alertness and awareness in myself when she is near, but who has so far been difficult to meet face-to-face. As I began my quest to know her, I had the feeling that the way to align myself more closely with her was to build her a harrow , an altar, in the soul-lands I walk while spaefaring. Thus, every time I go there, regardless of my intended purposes, I bring with me a few “stones” for her harrow that represent something meaningful to me and relevant to the power of awareness. Before I proceed to the intended purposes of my spaefaring, I first stop by and add my stones to her harrow.
There is a place in the spaelands, a nook or cranny in a large rock-formation, where I have set up the harrow and worship site for Vor. Such a place as a nook or cranny is called a “healh” in Anglo-Saxon. We know that our Anglo-Saxon forebears used such places for worship, because we have the Angelseax word “healh-halgung,” meaning “hallowing of the healh.” Perhaps these places were used especially after the incursion of Christianity, when the “folk of the heath” had to withdraw to the most secluded locations to conduct their Heathen worship. In any case, such is the place I have for my worship of Vor and my efforts to bring myself and her into closer alignment with each other. Slowly, her harrow is growing as I add my “stones” to it, and so also is my awareness of Vor, and sense of her nearness.
Long ago, I undertook a spaefaring, a soul-journey, as part of a series I was doing, one on each rune. I drew a rune at random–Jera or Year–and, not knowing what I would find, I set out on my journey. As it turned out, Vor chose to influence this faring with her gentle power, so I share it here as one illustration of this power.
Her power is usually very subtle; in some ways it is quite ordinary and everyday, but it adds dimensions of depth, intensity, and a feeling that one is looking in new and meaningful ways at the everyday and the ordinary. I hope this sense comes through, in the following brief account of this spaefaring under Vor’s aegis. Nothing earthshaking was presented to me here, but the dimensions of everyday life were beautifully enriched and deepened.
Year / Jera
I walk up to the tree outside the spaeland gate and then pass through, the warm scent of fallen leaves about me. A golden, gentle day. I stop by my little harrow that I am building for holy Vor in the healh, the hollow of the rock outcrop, and add my stones to the pile. It looks warm, inviting, dear. Standing in front of the harrow I spread my elbows, fists on my hips, into the Year-stadha, and spin around. Year. The leaves fall around me gently, golden, smelling of fall. Now the rangy white longhorn cow is here, Ing Frey’s gift to me, as mysterious as ever, seeming to hold approval in her dark eyes.
Year. I spin and feel the dark earth grow soft and moist beneath me, muddy. A thin film of ice crusts over it, protecting the life buried within. I spin. Now the snow is up past my ankles, fluffy and scratchy against them as I spin. The wind blows hard flecks of snow against me. White cow watches. The bison calf is here, too, and now Ule, the white owl, perches on the rock outcropping that is cleft with the little nook for my harrow.
Year. I spin slower and slower, as life contracts to a hard-shelled seed under the wrapping of winter. Cow and calf watch me, eyes full of wisdom. Ule cocks his head. I am almost stopped now, standing on a balance-point: Yule.
Year. The fore-memory of bird-call echoes in my mind, pulling me onward. Sun gleams on snow and cow and owl. I begin to turn more swiftly and spring breaks forth. Lovely Ostara stands before me, smiling sweetly in her filmy white gown. She wears a crown of flowers, and a garland wreathes the cow’s neck. A buttercup dangles from the bison calf’s mouth, a dreamy look in her eyes.
Year. The grain grows knee-high, turns to gold: walking through it, I feel the ripeness of life burgeoning in the crops, the soil, in myself. Freya is here, stalks of grain in her hand, in her eyes the same dark, mysterious look as in the cow’s. I sit down in the midst of the grain, longing for the presence of the lord of life, for Ing Frey. He comes, clad in russet and wheat, holding stalks of grain in one hand, two wild apples in the other.
Year. Frith. Peace. Holiness. Things as they should be, holding to the pattern. Blessed gifts. I see lightning and storm, grain tossing in the wind. Now the grain is shaven; the Old One walks through the stubbled fields with his grey horse, gleaning their share. Frigg in her grace presides over the sharing-out of the harvest goods. Deer walk the woods, huge red Hunter’s Moon glowing behind their night-shadowed shapes. A little hedgehog trundles across the crackly leaves to where I have spun to a stop in front of Vor’s harrow. It curls into a prickly ball between my feet and falls asleep. Year. Blessing.
Mythic Awareness
Myth allows us to reach levels of awareness that goes deeper and broader than the rational mind can encompass. We strive to express and enhance this mythic awareness in tales, songs and poems, in art and drama, dance and music, and in simply, deeply, experiencing the life of the soul for ourselves. Listening to and learning about the myths of our faith deepens our awareness. A way to strengthen the awareness even more is to enter into the myths and live them in some way: through ritual, drama, meditation, and other forms of experience.
One of the ways I am doing this myself is through the process of writing a book–a book of “fiction” if you will, that I prefer to see as a mythic tale, rooted in the understandings and worldview of our own faith. The book is about Gridhr, the Jotunn mother of the God Vidar, and about her world and folk, and the world of the Gods. As I believe often happens when writing fiction, the “characters” in my tale tend to take on a life of their own and take over the story themselves at every opportunity! This is exactly what happened in the short excerpts of the book that I present below, that involve Vor and her function of awareness.
I had no inkling or plan for this particular twist of the plot, until very suddenly, “out of the blue,” it evolved itself in this direction. I think this is what happens when one tries, as I am doing with this book, to enter completely and deeply into myth oneself, allowing it to take over one’s full awareness. I am striving to make a tale that reaches down into the place where the essence of living myth touches the roots of our minds, and it is no real surprise that this place does contain unexpected insights and awareness.
Implied within these passages of the story is some part of my understanding of Vor and of her relation to Frigg. Another theme that runs through my tale picks up and carries forward the thoroughly-enjoyed contest of wits that is perpetually waged between Frigg and Odin. The two of them have no other match for their minds in all the Worlds, and enjoy honing their sharp wits upon each other! The passages from my book, below, begin the weaving of yet another thread into the fabric of this contest. It is no great stretch of the imagination to believe that Vor, Goddess of Awareness, has a role to play in the relations between the subtle and mighty minds of Frigg and Odin.
So, as my final observations here on the nature of Vor and of awareness, here are two relevant passages from my tale. These ideas are not presented necessarily as “facts.” Rather this is, as with every mythic tale, “how it might have been.”
Asynja’s Flight
The night after Odin left was clear and bright, a full moon shining and the white star-path gleaming like fresh-fallen snow against the velvet background of the night sky. Gridhr the giantess sat outside her cave-dwelling, arms clasped around her knees, musing on the strange turn her life had taken. She carried a new child, Odin’s child and hers. A God-child with a mighty wyrd, who would avenge his father’s death and rid the world of the devouring Wolf when his day came. A child whose life would stretch out into worlds of which she knew nothing. She laid her cheek on her knees and sighed, not knowing how to embrace such strange knowledge, how to weave it into the familiar fabric of her own being.
Minutes later, Gridhr started and looked up, hearing the whisper of a great bird’s wings before she could spot its shape in the darkness. An enormous falcon winged low across the landscape, heading toward her. The rims of its feathers gleamed silver in the moonlight, brighter than the stars. A falcon, she thought, flying at night?
The bird swooped down to land in front of her, cupping the air in powerful wings as it reached with talons outspread to grapple the snow-patched turf below it. Alighted, the bird tucked its wings and fixed Gridhr with eyes deep-set under bony brows….eyes that reminded Gridhr, strangely, of the dark orbs of Audhumla the Cow, the great Ur-Mother whom she had seen in her vision. The young giantess and the falcon stared at one another while time passed outside of Gridhr’s awareness. The falcon’s eyes seemed to her to be all there was, everything else around her but a shadow, a memory of a dream.
As Gridhr stared bemused, the falcon’s form blurred and flickered. Gridhr rubbed her eyes to clear them, and as she looked again, she saw a mantle of feathers cast upon the ground. Standing with her feet enwrapped in the feathery cloak was a tall Goddess, clad in silver with silver hair, her eyes as dark blue as the night sky. Overwhelmed, Gridhr knew not how to react, but simply stared.
“Gridhr.” The voice was silvery, firm and shining at once, faintly ringing with the sound that Gridhr could sometimes hear, of the stars echoing in the wind of a summer night. “Gridhr, I am Frigg of the Æsir.”
Gridhr felt paralyzed with amazement. No vestige could she feel of her customary challenging fierceness toward the Æsir, traditional enemies to many of the giant-folk. Nor was the familiarity there between her and Frigg, the almost-camaraderie that she had come to feel with Odin as she had stretched her mind to follow his, while they walked a wary path toward peace between them. Neither enmity nor familiarity could Gridhr muster, as she tentatively tested different reactions and found that none of them fit the space that lay between herself and the silver-haired Asynja before her, Queen of the Æsir and Odin’s wife.
“Lady? How do you know my name?” Gridhr whispered. “Why are you here?”
A faint smile crossed the star-dusted face of the Goddess. “I know most things, Gridhr, that I want to know,” Frigg answered. “And things that I don’t wish to know, as well,” she whispered, and a cloud passed over the light of her face. “As to why I am here: close your eyes now, and sense within yourself.”
Gridhr did so, suddenly feeling the deep sense of self-knowledge and completeness that she had earlier been seeking. She sank into this sense of herself as into an ocean of light, filled with quiet delight at her knowing. Within her, she perceived a mote of being that was swimming and frolicking, full of life although it was so tiny. Her heart leapt with joy, greeting the child of her blood and her soul as he awoke into life. Entranced, she watched him play like a fish in the ocean of herself, at home and perfect in every way.
Gridhr opened her eyes to look at Frigg, ready to thank her for this gift of knowledge. But her words went unspoken as Frigg caught her mind in a fresh paralysis of surprise. Not one Goddess stood there, but two: one solid and frosted with silver, the younger one shadowy and dim, with feathery dark hair and bright eyes just visible as blue gleams through the shadows of her hair. The young Goddess overlapped the solid outlines of the Æsir’s Queen as though she were a soul-shadow of Frigg, a shadow cast by the bright light of Frigg’s own wisdom.
Stunned, Gridhr watched as the young Goddess slowly drifted apart from Frigg and floated in her direction. As the shadow-Goddess approached her, Gridhr was overcome with giddiness. Blackness filled her sight, and the giantess fell helplessly backwards, sprawled on the winter-brown turf. The ocean of herself billowed and churned, sparks of light and chips of darkness flying like wind-tossed spray from the waves, blinding her senses. She was tossed and turned helplessly, losing all sense of time and place.
Slowly, peace and stillness returned to her. Gridhr took a deep breath, trembling slightly, and opened her eyes. There was no sign of the shadowy young Goddess. Frigg sat beside her, looking up at the stars. Sensing movement, the stately Asynja turned, and again Gridhr was lost in those dark, intensely blue eyes, the eyes of the Ur-Mother.
“Look again now, Gridhr. Look into yourself again.”
Gridhr gazed back at the Goddess, shaken. She was not sure she was ready to face that churning ocean. Hesitantly, she shut her eyes and reached within. Now, as at first, the bright ocean was still and serene, glittering as though kissed by the sun. Gridhr felt deeper: there, again, was the tiny son-mote, playing joyfully within his world that was her Self. Gridhr caught her breath with astonishment and was struck again by giddiness. A second mote was there, twin to the first! Intently focused, she caught a fleeting glimpse of feathery darkness and a flash of blue as the second mote joined the first, twirling and spinning about each other in an ecstasy of delight.
Gridhr floated up out of her ocean-self and let out her breath with a deep sigh. She was overwhelmed yet again by the unfathomable strangeness of everything that was happening to her. She lay staring at the stars, breathing deeply to calm herself, trying to gentle her whirling mind and emotions as she would a frightened animal. Slowly she calmed, lying there on the cold sward, feeling the warmth of the quiet Goddess beside her in the darkness.
“Frigg?” Gridhr ventured, and paused for another breath as the tall Asynja turned toward her. Gridhr fought to keep from being entranced again as the dark blue eyes gazed into hers. “I have heard a strange tale told: that the God Heimdal was born of nine mothers. No one I know can understand how that could be.” Gridhr paused, her tongue tangled with questions for which there were no words. Giving up, she asked simply, “Is this the truth?”
“It is the truth, Gridhr.”
Gridhr stared up at the stars, thinking of a shadow-Goddess and of motes playing in the sparkling ocean of herself, and of a Queen who could cast a shadow of being by the bright light of her own wisdom.
“Whose is the child, Lady? The second child, the new one?”
Frigg smiled at her. “Ours, Gridhr. She is mine, and yours, and Odin’s, although he knows her not. Her name is Vor.”
Gridhr breathed deeply, turned within herself to sense all the strange new things that resided within her: tiny beings with names of their own, and changed understanding of things she had always taken for granted. Vor, she thought. Aware: my daughter’s name is Aware. And she is the child of a Goddess, and a God, and of me.
Gridhr lay breathing the chill night air, with questions in her heart that seemed to have no answers. She heard again the faint echo of star-song whispered in the wind, calling her out of herself. As Gridhr looked up she saw a great falcon wheeling across the sky, blotting out the stars with the shadow of her silver wings.
A Strand for the Weaving
(Several years later Odin visited Gridhr to meet his young son Vidar for the first time. He arrived in the dead of night and called Vidar out to him in the moonlight, to take him into the forest for a test of his Mood and courage. Afterwards, Odin sent Vidar back to his bed, and then returned to Gridhr’s dwelling the following morning to make his visit to her in more customary style.)
The two children entered the main chamber of their mother’s cave-dwelling hand in hand. They paused in the doorway, looking at their visitor with blue eyes half-hidden under identical falls of dark hair. Odin broke off his speech with Gridhr and stared at them in astonishment.
“And who is this other one here with our son?” he asked, looking back at Gridhr.
Gridhr smiled, hiding her laughter. “She is your daughter.”
“My daughter!” Odin was overcome with amazement, staring again at the children. “Indeed, I see that she is my son’s twin, his very likeness! How did this come about, then? I had no knowledge of this.” Odin held out his hand to the little girl, calling softly. “Come here, my child; let me see you.”
Vor came forward and laid her hand in his. He took it gently and bent toward her. “What is your name, little one?”
She answered in a sweet, firm voice, “I am called Vor, Father.”
Odin looked at the child for a moment in bemusement, then dropped her hand and began laughing. He threw his head back and laughed until tears fell from his eye and his laughter rolled echoing across the roof of the cave. “Vor!” he gasped in the midst of his laughter. “Every child of mine since the beginning of time have I foreknown, except for this little maiden. And what is her name, this one who was hidden from her father’s knowledge? Aware! Her name is Aware, and I knew her not!” His chuckles shook his frame like an earthquake as he looked toward her again. “But come! I am startling you and I have no wish to do so. I am not laughing at you, dearling, but at myself. I have very seldom been so surprised by anything or anyone!”
He stroked her hair with a strong, gentle hand, but then looked over at Gridhr again, a faint frown creasing his brows. “Truly, Gridhr, I do not understand how this could have come about, that I would father a child and not know of it. How is this?”
Gridhr grinned openly now. “I think, Odin, that you must speak with Frigg about this.”
“Frigg?!” Odin looked at her incredulously. “Frigg?” Frowning in thought, Odin dropped his searching gaze to the soft little face looking fearlessly up at him while he held her chin. Then he raised his head and stared into the distance outside the doorway of the cave. A strange, unfathomable expression crept across his face as he whispered again, “Frigg…..?”
…..And so Awareness unfolds, petal by petal, across an endless horizon of knowing which is ever old and ever new.
Note: If you’d enjoy reading Vidar’s part of this story episode, the night before the events above take place, you can go to the last section of the article linked below and read about “The Testing of Young Vidar.”
https://heathensoullore.net/to-honor-vidar/
Book-Hoard
Larrington, Carolyne, transl. The Poetic Edda. Oxford University Press, New York. 1996.
Sturlason, Snorri. Edda. Transl. Anthony Faulkes. Charles E. Tuttle, Vermont. 1995.