Description

This is my offering for Beltane 2025. It is a devotional piece requested by a dear friend and mentor of mine and her partner. Both are practicing pagans and seidr weavers and when Michelle planted the seed in my mind and heart I knew this image, was going to be packed with power. So this Beltane seemed the perfect time to manifest this image, weaving together the lord and lady of Beltane with the great mother and the all father from the north. Many thanks to Michelle Mari Elliott and My Raven for being my muses for this piece.

Frigg (pronounced “FRIG” “Beloved”, sometimes Anglicised as “Frigga,”) is the highest-ranking of the Aesir goddesses. She’s the wife of Odin, the leader of the gods, and the mother of Baldur as well as being depicted as mother and associated with blessing of activities associated with hearth and home like weaving.

Frigg, also shares many attributes with another goddess, Freya who belongs to both the Aesir and the Vanir tribes. Some conjecture that the two goddesses’ mutual evolution came from the earlier Germanic goddess Frija. To me Freya is the wild maiden of the natural world where Frigg is mother of the people.

Like Freya, Frigg is often depicted as a völva, a Viking Age practitioner of the form of Norse magick known as Seidr. In the Old Norse poem Lokasenna, after Loki slanders Frigg, Freya warns him that Frigg knows the fate of all beings, an intimation of her ability to perform seidr. Frigg’s weaving activities are likely an allusion to this role as völva.

In the Viking Age, the völva was an itinerant seeress and sorceress who traveled from town to town performing commissioned acts of seidr in exchange for lodging, food, and often other forms of compensation as well. Like other northern Eurasian shamans, her social status was highly ambiguous – she was by turns exalted, feared, longed for, propitiated, celebrated, and scorned.

Odin (pronounced “OH-din” Óðinn, Old English and Old Saxon Woden, Old High German Wuotan, Wotan, or Wodan, Proto-Germanic *Woðanaz, “Master of Ecstasy”). He’s the ruler of the Aesir, yet he often ventures far from his kingdom, on long, solitary wanderings throughout the nines worlds and the cosmos. He’s a relentless seeker after and giver of wisdom, but he has little regard for communal values such as justice, fairness, or respect for law and convention. He’s the divine patron of rulers, and of outlaws alike. He’s a war-god, but also a poetry-god and master of the Wyrd, a shaman, a Seidr man a spell weaver like Frigg.

I wanted to emphasise this aspect of Frigg as völva, in this image. Making her the perfect match to her husband Odin as Shaman or Seidr man. Together they are the sacred union, the fated lovers, the lord and lady of Beltane, king and queen of the tribes and ritual holders of the sacred fires.

The fires that warm and nourish the tribes, cleansing and blessing the cattle, the wealth of the people, so it may manifest into a bountiful harvest.

Blessed Beltane

If you are interested in traditional West Country magick, please check out Michelle Mari Elliot at Wytchwyse on FB: https://www.facebook.com/WytchWyse?