Freya

Goddess of Love and Fertility; Freyja

Lesser God

Alignment: Neutral Good

Domains: Animal, Charm, Darkness, Good, Healing, Plant, War

Symbol: Falcon

Garb: Robes and cloaks of white, trimmed with white fur

Favored Weapons: Longsword, longbow, spear

Form of Worship and Holidays: Harvest moon feast and before large hunts. Feast of Freya at spring equinox. Secret rites at the new moon. The Calends of the third month is devoted to Freya and serve as a special holiday in her honor.

Typical Worshippers: Human females, farmers, midwives, hunters, druids

Freya is a lesser goddess of love and fertility. Freya is also the leader of a great band of women warriors known as valkyries. Freya represents fertility in all its forms. In the Southlands, Freya represents the cycle of death and rebirth. She is a goddess of the coming harvest, as well as of sexuality and procreation. Her beast is the falcon, though she is fond of the winter wolf and the hind. She appears most frequently to her worshippers as a beautiful human woman dressed in robes and a cloak of winter wolf fur, though she occasionally appears as a hunter in leather armor with spear and bow or as a warrior in shining mail with a glowing sword. She can take the form of a falcon — or any other bird — at will, as well as that of a huge winter wolf.

Freya is a transplant to the Foerdewaith pantheon from the Vanir of the Northlands, where she is called Freyja. Despite this foreign origin, Freya is one of the single-most popular deities worshipped by the peoples of Akados. She is slowly but surely replacing the Hyperborean goddess Zadastha as the goddess of love. As a goddess of the harvest, there is natural friction between her followers and those of Telophus, though this rarely comes to open conflict. She and Ceres likewise share dominion over midwives and the birthing process, though Freya approaches it more from the procreation aspect and Ceres from the aspect of a healthy family and community. As such, there is little conflict between the followers of these faiths, and small villages tend to lean toward one or the other as a whole rather than having shrines of both in the same community.

Though not an inherently violent faith (at least not outside the Northlands), Freya despises any kind of arachnid, and her battles against the drow goddess known as the Queen of Spiders are legendary. Her followers also frequently conflict with those of the arachnid deity called The Spider, though that deity is too bestial and unsophisticated to truly carry a grudge against the goddess.