Frigg the Fabulous

Question: Can you spare some time to discuss Frigg, Odin's wife? What do you think of her being a suggested Titan Avatar? Do you feel like she is definitely a goddess, particularly a Legend 12 goddess? What is it about her that makes her the "power behind Odin's throne"? How would you handle a Scion of Frigg?

At JSR, we can always spare time to talk about Frigg!

We definitely view Frigg as a goddess, and she's equally definitely Legend 12. Of all the Norse ladies excepting Freya (who, depending on the scholar you like, may actually have once just been part of a composite Frigg-Freya figure with her anyway), Frigg is the only one who has concrete stories of her awesomeness, in which she does things that matter to the world and demonstrates the ability to overcome even other gods. It's Frigg who appears at the creation of the world with Odin and his brothers, Frigg who gets the entire world to swear its oath to grant invulnerability to Baldur (and inadvertently gives up the secret of mistletoe to Loki), and Frigg who is the only living being besides Odin allowed to sit in Hlidskjalf and see the entire cosmos. Frigg's the queen of the gods, the mother of the heroes and the seer that even Odin respects. She's more than enough of a big deal, in others words, to be Legend 12.

As for her relationship with Odin, Frigg is pretty epic as the only person who consistently punks and conquers Odin at his own game. She's practically a wizard of manipulation; Odin gets cranky, gets tricksy and eventually punishes everybody else involved, but Frigg still always wins when they go head to head, and he never so much as threatens her with retaliation. When the two of them championed separate tribes to win a war, she argued him into declaring he would give victory to the first tribe he saw and then tricked him into seeing the people she wanted to win, forcing him to follow through. When the two of them decide to compete over whose foster-child is more successful, Frigg not only wins, she wins by tricking Odin into getting pissed off and murdering his own foster-child in the process. And if you believe Saxo's account (heavily euhemerized, so take him with the usual grain of salt), she routinely plundered offerings to Odin to make herself jewelry and gain allies, and he pretty much was so embarrassed by the entire ordeal that he went into self-imposed exile for several years.

So while Odin is certainly an extraordinarily powerful figure, Frigg is a match for him in her own way, which is extremely rare in Norse mythology (and by "extremely rare" I mean "Frigg is the only example"). Odin is the king, most certainly, and he calls the shots, but Frigg is always there at his side, and it's pretty clear that if she wants a shot called, he's probably going to accommodate her. Luckily for him, most of the time she conforms to the usual Norse goddess-role of faithful wife and loving mother, and never interferes in the politics of ruling the Aesir. (Or does she? Man, that Ultimate Manipulation is impossible to plan for.)

I think Frigg could be a Titan Avatar theoretically, but I'm not sure why anyone would want her to be. She's more than vibrant and involved enough in her pantheon to be one of its prime members, and I don't know what Titanrealm she would slot into easily. Fate, maybe, but the Norns are, like, right over there; I could see someone trying to draw a connection to Earth as her father is Fjorgynn (literally "earth"), but Frigg has no real connection to that realm other than the lineage, and anyway there are more effective Earth Titans, like Jord, already in play. There's just no reason to consign her to Titanhood (though a plot in which she made that choice during play as a result of Ragnarok or events leading up to it? Could be totally boss).

Incidentally, we have mentioned here before that we're big fans of the theory that most of the Asgardian ladies (with notable exceptions Thrud, who's Aesir, Idun, who's alfar, and Gerd & Skadi who are giantesses) are Vanir, married into the Aesir after the end of the war between their people. Frigg is a great example of that theory at work; her connection to an earthy father figure makes more sense, in her case, as a connection to the Vanir rather than to a Titan, and how much fun is the idea that Odin may have gotten a little more than he bargained for when he took a conquered Vanir bride?

We have not had any PC Scions of Frigg in play, though we have had one guest-star as an NPC, the ill-fated Michael Freeson, leader of Saki's original band (and Geoff Matheson by proxy, I guess, who really loves visiting his grandma). If we had any, though, we'd treat them just like any other Scion; their relationship with their mother would probably depend mostly on their personality and how they interacted with her, but she's likely to be extremely protective of her "good" children, and there's more than a chance Odin will screw with that kid's head just on principle. In fact, Scions of either Frigg or Odin usually run the risk of possibly being the newest bone of contention in one of their famous Manipulation wars... which is not an exciting place to be, I imagine, but hey, they probably won't even know about it most of the time.