Vanir

Alfheim to the light elves and Nidavellir to the dwarves, also known as the dark elves.

Jotunheim was given to the giants, and Vanahamir to the Vanir, a group of wise fertility gods.

Niflheim and Muspelheim are the primordial realms which formed the cosmos.

Finally, Hel is the land to which those who die dishonourably go, to spend their afterlife.

Their own bodies were far too massive to fight on the surface without doing the planet permanent harm, and so they made servants to fight in their stead.

The Titan-forged, the giants of stone and metal, and Storm who would one day be remembered as the Aesir and the Vanir.

The Titan-forged defeated the elemental lords and sealed them away in an elemental plane of their own.

They destroyed most of the Aqir, and then they turned toward the old gods themselves.

The important thing to remember is that humankind is kin of the gods, first crafted by their own hands, then imbued with their own life force, and later descended directly from them.

"...there are three mighty tribes of sacred beings, the Aesir, of which Odin, Honir, and Lodur were the first, the Vanir, and the Jotun race.

The Jotar or Jotnar often intermarried with other gods, and many of them were thus elevated, though some denominations consider them gods in and of themselves." Opinions will vary regarding the Jotnar and their role, and whether or not to venerate them is one of the major ideological fault lines across denominations today.

Traditional scholarship ascribes the venues of warcraft, knowledge, order, and the justice of the Aesir.

fertility, love, prosperity, and abundance to the Vanir, and chaos, destruction, and change to the Jotnar.

The Jotnar, at best, are greeted with ambivalence by a majority of modern heathens and, at worst, actively despised.

The relationship between the Aesir and the Vanir, however, did not start out on a pleasant note either." In another lay or tale of the poetic Edda, the Voluspa, the Cirrus summoned to life by Odin, speaks of the first war.

And it goes like this.

Freyja, the goddess of love, fertility, magic and war, is one of the most prominent.

She was part of the Vanir, a family of gods.

It is usually thought that all Viking warriors slain in battle went to Valhalla to feast in Odin's Hall.

However, according to sagas, Freyja claimed half of the warriors and took them to her realm of Falkner.

It was here, more than anywhere else, that the god Thor would travel, to fight and to test his strength.

Vanaheim was the home of the Vanir, the second family of gods, about whom more will be said later, The sources say very little about it, and nothing at all about where it lay.

Alfheim was the home of the light elves, who, Snorri says, are fairer than the sun to look upon.

It was given to the god Freyr as a tooth gift, a present given to a child when it cut its first tooth.

Odin hung on the tree for the sake of knowledge, a god offering himself to himself, in order to learn the secrets of the world.

Odin's hunger for wisdom also brought him the gift of poetry in one of the most colourful stories that Snorri tells.

After the long war between the two families of gods, the Aesir and the Vanir, which will be told later, the gods made peace, and to seal it, they all spat into a great vessel.

From that spittle, the gods made a man called Kvarsir, who was so wise that no one could ask him a question that he could not answer.

Not long after this,

the Ashar quarreled with the Vanir, wild enemies of theirs, and there was a terrible battle.

But in the end, the two sides made peace, and to prove that they never ever meant to quarrel again, they exchanged hostages.

The veneer gave to the Ashar old Njord the Rich, the lord of the sea and the ocean wind, with his two children, Frey and Freya.

This was indeed a gracious gift, for Freya was the most beautiful maid in the world, and her twin brother was almost as fair.

To the Vanir in return, Father Odin gave his own brother, Honeir.

And with Honeir, he sent Mima the Wise, whom he took from his lonely well.

Now the Vanir made Honeir their chief, thinking he must be very wise because he was the brother of the great Odin, who had lately become famous for his wisdom.

And that's Heath.

She's the one who started the, the Vanir-Aesir war.

They burned her three times, it didn't do anything.

And yeah, so he's giving us some deep, uh, anti-loosh harvesting lore here.

The All-Father works, the Elves understand.

The Vanir know, the Norns all fate ensure.

Ivelia gives birth, the Thursis wait, the Valkyries yearn.

¶¶

The way it starts out is that you've got Jötnar in the Norse, and you've got the Titans in the Greek.

And then the Titans are overcome by the gods of Olympus, and the Jötnar are overcome by the Aesir and the Vanir.

It extends even further with the Norse pantheon because one theory is that the Vanir were the gods of the pre-Indo-Europeans, and the Indo-Europeans brought the Aesir with them, these more warlike gods that these nomadic people would likely worship, would've come in and subjugated to an extent.

Now, the Vanir aren't necessarily lesser than the Aesir, but they hold a different purpose.

And in many cases, they overlap on one or two things.

So the Aesir, who are more warlike, and then the Vanir, who are more agricultural and fertility-based, things like that.

It's believed that the Indo-European migration may have accepted those gods as their own, but placed them kind of in a, a different role.

And we see this also with the Celtic pantheon.

In short, she was given this duty of sacred hospitality that also goes hand in hand with being cast out from the space of the gods, and I think is also intimately connected with those particular relationships.

This, by the way, is why fire and ice practice tends to name Hel as one of the Others, rather than belonging to the Aesir Vanir or Jotnar.

Hel herself is described as half corpse and half alive.

In Snorri's word, literally half black and half a lighter flesh color, which gives the impression of sort of a putrescent decaying body on one side and a living, though potentially cold one on the other.