Nanna, Norse goddess and wife of Baldr

Who is Nanna?

Nanna is the wife of Baldr, the most radiant of the Aesir, and the mother of Forseti, the judge god. Snorri names her Nanna Nepsdóttir, “Nanna daughter of Nep”.

She enters the story only when everything collapses: at the funeral of her husband, killed through Loki’s scheming. Her heart bursts as the body passes, and she burns on the same pyre. Then, from the land of the dead, she sends gifts back to the living — something no one else in the corpus does.

A genealogy with two versions

Snorri attaches her to one Nep, a figure about whom virtually nothing is known: no surviving myth features him, and his name barely outlives this patronymic. Hyndluljóð, a genealogical poem of the Poetic Edda, gives a different father: “Nanna was next there, Nökkvi’s daughter”.

Disagreements of this kind are ordinary in Norse tradition, where lists of descent exist to locate a figure in a network rather than to register a birth. But it is a useful reminder for reading the whole cluster: eddic genealogies are competing constructions, not one tree, and Snorri simply preserved one of them.

Downstream the tradition is firm. Gylfaginning states it plainly: “Forseti is the name of the son of Baldr and Nanna daughter of Nep.” Forseti sits in Glitnir, a hall with golden pillars and a silver roof, and is the best of judges: everyone who brings him a dispute leaves reconciled. The brightest line of the pantheon therefore ends in the judicial function — no small thing in a society built around the thing, the assembly of free men.

The pyre on Hringhorni

Nanna’s moment is the funeral, one of the most detailed passages in the whole Prose Edda. The gods carry Baldr’s body to his ship, Hringhorni, the largest of all vessels, to build the pyre aboard it. They cannot launch it, and have to send to Jotunheim for the giantess Hyrrokkin, who arrives riding a wolf with vipers for reins and shoves the ship so hard that fire leaps from the rollers and the earth shakes. Thor, enraged, wants to crush her skull and has to be held back.

Only then is Baldr’s body brought on board. Snorri continues in a single sentence: Nanna, daughter of Nep, burst with grief and died; she was carried onto the pyre. Odin laid the ring Draupnir on it, and Baldr’s horse was led into the flames in full harness.

It is worth registering what the text does here. Norse literature knows death in battle, death by treachery, death by vengeance; it knows no other death from sorrow. Nanna is not sacrificed and does not kill herself — mourning acts on her like a wound. Snorri’s phrase, sprakk af harmi, “she burst with grief”, has a physical violence most translations soften.

The gifts sent out of Hel

What follows is stranger still. Hermod, sent down to Hel to negotiate Baldr’s release, finds the couple seated in the place of honour in the hall of the dead. As he leaves, Baldr entrusts him with the ring Draupnir for Odin, and Nanna sends Frigg a linen robe along with a gold ring for the goddess Fulla.

The detail deserves attention: in the surviving sources this is the only gift-exchange running from the dead to the living. It transplants underground the most structuring social rule of the Scandinavian world, the gift that creates obligation and keeps a relationship alive. Dead, Nanna goes on maintaining a kinship network — and does it with exactly the objects a mistress of a household gives: textile, jewellery.

Hermod’s mission fails regardless, because Loki, disguised as the giantess Thokk, refuses to weep for Baldr. Readers of the full story will see what makes Nanna’s presents so bleak: the gods come back from Hel with gifts, but without their dead.

Saxo: Nanna as Hodr’s wife

The Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1200) tells an entirely different tale. In the Gesta Danorum, Nanna is the daughter of King Gevarus, a mortal girl loved by both the demigod Balderus and the human prince Høtherus — the Hodr of the Edda. She chooses Høtherus, arguing that a mortal cannot mate with a divine being, and their rivalry sets off the wars in which Balderus eventually dies.

In Snorri, Hodr is the blind, innocent instrument of a murder designed by Loki; in Saxo he is a rival in love who kills on purpose. Nanna shifts from inconsolable widow to matrimonial prize. The gap measures the distance between two projects: an Icelander compiling a mythology, and a Danish cleric manufacturing a national history out of the same names.

What the ancient sources say

Almost everything comes from Snorri Sturluson’s Gylfaginning (c. 1220): chapter 32 for her motherhood of Forseti and the name Nepsdóttir, chapter 49 for the funeral, the death from grief and the gifts carried back from Hel.

The Poetic Edda gives her a single line, and it contradicts Snorri: Hyndluljóð (20) calls her the daughter of Nökkvi. That one mention is enough to show that Snorri was working with material that was already plural.

Saxo Grammaticus (Gesta Danorum, Book III) preserves the euhemerised Danish tradition in which Nanna is a mortal princess married to Høtherus. None of these sources predates the twelfth century: for Nanna even more than for other figures, what we read is a late medieval shaping of pagan material whose earlier state is out of reach.

Further reading

The husband whose death kills her is covered in Baldr, and the full sequence of the disaster in the death of Baldr. The unwitting killer, turned into her suitor by Saxo, is Hodr, while the instigator remains Loki. For the recipient of her linen robe, see Frigg; for the ruler of the realm her gifts leave from, Hel; and for the dead god’s father, Odin.