Frige (Anglo-Saxon goddess)

Frige, or Frig, was the presumed Old English name for a goddess found in Anglo-Saxon paganism, the religion that dominated Anglo-Saxon England from the 5th to the 7th centuries CE. There are no direct descriptions of this deity in surviving literary sources, but historians have drawn together indirect evidence from a variety of other sources, arguing that she was probably associated with sexuality and fertility by her worshippers.

Following the Christianisation of England in the 7th and 8th centuries, Frige's worship was eradicated, but she left an influence on the English language. She lent her name to the Modern English word "Friday", which came from the Old English word Frigedæg, meaning "Frige's Day". She also provided the basis for a number of place names across the country, including villages like Froyle, Freefolk and Fretherne.

The role of Frige in pre-Christian England has been evaluated by a variety of different historians and scholars of Old English, such as Brian Branston (1957), Richard North (1997) and Stephen Pollington (2011). Because very little information about Frige has survived from English literary sources, scholars have looked for comparisons within Norse mythology to elucidate more about this deity. In Norse mythology, there were two distinct goddesses who have been compared with the Anglo-Saxon Frige: Freyja, who was associated with sexuality, magic, fecundity and violent death, and also Frigg, who was associated with childbirth, wealth and power over the household. Archaeologists have also suggested that certain female figurines found from Anglo-Saxon England might have represented the goddess Frige.

Anglo-Saxon paganism was not "static and monolithic" but rather a "living, developing tradition" that changed in accordance with the world around it.

Pre-Christian religion in Anglo-Saxon England was polytheistic, accepting the existence of multiple different deities. Although contemporary scholarship knows very little about the majority of these, the names of some of the most widespread have survived, being preserved in some Early Medieval literature and also in various English place-names. According to this evidence, one of the most prominent of these Anglo-Saxon gods was Woden, as "traces of his cult are scattered more widely over the rolling English countryside than those of any other heathen deity". Another prominent Anglo-Saxon god appears to have been Þunor, a god of the sky and thunder and who was "a friend of the common man". A third Anglo-Saxon god that we know about was Tiw, who, in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem Tir is identified with the star Polaris rather than with a deity, although it has been suggested that Tiw was likely a war deity.

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