On Frost, Frigg, and Frith

Trigger Warning: Loss of a Family Member

It is a brisk, frosty morning here in my part of the world. As I sit here, sipping my coffee, the patterns of the very thin ice still clinging to the world catch my eye as they spin the light from the most welcome appearance of the sun into multi-colored marvels. I take these things for granted so often. Miðgarðr is full of these little wonders, and I often find myself overlooking them in favor of whatever else seems more important in the moments that they offer themselves to my sight. Every so often something in my brain shifts, and I’m able to see clearly again. These moments of profound clarity and simple beauty, I’ve found, often come on the tail end of some terrible darkness in my mind or on my heart, and like a fool, it’s taken me too long a time to see them for what I believe they are.

At the point of this writing, it is almost a year to the date of the beginning of the worst month I’ve ever experienced. Soon the day will be upon me, and I have to hold these aforementioned moments I try so hard to see close to my chest to offset the weight of the Bad. You see, my mom was always there. I could call her at 2am and she would answer without hesitation…until she wouldn’t. Until she let go of the joy that a crisp frosty morning brings and lost herself in her own darkness. This lead to an accident that turned into a catastrophe, and a month-long horror show sprinkled with moments in which I dared to hope for a good outcome…a good outcome that was abruptly and violently snatched from my family’s grasp.

What followed was yet another dark night of the soul for me, in which I screamed at the gods and the ancestors and the spirits to do something, anything…and felt like no one answered. It was only after, sitting shell-shocked and staring at a blank page (which I wanted desperately to fill, but couldn’t), that something began to nag at my mind. Ragnarök. What, I wondered, had sparked that thought? I sat and I pondered it for a good long while. What did the epic final battle between order and chaos have to do with my personal struggle? And then it hit me: No one really talks about what happens following the deaths of Odin, Thor, and Freyr… no one really talks about the impact these losses have on those who love them most intimately. Well, no one save the völva, who in stanza 52 of the Völuspá references ‘Frigg’s second sorrow.’

It is that descriptor that my mind stuck on, and I spent a while mulling over that thought. Frigg, loving Allmother, knew loss such as this– that aching, terrible pain of losing someone so intrinsically woven into the tapestry of your life so quickly. And Frigg, who knows but never tells, had been attempting to prepare me for this for a while before it happened. I had simply ignored the tickling in my brain, the prickling sensation that someone needed me to know something, unwilling to listen or entertain the possibility. And like Frigg, when the moment came, I could not stop it from happening. My personal Ragnarök had come and left me both hollow and filled with so much grief that I thought I would burst.

I think there may be a tendency to overlook the aspects of Frigg that deal with loss and rebuilding. We don’t always see her as a terrified mother desperate to save her son from tragedy, as a wife who knows that she will one day lose her husband; we instead label her as a hearth-keeper and a homebuilder. We overlook the parts of her that make her less above us and more like us. Perhaps I am alone in that; perhaps it is my Christian upbringing and the deep-seeded need to have someone to look up to as opposed to an esteemed peer. Whatever the case, Frigg called, and I ignored her until it was too late and I was left in shambles. She was still there, though, when I was ready, and that is a great comfort. She is stern and soft, and the moniker allmother is fitting in my belief.

We talk a lot about the concept of frith. It is the constant thrum in the back of the mind when engaging socially within Awaken the North. I must keep the frith. Do not break the frith. To quote a beloved film, ‘You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.’ Frith is an old English word meaning ‘peace’ or ‘security.’ In the case of modern Heathenry, it is often evoked to avoid disagreement– or, more commonly, to ensure that everyone plays nice and no feelings get hurt. This is not what frith is, though. Frith is the bond of family, the promise to not hurt each other no matter how much we might like to sometimes. Disagreements happen. Being uncomfortable happens. Especially when many different people come together in one place, bringing with them their experiences and their beliefs and personalities that don’t necessarily always mesh well with our own. The very examples we try to follow, the gods and ancestors, understood this.

Frigg understands this. She certainly does not allow me to be comfortable often, for she forces me to a level of introspection only rivaled by what Odin imposes upon me. We disagree. But our gods do not demand that we always agree with them. They only ask us to consider, and possibly bend on occasion. Or not! But, having entered into a partnership of sorts with these entities, the onus is on both parties to keep the frith. When asked how I view the gods I follow, I usually tell people that I view them as family, as elders whom I admire and look to for example, and that this doesn’t mean I always like what they have to say. Quite often I do not. But that’s part of growth, isn’t it? One must endure the pangs in order to grow. One must decide and allow oneself to grow. And so maybe frith means flexibility in the face of differing opinions. Being able to set aside the ego for a moment and allow someone to say their piece, and to know how to counter or agree or simply walk away for a time until the initial reaction has faded.

When my mother passed, I thought I broke my frith with the gods. I howled at them and cursed them. And then I felt bad, and I wondered if I’d done irreparable harm to the relationships I had so carefully cultivated over the years. Like an idiot I then asked people why it felt like I was disconnected. Why it felt like I’d lost them, too. It took a frosty morning like this one to make me realize that I hadn’t. That those I am closest to also knew the pain of loss, and were simply waiting for me to wander back home.