Introduction
Freyja is a goddess of the Vanir, associated with love, beauty, fertility, gold, seidr (a form of magic), and, notably alongside these gentler associations, war and death: she claims half of all warriors slain in battle for her own hall, Folkvangr, with the other half going to Odin's Valhalla.
This article follows Old Norse mythological tradition, chiefly the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, noting where the two sources differ.
Family
Domains
Freyja is one of the most complex goddesses of the Norse pantheon, combining associations that might seem contradictory: love and desire, but also war and slaughter; beauty and luxury, but also magic and the dead. She owns a cloak of falcon feathers that allows the wearer to fly, and a necklace, Brisingamen, obtained from four dwarves.
Folkvangr and the slain
According to the Poetic Edda's Grimnismal, Freyja rides out to every battlefield and has first choice of the fallen warriors, taking half to her hall Folkvangr, while Odin receives the remainder for Valhalla, making her, alongside Odin, one of the two principal divine recipients of the honoured war-dead.
Sought by giants
Freyja's beauty makes her a frequent target of giants' desire throughout Norse myth: the builder who wagers to construct Asgard's wall demands her hand as payment (a demand the gods narrowly avoid through Loki's trickery), and the giant Thrym later demands her as the price for returning Thor's stolen hammer, a demand Thor circumvents by disguising himself as Freyja instead.
Confusion with Frigg
Freyja and Frigg, wife of Odin, share several overlapping traits and associations, and some scholars have proposed that the two may reflect an originally single goddess figure that later split, in different regional or chronological strands of tradition, into two related but distinct deities.