A Warrior’s Reward
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0As a warrior in Norse culture, it was your duty and your destiny to die in battle. The reward in the afterlife was great: fighting even more when Ragnarok rolled around. Until that time, you’d spend your time feasting and drinking mead and hanging out with all the other badasses that died in battle in Odin’s fabled hall, Valhalla. That is, unless you lost the metaphorical coin toss that determines your fate and got sent to Folkvangr, the fields of Freyja to sit in the grass and look at the pretty butterflies until the final battle.
By that point, who even wants to fight anymore?
A lot of people are familiar with the concept of Valhalla in the Norse version of the afterlife. Odin’s vast hall full of meat and bread and mead, shaking with the drunken partying of a hundred thousand boastful bearded warriors was but one honor given to the honored dead. To die with your sword in hand, covered in the blood of your enemy was the greatest end to life one could expect and was the key to acceptance into the halls of Odin. But did you know there was another alternative? Did you know that there was an equal chance that the brave slain warrior might end up in Folkvangr, The Field of the Host, ruled over by the goddess Freyja?
Something about lurking about in a beautiful field just doesn’t seem entirely…badass.
The idea of multiple destinations in the afterlife was nothing new to religion by the time the Norse religion began to take shape. Valhalla and Folkvangr were not even the only options for the departed spirit, but were given higher regard by this culture of warriors and poets than their alternatives. Whereas the honored warrior might be sent to Valhalla to be fed and entertained until Ragnarok, a person that dies a natural death might be sent to the realm of Hel or, in some regions, your spirit might reside in Helgafjell. The confusing bit here is why there are two destinations that are, ultimately, very similar in their function. There has been a great deal of discussion over this, some scholars believe that it has to do with initiation into different warrior clans that determines whether one is sent to reside with Freyja or Odin, though due to the cloudy nature of our knowledge of Norse religion, it’s hard to say for certain why this is.
When it comes down to it, not much is really known about Folkvangr, it is mentioned only briefly in different poems and in the Prose Edda. We do know that it is a realm in the afterlife, a field or meadow ruled over by Freyja, the goddess of fertility, love, beauty, and, interestingly enough, war. We know that Freyja keeps a hall, called Sessrúmnir, here much like Odin, and we can assume that she hosts the slain warriors in the hall like her male counterpart, rather than out in the fields as I’ve shown it in the comic (but that doesn’t make for a very good joke). Other than that, we can’t really be sure of much else. We can’t even really be sure that she hosts the slain in the hall, but it seems likely that this was the notion back then. It is also possible that Freyja, as a goddess of war and as a “Chooser of the Slain”, also claimed the souls of women that died a noble death and that they too would be given the honor to join the mighty host that would fight at Ragnarok.
One thing is for certain: Folkvangr is an interesting concept and one that serves to highlight just how complicated Norse religion actually was and how much we still have to learn about this culture’s spiritual beliefs.
Luckily for modern folk, we no longer need to worry about dying with a sword in our hands in order to get into the good afterlife. Most of us would be out of luck if we did.
I wonder if kitchen knives count?
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I thought Fólkvangr was Freyja’s domain?
Also, considering how promiscuous Freyja has been implied to be, I think most of the slain wouldn’t mind going to Fólkvangr
Thumbs up for Norse themed update.
Ahhh! You are absolutely correct! I was so tired yesterday that I missed the typo completely. I know it’s Freyja, but I mistyped Freyr at first and just never realized it, how embarrassing!
Thanks for pointing it out ;D
Pretty sure the only one who ever implied Freyja was promiscuous was Loki, and that was probably more or less wishful thinking after she repeatedly handed his ass to him at Flyting, fighting and other endeavors. indeed one of the core tenants of what we know of Freyja is that she is wed to Oor and cries red tears when her husband’s away.
Never know. She did bang four dwarfs for a necklace, afterall….
She did not ‘bang’ four dwarves! The dwarves are symbolic for the elements of the earth. Freyja was a goddess of chastity, her name was defiled by Christian slanderers. Indeed, the term fraulein comes from Freyja, which means virgin/young maiden in German.
Please, please, please tell me Folkvangr is where entomologists go for their afterlife? I’d take the fields of butterflies over my current beer-volcano arrangement anyway. Well, maybe. Let me think about it a bit longer…
Hooker factories!
And a fresh beer volcano!
Oodles of noodles.
*howls with laughter*
…..
*coughs*
Wow….Calypso!…I think….that that is your best haiku yet!
I am continually amazed with how good your character designs are.
Hi I’m new here and I just love your comics.
“fertility, love, beauty, and, interestingly enough, war”
Well, maybe the people who are sent to Folkvangr spend the afterlife having sex, instead of drinking mead, and eating.
Isn’t their favorite things sex, and battle?
The actual percentage is somewhere between 10-60% but 50% is a good one to go by because the sources are so varied. So maybe the reason it varies so much is because she was picking the pretty ones and there are different number of “pretty ones” per battle XD
Long time reader, first time commenter. Speaking of getting screwed out of going to Valhalla, it reminded me of one of my favorite short animations. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV5w262XvCU
I knew about Valhalla, but not Folkvangr. Fascinating! Love learning new things from your comics.
Kitchen knives do count, but only if they are those sexy Japanese (?) ones with the patterned blades.
I thought that the difference was that Folkvangr would survive Ragnarok, whereas Valhalla would not. The lesson being, that if you fought for glory, you would receive it in the afterlife, but only temporarily. But if you fought as a warrior, you would be considered worthy enough to replace the gods after the fall of all things.
I often wondered how much of Freya’s half was women. Because she’s also in charge of the Valkyries, even though she lets Odin borrow them to pour beer in Valhalla. If even a moderate percentage of Freya’s half of the slain is women slain in battles (which totally happened, this is the norse we’re talking about), it changes the dynamics of that choice quite a bit, and the Sagas are real fuzzy on how one gets tapped for the Valkyrie duty.
Dude, I enjoy your works immensely! Especially about the Norse. All my tattoos are Norse/Celtic related and I get great pleasure sharing your comics with people who ask about them. I tell them it gives them “depth of meaning.”
Yet another reason we need time travel–so that mysteries like this can be solved.
Oh my gosh. I always like to see great warriors in these types of situations!
maybe it has to do with age? It’s possible that the bachelors went to Odin, where as the married “family men” of the viking world went to Freya. I mean, if their wives ended up as honored dead, (or were at least allowed to visit their husbands) or possibly Vikings had a different definition for women (i.e have many babies and such)
Scoot,
I like your comics. Hes a video that you might like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV5w262XvCU
I like the Folkvangr version of the afterlife far better than the Valhalla version. I like to think of it as the lesbian version of Heaven.
I do not even know how you came to that conclusion considering the fact that homosexuality was viewed as disgusting by the Vikings.
My understanding was that Freyja let her chosen bring along their wives/lovers to Folkvangr.
Wich afterlife you went to sort of followed your occupation. A warrior was a warrior by proffesion and class, warrior foremost, family man and other occupation far behind.
The Host is the consripted men who are not warriors, but fight in wartime. They do not live by the creed, and thus cannot enter Valhalla.
It is not that those not living by a warrior’s creed automatically go to Folkvangr. Freyja chooses whom is to enter her domain. In fact, she gets the first choice of the slain, those living as warriors or otherwise. I have been told it is the afterlife for lovers, in that when one dies they will wait for their other half to join them. I think she would be more likely to choose those with emotional attachments than those in it for the glory.
Wasn’t Freyja a vanir while Odin was Aesir?
I always figured that Fólkvangr was the vanir equivalent of Valhalla, both of them getting to common use after the war.