Gefjon

Summary

Gefjon is a goddess of the Æsir in Norse myth; her name is Old Norse Gefjun or Gefjon. She is remembered with the plough, the oxen and the island of Zealand, the largest island of Denmark, which Snorri Sturluson says she ploughed out of Sweden and dragged into the sea. In the list of goddesses in Gylfaginning she is the fourth: "She is a maiden, and those who die as maidens serve her." Gylfaginning 35.

Snorri opens his book with her story. Gylfi ruled the lands now called Sweden, and he gave a wandering woman, as a reward for entertaining him, a plough-land in his kingdom, as much as four oxen could turn up in a day and a night. That woman was of the race of the Æsir, and her name was Gefjon. She took four oxen from the north, from Jötunheimr, who were her sons by a giant, and set them to the plough. The plough cut so broad and deep that it loosened the land, and the oxen dragged it out to sea and westward and stopped in a sound, where Gefjon set the land and named it Selund, Zealand. Where the land had come up, water was left behind in Sweden; it is called Lögrinn, Lake Mälaren, and its bays lie as the headlands of Zealand lie. Snorri quotes the old poet Bragi: Gefjon drew from Gylfi, glad, Denmark's increase, so that steam rose from the running beasts; the oxen bore eight brow-moons, that is eyes, and four heads.

Snorri tells it again in Ynglinga saga and gives it a cause. Odin settled on an island at the place now called Odense, and sent Gefjon north across the sound to look for land. She came to Gylfi, who gave her a plough-land; she went to the land of the giants and bore four sons there to a giant, shaped them into oxen, and dragged the land out to sea and westward opposite Odense, and settled it. Then Skjöldr, Odin's son, married her, and they lived at Hleiðra, Lejre, on Zealand.

In Lokasenna Gefjon tries to make peace between Loki and Bragi as they trade insults at Ægir's feast. Loki answers: be silent, Gefjon; I remember the white lad who turned your head and gave you a necklace, and over whom you laid your thigh. Odin says: you are mad, Loki, to make Gefjon your enemy, for she knows all the fates of men as well as I do.

The idea her story turns on is that land is given by a measure and the measure is then beaten by a trick. The king gave what four oxen could turn up in a day and a night, the size of a field, and Gefjon brought oxen from the giants, so that the field became an island. She takes land from one kingdom and gives it to another, and leaves water in the first shaped like what she took. Her life turns on giving: she is given land as a reward, given a necklace, and gives Denmark its increase.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read Gefjon. The opening of the name agrees with the Norse verb gefa, "to give", which Orel derives from Germanic *gebanan. The letters of the name are g, f and n, the letters of Arabic jafna in order, Arabic j being heard as g in many tongues. In Lane jafna is the largest kind of bowl, in which food is served; it is also "a generous man", and jafna gharrāʾ is "an appellation applied to a generous man who entertains many guests and feeds many", "because people are fed in the jafna"; jafana nāqatan is to slaughter a she-camel and give her flesh to the people in bowls; and jafna is also "a small well, as being likened to the jafna for food". On this reading Gefjon is the generous giver, the sense the opening of her name carries in Norse, and she is the one who left water in Sweden where the land she lifted had been.

Linguistic Root

Cleasby and Vigfusson cite Gefjon in Ynglinga saga and at the start of the Edda, and do not explain the name. They note that in the Middle Ages the Icelanders "used to render Diana by Gefjon", writing in Acts "great is the goddess Gefjon" and calling Diana's temple "Gefjon's temple", and rarely used the name for Venus or Minerva. Orel gives the Germanic verb *gebanan, "to give", Gothic giban, Norse gefa, and relates it to Latin habeō, "to hold", and Old Irish gaibid, "to take", so that in the Indo-European root giving and taking are one.

The comparison follows the Juthoor laws: j becomes j, g or y, f stays f, and n stays n. Lane's entry has two senses that touch the story: the jafna as the bowl of hospitality and the generous man who feeds people, and the jafna as a small well. The weak point is that if the name is gef- with a feminine ending, as its opening suggests, the n belongs to the ending, not the root, and jafna reaches giving through hospitality, not through a verb meaning "to give".

Key Mythic Narratives

Gefjon and Diana

When the Icelanders translated Latin books in the Middle Ages they put Gefjon in the place of the Roman Diana, the virgin of the wild. This agrees with Gylfaginning, where Gefjon is a maiden served by those who die maidens, and disagrees with what Loki says of her in Lokasenna.

The two versions

In Gylfaginning Gefjon comes to Gylfi as a wanderer and is given the land as a reward; in Ynglinga saga Odin sends her to look for land, and she then marries his son. The first version is a story of land taken by a trick; the second makes the trick part of the coming of Odin and his people into the North, as Snorri tells it in that saga.

Symbolic Reading

The story explains a landscape people could see: a lake in Sweden and an island in Denmark of matching shape, and Snorri says so himself, the bays of the lake lying as the headlands of the island. It is told from the Danish side: Bragi calls the dragged land "Denmark's increase", what Denmark gained and Sweden lost. Plough and oxen are the farmer's tools, but the story tells no farming: the plough cuts the land to own it, not to sow it.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The nearest story to hers is that of Elissa, whom the Romans call Dido, the founder of Carthage. Justin tells that she was the wife of Acherbas, priest of Hercules at Tyre, that is of Melqart; when her brother killed him she fled by ship, taking the sacred objects of Hercules with her. She landed on the African coast and bought from its people as much land as could be covered by an ox's hide, then had the hide cut into the thinnest strips and so took in more land than she had asked for, "whence the place was afterwards called Byrsa". When they dug the city's foundations they found an ox's head, a sign of a city fruitful but laborious and always subject, so they moved it and found a horse's head, a sign of a warlike and powerful people. In both stories land is granted by a measure taken from oxen and the measure is beaten by a trick: a hide cut into strips, oxen brought from the giants. Greek byrsa is a hide stripped off, properly an ox-hide. The Semitic tongue has a word for a citadel, Akkadian bîrtu and Hebrew bîrâ, and on the method we read the hill's name from it, the Greeks hearing in it their word for a hide and explaining it by the story.

At Rome Romulus marks the city's boundary with a plough. Plutarch says he fitted a plough with a bronze share, yoked a bull and a cow to it, and himself drove a deep furrow round the boundary, while those following turned the clods the plough threw up inwards towards the city, and where they meant a gate to be they lifted the plough over the ground. Romulus's plough draws a line that closes a city in; Gefjon's plough cuts a land out of one kingdom and carries it to another.

Land taken by a measure that is outwitted is one form of the trickster's work: the trickster does not break the bargain, he takes more from it than the other party meant.