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Excersus LXVI: Hearth Attack
One of my favorite things about Norse religion is the amount of space it gives to the honoring of love. Whereas Christianity spent the better part of a millenium and a half fighting against romantic love between individuals (as we talked about previously), the beauty of mortal love was consistently celebrated in Norse mythology. Frigga, who comes off as something of a nag when you look at her through the lens of Wagner's Ring Cycle, was the beloved protectress of marriage and conjugal love, and there are even stories of gods separating if the love between them wasn't pure enough to sustain a real life bond (witness the story of Skadi and Niord). Romantic love could come out above the formalism of marriage, and the bond of marriage was itself a thing respected by the gods, all of which is almost entirely opposite of the Christian system until it decided to get on the marriage bandwagon in the last couple of centuries.
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