Freya-Onions-report

“Freya alone I lack, methinks.”

I woke up yesterday in a flash of anxiety: I should have had that letter tracked. The letter, which I had drunkenly slid into the postbox at the end of my street at 11pm the night beforehand contained a few vitally important documents, namely my only form of ID (driving license) my original deed poll, as well as a £17 postal order, along with a letter from my psychologist confirming my desire to change my name and gender on my driving license. 

Friends in the pub had told me that very night: “you should have that tracked” but, somewhat counterintuitively, the sheer amount of effort I had put into collecting this assortment of payment and documentation over the previous months had pushed me into a blind mania to have the letter sent, regardless of my ability to safeguard its contents.

Anyway, the letter is sent, and so begins my wait for 2-3 weeks, without ID of any kind (I have reluctantly come to accept that I lost my passport in the process of moving flats last September) in the hope that the DVLA will graciously send me back both my original documents as well as a new updated ID registering Freya as my name, Miss as my title, along with a photograph that hopefully less resembles a swoopy haired, smooth-brained twat than my current one.

In the days prior to this I received my new bankcard, which, to be quite honest, has delighted me. ‘Miss Freya Onions’. Hell yeah! I made sure that my first transaction under my new name was a £6.60 pint of 7.2% craft beer from a trendy ‘taproom’ outside Camberwell on a weeknight. Start as you mean to go on, eh?

Unsurprisingly, these events have brought me back to the topic of names.

I spent a month or so thinking about names- specifically transfeminine naming practices- in the context of Plato’s bizarre dialogue on the nature of language, Cratylus, back in May of 2022, which resulted in my most highly marked essay ever (you can read that here). Now I guess I want to return to this topic, but with a more personal flavour.

I want to write specifically about the name Freya.

As such, I have spent the morning rereading what is perhaps one of the most popular ballads of the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse narrative poems. I first came across, Þrymskviða, or ‘The Lay of Thrym’ shortly after picking the name Freya for myself— which I guess was around a year ago.

Eager to add some mythological weight and metaphysical import to my chosen name, I quickly ordered a copy of the Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander, and over the following week read through, eagerly absorbing each mention of the Goddess of fertility and love, Freya. 

I certainly got what I was after, but, in the case of Þrymskviða in particular, I found an altogether more poignant literary artefact than I was expecting. Little did I know that The Lay of Thrym is a fascinating exploration of gender, transfemininity and naming which says a lot about the anti-trans moral panic currently underway.

[A quick disclaimer before I begin my reading of Þrymskviða: not only do I know next to nothing about Norse Mythology, Norse literary forms and meter, but I have also read absolutely zero critical material on this particular ballad. Forgive my total absence of context and attention to scholarly consensus. The general purpose of this reading is personal to myself and my situation alone.]

So, Þrymskviða tells the story of Thor who, upon awaking to find his hammer, Mjöllnir, missing, sends Loki to ascertain its whereabouts. Loki and Thor go to Freya’s court to ask for her feather cloak to aid in their quest to find the hammer. She graciously agrees. 

The two leave with the cloak, and Loki is told by Thrym, King of the jǫtnar, that it is he who has taken Mjöllnir and, what’s more, he has a request. He tells Loki that he will only return Mjöllnir if Freya is brought to him to be his bride.  Within seconds, the powerful elegance of Freya’s court, her ability to give the feather cloak or conversely withhold it, is subsumed by a patriarchal power game of arranged marriage with her voice entirely absent. 

What follows could quite easily be called an instance of what Sedgwick, at the genesis of queer theory, called homosocial bonding (See Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire). In this case, Thrym’s desire to have Freya delivered to him by Loki could be read as a stifled queer desire to sexually engage with Loki through the socially acceptable proxy of Freya’s body. So doing, homosexuality is rendered acceptable through the use of the female body as a passive receptacle for male sexuality. 

At the same time, Thor and Loki’s subsequent decision to crossdress, with Thor donning bridal dress to disguise himself as Freya and Loki as her maid, quite easily reveals itself as another mechanism with which to temper an otherwise dangerously unchecked queer desire. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly though, Thor’s ultimate aim to retrieve his hammer— no prizes for pointing that the hammer is a proxy phallus— ends what could have been the first explicitly queer Norse ballad as a tale of vengeful bloodshed, as Thor leaps from his female disguise to slaughter Thrym and his court before retrieving Mjöllnir. 

One could read this ballad quite simply as reinforcing an often invoked narrative of sexual binarism: while able to help male characters achieve their wants, Freya, beautiful Goddess of love, remains ultimately passive in the face of Thor’s homosocial masculine aggression.

Freya, we are led to believe, would be incapable of such rage. She, paragon of womanly virtue, can only be an object of desire, a fountain of unconditional love and abundance (mother earth, giver of fertility, male ejaculation— and feather cloaks). 

Such a reading is in keeping with much of the arguments used by anti-trans activists, particularly those who call themselves ‘gender critical’ who are quick to suggest that trans women, because ultimately men in bridal gowns, retain their immutable threat of sexual violence. Trans women, they might argue, can never be ‘Freya’, Goddess of Love, ontological victim, because they lack her female essence.

How interesting that an Old Norse ballad should have the anxieties of this band of predominantly white, middle class and middle aged women encoded into it! Or perhaps, how unsurprising that ‘gender criticals’ have the same understanding of patriarchal gender relations as tenth century Scandinavians.

Recently of course, in the midst of the anti-trans backlash against Scotland’s vote to reform the process by which trans people can retain a gender recognition certificate, all sorts of attempts have been made to brand trans people, particular trans women, as deviant sexual perverts, undeserving of any legislative protection let alone public empathy. In a particularly egregious example, in a livestream hosted by prominent ‘gender critical’, Kellie Jay-King, whose ties to the American far right are both widely known and accepted, one gender critical woman decided to quote Adolf Hitler to explain her opposition to trans women:

Revamping the anti-semitic conspiracy theory know as ‘the big lie’, the woman explains to a group of anti-trans protestors that we are being fed a new ‘big lie’ by deviant male perverts. The lie, she claims, is that ‘trans women are women’. 

Beyond the staggeringly shortsighted decision to rehabilitate Nazi propaganda to aid the anti-trans cause, this woman tellingly encapsulates the mode by which the anti-trans media machine functions. 

Indeed, to me at least, the concerted, collaborative effort made by the privileged group of primarily cis, white and middle class journalists to vilify some of the most marginalised people in the country came to a kind of fruition of self disclosure in this moment. Finally these people who dedicate their lives towards trans exclusion revealed the logical conclusion of their efforts: trans annihilation. Perhaps this Nazi quoting imbecile was merely saying the quiet part out loud.  

By branding trans women as violent men in disguise, as ontological ‘liars’, journalists and politicians have been able to reignite the very same arguments which were used against gays and lesbians in the 80s and 90s: that they are predatory; that they make sexual advances on minors; that they indoctrinate the youth; that they spread disease; that they act against nature and against biology; that they act in this way only because of some traumatic event in childhood; that they can be cured or persuaded out of their ‘perversion’; that the spread of their ‘ideology’ is madness and stands against truth. 

But to read Þrymskviða in this way and to suggest that it endorses such a reductive reading of gender relations is to overlook some of its most crucial aspects. In Þrymskviða, Freya is a heck of a lot more complex than these fools would have you know.

In fact, the aforementioned sexual dichotomy of a passive, giving and loving female ontology (Freya) set against an aggressive, sexualised male agency (Thor dressed as Freya) is not quite so simple nor apparent in the text itself. For example, note what happens when Thor and Loki return to ask Freya to give herself as a bride to Thrym:

To Freya’s bower they bent their steps.
These words then first fell from his lips:
“Busk thee, Freya, in bridal linen,
we twain shall wend to the world of etins.”

Upon being asked to give herself up as an unwilling bride to appease Thor’s anxiety of phallic lack (the theft of his *hammer*) and simultaneously fulfil the homosocial bond between Thor and Thrym, Freya unleashes what is the sole expression of pure rage in the whole ballad:

Wroth grew Freya, foamed with rage;
the shining halls shook with her wrath,
the Brísings’ necklace burst asunder:
“Most mad after men thou mayst call me.
if I wend with thee to the world of etins.”

Freya angrily refuses their request and explodes with such a rage that ‘the shining halls shook with her wrath’. Already, Thor’s violent attack from his bridal disguise looks a lot less like an expression of his inherent tendency towards anger and a lot more like an anxiety conditioned by his own wounded masculinity and conflicted homosocial desire.

Freya’s rage punctures the text, along with any notion of sexual binarism the text may have superficially endorsed. 

Indeed, Freya, Goddess of love, is actually the angriest person in the ballad— both entirely capable of violence nor hindered by the strictures of traditional feminine virtue and decorum. Freya’s name and the bridal gown disguise taken on by Thor then become symbolic of a reversed transfeminine vitality: a rage passed from female to the transfeminine as a violent affront to patriarchy. 

For it is only with the name ‘Freya’, and the symbol of her refusal and rage towards patriarchal power structures that Thrym and all that he represents can be defeated. 

Thor’s anger, if discernible in the ballad at all, is a kind of mechanical anger inseparable from the physical acts of violence he commits. It is not rage. It is merely cause and effect.

It is for this reason that, upon rereading Þrymskviða, and immediately noticing the parallels with some transphobic arguments of the modern day, that I still have no qualms in adopting the name Freya. Not only is it my favourite name, but to me it is intimately connected with not only a productive feminist rage but a transfeminine affirmation of female agency. (Though I recognise this is generally a retroactive attribution.)

I realise I have explained this all terribly but haven’t the time to edit this. Not at University anymore. Ugh. This is my free damn time. And I want lunch. 

So, I’m waiting for my new ID and have no idea when it will arrive. Waiting for a letter— how dissatisfyingly Ashberrian.

I  returned one of two blue sequin dresses I ordered online this morning because I couldn’t financially justify buying two of of them… and one of them dropped horrible black marks and sequins onto my laminate floor. I repeat: the white flowers on my desk are artificial. 

To conclude I want to discuss a fragment of what Thrym says in the moments when he mistakenly believes that his plan to obtain control over Freya has worked. As a King replete with material possessions, as well as a penile hammer— stolen from Thor of all people!— Thrym has everything. Except one thing:

“In my garth there graze golden-horned kine,
oxen all black, for etins a joy;
many rings have I, many riches have I,
Freya alone I lack, methinks.”

This last line is utterly fascinating— so full of signification and yet so unforgiving in its ambiguity. In a stanza which transforms its linguistic components into material objects, ‘oxen’, ‘rings’, ‘riches’, Freya refuses to be turned into a mere signifier of masculine value. Indeed, her ‘lack’ both in the sense that Thrym lacks her body to complete his homosocial transaction and in the sense of phallic lack she represents as a woman within patriarchal linguistic structures, foregrounds the epistemological threat she poses to the functioning of those structures. 

Cut into two distinct clauses, the latter, ‘I lack, methinks’, then exemplifies another poignant self disclosure: a recognition that the ‘lack’ so often accorded to women as a penile lack is not a biological fact at all but a product of patriarchal language. So, Thrym comes to recognise his own ‘lack’ as presented by the threat Freya’s bodily agency poses to him.  

Freya’s rage carries across the text in and through this ‘lack’. As lack is absence, so too is it disguise. So too is it the transfeminine transference of female rage. 

Rage, of course, proved a foundational concept to not only feminist theory and praxis, but to lesbian feminism and transgender theory.  Just as the Radicalesbians’ 4 page manifesto ‘Woman Identified Woman’, published in 1970, opens: 

‘What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all woman condensed to the point of explosion’

Trans theorist Susan Stryker writes in her foundational  1994 essay, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’: 

‘Rage
constitutes me in my primal form.’

What I mean by citing these past examples is that rage has served as an immensely productive force in the liberation and politicalisation of oppressed gender minorities. All the more-so because rage is an emotion continually denied to women and those perceived as women. Rage, and our refusal to accept the attempts of those in power to divide and diminish us is perhaps our greatest organiser. 

Blue sequins. Sisterhood. Even in waiting.

the shining halls shook with her wrath,

22/01/23