Freyr (Old Norse Freyr, "Lord") was the principal male god of the Vanir, the second divine race of Norse mythology, originally distinct from the Aesir but joined to them after the war between the two divine families. He was a son of Njord (the sea-god, treated below) and the giantess Skadi (or, in other accounts, of Njord and his unnamed sister, the Vanir practicing sibling-marriages that the Aesir disapproved of); brother of the goddess Freyja. He was the god of fair weather, of the harvest, of fertility and male potency, of peace; his cult was particularly strong in Sweden, where the great temple at Uppsala held a phallic image of him alongside the images of Odin and Thor (the three principal gods of the Swedish state-religion as Adam of Bremen described it about 1075). His sacred animal was the boar (he rode a golden boar called Gullinbursti, forged for him by the dwarves), and the boar's image on the helmets of warriors was a Freyr-symbol.

His most famous narrative is the wooing of Gerðr, a giantess whose beauty he had glimpsed from Odin's high seat (which gave a view of all the worlds, but at the cost — for those not Odin — of seeing things that troubled them). Freyr fell instantly into hopeless love. He sent his servant Skírnir to woo her on his behalf, giving Skírnir his own marvelous sword (which struck of itself against the giants); Skírnir threatened, cajoled, and at last won Gerðr's reluctant consent. The marriage was agreed; but Freyr, having given away his sword, was thereafter weaponless against the giants — and at Ragnarök he would die fighting the fire-giant Surtr without it, a death the Eddas treat as the consequence of his earlier passion.