Jaktens gudinna
Snow-shoes striding, hail swift huntress!
Wild one, free and willful goddess,
bow and blade you bear beside you,
finding food to fend off hunger.
Winter will not leave us wanting;
give good hunting, grant us skill!
Skade
Njords maka. Gudinna over snon, vintern, och den kalla norden
Alias: skade
normal
normal
Enligt Britt-Marie Näslund, från "The great goddess of the north"
Some scholars apprehend Skadi as an earth goddess or intimately connected with the soil. She appears in the myth as the daughter of the giant Tjatse and marries Njord under peculiar circumstances. In this connection it seems like more then a coincident that Skadi is a masculine form, but the attempts to suggest a change of sexes between Skadi and Nerthus-Njord has been without success. Skadi is represented in several placenames in Sweden and Norway like Skadevi, Skadalunda, Skee, Skea, Skadeland etc, of which many imply a cult of Skadi, which is also reflected in her own words:
from my shrines and fields will cold counsel ever come to you.
Whether a giantess or goddess, it is obvious from the material that Skadi hardly carries the evident characteristics of fertility that characterizes Nerthus. She is - according to Snorre and Ragnarsdrapa - connected with the wild nature and icy mountain, evoked as the the skiing woman. Skadi rather conveys characteristics that are opposite to those of the Vanir, destroying aspects like cold, frost and darkness, which is implied in a possible interpretation of her name, damage. This opposition is exhibited in the alternating song between her an Njord, which not only reflects the contrast between the inland and the coast, but even between wild nature and human culture.