Gefjon was the Norse goddess of ploughing, agriculture, abundance and unmarried women — a powerful deity associated with foreknowledge and fertility, famous above all for the myth in which she ploughed the island of Zealand out of the land of Sweden using four oxen who were her own giant-born sons. A goddess of plenty and of the virgin maidens, she shaped the very map of the north with her plough.
The Goddess of the Plough
Gefjon (Old Norse Gefjun, “the giver”) was a goddess of agriculture, the plough, abundance and prosperity, and a giver of good things to those she favoured. She was counted among the Aesir and was, like Frigg, said to know the fates of all — for it was told that she knew the future as well as Odin himself. She was especially associated with virgins and unmarried women, and it was believed that those who died unwed went to serve in Gefjon's hall — making her a patroness of maidens as well as a goddess of the fertile, ploughed earth.
The Ploughing of Zealand
Gefjon's great myth tells how she created the Danish island of Zealand. The Swedish king Gylfi, pleased with her, promised Gefjon as much land as she could plough in a single day and night. Gefjon went to the land of the giants and there, by a giant, bore four sons; these she transformed into four mighty oxen, yoked them to an enormous plough, and set them to work. So deep and strong did the plough bite that it tore an entire vast section of land loose from Sweden; Gefjon and her ox-sons dragged it out into the sea, where it became the island of Zealand (on which Copenhagen now stands), and the great hollow left behind in Sweden filled with water to become a lake (Mälaren or Vänern). Thus the goddess of the plough reshaped the geography of Scandinavia in a single night with her four divine oxen.
The Giver of Plenty
Gefjon's name marks her as “the giver,” and giving was her nature — the bestowing of fertility, good harvests, prosperity and abundance upon the land and the people. As a goddess of the ploughed and cultivated earth, she stood for the wealth that comes from working the soil, the bounty drawn up from the ground by the plough. Her great myth is itself a story of giving and making: from her own body she bore the oxen, and with them she gave Denmark its very land, dragging an island up out of the sea.
The Shaper of the Land
Gefjon endures as the Norse goddess of agriculture, abundance and the plough — the giver of plenty, the patroness of maidens, the knower of fates, and the goddess who literally ploughed an island into being. She embodies the Norse reverence for the cultivated earth and its bounty, and the marvelous idea that the very landscape of the north — its islands and its lakes — was shaped by the labour of a goddess and her four ox-sons in a single mighty night of ploughing.
Given all the land she could plough in a day and a night, she turned her four sons into oxen and tore a whole island loose from Sweden — and so the goddess of the plough shaped the map of the north.