Nanna was the gentle Norse goddess who was the devoted wife of the shining god Baldr — and who, in the supreme expression of love and grief in Norse myth, died of a broken heart at his funeral and was burned upon his pyre to join him in the realm of the dead. Her story is brief but among the most touching in all the northern tales: love so deep that it would not be parted even by death.
The Wife of Baldr
Nanna (Old Norse Nanna) was an Aesir goddess, the wife of Baldr the beautiful and the mother of Forseti, the god of justice. She was a goddess of gentleness, joy and devotion, the loving companion of the most radiant and beloved of the gods. Her life was bound to Baldr's, and so, inevitably, was her death — for when the shining god fell, Nanna could not bear to live on without him.
Death of a Broken Heart
When Baldr was slain by the mistletoe through Loki's scheme, the gods bore his body to the shore to give him a great funeral upon his ship, Hringhorni. As the preparations were made and Baldr was laid upon the funeral pyre aboard his ship, Nanna was so overcome with grief at the death of her beloved husband that her heart broke within her, and she died of sorrow on the spot. It is one of the most affecting moments in Norse myth: the goddess who simply could not survive the loss of her love, dying of a grief too great to bear.
The Shared Pyre
And so Nanna was laid upon the funeral pyre beside her husband, and the two were burned together aboard the great ship and sent out in flames upon the sea — united in death as they had been in life. Nanna thus accompanied Baldr down into the realm of Hel, the land of the dead, where the two remained together. When the messenger Hermod rode down to Hel to beg for Baldr's return, he found Nanna there at her husband's side; and she sent gifts back up to the living — a linen robe for the goddess Frigg and a ring for Fulla — tokens from the dead wife to the world above, gracious even in the land of death.
The Return After the End
Like her husband, Nanna's story holds the promise of renewal. For it was foretold that after Ragnarök, when the old world has passed and Baldr returns from the dead to dwell in the new and cleansed world, Nanna will return with him — the loving wife restored to her husband, the two of them reunited not only in death but in the bright world reborn. Nanna endures as the Norse goddess of devoted love and faithful grief, the wife who died of a broken heart and followed her husband into death and beyond, embodying the deepest truth her people knew about love: that it does not end at the grave.
She died of grief at her husband's funeral and was burned upon his pyre to follow him into the land of the dead — and is promised, after the world ends, to return at his side into the world reborn.