Eir: A Healer in a Short Description

“The third is Eir, who is the best leech.”

Eir appears in Gylfaginning as the third of the goddesses that Hár lists to Gangleri, after Frigg and Saga. The list gives her one description: she is the best of physicians. No home is named for her, no family, and no story about a cure.

Where the list gives a goddess a hall or a task, Eir receives only her skill. That is all Snorri says of her, so what she heals, and how, is left open. A name that matches hers also appears in the poem Fjölsvinnsmál, but there it stands inside a list of maidens, and the poem says nothing more about her.

The Old Norse word eir is usually taken to mean something like mercy or help, and one older glossary gives “to befriend, to tranquilize”. Snorri does not explain her name, so the link between name and skill is a reading, not something the text says.

In Fjölsvinnsmál, in Thorpe’s numbering, stanza 39 names Eir among the maidens who sit at Menglöð’s knees. Whether this is the same figure as the goddess in Gylfaginning is not stated in either text.