Gefjon

Gefion is the goddess who, in the Ynglinga origin, ploughed an island out of the earth. Sent by Odin to win land from the Swedish king Gylfi, she was promised as much as she could plough in a day and a night — so she turned her four giant sons into oxen and ploughed a great piece of the country loose, dragging it out into the sea to make the Danish island of Zealand, and leaving behind the lake whose shape matches the island still. The tale is one of the bright old myths Snorri keeps even inside his rationalised history of the gods-as-kings — too good, too rooted in the real landscape of lake and island, to discard. Gefion is the corpus's image of the land itself being shaped by the divine ancestors of the kings: a goddess with an ox-team and a day's ploughing, tearing an island free of the mainland and giving it to Denmark.