Óttar

Óttar is the mortal whose goddess fought his case for him. Freyja's devoted protégé and favourite, faithful in his worship of her, he has staked everything on a wager about his own descent — and cannot win it unless he can recite his ancestry back through the great houses of the North. So his goddess carries him to the one being who knows the lineages, the giantess Hyndla, disguising him as the boar she rides, and wrings the genealogy and a draught of memory-ale from her on his behalf. Óttar is the human object of divine favour, the worshipper the goddess will go to a giantess's cave and trade insults to protect — and his story is the Norse conviction that a man's standing is his bloodline, and that piety toward the gods is a thing they remember and repay.