The Story of the God Eir

High on the mountain called Lyfjaberg, the Healing Hill, where the air is sweet with the scent of medicinal herbs and springs bubble up from deep earth, stands a hall unlike any other in the Nine Realms. Its walls are built from white stone that seems to glow with inner light, and its roof is thatched with grasses that never wither. This is the dwelling of Eir, greatest of healers among the gods.

Eir was counted among the Aesir, though some say she served as handmaiden to Frigg, Odin’s wife. Whether goddess in her own right or honored servant, none disputed her gift—for in all the realms, no one possessed such knowledge of healing as she. Her very name means “help” or “mercy,” and both gods and mortals spoke it with reverence.

Her hands were gentle as a mother’s touch, yet firm as iron when needed. Her eyes, green as spring meadows, could see illness before it showed itself, could read the story of pain written in a sufferer’s face. When Eir walked through her gardens, the plants seemed to lean toward her, as if drawing strength from her presence.

“Every herb has its purpose,” she would say to those who came to learn from her. “Every root and leaf, every bark and berry, holds within it the power to heal—if only one knows how to listen to what it teaches.”

In the early days, when gods still walked freely among mortals, a terrible plague swept through Midgard. Children burned with fever, strong men fell weak as newborn calves, and wise women found their remedies powerless against this unknown sickness.

The cries of suffering rose to Asgard like smoke from a great fire, and the gods looked down with concern.

“Something must be done,” said Frigg, her maternal heart aching for the mortal children. “Eir, will you not go to them?”

Without hesitation, Eir gathered her healing kit—small clay pots filled with salves and tinctures, bundles of dried herbs tied with colored threads, silver needles for precise work, and a crystal bowl that seemed to hold moonlight within its depths.

She came to Midgard not in glory and thunder like Thor, nor in the ravens’ shadows like Odin, but quietly, appearing first as a traveling healer woman with kind eyes and sure hands.

In the first village she found, people lay dying in their beds while their families wept helplessly.

“Please,” begged a young mother, holding her burning child, “my daughter grows weaker by the hour. Nothing we try helps her.”

Eir knelt beside the child’s bed and placed her cool hand on the small forehead. Through her touch, she could feel the sickness itself—a poison in the blood, spreading like oil through water.

“Bring me fresh water from the cleanest spring you know,” she instructed. “And these herbs—” She sketched swift drawings on birch bark. “Willow bark for the fever, elderflower for the poison, and honey to help the child take the medicine.”

Working through the night, Eir prepared her remedy. But more than herbs went into that healing—she sang soft songs that seemed to draw the sickness out like pulling thorns from flesh, and her touch carried comfort that reached deeper than any earthly medicine.

By dawn, the child’s fever had broken. By evening, she sat up and asked for porridge. Word spread from house to house, village to village: a healer had come, one whose skill surpassed all others.

But Eir did not simply cure and move on. She gathered the local healers—wise women, herb-workers, those who tended the sick—and taught them what she knew.

“See how the willow grows beside streams?” she said, leading them through field and forest. “The tree that loves water can help cool the fire of fever. And this plant here, with leaves like tiny spears? Yarrow will stop bleeding when nothing else can.”

She showed them how to prepare tinctures, how to dry herbs so their power remained strong, how to read the signs that told when gathering was best—all the lore that she had mastered through ages of study and practice.

“But remember,” she cautioned, “healing is more than herbs and powders. The manner of your giving matters as much as what you give. A gentle touch, a listening ear, a word of hope—these too are medicine.”

An old herb-woman named Sigrid nodded thoughtfully. “You speak as one who has felt pain herself.”

Eir’s smile was soft and sad. “To heal others, one must understand suffering. Even the gods know grief and loss, though we may bear it differently than mortals do.”

As the plague retreated and health returned to the land, Eir prepared to depart. But the people begged her to stay.

“You have saved us,” they said. “Surely you must remain and be our guardian always.”

“I cannot stay forever in one place,” Eir replied gently, “for suffering calls from many corners of the world. But I leave you with knowledge, and that is a gift that grows rather than diminishes when shared.”

Before she left, Eir planted a special garden in the center of the village—a plot where the most powerful healing plants would grow, tended by those she had taught. And she made this promise: “When the need is greatest, when healers work with pure hearts to ease suffering, I will hear their call and lend my aid.”

Back in Asgard, the gods praised her work, but Eir simply returned to her studies. For every disease she conquered, new ailments arose. For every remedy she perfected, fresh challenges appeared. The work of healing, she knew, would never be finished—and that knowledge did not discourage her, but rather strengthened her resolve.

In her hall on Lyfjaberg, Eir continues her work still. When mortal healers face illnesses they cannot cure, when they work with selfless hearts to ease pain, some say they can feel her presence—a steadying of the hand, a flash of insight about which treatment to try, a sense that they do not labor alone.

And in every act of healing—whether the mending of a child’s scraped knee or a surgeon’s delicate work—there echoes something of Eir’s gift: the understanding that to heal is not merely to cure the body, but to restore hope, to kindle courage, and to remind the suffering that they are not forgotten.

Her legacy lives on in every healer who sees their work not as mere craft but as sacred calling, in every hand that offers comfort, in every heart that refuses to let suffering have the final word. For Eir taught that the greatest healing comes not from herbs alone, but from the simple, powerful act of caring—one being for another, across the vastness of life and time.