Freya, Freyja or Freja?

[FoleyHuck]

Hi All

4 weeks until d-day and DH and I are driving ourselves mad trying to choose names.

For girls we had Edith, Matilda and Astrid on the shortlist but have been going back and forth on all of them. My current favourite of the 3 is Edith / Edie. I like the idea of Astrid more than I actually like the name I think. Matilda appeals because I loved the book when I was a young avid reader, and because it offers a lot of variant potential (Tilly, Tilda, Tilde, Matti etc).

We've now upped the confusion by adding Freya / Freja / Freyja to the list and it's fast growing on me, but I can't decide which would be the best spelling to use.

We live in Britain, but DH is Scandinavian, as is our surname.

Any thoughts please wise MNetters? I'm finding myself very jealous of people who knew their baby's name for certain early on! Let's not even mention that we don't know if baby is a girl or a boy, so this is only half the discussion!!

Going against the trend here but I would use whatever is most traditional in DH’s country. She will grow up immersed in British culture anyway, it’s nice to give that extra nod to the Scandi side.

Freyja and Freja are not difficult spellings anyway, if Brits can learn to cope with Kathryn/Catherine and Steven/Stephen then they’ll handle this one too.

I think they are all beautiful names so I’m no help at all!

We've chewed it over some more and are pretty set on the Old Norse Freyja, which we both think is prettier than Freya but not as likely to be pronounced wrong as Freja.

Spelling wise I think unless you go for something totally bulletproof (Sam, Tom, Jack, Eve?) you're inevitably going to be asked regularly anyway. My own first name is a common British name and ostensibly easy to spell / only has one spelling. I'm asked to confirm the spelling the majority of times I give my name to someone writing it down 🤷🏻‍♀️

Freya. Freyja and Freja you will get mispronunciations but if you’re happy to correct then go for it. My daughter’s name is mispronounced a lot and the only time it gets irritating is when people are too damn thick to remember how it’s pronounced. Most people will get it right after being corrected once but be prepared for people who are wilfully stupid.

I like Freya - it's a lovely name regardless

Speaking from experience... most people in the UK will pronounce it correctly without issue. But they will spell it wrong almost always, even if you have specifically told them about it before.

It's fine for us because we used the default spelling for our country of residence so almost everyone in our daily lives can spell it right. But I think it would annoy the hell out of me in the UK and that's why I'd always recommend the default spelling for the place you actually live.

Though I quite agree it's prettier. And also looks more 'proper' to my biased eyes.

Go for the spelling you prefer. I think it’s a a very well known name so she’d only need to correct someone once if they weren’t sure.

Freya

After I'd started this thread I followed a tip I'd found elsewhere and spent some time writing all our options out. Turns out that while we both prefer the look of Freyja it's horribly clunky to write down, so if we use the name we'll use Freya.

I'm glad I did that, or we might have gone with Freyja and then not handwritten it until after we'd registered the name!

Freya

@FoleyHuck Surely any word or name is easy to write when you've practiced? I can imagine writing Freyja with a nice flow in joined up letters, with the y and j looping together.
Freyja would be my choice. If you like Edie and Astrid have you considered Ingrid? That's one of my favourites.

We nearly had a Freyja ourselves. Both of us have a bit of Scandi heritage going way back (I have a Swedish great-gran), but also we were deep in our era of watching Vikings on Amazon, and loved the idea of having a strong norse goddess name! It was certainly in our top 3-5 names.