Skaði in Later Traditions
Skaði's clearest structural parallels stand inside the Norse corpus itself: Gerðr, the giant's daughter who marries Freyr — Skaði's own stepson by Njǫrðr — so that two giant-brides enter the Vanir household a generation apart; and Ullr, named in the same chapter of Gylfaginning as an archer and snow-shoe runner, who functions almost as her male doublet, his cult the better attested of the two in Scandinavian place-names. Etymologists have connected her name with Gothic skadus and Old English sceadu, 'shadow', and the first element of Scandinavia (Pliny's Scadinavia) has been derived from a related root — both proposals remain conjectural and debated. Beyond the Germanic world she invites comparison rather than borrowing: Artemis, the mountain huntress with the bow, is the obvious Greek functional echo. In later Scandinavian folklore she fades from cult but not from landscape — the wild huntress and the mountain-woman of the high fells keep her outline, and the nineteenth-century Norwegian ski revival made her silhouette a national one.