Editing Vanir (section)

===Membership, elves, ship symbolism, "field of the dead", and ''vanitates''===
Hilda Ellis Davidson theorizes that all of the wives of the gods may have originally been members of the Vanir, noting that many of them appear to have originally been children of [[jötunn|jötnar]].{{sfn|Davidson|1988|p=121}} Davidson additionally notes that "it is the Vanir and Odin who seem to receive the most hostile treatment in Christian stories about mythological personages".{{sfn|Davidson|1969|p=132}}

Joseph S. Hopkins and Haukur Þorgeirsson, building on suggestions by archaeologist [[Ole Crumlin-Pedersen]] and others, link the Vanir to [[ship burial]] customs among the [[North Germanic peoples]], proposing an early Germanic model of a ship in a "field of the dead" that may be represented both by Freyja's afterlife field [[Fólkvangr]] and by the Old English [[Neorxnawang]] (the mysterious first element of which may be linked to the name of Freyja's father, Njörðr).{{sfn|Hopkins|Haukur|2011}}

[[Richard North (academic)|Richard North]] theorizes that glossing Latin ''vanitates'' ("vanities", "idols") for "gods" in [[Old English]] sources implies the existence of ''*uuani'' (a [[Linguistic reconstruction|reconstructed]] cognate to Old Norse ''Vanir'') in [[Deira]]n dialect and hence that the gods that [[Edwin of Northumbria]] and the northern Angles worshiped in pre-Christian [[Anglo-Saxon England]] were likely to have been the *''uuani''. He comments that they likely "shared not only the name but also the orgiastic character of the [Old Icelandic] ''Vanir''".{{sfn|North|1998|pp=177–178}}

[[Alaric Hall]] has equated the Vanir with the [[Elf|elves]].<ref>{{harvnb|Hall|2007|pp=26, 35–36}}; cited in {{harvnb|Tolley|2011|p=23}}.</ref>