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Ásynjur

Hlín

In Snorri, a goddess who guards the people Frigg wishes to save; in Völuspá, Hlín seems to be another name for Frigg herself.

Hlín is one of the clearest cases where Snorri seems to have turned a poetic name into a separate goddess.

In his list of the Ásynjur, she is the twelfth: a guardian "over those men whom Frigg desires to preserve from any danger", and Snorri explains her name with a saying that a man who escapes "leans" Gylfaginning 35. That is all he says.

In Völuspá, the name appears once, at Ragnarök: "Now comes to Hlin yet another hurt, / When Othin fares to fight with the wolf" Völuspá 53. Her first hurt was the death of Baldr, and the stanza ends with the fall of "the joy of Frigg". A woman who grieves first for Baldr and then for Odin is most naturally Frigg, and most readers take Hlín here as a poetic name for her. When Snorri quotes the same stanza in his own Ragnarök chapter, his text reads "the Goddess" rather than Hlín Gylfaginning 51.

Whether Hlín was ever thought of as a separate being, or whether Snorri built one from the Völuspá line, cannot be settled from the sources.

In the sources

Quoted from the hosted translations; each line is checked against the text when the site is built. Select a reference to read it in context.

The twelfth is Hlín: she is established as keeper over those men whom Frigg desires to preserve from any danger; thence comes the saying, that he who escapes 'leans.'
Gylfaginning 35 Snorri makes Hlín a separate goddess in Frigg's service.
Now comes to Hlin yet another hurt, When Othin fares to fight with the wolf
Völuspá 53 Here Hlín's second grief is Odin's death, so Hlín is most naturally Frigg.

Related

Frigg Odin's wife and the foremost of the goddesses: she knows the fates of all but never speaks them, and her failed attempt to protect her son Baldr is the hinge of Norse myth. Odin Óðinn Chief of the Æsir: a one-eyed god of wisdom, poetry, magic, war and the dead, who gave an eye and hanged himself on a tree for knowledge, and who dies at Ragnarök. Fenrir The giant wolf fathered by Loki on Angrboða, raised by the gods, bound with the fetter Gleipnir at the cost of Týr's hand, and fated to swallow Odin at Ragnarök. Ragnarök The foretold end of the gods' world: wolves swallow sun and moon, Loki and the monsters break loose, the gods fall in battle, Surtr burns the earth, and a new world rises. Fulla Frigg's maidservant and confidante, who carries her mistress's coffer, minds her shoes and knows her secrets; poets called gold 'Fulla's snood'. Gná Frigg's messenger, who rides through sky and sea on the horse Hófvarpnir; some of the Vanir once saw her flying overhead.