Friðþjófs saga contains a piece of practical advice. Caught in a storm at sea, the hero divides his gold among his crew, because it will not do to arrive at Rán's hall empty-handed — a man should have something with him if he is going to be a guest there.
That is the most useful sentence anyone wrote about Norse religion. It is not theology. It is what you did when the boat was going over.
The net
Rán's defining possession is a net, and it is not a metaphor. Skáldskaparmál says she had a net in which she caught every man who went to sea, and Reginsmál's prose has Loki borrow it from her in order to catch the dwarf Andvari, who is in pike form in a waterfall — the theft that starts the whole cursed-gold sequence running toward Sigurd.
A net is a fisherman's tool. The sea-goddess of a fishing culture uses the same gear the fishermen do, on them. It is the bleakest possible inversion and it is stated without comment.
Her hall
To drown is to fara til Ránar, to go to Rán, and skalds use it as an ordinary way of saying a crew was lost. Her hall is a genuine destination in the sources — not a place of punishment, and not an alternative to Hel or Valhalla so much as a separate and unexplained claim on a particular category of dead.
Eyrbyggja saga contains the most vivid evidence of what people made of this. At a funeral feast held for men drowned at sea, the drowned men themselves walk into the hall, dripping, and sit down by the fire. The household reads this as a good omen, because — the saga explains — it was thought at the time that drowned men who came to their own funeral feast had been well received by Rán. Then they come back every night for weeks, and the household eventually has to hold a formal court to expel them; see the draugr for how Icelanders handled that kind of problem.
Egill's grief
The most powerful use of her name in all of Old Norse is in Sonatorrek, the poem Egill Skallagrímsson composed after his son Böðvarr drowned. He says the sea has broken the fence of his family; that he cannot avenge himself, since he could not fight the sea-god's wife; and that if he could bring a sword against the brewer of the waves he would.
A father works through the logic of the feud system and discovers that it has no procedure for the ocean. There is nobody to kill and no compensation to demand. The poem is one of the earliest sustained pieces of personal grief in any European vernacular, and its central move is the collapse of the vengeance framework that structures every other death in the sagas.
What kind of figure
Rán as a common noun means robbery, plunder, theft — specifically the open taking of property by force, which Icelandic law distinguished from stealth. Whether the name was a description that hardened into a person or the reverse is not recoverable.
She is married to Ægir, and their nine daughters are the waves. The division of labour in that household is the closest thing Norse myth has to a systematic account of the sea: he is the hall, the ale and the gold; she is the net and the drowned. In Helgakviða Hundingsbana I the two functions appear together — Rán tries to catch the fleet, and the ships come through because a higher power holds them.
Her hall is lit, like his, by gold laid on the floor, which is why sailors carried it. The custom recorded in Friðþjófs saga is not an isolated flourish: the association of gold with Rán's dwelling is embedded in skaldic kenning-vocabulary, where "Rán's fire" and "the flame of the sea" mean gold. A man drowning with coin on him was equipping himself for arrival.
No cult, and a great deal of belief
There are no Rán place-names, no temples, no recorded sacrifices to her. What there is instead is a set of practices and expectations reported casually in prose: what you do in a storm, what it means when the drowned turn up at their own wake, how a poet describes a loss. That is a different kind of evidence from the archaeology behind Thor or Freyr, and arguably a more intimate one.
Modern reception is minimal — occasional appearances in fiction, a Norwegian and Icelandic given name, several ships. The word ran still means plunder in Icelandic. For the wider system of the Norse dead, see the underworlds compared; for the tradition, the Norse overview.
Is being taken by Rán better or worse than going to Hel?
The sources do not rank them, and that is significant. Norse afterlife destinations are not arranged on a moral scale — nobody in the corpus argues that one hall is a reward and another a punishment, with the arguable exception of Náströnd. Rán's hall is described in terms of hospitality: whether you are well received, whether you brought something. What the Eyrbyggja episode suggests is that the anxiety was about reception rather than about location — not "where do the drowned go" but "were they made welcome."
Why do her daughters have names and she does not have a myth?
Because the wave-names are a poet's resource and she is not. The nine daughters exist largely inside the kenning system: a skald describing a storm could name the waves individually, and lists of their names circulate in Skáldskaparmál precisely as raw material for verse. Rán herself is invoked rather than narrated — she appears in similes, in idioms for drowning, and in one borrowed net. The Norse sea has enormous vocabulary and almost no plot.