The earliest suggestion for the figure's identity was that it is the god Freyr. This position was taken by the archeologist Bernhard Salin in the earliest scholarly article about the object, published in 1913. The identification with Freyr remains the most accepted and is repeated in many works about Old Norse religion and the Viking Age. It is however uncertain, and is supported only by the phallus, which is associated with Freyr through the 11th-century chronicler Adam of Bremen, who made a single, possibly unreliable mention of a phallic statue of Freyr supposed to have stood in the Temple at Uppsala. The Rällinge figure does not display any of the known attributes of Freyr from his myths, such as his sword, ship or boar.
