Sif

Gold had a nickname in the old skaldic poetry, and the nickname was hair. *Sifjar haddr*, Sif’s hair: a cold, heavy metal named after a woman’s head, so that a poet could hand a listener an arm-ring without ever using the word for it. Behind the phrase sits a haircut that went badly wrong, and behind that, a goddess about whom the sources are strangely, stubbornly quiet.

Her name is the singular of *sifjar*, an ordinary Old Norse plural noun meaning kinship and affinity through marriage. It is cognate with Old English *sibb* and survives in modern English as *sibling*, and in German as *Sippe*, the clan. Lindow renders it “in-law-relationship”, Orchard simply “relation”, Simek “relation by marriage”. Whatever else she is, she is named for a connection rather than a power. Most gods are called after what they do. She is called after who she is attached to.

What she looks like comes almost entirely from one sentence. In the euhemerised Prologue to his *Edda*, Snorri calls her the loveliest of women and gives her hair of gold, and adds that her own ancestry is unknown. That is the whole portrait. There is no chariot, no beast, no weapon, no colour of eye. The one glimpse of her moving comes from *Lokasenna*, where she crosses the floor of Ægir’s hall with a crystal cup of ancient mead and sets it in front of the guest who has spent the evening insulting everyone present, and says, evenly, that of all the Æsir’s children she alone is blameless.

The famous story is short and Snorri tells it flatly. Loki Laufeyjarson, for mischief’s sake, cut off all Sif’s hair. When Thor found out he took hold of Loki and would have broken every bone in him, and let go only when Loki swore to get the black elves to make Sif hair of gold that would grow like real hair. Loki went to the dwarves called the Sons of Ivaldi, and they made the hair, and while their forge was hot they also made the ship Skíðblaðnir and the spear Gungnir. The wager that followed produced the boar Gullinbursti, the ring Draupnir, and the hammer Mjöllnir. Lindow points out what is easy to miss in the rush of treasures: the entire armoury of the gods, Odin’s spear and Thor’s hammer included, comes into existence because somebody cut a woman’s hair off while she slept.

Snorri never says how Loki got close enough to do it. Two poems may. In *Hárbarðsljóð*, Odin in disguise refuses Thor a ferry and needles him with the claim that Sif has a lover at home, and Thor answers that this is the worst thing his tormentor could have said and that it is a lie. In *Lokasenna*, Loki takes the horn Sif has handed him, drinks it dry, and tells the hall that he alone knows the one lover she has taken besides Thor, and that it was himself. Larrington notes that nothing else in the corpus accuses Sif of infidelity, and suggests the shearing and the boast may be two halves of the same insinuation. Sif does not answer him. The quarrel simply moves on to Beyla, which is its own kind of comment.

She is wanted elsewhere too. Drunk in Asgard before his duel with Thor, the jötunn Hrungnir boasts that he will kill every one of the gods except Freyja and Sif, whom he intends to take home with him. He does not get the chance. Thor kills him at the appointed field.

Her family is a set of loose ends. Ullr, the archer and skier whom nobody can match on the snow, is her son and Thor’s stepson, and the *Edda* never names his father. Þrúðr is her daughter by Thor. The Prologue gives her a son called Lóriði who took after his father. Niels Åge Nielsen once proposed that her first husband was Njord, which requires Ullr and Freyr to be the same figure, a move Simek calls very precarious. Most readers leave the first husband unidentified, because the texts do.

Then there is the question of what she was for, and the honest answer is that the field cannot agree. Skáldskaparmál lists her name as a poetic word for earth, and from that thread Grimm and Vigfússon spun a grain goddess, mother earth with her golden sheaves, guardian of the sanctity of the family. Davidson kept the shape of it, reading the marriage of Thor and Sif as the memory of a sky god coming down to an earth goddess in the thunderstorm, the rain going into the fields. Turville-Petre took a different route, through the rowan tree that Skáldskaparmál calls the salvation of Thor because he once saved himself by clinging to it, and through the Sámi Ravdna, consort of the thunder god Horagalles, whose red rowan berries were holy; perhaps, he suggested, Thor’s wife was once imagined as the tree itself. Simek will have none of it. He calls the grain reading over-zealous, says Sif has no discernible function beyond being Thor’s wife, and suspects Snorri invented the shearing story in the first place to account for where the gods got their gear. Nobody can settle it.

So her powers are hard to list, because the texts never grant her one. What she has instead is standing. She keeps the cup moving in a hall full of armed and drunk immortals, and the moment she stops being able to do that is the moment the hall comes apart, which is precisely what *Lokasenna* is about; several scholars, beginning with Magnus Olsen, have set her beside Wealhtheow in *Beowulf*, moving through Heorot with mead and defusing what she can. Her weaknesses follow from the same fact. A goddess defined by her ties is a goddess who can only be attacked through them: shear her hair while she sleeps, whisper about a lover at home, promise to carry her off as spoil. Every injury she suffers in the sources is aimed past her, at Thor. She is never once given a line of reply.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sif in Norse mythology?

Sif is a goddess of the Æsir, the wife of the thunder god Thor, and the mother of Ullr and of Þrúðr. She is known above all for her golden hair, and her name is an ordinary Old Norse word meaning kinship or affinity by marriage. She appears in both the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda.

Why did Loki cut off Sif’s hair?

Snorri says only that Loki did it for mischief’s sake, giving no deeper motive. Thor caught him and was ready to break every bone in his body until Loki swore to replace the hair with gold. Some readers connect the shearing to Loki’s later boast in *Lokasenna* that he had been Sif’s lover, which would explain how he got close enough to do it.

What treasures came from Sif’s golden hair?

The dwarves called the Sons of Ivaldi made Sif’s replacement hair of gold, and at the same forging produced the ship Skíðblaðnir and Odin’s spear Gungnir. The wager that followed added the boar Gullinbursti, the ring Draupnir, and Thor’s hammer Mjöllnir. The most important objects the gods own all trace back to Sif’s ruined hair.

Is Sif a fertility or harvest goddess?

Scholars disagree, and the sources do not settle it. Skáldskaparmál lists Sif’s name as a poetic word for earth, and writers from Jacob Grimm to H. R. Ellis Davidson read her golden hair as ripe grain and her marriage to Thor as a sky god wedding the earth. Rudolf Simek rejects this as over-interpretation, arguing that Sif has no attested function beyond being Thor’s wife.

Who is Sif’s son Ullr’s father?

The sources never say. Gylfaginning calls Ullr the son of Sif and the stepson of Thor without naming his father, and Snorri lists Sif’s own ancestry as unknown. Niels Åge Nielsen proposed Njord, but that argument requires identifying Ullr with Freyr, which Simek calls very precarious, so most scholars leave the father unidentified.

Related Entries

Thor, Loki, Odin, Freyja, Freyr (Frey), Njord, Balder, Æsir, Jötunn, Dvergr, Svartálfar, Jörð, Beowulf