Sif

Summary

Sif is Thor's wife in the Scandinavian myths, mother of his daughter Þrúðr, and mother of Ullr by a father the sources do not name, so that Ullr is Thor's stepson. The poets call her "the fair-haired goddess" and "co-wife of Járnsaxa", the giantess who bore Thor his son Magni. Skáldskaparmál 29; Gylfaginning 31.

Her best-known story is the story of her hair. Loki cut off all her hair out of malice. When Thor found out he seized him and would have broken every bone in him, until Loki swore to get the dwarfs to make her hair of gold that would grow like any other hair. He went to the dwarfs called the sons of Ívaldi, who made the hair, and with it the ship Skíðblaðnir, which went to Freyr, and the spear Gungnir, which went to Odin. Then Loki wagered his head with the dwarf Brokkr that Brokkr's brother Sindri could not make treasures as good, and Sindri made the golden boar, the ring Draupnir and the hammer Mjöllnir. Odin, Thor and Freyr judged the hammer the best of all the treasures. As for the golden hair, as soon as it was laid on Sif's head it grew fast to the flesh.

The idea the story turns on is that the damage Loki did in Thor's house became the source of the gods' treasures. From Sif's shorn hair came the hammer with which Thor protects the gods, and with it the ship, the spear, the ring and the boar. An attack on the woman of the house Thor guards is an attack on the whole house, and its repair left the house stronger than before; gold kept the poetic name "Sif's hair".

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Her Old Norse name Sif has no nominative ending, and its letters are s, then i, then f, the letters of Arabic sayf in their order. The essay reads it as sayf, "sword", and makes her golden hair like a drawn sword, a sharp beauty that cannot be touched. Lane's entry for the same root has senses that bear on hair directly: sayf is said of the hair of a horse's tail, and sīf, with the i of her name, is the coarse fibre that grows at the roots of palm branches. The root joins the blade and the hair, and Sif's story joins them too: hair that was cut off and then made again by smiths out of gold that grows.

Linguistic Root

Sif and sayf

Old Norse sif occurs in the singular only as the goddess's name; its plural sifjar means the kinship that marriage creates, set against frændsemi, blood kinship, in the old law. To "spoil the sifjar", spilla sifjum, means to commit adultery. Cleasby–Vigfusson call Sif the goddess of the sanctity of family and wedlock, "whence her name". Orel gives the Germanic source as *sebjō, with Gothic sibja, kinship, and Old High German sibba, peace and alliance.

Lane, under s-y-f, gives sayf as the sword, with more than a thousand names in Arabic, and, by comparison, the hair of a horse's tail; sīf is the seashore, and also the coarse fibre clinging to the roots of palm branches; and sayfāna is a tall, slender woman, like a sword-blade.

The comparison keeps all three letters in order: s is s, the y answers the i of Sif, and f is f. Gothic sibja has b; b and f are both lip sounds, and in the Juthoor table Arabic f becomes f or p. One thing remains: the sense of the Germanic word, kinship by marriage, is not carried by the Arabic root. The Arabic reading meets the story of the hair, while the Germanic word meets Sif's place as the wife in Thor's house.

Other readings in the essay

The essay puts sayf first, then sīfa, edge, then ṣafā, the pure gold of the hair, then saffa, plaiting threads. Ṣafā changes s to ṣ and drops the y; its sense of brightness suits the gold but does not reach the cutting. Lane gives asaffa al-khūṣ as weaving palm leaves with the fingers, close to braiding hair, but saffa has two f's and no y.

Key Mythic Narratives

Sif's husband

The poems often call Thor "Sif's husband": when he eats two of Hymir's oxen by himself, when he lifts Hymir's cauldron onto his head, and when he drinks three casks of mead in his bridal dress at Þrymr's hall.

Hrungnir and Sif

When the giant Hrungnir grew drunk in the gods' hall he said he would sink Asgard and kill all the gods except Freyja and Sif, whom he would take home with him to the land of the giants. These words led to his duel with Thor, in which he was killed.

The flytings

In Hárbarðsljóð the ferryman Hárbarðr tells Thor that Sif has a lover at home and that he would do better to go and find him. In Lokasenna Sif offers Loki a cup of mead to make peace and asks him to leave her, at least, without blame among the gods; Loki answers that he alone was her lover behind Thor's back. Both poems are flytings, in which every goddess is charged with whatever shames her, and no other source tells this charge.

Symbolic Reading

The Semitic-reading essay takes Sif's golden hair as an image of nature's golden beauty, that is, the wheat, and Cleasby–Vigfusson say much the same: Sif betokens mother earth with her golden sheaves. The story itself mentions no field and no sheaf; it tells of hair that was cut off and remade as gold that grows into the flesh, so that gold came to be called by its name.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Iliad calls Demeter "fair-haired" as she separates grain from chaff on the threshing floor in the driving wind, so that yellow hair and ripe grain meet in one epithet, the image through which the essay and Cleasby–Vigfusson read Sif's hair. The difference is that Demeter is mistress of the harvest in the text itself, whereas no ancient text links Sif with crops. The making of treasures that grew out of her story stands beside Kothar-wa-Khasis, who makes Baal's weapons, and Hephaestus, the smith of the Greek gods.