Sif

Norse goddess

Written by

Charles Preston

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

History

Sif, goddess in Norse mythology known as the wife of the thunder god Thor. Her flaxen hair is thought to be connected to fertility and the harvest of grain. She is the mother of the god Ull (or Ullr), a deity of archery and skiing who is Thor’s stepson.

Mythology

Very little is said of Sif in the texts of Norse mythology in which she is mentioned, the Poetic and Prose Eddas. Her identity is fairly limited to her beauty, hair, and relational role as wife of Thor and mother of two sons, Ull and Loridi. Adding to Sif’s mystery, Ull’s father is not mentioned, nor is her own lineage. Loridi’s father, however, is Thor. Sif’s name means little more than “relation by marriage or kinship” and is cognate with the Old English word sib and thus the modern English word sibling.

According to a tale about Sif related in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, Loki the trickster god, in a bout of mischief, cuts off Sif’s flaxen hair. Thor is incensed and threatens to kill Loki. He forces Loki to make Sif a finer replacement out of gold. Loki enlists dwarfs to fashion hair of gold that grows like regular hair. The story is offered in the Prose Edda as the reason gold is called “Sif’s hair.”

Romantic poetry

This story of Sif’s hair, Loki’s mischief, and the dwarfs’ magical work is retold in the poem “The Dwarfs” by Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, a 19th-century Danish Romantic poet who was heavily influenced by Norse mythology. As he renders the initial mood after Loki’s prank:

Loke sat and thought till his dark eyes gleam
With joy at the deed he’d done;
When Sif look’d into the crystal stream
Her courage was well nigh gone.

For never again her soft amber hair
Shall she braid with her hands of snow;
From the hateful image she turn’d in despair,
And hot tears began to flow.

After Thor’s threats, Loki promises:

“And thence for Sif new tresses I’ll bring
Of gold, ere the day-light’s gone,
So that she shall liken a field in spring,
With its yellow-flower’d garment on.”

Translation by Grenville Pigott, in A Manual of Scandinavian Mythology (1839)

Modern appearances

In Scandinavian countries, Sif (or Siv) is used as a female personal name. There is a volcano on Venus that was named Sif Mons after her. The goddess Sif occasionally holds religious significance in modern Paganism as a figure of marriage and as a botanical life force.

In cinema Sif is a character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Portrayed by Jaimie Alexander, she appears in Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). Alexander also plays Sif in the Marvel spinoff television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–20) and Loki (2021–23). Sif is also a character in the original Marvel comics related to Thor. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Alexander’s Sif has dark hair, unlike the original mythological depiction. As imagined by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Marvel comics, she is reinterpreted as a powerful warrior and, in the comic’s retelling of the hair-cutting myth, her shorn hair is replaced with the dark night instead of gold.