Superpowers: Beautiful blonde hair. A great wife.
Weaknesses: Beautiful blonde hair. A great wife.
Modern Analogue: A great wife with… beautiful blonde hair.
The Goddess Sif, like most women in history, is primarily defined by her appearance and relationship to men. The wife of Thor and mother of Þrúðr, Sif is, um, well, she’s, er, she’s a great, like…well…uh…
Actually, you know what? Never mind. Skip this whole $%#∑€˜≤ article.
Why? Because according to practically every online and literary source about Sif, there’s only two notable things about the immortal deity. Despite being an invincible, all-knowing, supremely powerful being, apparently the bitch only has two characteristics worth documenting. And what are they? Hold your horses, mister! I’m going to attempt to spin them into a 500-word article, so strap on in.
Beautiful blonde hair
Yup, you guessed it. The number one thing you need to know about Sif is that she has beautiful blonde hair. It’s pretty much all anyone talks about actually. Of course, some refer to it as “golden locks” or “a mane the shining colour of wheat” but really, when you boil it down, it’s just beautiful blonde hair. She’s a beautiful blonde-haired woman much like, oh, I don’t know, January Jones. She’s basically just January Jones with omnipotent powers and a way lamer name.
Some online bloggers try to argue that her golden hair represented wheat and then do some bizarre mental gymnastics to claim she was a fully-fledged character who was massively important despite rarely being mentioned (if at all). Some even go so far as to call her a feminist icon, which I totally agree with, as I’m so tired of people talking about my personality and not just reducing me to my sexy hair colour, which is actually a beautiful raven black. I’m not just a brain, mister! I have a body, too!
What I’m trying to say is that beautiful wives of famous men do not get their fair share of objectifying media coverage, so I’m happy to see a revolutionary character like Sif in the Eddas, who gets to be reduced to her dead cells rather than her live ones. Werk sis! Yaaas!
But that’s enough of that,. Let’s get onto Sif’s second trait—it might shock you.
A great wife
Boom! I tricked you! I actually said Sif’s second important characteristic in the first paragraph and it was so boring that I’m sure you thought, “There has to be more to her character than this!” Nope!
Yes, Sif was the wife of Thor, who you might know for his passions, hobbies, flaws, strengths, multiple plot-lines, familial trauma, illegitimate children and many other things that culminate in a well-rounded character and lends itself well to franchise work. The two have one child together named Þrúðr, who is very much like her mother, in that all we know about her is that she has a fiancée. Unfortunately, it’s a dwarf who later gets turned to stone.
That said, Sif does have one moment in the sun. In the Prose Edda, there’s this one moment where Loki does this sweet prank and cuts off Sif’s hair, which we can only assume leaves her entirely devoid of half her life-force.
But in the end, it’s no big deal, because Loki just goes to the dwarves Brokk and Sindi and then performs what might be the first hair transplant on Sif and suddenly she has new locks that are made of actual, literal, gold. So really, in the end, Sif just rises stronger than ever.
So all hail Sif, our beautiful blonde wife. She’s actually a big inspiration to me, as I once bleached my hair too and hope to get married one day. Feminist icon, right?
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