Sif was the Norse goddess of the harvest and the earth's golden grain — the wife of mighty Thor, famed above all for her long, beautiful hair of pure gold, the loss and replacement of which gave rise to the forging of the gods' greatest treasures. A goddess of fertility, family and the ripe golden fields, she is best remembered through one of Loki's most consequential pranks.
The Golden-Haired Goddess
Sif (Old Norse Síf, a word related to the bonds of kinship and marriage) was an Aesir goddess and the wife of the thunder-god Thor. Her defining feature was her hair: long, flowing and made of real gold, gleaming and beautiful, which is widely understood to symbolise the golden fields of ripe grain — making Sif a goddess of the harvest, of the earth's fertility and abundance, the golden bounty that Thor's rains helped to grow. She was the mother of the goddess Thrud by Thor, and of the god Ullr (the archer and skier) by a father unnamed.
The Theft of the Hair
Sif's most famous myth begins with a cruel prank: the trickster Loki, out of pure malice, crept up on the sleeping Sif and sheared off all of her golden hair, leaving her shorn and shamed. When Thor discovered the outrage, his fury was terrible, and he seized Loki and threatened to break every bone in his body unless he made it right. To save himself, Loki swore to replace Sif's hair with something even finer.
The Treasures of the Gods
And so Loki went down to the dwarves, the master-smiths of the underworld, and there set in motion the forging of the greatest treasures the gods would ever own. The dwarf sons of Ivaldi forged new hair for Sif — real gold that would grow from her head like natural hair — along with Odin's spear Gungnir and Frey's magical folding ship Skidbladnir. Then Loki, in a wager, goaded the dwarves Brokkr and Eitri into forging three more wonders: Frey's golden boar Gullinbursti, Odin's self-multiplying ring Draupnir, and — greatest of all — Thor's hammer Mjölnir itself. Thus from the theft of Sif's hair came, indirectly, the hammer that defends the gods, the spear of the All-Father and the other great treasures — one of Loki's pranks turned, despite itself, into the gods' greatest gain.
The Goddess of the Golden Fields
Sif endures as the golden-haired goddess of the harvest and the faithful wife of Thor — her gleaming hair the very image of the ripe grain bowing in the fields, her story the origin of the gods' mightiest treasures. She embodies the Norse vision of the cultivated earth's fertility wedded to the storm-god's rains: the golden bounty of the harvest, watched over by the goddess whose hair is spun of gold.
Loki sheared off the golden hair of Thor's wife for spite — and to undo it, the dwarves forged the very hammer that guards the gods, and gold that grows like living hair.