Sif's Son by Another Father: A Quiet Genealogical Note

Snorri's Prose Edda includes a small genealogical detail about Sif that is easy to overlook amid the drama of her stolen hair: he identifies the archer-god Ullr as her son, but specifically as Thor's stepson rather than his biological child, meaning Ullr was born to Sif before her marriage to Thor, from an earlier union the sources do not name or describe in any further detail. This places two of the more thinly documented figures of the Norse pantheon, Sif and Ullr, into a single family unit without ever explaining the connection beyond the bare statement of it, characteristic of how much of the surviving mythology consists of scattered genealogical fragments that were evidently common knowledge to a medieval Icelandic audience but arrive to modern readers with no accompanying story to flesh them out. It also means that the household Snorri describes at the centre of Thor's family life quietly combines three figures whose worship, on the evidence of place-names and other external attestation, seems to have been considerably more prominent in parts of the Norse world than their scant appearances in the surviving mythological narratives would suggest on their own, Sif herself linked to fertility and the harvest, and Ullr traceable across dozens of Scandinavian place-names as discussed elsewhere in this atlas.

Whether this family grouping reflects a genuinely old set of religious associations, a stepfather storm-god, a grain-linked stepmother, and an archer stepson each drawn from different regional or functional cult traditions and only later assembled into one household by mythographers, or is simply a narrative convenience Snorri inherited from earlier tradition, is not something the sources allow us to determine with confidence.