She does nothing grand – no heroic deed, no spell – and yet she is one of the most moving figures in all of mythology. Sigyn, the wife of Loki, stands night after night beside her bound husband and holds a bowl over his face so the serpent’s venom will not strike him. Loyalty in its purest form.
Sigyn (Old Norse Sigyn, probably ‘friend of victory’) is one of the Æsir and Loki’s faithful wife. With him she has the sons Narfi and Váli. While Loki is the troublemaker of the heavenly realm, Sigyn stays wholly in the background – until that one moment that makes her immortal.
After Loki, with his scheming, brought about the death of the shining Baldr and mocked the gods at the great feast, the Æsir catch him. As punishment he is bound in a cave over three stones – with the entrails of his own son, which turned to iron. Above his face the giantess Skadi hangs a venomous serpent, whose venom is to drip ceaselessly onto his face.
And here Sigyn enters the picture: she stands beside him and holds up a bowl that catches the venom. Only when the bowl is full and she must turn away to empty it does a drop strike Loki. Then he writhes in such wild convulsions that the whole earth quakes – and so, the myth tells, earthquakes come to be.
“There Sigyn abides, taking no joy
in her husband, beside him –
and catches the venom in the bowl.”
— after Völuspá / Gylfaginning (sense following Karl Simrock, 1851, public domain)
Sigyn is the emblem of unconditional loyalty. She stands beside the most hated being in the world of the gods – not because he is innocent, but because he is her husband. She cannot turn aside his fate, only ease it; she cannot prevent the last drop, but she can catch every one before it. Herein lies the quiet greatness of this figure: loyalty that gains nothing and yet does not yield.
Loki · Hel · Ragnarök · The Norse pantheon · Frigg.
Poetic Edda: Völuspá, Lokasenna (prose frame). Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda (Gylfaginning: Loki’s binding, Sigyn’s bowl), c. 1220. Picture stone: Gosforth Cross (England, 10th c.). German public-domain translation: Karl Simrock, Die Edda (1851). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).