Devotional blog dedicated to the Goddess Sigyn offering support to those who are "holding the bowl" within difficult relationships.
Hello! I’d like to know something more about Sigyn, since despite my researches I don’t seem able to find much about her. Than you in advance for your time!
Unfortunately there really is not very much about Sigyn in Norse mythology, so it’s possible that you actually have found all of it and still feel shortchanged. In the Edda poems Sigyn is mentioned only in Völuspá, and all it says is:
Þar sitr Sigyn þeygi um sínum ver velglýjuð
There sits Sigyn (under Hveralundr, with Loki) not (yet?), of/concerning her husband, happy.
Snorri explains early in Gylfaginning that Loki is married to Sigyn and they have a son named Nari or Narvi (that is, Snorri gives both names). Váli is not mentioned at that time. Later he describes the events mentioned in Völuspá, that Loki is bound to the rock and Sigyn protects him from poison by holding a bowl over him, and this description is also found in the prose epilogue to Lokasenna.
This really is all of the remaining mythological information on Sigyn. What is especially strange and frustrating is that she actually is mentioned in early skáldic poetry in a kenning for Loki – farmr Sigynjar arma ‘burden of Sigyn’s arms’ in Haustlöng by Þjóðólfr úr Hvini, and possibly also farmr arma hapts galdrs ‘burden of the arms of the captive of magic’ in Eilífr Goðrúnarson’s Þórsdrápa (or something like that, it’s a little difficult to unpack… this is the “incantation fetter” that you see floating around, though I’m not sure how one would translate haptr, which means a captive or prisoner, that way. It’s not clear why this would refer to Sigyn).
(Edit 5/5/15: I messed up, reading hapts as the genitive of the word haptr meaning ‘captive’, following this translation of the poem, and failed to notice that it can also be hapt ‘fetter; deity’. See this post for more)
The references to her in skáldic poetry and the scene’s appearance on the Gosforth cross indicate that it was already well-known in the Viking age, but it doesn’t really tell us much more about Sigyn. A last thing I would like to add is that it is considered highly debatable whether Loki originally played a part in the myth of the death of Baldr. A lot of scholars believe that blaming Loki for Baldr’s death was a late innovation in Norse mythology, maybe not even occurring until after Christianization. If that’s true, we can’t help but wonder why exactly Loki’s binding is already known in early times, before the motivation for it. It’s also interesting to me that the image above from the Gosforth Cross appears on the same panel as a figure interpreted as Heimdallr (because he’s holding a horn) fighting a monster that is clearly not Loki. Granted, we don’t need to believe that both images are depicting things happening at the same time, and Loki is a shapeshifter, but it does seem to be evidence, even if weak, that the artist who made the Gosforth cross would have disagreed with Snorri that Heimdallr and Loki kill each other at Ragnarök.
That is about all I have to say about Sigyn as a mythological figure. If you’re interested in the meaning of names I did write a piece on why I think the meaning “victorious girlfriend” (a frequently given definition of Sigyn) is wrong on my own blog here (link). It’s a little dense but you might find it interesting.
Holding the Bowl 