Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 9
Gripla XXXIV (2023): 7–36
DECLAN TAGGART
SIÐR, RELIGION AND MORALITY1
For all that Old Norse scholarship over the last sixty years has care-
fully emphasised the artistry, industry, and intellect of early medieval
Scandinavians and Icelanders, even the most generous of scholars can de-
fault to a view of them as communities of pirates, a position encapsulated
in a comment by John Hines that the Icelander Egill Skallagrímsson’s soul-
ful poetry should “warn the non-Viking reader that the Vikings, however
barbaric their behaviour, were not mindless barbarians” (Hines 1994–97,
102–3). For some earlier onlookers, this barbarianism stemmed from the
northerners’ pagan practices (e.g. de Vries 1970; Gehl 1937; Gordon 1957,
xxxiii; Sigurður Nordal 1990, originally published in 1942 as Íslenzk menn-
ing). The majority of modern studies of Old Norse religion simply avoid
the topic of morality entirely (a noteworthy exception is Lindow 2020,
479–80).
It is in this context that I address the word siðr, which is commonly
translated as “custom” (or a variation on that term), though with second-
ary definitions like “moral life” and, very commonly, “religion” (Cleasby
and Gudbrand Vigfusson 1874, s.v. “siðr;” Fritzner 1886–96, s.v. “siðr;”
de Vries 1962, s.v. “siðr;” Zoëga 1910, s.v. “siðr”);2 because of the nature
of the corpus of works in which siðr appears, that definition is necessarily
and mainly based on attestations to the term in early Christian texts. Did
siðr have a signification like “moral” for Viking Age worshippers of Old
1 Many thanks to both anonymous reviewers for their very helpful commentary on this
article and to Valgerður Pálmadóttir for proofreading the Icelandic summary. This research
was supported by the Icelandic Research Fund (grant no. 207157-053).
2 No consensus exists on siðr’s etymology. The two strongest derivations have their roots in
the idea of custom, though the first has connotations of individual habit (related to Sanskrit
svadhā “particularity, custom:” Orel 2003, s.v. “*seđuz;” Pokorny 1948–69, 883; cf. de Vries
1962, s.v. “siðr”), whereas the other has greater underlying notions of social obligation
(Kroonen 2013, s.v. “*sidu-;” Bammesberger 1990, 150, 159). In light of this uncertainty
and the potential for the siðr’s semantics to have developed over the Viking Age and early
medieval period, as Sundqvist advises (2005, 273) usage may be more helpful than etymol-
ogy as a guide to the word’s significance.