Gripla - 2023, Page 21

S I Ð R , RELIGION AND MORALITY 19
it as a catch-all term for outlawry, piracy, and theft (st. 6). Probably from
later in that century, stanza 16 of Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar describes Óláfr
Tryggvason having banned ósiðr among warriors who loved lǫstr “a fault,
misdemeanour, vice,” after telling us that the same king punished thieves.
Given that Óláfr’s legend fixates on religious change (the poem has pre-
viously depicted him subjugating non-Christians, and siðr appears with
religious semantics in stt. 10 and 15, as discussed above), that lǫstr may be
religious in nature, linking immorality with religion, although the stanza
does not actively promote this reading (cf. the younger Hugsvinnsmál, st.
100 and FoGT, st. 33).
The early poetic sources using siðr without religious semantics do
so in Old Icelandic, although Tøgdrápa is for a Danish king and the
term is well-attested in such senses in Old Norwegian prose such as the
thirteenth-century Konungs skuggsjá (Holm-Olsen 1945). Osidher, the East
Norse cognate of ósiðr, also appears in Östgötalagen (Schlyter 1830, 23)
and Konungastyrelsen (Bureus 1964), which ostensibly date to the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries respectively (Ronge 1986; Ståhle with
Holm 1988). Moral semantics were not limited to West Norse. Indeed,
sidher itself likewise appears in Konungastyrelsen, where it can mean both
“behaviour” and “moral.” Returning to the point with which I concluded
the survey of religious material, if Harry Perridon (2002, 1018) is correct
that the North Germanic languages showed relatively little variation by
the end of the Viking Age, and that their substantial differences arose af-
terwards, this implies that these senses of siðr were already present across
the Germanic-speaking North by the eleventh century. Confidence in that
assertion must be limited, however: the lexicons of East and West Norse
are little-compared, and research so far has concentrated on phonological
divergence (cf. Simensen 2002, 961).
In Summary
Siðr means “(individual) practice” in the tenth-century poetry of Hallfreðr
vandræðaskáld Óttarsson.
• The word possesses connotations of judgement, based on the
fulfilment of social expectations, in Hallfreðr’s other surviving
use (Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar, st. 1); these are also present
slightly later in Tøgdrápa (st. 1).