The Invention of Skiing

Question: So, Uller is Sif's son and Thor's stepson... so who's Uller's dad?

Nobody knows, actually. While Uller is clearly said to be Sif's son in Gylfaginnig, he's also clearly noted not to be Thor's son, with no mention or explanation of who his actual blood father might have been. As if to drive the point home, Thor's referred to several times by the kenning "stepfather of Uller", so it was clearly an established fact that he wasn't actually related to the kid. But none of the Norse myths we still have mention anything about Sif's life or possible spouses before Thor, nor about Uller's family history, so where did our favorite Odin-impersonator come from?

Technically, you could decide that any of the other Norse gods were Uller's father, depending on what kind of shocking reveal you want in your story. Is he another son of Odin (which would maybe explain why he did so well taking over for him that one time)? Is he a son of Loki, who (at least according to himself) is famous for seducing the ladies of Asgard, including Sif? Is he, like Thor, half-giant with some towering jotun in his mother's past, or is he the unsung son of someone like Tyr or Heimdall? And, of course, this is Scion we're talking about - a goddess with a famous son with totally unknown father sounds pretty familiar, and Uller might be that rare example of a god who was himself a Scion and ascended to godhood in times long gone. Another theory floating around the scholarly community is that Uller might be the son of Aurvandil, the enigmatic and little-known star-god that Thor cut the toe from (thus offending his surgeon into refusing to remove the rock in his head), pointing out that he is, like Uller, a skilled archer with ties to Thor's family.

We're particularly fond of the theory that the ladies of the pantheon are mostly Vanir brides, taken by the Aesir when the war between the two peoples ended. Just as Njord was married to his Vanir sister and had his children Freyr and Freya with her before coming to live with Odin's brood, so Sif might have had a Vanir husband before she was taken to Asgard, making Uller also one of the true Vanir among the Aesir.

Or you could even get totally crazy and decide that his father was someone not even among the Aesir, making him the son of an Inuit or Siberian god or even someone from a faraway pantheon whose identity remains secret because of Super Secret Plot Reasons. There's no guidance from mythology in this case, so if you've got a plot in mind, go wild!

Two Norse Wallflowers

Question: I get leaving out the new gods from Ragnarok, but why did you get rid of Sif and Vidar? They were in the core book.

Actually, we kept two of the gods from Scion: Ragnarok, Njord and Uller. We love Ragnarok; it's a great book. We aren't rejecting its gods because of their source, just because most of them were pretty minor figures compared to the rest of Scion's cast.

Ah, Sif and Vidar. I don't want to ruffle feathers by saying so, but they're not actually very important. They ended up not making the cut for our playable roster simply because they don't actually do, like, anything.

Vidar's a really cool figure, but the problem is that all his coolness is future-tense. At some point in the future, at Ragnarok, he's going to kill the Fenris wolf and avenge his father. Neat! But before then, what is he doing? Nothing. Literally nothing. He's a god who sometimes turns up at feasts and who doesn't talk. That's not much to go basing a playable parent on. As far as we can tell, he never had any cult and was only worshiped inasmuch as people tried to contribute spent scraps of leather to his preparatory wolf-stompin' boot. Not having a cult isn't enough to get him cut on its own, but what would you give him for associateds? Stamina or Strength, maybe, for wolf-murdering? But there are a lot of people in his pantheon famous for those things, and he's not one of them. He's the god of vengeance, so I wanted to give him Justice, but, as John pointed out, he's not a justice-god; not only does he not do anything really justice-related, the only vengeful thing he ever does is kill the wolf, something that hardly involves Justice boons. Aside from trying to stretch to give him Fertility for being in charge of Landvettr, there's just nothing to go on.

So Vidar was bumped from the roster (much to Folkwardr's player's dismay, but he's coping with his grief). Our final consensus was that Vidar probably will be super important - at Ragnarok, he's one of the few survivors and will probably rocket up to Legend 12 like a missile - but for the moment, his time has just not yet come.

Sif is more of a problem for most people, I've found, which is funny because she's even more useless than Vidar. She does absolutely nothing. If Norse mythology were a play, Sif would not have any lines.

Sif gets a lot of love, primarily because of one thing: she's married to Thor. And who doesn't love Thor, right? Everyfuckingbody loves Thor. He's a good time. He's the popular, thunder-bolt-toting shit. And as a result, Sif, who is totally without any divine role except Goddess of Being Married to Thor, sort of gets towed along for the ride. Sure, she got her hair cut off that one time, but that was a story about Loki and Thor, not really about her. Sure, people occasionally accuse her of infidelity, but again, those are stories about Loki and Thor. Sure, the Prose Edda calls her a spakona, but if we start giving out associateds based on single throwaway lines from euhemerized Snorri we might as well give everyone seventeen associateds and call it a day.

But Sif herself does not, never has and is never prophesied to do anything. You could give her Prophecy on the strength of that one line in the Prose Edda, but if you do you'd probably also give Thor Intelligence (for being "wise"), and also make everybody in the pantheon actually a human king from Norway or Sweden. You could give her Fertility based on scholar theories that her golden hair was a big deal because it represented fields of wheat, but if you do you have to admit that you're just kind of making shit up now (it's a nice theory, but it's also pretty much just a blind guess). In the end, Sif probably doesn't have anything but Appearance, and her utter lack of ever doing anything suggests, again, that she's probably not of particularly Legend 12 importance.

I suspect most of the Sif love comes from Marvel's Thor. Which is understandable, because I also love Marvel's Sif, but aside from the hair incident and the partiality to Thor, she really has nothing to do with the Sif of the Eddas (who is definitely not a badass in any sense of the word).