Sigyn: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
Evidence dossier 330 — Sigyn. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Sigyn
- Original script: ᛋᛁᚴᚢᚾ
- Pantheon: Norse
- Convention: normalized Old Norse spelling — þ, ð, ǫ, æ and length marks preserved as the editions print them
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 330 of 397
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is ᛋᛁᚴᚢᚾ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Sigyn.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form sigyn differs from the canonical Sigyn only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Sigyn has one candidate image and it is famous: the Gosforth Cross in Cumbria, carved in the first half of the tenth century, whose programme of Ragnarök scenes includes a bound male figure with a smaller figure kneeling beside him holding a bowl — standardly interpreted as Loki bound and Sigyn with the basin (Bailey; Lindow), the one Viking-Age monument that may show her at her post. Otherwise she is a wholly textual goddess: no runestone invokes her, no votive deposit names her, and no other image can be securely identified. Her attestation hangs on the manuscript witnesses of the Loki cycle — the Codex Regius for Völuspá 35 and the Lokasenna prose epilogue, and the Codex Regius, Codex Wormianus, and Uppsala codices of Snorri's Edda for Gylfaginning 34 and 50 — with Þjóðólfr's Haustlöng (c. 900), quoted in Skáldskaparmál, proving the kenning 'the burden of Sigyn's arms' was already current a century before Iceland's conversion.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Sigyn's afterlife is the afterlife of one image. The medieval earthquake-theory — the earth shakes when she lifts the bowl — survived for centuries as the North's household explanation of tremors, and every retelling of Loki's punishment, from the Kearys' Victorian 'Heroes of Asgard' onward, keeps the wife and the basin at the centre of the scene: it is the one moment of grace in the flyting's long aftermath, and illustrators have never been able to leave it out.
The Convention's Own History
The Poetic Edda survives essentially in one manuscript — the Codex Regius, c. 1270 — and normalized Old Norse spelling descends from what that manuscript and its siblings actually write. Þ and ð are not decorations: they are letters of the alphabet the skalds used (and English later abandoned), and ǫ is a nasal vowel the normalization preserves because the sources carry it. The register's rule is the manuscript's rule: spell the names the way the tradition that sang them wrote them down.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Sigyn: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form sigyn is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /sites/sigyn/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 8 cited sources — Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 34 (Sigyn, wife of Loki; their son Nari or Narfi) and 50 (the binding; Skaði's snake; Sigyn's basin; the earthquake aetiology); Skáldskaparmál þulur (ásynja heiti), trans. Anthony Faulkes, Poetic Edda: Völuspá 35 ('there sits Sigyn, by no means happy about her husband'); Lokasenna, prose epilogue (the binding and the basin), trans. Carolyne Larrington, Þjóðólfr of Hvinir, Haustlöng (quoted in Skáldskaparmál): 'farmr Sigynjar arma' — the burden of Sigyn's arms, a kenning for Loki.
The Register Continues
Entry 330 of 397 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Sigurðr (read it) · next entry: Sindri (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.