Loki

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On a beach near Snaptun, on the Danish coast, a soapstone block turned up in 1950 — a hearth stone, a guard set before a blacksmith’s bellows to shield them from the heat of the forge. Carved into it, around the year 1000, is a face: a mustached man whose lips are sewn shut with a row of stitches. The stone is one of the very few objects from the Viking age that scholars are willing to call, with reasonable confidence, a likeness of Loki. The reading turns on a single story. In the dwarves’ workshop where the gods’ treasures were made, Loki had wagered his head and lost, and the dwarf who won it, forbidden to touch the neck, settled for sewing the trickster’s mouth shut so that he would stop talking. That the stitched face should appear on a forge-tool — on the very kind of bellows-guard Loki had tried to sabotage by turning into a fly and stinging the smith at his work — is the sort of joke the figure attracts. He is the god who is punished by being silenced, carved onto the instrument of his own undoing.

Loki is the trickster of the Norse gods, and the most difficult of them to fix in place. He lives among the Æsir and is counted among them, yet he is born of giants; he wins the gods their finest possessions and then destroys their best, engineering the death of the bright god Baldr and steering, at the end of the world, the ship of the dead against his own companions. He changes shape and changes sex; he is mother to a horse and father to a wolf, a serpent, and the queen of the dead. No single office contains him, which is itself the clue to what he is.

A son of giants among the gods

What can be told of Loki comes, like nearly all of Norse mythology, through Christian Iceland. The two collections together called the Eddas are the spine of the record: the Poetic Edda, a gathering of older anonymous verse preserved chiefly in a single late-thirteenth-century manuscript, and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179–1241), a Christian magnate and lawspeaker who composed his handbook of myth and poetic diction around 1220–1241, more than two centuries after the island’s formal conversion in the year 1000. Snorri systematized; the verse is older and more fragmentary. Disentangling the archaic from the antiquarian and the Christian is the standing labor of the field, and with Loki it is especially fraught, for he is a figure on whom — as the modern handbooks like to say — more ink has been spilled than on any other in the corpus.

His parentage already marks him as a crossing of categories. He is the son of the giant Fárbauti — the name means something like “cruel-striker” — and of a mother named Laufey or Nál; against the patronymic custom of the north, Loki is regularly called by his mother’s name, Loki Laufeyjarson. He has two brothers, Helblindi and Býleistr, of whom almost nothing survives but the names. By descent, then, Loki belongs to the jötnar, the giants or “devourers,” the boundary-beings who stand outside the order of Asgard and against whom Thor wages his perpetual war. Yet Loki dwells with the gods and is reckoned one of them. The bond is an oath: in the flyting poem Lokasenna, Loki reminds Odin that the two of them mingled their blood in ancient days and swore brotherhood, and that Odin had vowed never to drink unless ale were borne to them both. He is inside the circle of the gods by covenant, not by kind — a giant admitted to the table of his enemies. The Norse frame does not resolve the contradiction; it keeps it. Loki is the seam where the two great families of beings meet, and seams are where things come apart.

His own offspring make the danger explicit. By the giantess Angrboða — “she who bodes anguish” — Loki fathers three children who are not children but powers. The first is the wolf Fenrir, whom the gods raise among themselves until his growth frightens them and they bind him with a fetter forged of impossible things, at the cost of Tyr’s right hand. The second is the world-serpent Jörmungandr, flung by Odin into the encircling sea, where it grows until it girdles the whole earth with its own tail in its mouth. The third is Hel, the half-dark daughter cast down to preside over the dead who die of sickness and age, the queen of the cold country beneath the roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil. The three monsters of the last days are all Loki’s, and the gods, by raising and binding and casting them out, only postpone what they are.

The contriver of treasures, and a horse

If that were the whole of him, Loki would be merely an enemy. He is more useful and more dangerous than that, because the same cunning that ruins also provides. Several of the gods’ defining possessions exist because Loki first caused a crisis and then, to escape it, talked it into a gift.

The clearest case is the making of the treasures, told in Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál. Loki, in a fit of malice, shears off the golden hair of Sif, Thor’s wife. Threatened with death, he swears to replace it, and goes to the dwarves. The sons of Ívaldi forge for him not only new hair of spun gold that will grow like real hair, but the ship Skíðblaðnir and the spear Gungnir that will become Odin’s. Loki, never able to leave a wager alone, then bets his head against the dwarf Brokkr that Brokkr’s brother Eitri cannot make finer things. Eitri makes three: the gold ring Draupnir that drips eight rings of its own weight every ninth night; the golden-bristled boar Gullinbursti; and the hammer Mjöllnir, whose only flaw is a short haft, because Loki, in the shape of a fly, stung the smith at the bellows and nearly spoiled the work. The gods judge Eitri’s gifts the greater — chiefly for the hammer, the one weapon that holds the giants at bay — and Brokkr wins the bet. Loki keeps his head only on the lawyer’s point that the neck was not wagered, and so the dwarf sews his lips instead. The episode is the whole of Loki in miniature: the gods’ single most important defense, Thor’s hammer, comes into the world only because Loki made trouble and then, cornered, paid for it with someone else’s craft and his own near-ruin.

The wall of Asgard turns on the same pattern, and produces the strangest of all his children. A builder offers to raise an impregnable wall around the gods’ citadel within a single winter, demanding as his wage the sun, the moon, and the goddess Freyja. On Loki’s advice the gods accept, certain the work cannot be finished — until the builder, aided by his prodigious stallion Svaðilfari, comes within days of completing it, and the gods, who would lose the sun and Freyja, round on Loki, whose counsel it was. To undo what he has set in motion, Loki turns himself into a mare and lures the stallion away into the woods. The wall goes unfinished; the builder, revealed as a giant, is killed by Thor. And Loki, some time after, bears the foal: Sleipnir, the gray eight-legged horse that becomes Odin’s mount, the swiftest of all horses, who can run over sea and air and carry his rider down the road to Hel and back. The trickster is here a mother, and the high god rides the issue of his shape-shifting. The Norse imagination does not flinch from this; it makes Loki’s fluidity productive, the source of the one creature that can travel between the worlds.

This is the double face the tradition gives him. Loki is, in the modern scholarly idiom, a liminal being — one who belongs fully to no category and so can pass through all of them, slipping between god and giant, male and female, helper and saboteur. His mischief is not yet evil. Through much of the mythology he is the gods’ companion on the road, the quick wit who gets Thor out of the troubles into which his strength alone cannot reach. The turn comes once, and it is irreversible.

The death of Baldr and the binding

Baldr, the most beloved of the gods, begins to dream of his own death. His mother Frigg goes through the whole world and takes from every thing an oath not to harm him — fire and water, iron and stone, sickness, beasts, birds, and serpents all swear. Only one shoot she passes over, the mistletoe, too young to bind. The gods make a game of their darling’s new invulnerability, hurling weapons at him for the pleasure of watching them turn aside. Loki learns of the single exception. He cuts a dart of mistletoe, and seeks out Höðr, Baldr’s blind brother, standing apart from the sport because he has nothing to throw and cannot see to aim. Loki puts the dart in his hand and guides it. The mistletoe goes through Baldr, and Baldr falls dead, and the brightest thing in the world goes out.

Even then it might be undone. The goddess Hel agrees to release Baldr if every being in the world will weep for him, and the gods send word, and all things weep — all but one. In a cave sits a giantess who gives her name as Þökk, and she will not weep: let Hel hold what she has, she says, dry-eyed. Þökk is Loki, and by refusing the single tear he seals Baldr among the dead until the world ends. The first killing could be read as mischief gone too far; the refusal to weep is something colder. It is the act for which the gods at last turn on him without mercy.

He flees, builds a house with doors on all four sides to watch every approach, and by day turns himself into a salmon and hides in a waterfall. The gods catch him in a net of his own devising — for he had been the first to weave one — and drag him out by the tail. They take his two sons; one is turned into a wolf that tears the other apart, and with the entrails of the dead son they bind Loki to three stones. The giantess Skaði fixes a serpent above his face so that its venom drips down, and there he lies, with his faithful wife Sigyn beside him holding a bowl to catch the poison. But the bowl fills, and when she turns to empty it the venom falls on Loki, and he writhes so that the earth shakes — which is why, the story says, there are earthquakes. So he stays, bound beneath the dripping serpent, until the last days.

The Punishment of Loki, wood engraving by Louis Huard (1813–1874) for The Heroes of Asgard (MacMillan, London). Sigyn holds the bowl while the serpent’s venom drips on the bound Loki. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The chaining of Loki is, in the Norse account of things, the gods’ last clear victory and the measure of how little time they have left. They have bound the wolf, cast out the serpent, sent down the daughter, and now pinned the father — and every one of those bonds is a thing the prophecy says will break.

Ragnarok

It breaks at Ragnarök, the doom of the powers. The great winter comes, the bonds of the world loosen, and Loki comes free at last. From the east sails Naglfar, the ship built from the untrimmed nails of the dead, and Loki steers it, carrying the host of Hel and the giants against the gods. His children muster against the order that exiled them: Fenrir runs with his lower jaw on the ground and his upper against the sky and swallows Odin; Jörmungandr rises from the sea and meets Thor, who kills the serpent and walks nine steps and falls dead in its venom. On the field Loki meets Heimdall, the watchman of the gods who had once already fought him in another shape, and the two old enemies kill each other, each by the other’s hand. The world burns and sinks, and from the sea a new earth rises, green again, where a remnant of the gods returns and Baldr comes back from the dead. Loki has no place in what follows. He is bound to the world that ends; the trickster belongs to the old order and dies with it, the agent of its ruin and, in the strange economy of the myth, the necessary condition of its renewal.

The argument over a god who may never have been worshipped

What remains, after the myth, is a long argument about what kind of being this was. Almost alone among the major Norse figures, Loki has no clear trace of cult. No place is named for him in the way places are named for Thor and Freyr and Odin; no certain temple, no personal name compounded with his, no day of the week, no firm sign that anyone ever sacrificed to him or asked him for anything. The Snaptun stone and the carved crosses of northern England — the Gosforth Cross in Cumbria, with its panel that may show Sigyn holding her bowl above the bound figure — are images, not altars. Whether Loki was ever a god in the cultic sense, or is rather a figure who lives only in story and verse, is genuinely unsettled; scholars have read him as a fire-spirit, a sky-traveling spider, a degraded older deity, a borrowed Christian devil, and, most durably, as a pure trickster of the kind the comparative study of religion finds across the world — the boundary-crosser whose function is to disturb. The disagreement is old and shows no sign of ending, and it should be held as what it is: a contested question, not a settled fact dressed as one.

The trickster reading travels well, because tricksters travel. The figure who is helper and saboteur at once, who shifts shape and sex, who steals fire or treasure and pays for it, who is both inside the order and against it, has cousins in many traditions — the West African Eshu and the spider Anansi, the coyote and raven of Indigenous North America, the Greek Hermes in his thieving aspect. Loki is not those figures, and the resemblances can be pressed too hard; but the cross-cultural pattern is part of why he reads as legible to people who know nothing else of the north.

It is the modern afterlife that has made him so. Richard Wagner, building his Ring cycle in the 1850s and 1870s, drew the demigod Loge from Loki and the wider Norse and Germanic material, a flickering fire-spirit and counselor of the gods. A century later the figure passed into American comics: from 1949 and then, transformed, in the Marvel line from 1962, Loki became Thor’s adopted brother and chief antagonist, and through the films and television of the twenty-first century one of the most widely recognized characters drawn from any ancient mythology — known, now, to vast audiences who could not name a single other god of the Æsir. That the Norse pantheon should reach the modern world chiefly through its trickster is a fitting last turn. The being who never quite belonged among the gods is the one who outlived them in the common memory, the seam in their order grown into its most familiar face.

The Snaptun Stone, a forge bellows-guard of c. 1000, now in the Moesgaard Museum near Aarhus, Denmark. The stitched lips recall the dwarf Brokkr’s sewing-shut of Loki’s mouth. Photograph by Bloodofox, released to the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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