A feast of the gods, ale in plenty – and a guest who exposes every single one of them. The Lokasenna („Loki’s flyting") is the most famous quarrel-poem of the North: a scene full of malice, wit and uncomfortable truths. Loki holds up a mirror to the mighty – and no one comes off unscathed.
The sea-giant Ægir invites the Æsir to a banquet. His hall is so bright that gleaming gold, not fire, lights the room; the ale pours itself. Almost everyone has come: Odin and Frigg, Freyja, Freyr and Njörd, Tyr, Bragi and Idun, Sif and many more. Only Thor is missing – away in the east fighting giants. Ægir’s servants Fimafeng and Eldir serve so well that the gods praise them aloud. And that is exactly what Loki cannot bear: out of pure envy he kills Fimafeng. The gods shake their shields in anger and drive him out into the forest.
But Loki comes back. At the door he meets the servant Eldir and, in dark verses, makes him tell what is being said inside. Then he enters and invokes the sacred law of hospitality: by old custom he demands a seat and a drink. Bragi refuses him both – but Odin himself has his son Vídar make room and fill the cup. A fatal mistake, for Loki raises the cup, mockingly greets all the gods and goddesses – „all but one: Bragi" – and so opens the duel of words.
The Lokasenna is a flyting (Old Norse senna): a ritualised contest of abuse in which one out-does the opponent with artfully sharpened accusations. Such word-duels were real and feared in the Viking Age – a well-aimed slur, the níð, could wound a man’s honour so deeply that blood was shed. The scholar Carol Clover showed how strictly such duels followed a pattern: charge, counter, out-trump. Loki is a master of it – for as the gods’ long-time companion he was present at every embarrassment.
And now it comes blow by blow. Each charge lands because each carries a grain of truth from another myth:
Bragi he calls a coward who boasts but never fights. Idun he accuses of having embraced her brother’s slayer. Gefjon and Frigg he charges with unfaithfulness – Frigg, he says, slept with Odin’s brothers Vili and Vé while Odin was away. Odin he counters twice over: the All-father hands out victory unjustly, and worse, on the isle of Samsey he worked seiðr like a witch – the most unmanly of arts. Freyja he tells that she slept with everyone in the hall, even her own brother Freyr. Njörd he mocks as a hostage whom the daughters of the giant Hymir used as a chamber-pot. Tyr he taunts, because Loki himself fathered a son with Tyr’s wife. Even the small servants Byggvir and Beyla get their share. Only one briefly shakes him: Skadi reminds him that a cruel end awaits – and Loki cynically admits he was in the front rank at the death of her father.
“Remember, Odin, how once we two / mingled our blood together? / No ale wouldst thou taste / unless it were brought to us both.”— after Lokasenna 9, translation Karl Simrock (1851, public domain)
Only when Thor returns from the east and threatens Mjöllnir does the mocker fall silent. Four more times Loki jeers – „but before the wolf thou shalt flee, when he swallows the sun" – yet as the hammer rises the fourth time he yields. He leaves, but not without a final curse: Ægir’s hall shall one day go up in flames. So the quarrel ends – and Loki’s doom begins.
For the prose after the poem tells how the gods hunt Loki down. He turns into a salmon, is caught all the same, and is bound in a cave with the entrails of his own son. Above him hangs a serpent whose venom drips onto his face; only his faithful wife Sigyn catches it in a bowl. When she empties it, Loki writhes so that the earth quakes – the origin, the myth says, of earthquakes. We tell the whole story in Loki’s Punishment.
The Lokasenna is more than divine gossip. It is a mirror held up to the mighty by an outsider. Loki says what is otherwise kept silent, and exposes that even gods are vain, fallible and contradictory. At the same time the poem is a brilliant „who’s who" of scandal: nearly every charge alludes to another myth – whoever grasps the allusions reads half the Norse pantheon between the lines. And over it all lies a very Norse, bitingly dark humour.
Loki · Seiðr – the magic · Thor · Freyja · The Norse pantheon.
Poetic Edda: Lokasenna (with prose frame), Codex Regius; public-domain translation Karl Simrock, Die Edda (1851); English tradition after Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda (Ægir’s feast), c. 1220. Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001); Carol J. Clover on the senna/flyting; Ursula Dronke, The Poetic Edda vol. II.