Loki fits no category. Sometimes he saves the gods with a clever trick, sometimes he plunges them into ruin. It is precisely this ambivalence that makes him so fascinating.
Hardly any figure in Norse mythology is as hard to pin down as Loki. He lives among the Æsir, yet actually belongs to the giants and is Odin’s blood-brother. Sometimes he is the resourceful helper who frees the gods from self-inflicted trouble, sometimes the very one who brings that trouble about.
Loki can change his shape – he appears as a salmon, a mare, a fly. In the form of a mare he even gave birth to Odin’s eight-legged steed Sleipnir. This changeability makes him unpredictable: no one ever knows for certain whose side he is on.
With the giantess Angrboða, Loki fathered three children who play a dark role in the fate of the world: the wolf Fenrir, the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr and Hel, mistress of the realm of the dead. In them already lies the seed of doom.
Loki’s most fateful deed is his part in the death of the shining god Baldr: he guided the blind Höðr so that his mistletoe dart killed the invulnerable one. As punishment Loki was bound. At Ragnarök, however, he breaks free and leads the enemies against the gods. So Loki expresses a deep insight of the mythology: that order and chaos are inseparably bound.
The stories of Loki are found in the Lokasenna and the Þrymskviða – both are in the public-domain Edda editions in our Library.