Loki fits no box. Now he saves the gods with a trick, now he plunges them into ruin. It is exactly this doubleness that makes him perhaps the most modern figure of the Edda – and the engine of almost every good story.
Few figures of Norse myth are as hard to pin down as Loki. Son of the giant Fárbauti and of Laufey, he lives among the Æsir but truly belongs to the giants – and is Odin’s blood-brother: Odin had sworn he would drink no ale that was not also offered to Loki. Now Loki is the resourceful helper who frees the gods from self-made trouble, now the very one who calls that trouble down.
Loki changes shape the way others change a cloak: he appears as a salmon, a fly, a seal, an old woman. As a mare he lured away the stallion of the giant builder – and months later gave birth to Odin’s eight-legged steed Sleipnir. So Loki is both father and mother of famous beings. This changeability makes him unpredictable: no one is ever quite sure whose side he is on.
Astonishingly many treasures of the gods come from Loki’s mischief-and-mending. Out of spite he cuts off the golden hair of the goddess Sif – and, to escape Thor’s wrath, must fetch a replacement from the dwarves: so, in the great smithing wager, are born Sif’s new gold hair, Odin’s spear, Freyr’s boar and Thor’s hammer. He lets the goddess Idun be carried off with her apples of youth – and brings her back. And he devises the plan by which Thor regains his stolen hammer. Without Loki, half the mythology would stand still.
His dark side has names. With the giantess Angrboða Loki fathered three children in whom the seed of doom already lies: the wolf Fenrir, the Midgard Serpent and Hel, mistress of the realm of the dead. With his faithful wife Sigyn he also has the sons Narfi and Váli – who will play a cruel part in his punishment.
At the sea-giant Ægir’s ale-feast Loki loses all restraint: in the Lokasenna he exposes one god after another, laying bare affairs, cowardice and shame – until Thor enters with raised hammer and ends the mockery. It is the moment in which the troublemaker becomes, once and for all, the enemy.
“Remember, Othin, in olden days / that we both our blood have mixed; / then didst thou promise no ale to pour, / unless it were brought for us both.”— Lokasenna 9, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
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 – and, so the tradition goes, in the shape of the giantess Þökk („Thanks“), prevented all beings from weeping Baldr free of the death-world. (That this reluctant giantess was Loki, Snorri himself gives only as a guess – „people believe“ it.) For this one of the cruellest punishments of the mythology overtakes him: bound with the entrails of his own son, he lies beneath a serpent whose venom Sigyn catches in a bowl – and when she empties the full bowl, his shudder runs through the earth as an earthquake.
At Ragnarök, though, Loki breaks free. He steers the death-ship Naglfar and leads the foes against the gods; in the end he and the watchman Heimdall kill one another. So Loki gives voice to a deep insight of the Norse myths: that order and chaos, creation and destruction, are inseparably bound.
Fenrir · The Midgard Serpent · Idun · Thor · Ragnarök · The Norse pantheon.
Völuspá, Lokasenna, Þrymskviða, Hyndluljóð (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál. Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; Anna Birgitta Rooth, Loki in Scandinavian Mythology (1961); John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).