Loki: The Trickster of Norse Mythology
Explore Loki, the trickster of Norse myth, his shape-shifting, his children Fenrir and Jormungandr, his role in Baldr's death, and his prophesied return at Ragnarok.
Loki is the most controversial of the figures in the Norse pantheon, a being of no fixed moral character who moves between the worlds of the gods and the giants, the helper and the accursed, the witty companion and the bringer of the end of the world. He is the son of the giant Fárbauti and the giantess Laufey, and yet he is the sworn brother of Odin and the companion of the Aesir. He is the father of the monsters that will destroy the world at Ragnarok, and the agent of much of the mischief that makes the Norse gods who they are. His mythology is preserved in the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, in the Poetic Edda, in the Heimskringla, and in a constellation of later folklore and legend.
The Origins of Loki
In the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, Loki is described as the son of the giant Fárbauti and the giantess Laufey, and the brother of Helblindi and Býleistr. He is handsome and cunning, swift in word and deed, and possessed of a kind of magic that is sometimes called skáldskapr (poetry) but is more often a kind of cunning shape-shifting and pragmatic deceit. He comes into the company of the gods by oath-brotherhood with Odin, the terms of which Snorri carefully describes.
The exact status of Loki in the Norse pantheon is debated. Some scholars have argued that he is a relatively late addition to the Norse divine world, perhaps a reflex of an earlier continental trickster figure, and that his prominence in the Prose Edda is partly the result of Snorri’s literary interests. Others have argued that Loki is a fundamental figure in the Norse mythology of fate, that his role as the agent of the gods’ destruction is built into the structure of the Eddic corpus, and that his presence in the medieval sources cannot be explained away as a literary afterthought. The evidence is mixed: Loki is absent from the earlier continental Germanic record, and yet he is central to the Norse mythology of the end of the world.
Loki’s Children
Loki is the father of a remarkable and terrible brood, all of them monstrous and all of them central to the Norse mythology of the end of the world. With the giantess Angrboða (“she who offers sorrow”), he fathers three children: the wolf Fenrir, the world-serpent Jörmungandr, and the half-blue, half-flesh Hel, who will rule the realm of the dead. The Gylfaginning describes the gods’ reaction to the offspring: they threw the serpent into the deep ocean, where he grew so large that he encircled the world and bit his own tail; they threw Hel into the underworld, where she was given dominion over the dead; and they brought the wolf to Asgard, intending to bind him with iron, but he grew so fast that they despaired of holding him.
With his wife Sigyn, Loki fathers a son named Narfi (or Nari), and a son named Váli in some versions of the myth. When the gods bind Loki for his part in the death of Baldr, they transform Váli into a wolf and he kills his brother Narfi; the entrails of Narfi are then used to bind Loki, and they turn to iron.
With the stallion Svaðilfari, Loki fathers Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of Odin, the best of all horses. The mother is the brood-mare of a giant builder, and the conception is the result of a shape-shifting episode in which Loki turns himself into a mare to distract the stallion from his work on the walls of Asgard.
A passage in the Lokasenna taunts Odin for practising the women’s magic seiðr and for being ergi (unmanly); the accusation is that the Allfather, the war-god, has transgressed gender boundaries, not that he has fathered children with Loki. In a separate, contested passage the Prose Edda (via the Lokasenna and Gylfaginning) has Loki accuse Odin of having fathered children by Frigg — the goddess the Eddas elsewhere identify as Odin’s wife — and a minority of scholars have read this as a vestige of a more ambiguous relationship. The passage is contested and is not a mainstream reading of the source.
Loki as the Helper of the Gods
Loki is the indispensable helper of the gods in many of the principal Eddic stories. He cuts off the hair of the goddess Sif, and he must then procure a new head of hair from the dwarves; he procures the new hair, the ship Skíðblaðnir, the boar Gullinbursti, the spear Gungnir, the ring Draupnir, and the hammer Mjölnir in a single contest of skill with the dwarves. He steals the apples of youth from Iðunn and brings them back to the gods, after a journey in which he is rescued by Freya, who lends him a falcon’s plumage. He leads the expedition to recover the hammer from the giant Thrym in the Þrymskviða, by the stratagem of Thor disguised as a bride.
In each of these episodes, Loki’s role is that of the trickster in the technical sense: the marginal figure who uses cunning and deceit to obtain for the gods what they cannot obtain by force. He is not moral, in the sense that his actions are not always virtuous; he is competent, in the sense that he gets the job done. The Gylfaginning praises him as “the most cunning of all,” and his pranks are part of the standard repertoire of the Norse divine household.
Loki’s Mischief
Loki is also the agent of a great deal of mischief that brings the gods close to ruin. He cuts off the hair of Sif; he steals the apples of Iðunn; he procures the apples again only by giving himself to the giants; he arranges the building of the walls of Asgard, in which the giant builder asks for Freya and the sun and the moon as his price; he kills the servant of the giant Skrýmir in the Þrymskviða; he makes the goat that pulls Thor’s chariot limp on one side (this last episode is recorded in the Skáldskaparmál).
In the Gylfaginning, Loki is the one who contrives the death of the servant Kvasir, who is killed by the dwarves Fjalar and Galar and whose blood is brewed into the mead of poetry. The mead is hidden by the dwarves and then by the giant Suttungr; Loki steals it and brings it back to Asgard. The episode is part of the standard account of the origin of poetry, and Loki is at the center of it.
The Death of Baldr
Loki’s most consequential mischief is the death of Baldr, the beautiful god of light. The story is preserved in the Baldrs draumar and the Gylfaginning. Baldr is troubled by dreams of his own death, and his mother Frigg extracts oaths from every thing in the world — fire and water, iron and all metals, stones, trees, sicknesses, beasts, birds, poison, and serpents — that they will not harm him. The gods amuse themselves by hurling weapons at Baldr and watching them turn aside, for none of them can hurt him. Only the mistletoe is overlooked, growing on a tree west of Valhalla.
Loki, learning of the oversight, plucks the mistletoe and fashions a dart from it. He places the dart in the hand of the blind god Höðr, Baldr’s brother, and guides his aim. Höðr throws the dart, and Baldr falls dead. The world of the gods is shattered by the event, and all the divine powers can do is weep and lament.
Loki flees to the mountains, where he builds a hut with four doors, so that he can see in all directions. He sits there, brooding, weaving a fishing-net, when the gods come to take him. He burns the net, transforms himself into a salmon, and jumps into the river, but the gods catch him, and he is bound with the entrails of his son Narfi. The goddess Sigyn stays by him, holding a basin to catch the venom of a serpent that hangs over his face; when she goes to empty the basin, the venom falls on Loki, and he writhes so violently that the whole world trembles. This is the source of earthquakes.
The death of Baldr is the central tragedy of the Norse divine world, and it sets in motion the events that lead to Ragnarok. The killing is not an accident: Loki’s role in it is deliberate, even if his motives are unclear. The Baldrs draumar suggests that Loki’s envy of Baldr is part of his motivation, but other sources are more cautious about assigning him malice.
The Lokasenna
The Lokasenna (“Loki’s flyting”) is one of the most extraordinary of the Eddic poems, and Loki is its central speaker. The poem describes a feast at the hall of the sea-giant Ægir, at which the gods are drinking and the entertainment is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Loki, who has been cast out of the hall. He is admitted at the suggestion of Odin, and proceeds to insult each of the gathered gods in turn.
The insults are sexual, criminal, theological, and personal. Loki accuses Freya of incest, Frigg of infidelity, Odin of effeminacy, Njord of cowardice, and the others of various crimes. Each god responds in turn, defending himself in a series of formal speeches. The poem ends with the arrival of Thor, who threatens Loki with Mjölnir, and Loki departs.
The Lokasenna is a remarkable literary work: it is a flyting in the formal Norse style, in which two parties exchange formalized insults. It is also a theological document, in which the gods’ virtues and vices are catalogued in a single scene. Loki’s role as the accuser of the gods matches his role as the agent of their destruction, and the poem is often read as a foreshadowing of the binding of Loki and the events of Ragnarok.
Loki and the Wall of Asgard
One of Loki’s most famous actions is recorded in the Gylfaginning. A master builder arrives in Asgard and offers to build a wall around the city in a single winter, in exchange for Freya and the sun and the moon. The gods agree, on condition that the builder completes the work alone in the time given, and that he receive no help from any man. The builder is accompanied by a great stallion, Svaðilfari, and the wall rises at remarkable speed.
Loki, fearing for the loss of Freya and the sun and the moon, transforms himself into a mare and leads the stallion away into the woods. The builder, deprived of his helper, cannot complete the work, and the gods owe him nothing. He is enraged, and reveals that he is a giant; Thor is summoned, and slays him. Loki returns from the woods after some time, with Svaðilfari’s foal at his side — the foal is Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of Odin.
The episode is one of the most often cited stories of Loki’s shape-shifting, and it is the basis of his connection to the birth of Sleipnir.
Loki in the Brokkr and Eitri Episode
The contest of the dwarves is recorded in the Skáldskaparmál. Loki, having cut off the hair of Sif, is given a deadline by the gods to procure a new head of hair or face the consequences. He goes to the dwarves, and the sons of Ivaldi (the dwarves of Svartálfheim) fashion a new head of hair of pure gold that grows like natural hair.
Loki then bets his head with the dwarves Brokkr and Eitri (or Sindri) that they cannot forge three treasures as fine as the hair. The dwarves work at their forge, and Loki, in the form of a fly, bites the dwarves’ eyes to spoil their work. The first treasure is Gullinbursti, a boar with golden bristles; the second is Draupnir, a ring that drops eight duplicates of itself every ninth night; the third is Mjölnir, the hammer of Thor, which is flawless except for a flaw in the handle. The dwarves win the bet, and Loki is owed nothing, since Brokkr and Eitri had produced three treasures as fine as the hair. Loki is forced to pay with his lips, and the dwarves sew them shut.
The episode is the principal source of the origin of the treasures of the gods in the Prose Edda, and it is one of the central myths of the dwarves’ craft.
Loki at Ragnarok
In the Völuspá and the Gylfaginning, Loki is prophesied to break free from his binding at Ragnarok. He is described as the captain of the ship Naglfar, which is made of the nails of the dead and which carries the forces of chaos across the sea. He is the leader of the army of Hel, of the sons of Muspell, of the Fenrir and the Jörmungandr.
In the closing scene of the Völuspá, Loki and Heimdall meet on the field of Ragnarok, and they slay each other. The pairing is theologically significant: Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, is the defender of the world, and Loki, the trickster, is the agent of its destruction. They are the opposite poles of the Norse mythology of order and chaos, and they are destined to meet in mutual destruction.
Loki in Folklore and Modern Culture
Loki survives in the folklore of Scandinavia as a marginal figure of mischief and cunning, often conflated with the devil of Christian tradition. The Sampo of the Kalevala and the Finnish Loviatar show a similar figure of the trickster in the Finnic tradition, and the Lappish (Sami) Lieski is sometimes compared to Loki.
In modern popular culture, Loki has become one of the most recognizable figures of the Norse pantheon, particularly through the medium of the Marvel cinematic universe, in which he is the adopted brother of Thor and the perpetual antagonist of the gods. The Marvel tradition has had a significant effect on the popular reception of the Norse trickster, although it diverges in many details from the medieval sources.
Loki in the Sörla þáttr and Loki in the Late Tradition
The Sörla þáttr is a short tale preserved in the Flateyjarbók and other late manuscripts, and it is the source of one of the most famous stories of Loki in the late Norse tradition. The tale describes an episode in which Loki and the giant Sörli play a game of chess, in which the giant’s life is at stake. Loki cheats in the game and the giant is killed, but the giant’s ghost pursues Loki and threatens him, and Loki must flee. The tale is a late addition to the mythology of Loki, and it is sometimes read as a Christianization of the older cult of the trickster.
The Sörla þáttr is also important as a source for the medieval Icelandic reception of Loki as a marginal figure of mischief, and it is one of the texts that contributed to the modern image of the trickster as a kind of medieval devil. The conflation of Loki with the Christian devil is a feature of the late Norse tradition, and it is a major theme in the modern reception of the Norse mythology.
Loki in the Saga Literature
Loki appears in the saga literature, although less frequently than the principal Aesir gods. In the Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, the hero Egill is described as having a grudge against the cult of Thor (which he associates with the paganism of his youth), and the saga uses the cult of the gods as a symbol of the older religion in conflict with the new. Loki is not a major figure in the saga, but the cult of the trickster is implicit in the figure of Egill, who is a kind of human trickster in his dealings with the Norwegian kings.
In the Gísla saga, the hero Gísli is described as a worshiper of Freya and the cult of the Vanir, and the saga uses the cult as a symbol of the older Icelandic religion. The cult of Loki is implicit in the figure of the outlaw Gísli, who is the victim of a treacherous oath.
In the Laxdæla saga, the most famous of the Icelandic family sagas, the figure of the trickster is a major theme, and the saga uses the cult of Loki as a symbol of the darker side of the human world. The hero Kjartan is associated with the cult of Thor and Odin, while his rival Bolli is associated with the more ambiguous figures of the Norse pantheon, including Loki.
Loki in Comparative Mythology
Loki is often compared to the tricksters of other Indo-European mythologies, and the comparison is a major theme in the study of Norse mythology. The Vedic Indra (whose double nature as both champion and transgressor of the cosmic order invites comparison with Loki), the Greek Prometheus, the Celtic Lugh (who is sometimes compared to Loki in his function as a bringer of culture), and the Finnish Loviatar are all figures of the trickster in the broader Indo-European tradition. The comparison is not exact: Loki is not a bringer of culture, and he is not a helper of humanity, and he is not a benefactor of the gods. He is, rather, a marginal figure who belongs to both the gods and the giants, and who is the agent of both the divine mischief and the divine destruction.
The Finno-Ugric comparison is particularly striking. The Finnish Väinämöinen of the Kalevala is a bringer of culture, a singer, and a magic-worker, and he is sometimes compared to Odin. The Finnish Lemminkäinen is a trickster figure, and the comparison to Loki is suggestive. The Samic figures of the Norse-Sami frontier (Stállu, Leuhman) are also trickster figures, and the comparison to Loki is again suggestive. The pattern of the trickster as a marginal figure who belongs to both worlds is a feature of the mythology of the Finno-Ugric and the Norse traditions, and it suggests a deeper connection between the two.
Loki and the Question of Evil
Loki is often presented in modern interpretations of the Norse mythology as the Norse god of evil, a kind of Norse devil, but this interpretation is not supported by the medieval sources. The Norse gods are not a moral system, and Loki is not the embodiment of evil in the Christian sense. He is a marginal figure who is the agent of mischief and destruction, but he is also a member of the divine household, and he is the father of gods as well as of monsters.
The question of the origin of evil in the Norse mythology is a complex one, and Loki is only part of the answer. The Norse mythology is fundamentally a mythology of fate, and the gods are subject to the will of the Norns. Loki is the agent of the destruction of the gods, but he is also the agent of their prosperity, and the question of his moral character is not a question that the medieval sources are interested in answering. To read Loki as the Norse devil is to read the Norse mythology through a Christian lens, and it is a misreading of the medieval sources.
Conclusion
Loki is the most theologically complex of the Norse gods after Odin, and his mythology raises the deepest questions of the Norse divine world: the question of the origin of evil, the question of the relationship between fate and free will, the question of the solidarity of the divine household. He is the helper and the destroyer, the companion and the traitor, the father of monsters and the rescuer of the gods. To read the Lokasenna is to read the accusations of the trickster against the divine order; to read the Gylfaginning is to read the structure of that order. Loki is the figure who, in the end, is bound in the cave with the serpent dripping venom on his face, the figure of the unreconciled god who is waiting for the end of the world.