Who Is Loki in Norse Mythology?

Loki is usually described as being of giant descent yet living among the gods in Asgard. That in between position matters. In Norse mythology he belongs to neither side completely, which is exactly what makes him useful and dangerous.

He is not a god of anything in particular. He has no domain like thunder or the sea. What he has is cleverness, a talent for shape shifting and a habit of talking his way out of trouble he created himself.

A recurring pattern in Norse mythology is that Loki creates a crisis and then resolves it, often at his own expense. He cuts off the goddess Sif's hair and then obtains golden hair, plus several other treasures, from the dwarves.

He also gets the gods their greatest possessions this way, including Thor's hammer and Odin's spear. Loki turns into a mare on one occasion and becomes the mother of Odin's eight legged horse Sleipnir. These are not the actions of a straightforward enemy.

The mood changes with the death of Balder, the most loved of the gods. Loki discovers the one thing that can harm him and arranges his death, then blocks the attempt to bring him back.

For that the gods bind Loki beneath the earth with a serpent dripping venom above him. In Norse mythology he stays there until Ragnarok, when he breaks free and fights against the gods at the end of the world.

Loki is not unique. Many traditions have a figure who breaks rules and reshapes the world by doing it. What they usually share is:

• •The ability to change form or identity
• •A talent for exposing pride and pretension
• •A habit of bringing useful things through bad behaviour
• •An uncomfortable place between the community and the outside

Loki's offspring are central to how Norse mythology ends. With a giantess he fathered three: the wolf Fenrir, the world serpent Jormungandr, and Hel, who rules over much of the realm of the dead.

The gods dealt with each in turn, binding Fenrir with a magical ribbon, casting the serpent into the ocean and giving Hel her realm. All three return at Ragnarok, and Fenrir kills Odin while the serpent kills Thor. The gods' attempts to contain Loki's children arguably guarantee the outcome they were trying to prevent, which is a familiar shape in mythology everywhere.

Loki is a puzzle for historians of religion. Gods such as Thor and Odin appear in place names, personal names and archaeological finds, which suggests they were actively worshipped. Loki has almost none of that. There is no clear evidence of a cult, sacrifices or sanctuaries dedicated to him, so he may have existed mainly as a character in stories rather than a god people prayed to. Most of what we know comes from the same thirteenth-century Icelandic sources that preserve the rest of Norse myth, including a poem in which Loki insults the assembled gods one by one.

A few objects may show him. A carved stone hearth plate found at Snaptun in Denmark, dated to around the year 1000, shows a face with stitched lips. Many scholars link it to the story in which a dwarf sews Loki's mouth shut after he loses a wager, though the identification cannot be proven. Scholars also debate how far the Christian writers who recorded the myths reshaped Loki into something like the devil, especially in his role at Ragnarok. Some see an older trickster darkened in the retelling, while others think the dark side was always there.

If you know Loki mainly from modern films and comics, several details will look different in the medieval texts. There he is not Thor's adopted brother. His father is the giant Fárbauti and his mother is called Laufey, sometimes Nál, which is why he is often named Loki Laufeyjarson after his mother. In one poem Loki reminds Odin that the two of them once mixed their blood together, making them sworn brothers rather than father and son. Thor is his frequent travelling companion, not a sibling.

The sources also give Loki a wife, Sigyn, who is usually overlooked. After the gods bind him, she stays beside him holding a bowl to catch the venom dripping from the serpent above. When the bowl fills and she has to empty it, the venom falls on Loki's face, and his violent writhing was said to cause earthquakes. Snorri also says the binding used the guts of one of Loki's own sons. These details show how carefully the storytellers linked his punishment to both suffering and loyalty.

One of the funniest stories about Loki shows him as Thor's ally. In the Eddic poem known as Thrymskvida, Thor wakes to find his hammer gone. Loki borrows the goddess Freyja's feathered cloak, flies to the land of the giants and learns that the giant Thrym has hidden the hammer deep underground. Thrym will return it only if Freyja becomes his bride. Freyja angrily refuses, so the gods settle on a desperate plan. Thor himself is dressed as the bride, veiled and wearing Freyja's famous necklace, with Loki going along disguised as his maidservant.

At the wedding feast the bride eats a whole ox and eight salmon and drinks three casks of mead, and Thrym is baffled. Loki smoothly explains that Freyja was so eager for the wedding that she had not eaten for eight nights. When Thrym peers under the veil and sees fierce, burning eyes, Loki says she had been too excited to sleep for eight nights as well. Finally the hammer is laid in the bride's lap to bless the marriage, and Thor seizes it and kills the giants. Here Loki's quick tongue serves the gods rather than endangering them.

Another story shows Loki's familiar pattern of causing a disaster under pressure and then fixing it. Travelling with Odin, he is seized by the giant Thjazi, who has taken the form of an eagle, and is released only after promising to lure the goddess Idunn out of Asgard. Idunn keeps the apples that keep the gods young. Loki tricks her into the forest, Thjazi carries her off, and the gods begin to grow old and grey. When they realise Loki was the last person seen with her, they threaten him with death unless he brings her back.

Loki borrows Freyja's falcon form, flies to Thjazi's hall, turns Idunn into a nut and carries her home in his claws. Thjazi chases him as an eagle, but the gods light fires on Asgard's walls and the giant falls burning and is killed. When his daughter Skadi arrives demanding compensation, Loki is the one who makes her laugh, with a crude stunt involving a goat. Snorri Sturluson tells the story in the thirteenth century, but it also appears in Haustlöng, a skaldic poem probably composed around 900. That older poem shows Loki's trickster role is not simply a late invention by Christian writers.

Loki in Norse mythology is the shape shifting trickster who helps and harms in equal measure, and reading him as simply evil hides what the old stories were actually doing with him.