216 Norse Mythology

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This face carved on a furnace stone and found on the beach in Jutland may be that of Loki.
The lines cut across the closed mouth bring to mind Loki’s punishment of having his lips
sewn together for having lost a wager. (Werner Forman Archive/Art Resource)

See also Loki

References and further reading: Philip N. Anderson, “Form and Content in the
Lokasenna: A Re-evaluation,” Edda, 1981: 215–225. A. G. van Hamel, “The
Prose-Frame of Lokasenna,” Neophilologus 14 (1929): 204–214. Joseph Harris,
“The Senna: From Description to Literary Theory,” Michigan Germanic Stud-
ies 5 (1979): 65–74. John McKinnell, “Motivation in Lokasenna,” Saga-Book of
the Viking Society 22 (1987–1988): 234–262.

LOKI
Trickster figure, lives among the gods but will fight with the giants at Ragnarök.
In my view the single most significant line about Loki in the sources comes at
the end of the catalog of æsir in the Gylfaginning section of the Edda of Snorri
Sturluson: Loki is “also numbered among the æsir,” that is, he is counted as one
Copyright 2002. Oxford University Press.

of them even though he may actually not be one. Indeed, given the principle of
reckoning kinship along paternal lines only, Loki is no god but a giant, since he
has a giant father, Fárbauti. His mother, Laufey or Nál, may well have been one
of the æsir, but that should not count. And Loki is himself the father of three

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/21/2023 4:48 AM via UNIVERSITY OF SZEGED
AN: 169169 ; John Lindow.; Norse Mythology : A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs
Account: s6185934.main.ehost
 Deities, Themes, and Concepts 217

monsters, the Midgard serpent, the

wolf Fenrir, and Hel, by the ogress
Angrboda. With his wife Sigyn he
has the son(s) Nari and/or Narfi.
It seems that Loki’s allegiance
is for the most part with the æsir
during the mythic present, but that
in the mythic past, when he mated
with Angrboda, and in the mythic
future, at Ragnarök, he is un-
abashedly against them. In the
mythic present he travels with
Odin and Hœnir in both the Thjazi
and Andvari stories, and he travels
with Thor in the Útgarda-Loki
story and in one version of the
story of Thor’s visit to Geirröd.
Often it is Loki whose actions set
the complications of a story in
motion: For example, he is stuck to
Thjazi and agrees to deliver Idun
and her apples; he is starved by
Geirröd and agrees to deliver Thor
without his weapons. Sometimes
when things go wrong the æsir
assume it is Loki’s fault even when
no blame has entered the story, as
in the story of the master builder of
the wall around Ásgard. But in that
story and others, he is willing to fix This stone found in Cumbria depicts a bound figure,
perhaps Loki. (Axel Poignant Archive)
things; for example, he causes the
six precious objects of the gods to be made in connection with replacing Sif’s
hair, which he had mysteriously cut off. (These six objects, made by dwarfs, are
Sif’s golden headpiece, Odin’s spear Gungnir and his ring Draupnir, Thor’s ham-
mer, and Frey’s boar Gullinborsti and his ship Skídbladnir.)
Not infrequently Loki sacrifices his honor (or worse) to help the æsir, as
when he changes himself into a mare to seduce the master builder’s horse and
bears a foal from it, not something that would enhance a man’s reputation in the
hyper-masculine society that was medieval Iceland. Similarly, dressing as the
handmaiden of Freyja (that is, of Thor very reluctantly in drag) would leave him

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 Panel from the Thorwald Cross from Andreas on the Isle of Man, showing Odin being
devoured by his ancient foe, the wolf. (Werner Forman/Art Resource)

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 Deities, Themes, and Concepts 219

open to charges of effeminacy. Then there is the method he used to make Skadi
laugh when the gods were compensating her for the loss of her father, Thjazi: He
tied a rope around his testicles and the beard of a she-goat and both bleated as
Loki fell into Skadi’s lap. Loki shares this sexual ambiguity with Odin, who
practiced the effeminate magic called seid, and in fact the two were blood broth-
ers. It seems likely to me that Odin entered into blood-brotherhood with Loki in
an attempt to head off future mortal conflict with him. If so, Odin failed.
Loki’s unequivocally negative actions should probably begin with his mys-
terious struggle with Heimdall, apparently over the Brísinga men, which Loki
may have stolen. This incident is obscure, but his vicious insulting of the gods
and goddesses in Lokasenna is crystal clear. Worse yet is his arranging the death
of Baldr, the first death among the æsir and almost certainly the event that leads
inevitably to Ragnarök. I would assign both Lokasenna and Baldr’s death to the
last stages of the mythological present, when Loki is beginning to reveal his true
colors. Lokasenna and Snorri’s Edda agree that Loki was bound in revenge,
either for the reviling of the gods or for his role in Baldr’s death. But in the early
stages of the mythic future he will break free. And according to Völuspá, stanza
51, he will pilot a ship from the east full of Muspell’s peoples, the enemies and
ultimate destroyers of the gods and the cosmos.
In that sense we may say that Loki has a chronological component: He is the
enemy of the gods in the far mythic past, and he reverts to this status as the
mythic future approaches and arrives. In the mythic present he is ambiguous,
“numbered among the æsir.”

See also Andvari; Baldr; Bound Monster; Brísinga men; Heimdall; Idun; Lokasenna;
Muspell; Ragnarök; Skadi; Thjazi; Útgarda-Loki
References and further reading: The literature on Loki is vast, and most of it is in
German and the Scandinavian languages. Everyone agrees that there was never
any cult of Loki, and everyone agrees that he was important, but beyond that
it is difficult to generalize. Older (and even some modern) critics thought he
could be associated with natural phenomena, such as fire (Wagner made of
him Loge in the Ring Cycle) or air, the latter based on his name Lopt. The
most consistently useful strand of the scholarship reads Loki against the trick-
ster figures of Native American and African traditions: Trickster thinks only
of the present and never of the future, is creative but destructive at the same
time, and often has a connection with sexuality. Such a view characterizes the
book of Jan de Vries, The Problem of Loki, FF Communications, 110
(Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1933), who brings out the dual aspects
of culture hero and trickster. A later book in English is that of Anna Birgitta
Rooth, Loki in Scandinavian Mythology, Skrifter utgivna av Kungliga human-
istiska vetenskapssamfundet i Lund, 61 (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1969). Using
an extremely strict historical-geographical method and regarding anything
found elsewhere as having been borrowed into Scandinavia, Rooth is left with

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