Loki

Loki tricks Hod to shoot Baldur

Loki Laufeyiarson, in Norse mythology is the "god" of mischief (actually, not a god at all but a giant, although mixing freely with the gods for a long time and even becoming Odin's foster-brother), a son of Farbauti and Laufey, and is described as the "contriver of all fraud."

The trickster god is a complex character, a master of guile and deception. He is also conceived of as a fire spirit, with all the potential for good and ill associated with fire. Loki is also an adept shape-shifter, with the ability to change both form (examples include transmogrification to a salmon, horse, bird, flea, etc.) and sex.

Loki was the father of many creatures, men and monsters. With Glut, his first wife, he was the father of Einmyria and Eisa.

Having liaisons with giantesses was nothing unusual for gods in Norse mythology—both Odin and Freyr are good examples; and since Loki was actually a giant himself, there is nothing unusual about this activity. Together with Angerboda, he had three children:

• Jormungand, the sea-serpent;
• Fenrir the giant wolf preordained to slay Odin at the time of Ragnarok;
• Hel, the goddess of the realm of the dead.

Loki was flying as a hawk one day and was captured by Geirrod, a frost giant. Geirrod, who hated Thor, demanded that Loki bring his enemy (without his magic belt and hammer) to Geirrod's castle. Loki agreed to lead Thor to the trap.

On the way to Geirrod's, they stopped at the home of Grid, a giantess. She waited until Loki left the room then told Thor what was happening and gave him her iron gloves and magical belt and staff. Thor killed Geirrod, and all other frost giants he could find.

Loki was not so much a figure of unmitigated badness as a kind of celestial confidence trickster, who always managed to persuade the gods to give him another chance. Some anthropologists have compared him to Coyote, a trickster figure of Native American mythology.

Loki occasionally works with the other gods. For example, he tricked Hrimthur, who built the walls around Asgard, out of being paid for his work by distracting his horse disguised as a mare—thereby he became the mother (!) of Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir. He also retrieved Odin's spear, Freyr's ship and Sif's wig from Dvalin, the dwarf, as well as rescuing Idun. Finally,in Trymskvida, the funniest of Thor's adventures, Loki manages, with Thor at his side, to get Mjollnir back when the giant Thrym secretly steals it, in order to ask for fair Freya as a bride, in exchange.

Loki overplayed his hand in this respect: disguised as a giantess, he arranged the murder of Baldur, although earlier versions of the myth, attributed to Saxo Grammaticus do not implicate Loki. Significantly, also, the poem in the Elder Edda most associated with Loki, the Lokasenna, does not directly implicate Loki in Baldur's death.

When the gods discovered that the giantess had been Loki in disguise, they hunted him down and bound him to three rocks. Then they tied a serpent above him, the venom of which dripped onto his face. His wife Sigyn (a goddess, not the giantess who was the mother of Loki's monster brood) gathered the venom in a bowl, but from time to time she had to turn away to empty it, at which point the poison would drip onto Loki, who writhed in pain, thus causing earthquakes. He would free himself, however, in time to attack the gods at Ragnarok.

Same as some other characters of Old Norse mythology, Loki has been adopted by later authors. In the Marvel Universe, for example, Loki is a supervillain who is the primary enemy of his half-brother, Thor.

In Norse Mythology, Thor's parents were Odin and the Earth—nobody identical with any of Loki's parents, as mentioned above—so they weren't half-brothers. On the other hand Loki, as Odin's foster-brother, was in a way Thor's adopted uncle.

Loki and Odin are main characters in a novel by Neil Gaiman called American Gods. These two, together with Thor, are also the three characters to appear most often in Nordic myths.

Not all lore depicts Loki as a malevolent being. A Medieval ballad from the Faroe Islands, entitled Loka Thaattur, depicts Loki as a friend to man: when a thurs (troll or giant) comes to take a farmer's son away, the farmer and his wife pray to Odin to protect him. Odin hides the son in a field of wheat, but the thurs finds him. Odin rescues the son and takes him back to the farmer and his wife, saying that he is done hiding the son. The couple then prays to Hoenir, who hides the son in the neck-feathers of a swan, but again the Thurs finds him. On the third day, they pray to Loki, who hides the son amidst the eggs of a flounder. The thurs finds the flounder, but Loki instructs the boy to run into a boathouse. The giant gets his head caught in a peephole (the translation is not complete, but it appears to be a peephole) and Loki kills him by chopping off his leg and inserting a stick and a stone in the leg stump to prevent the thurs from regenerating. He takes the boy home, and the farmer and his wife embrace both of them.

Other spellings

• Common Danish, Swedish and Norwegian form: Loke

External links

• Our Troth chapter on Loki
• Loki - A Paean in Progress
• The Baldr Myth
• An essay on Loki

Referenced By