Loki

• 1. Introduction

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  Loki is a god in Norse mythology whose identity has been debated by scholars more than any other figure in the Norse pantheon. A völva prophecies in the Poetic Edda poem Baldrs draumar that no one will visit until "Loki is loose, escaped from his bonds" and the age of Ragnarök is upon the world. That single image captures what makes Loki so strange among the gods: he is simultaneously one of them and something altogether more dangerous, bound beneath the earth, waiting. He is the father of monsters, the architect of catastrophe, the god who engineers the death of the beloved Baldr. And yet he is also the figure who rescues Thor's stolen hammer, who saves the gods from a ruinous bargain, who brings Sleipnir the eight-legged horse into existence. How does a single being contain all of that? That is the question at the heart of this documentary.

• 2. A God Between Worlds

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  High, the enthroned figure in the Prose Edda's Gylfaginning, introduces Loki in chapter 34 as one "reckoned among the Æsir" while also carrying the title "the Æsir's calumniator", "originator of deceits", and "the disgrace of all gods and men". High describes him as "pleasing and handsome" in appearance, malicious in character, and "very capricious in behaviour". No other Æsir god receives a summary like that one.

  Loki's parentage is itself a statement of in-between-ness. His father Fárbauti is a jötunn, a giant, while his mother Laufey is described as a goddess. His brothers, Helblindi and Býleistr, appear almost nowhere else in the mythology; they exist mainly to give Loki a set of family names he is called by in the poems. When Loki refers to himself in Lokasenna as "the son of Laufey", he is using his mother's name, not his father's, which is unusual for Norse naming customs and signals something deliberate about which side of his heritage he wants to foreground.

  His children deepen the paradox. By the goddess Sigyn he has two sons, Narfi or Nari and Váli. By the jötunn Angrboða, who lived in Jötunheimr, he fathers Hel, who presides over the realm of the dead; the wolf Fenrir; and the world serpent Jörmungandr. The gods, upon learning that these three were being raised in Jötunheimr, expected trouble from them "partially due to the nature of Angrboða, but worse yet Loki". And as a mare, Loki was impregnated by the stallion Svaðilfari and gave birth to the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, described in Gylfaginning as "the best horse among gods and men".

• 3. The Name and Its Roots

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  The etymology of the name Loki has been extensively debated without a firm consensus. The obvious candidate, the Old Norse word logi meaning "flame", is tempting but scholars have found no sound linguistic basis for it. A more convincing trail leads to the Germanic root luk-, which denoted things connected with loops, knots, hooks, closed-off rooms, and locks.

  The later Scandinavian variants of the name, including Loke, Lokki, Lokke, Locke, Luki, and Luku, all point toward that root. This fits a pattern of real folk usage: Swedish lockanät and Faroese lokkanet both mean "cobweb", literally "Lokke's web", and modern Swedish lockespindlar means "Locke-spiders". The web-maker, the knotter, the layer of traps. Scholars have noted that this identity as a "tangler" is consistent with Loki being the inventor of the fishnet, which consists precisely of loops and knots.

  Loki also goes by the byname Loptr, generally derived from Old Norse lopt meaning "air", which appears in the Poetic Edda poems Lokasenna, Hyndluljóð, and Fjölsvinnsmál as well as in sections of the Prose Edda. Another byname, Hveðrungr, meaning roughly "roarer", appears in names for Hel and in reference to Fenrir in Völuspá. A single god with a name pointing to loops and locks, a second name pointing to air, and a third pointing to roaring: the etymology itself refuses to settle.

• 4. Flyting at Ægir's Hall

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  The poem Lokasenna, whose title translates as "Loki's Flyting", opens with Loki killing the servant Fimafeng at a feast hosted by Ægir, a figure associated with the sea. The gods grab their shields, chase Loki into the woods, and then return to drinking. Loki comes back, meets the servant Eldir outside the hall, and announces that he will enter the feast and "mix their mead with malice". Eldir warns him that whatever fighting he brings in, the gods will wipe it off on him. Loki enters anyway.

  What follows is a systematic assault on the reputation of nearly every deity present. Loki accuses Bragi of cowardice, telling him he is brave only when seated and earns the title "bench-ornament". He tells Iðunn she placed her arms around her brother's slayer. He charges Gefjun with letting herself be seduced by a "white boy" who gave her a jewel. He accuses Odin of handing victory to the faint-hearted, and Odin responds by claiming that Loki once spent eight winters beneath the earth as a woman milking cows and bearing children. Loki counters that Odin practiced seiðr sorcery on the island of Samsey, appearing as a wizard among mankind. Frigg is accused of once taking Odin's brothers Vili and Vé into her embrace.

  The flyting keeps escalating. Loki accuses every goddess present of sexual misconduct and every god of some failing in courage or honesty. When Skaði warns him that he will soon be bound with his "ice-cold son's guts on a sharp rock", Loki responds by claiming he was "first and foremost" among those who killed Skaði's father Þjazi. It is only Thor's arrival, hammer Mjöllnir in hand and threatening to smash Loki's head from his shoulders, that ends the contest. Loki gives Thor the last word, acknowledging that Thor alone actually strikes.

• 5. The Trickster at Work

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  Þrymskviða shows Loki operating at his most useful. Thor wakes to find Mjöllnir missing. He goes to Loki first, because as Gylfaginning confirms, Loki is both the most reliable source of trouble and the most reliable finder of solutions. Loki borrows Freyja's feather cloak, flies to Jötunheimr, and locates the jötunn Þrymr, who is sitting on a burial mound plaiting golden collars for his dogs and admits to having hidden the hammer eight leagues beneath the earth. Þrymr will return it only if Freyja is brought to marry him.

  Freyja refuses with such fury that the necklace Brísingamen falls from her neck as the halls tremble. At the gods' assembly, it is Heimdallr who proposes that Thor dress as the bride, and it is Loki who makes the case stick: without Mjöllnir, the jötnar will invade Asgard. Loki then volunteers to go along as Thor's maid.

  In Jötunheimr, Thor consumes entire animals and three casks of mead. Þrymr is baffled by the "bride's" appetite. Loki, sitting before Þrymr and described as "a very shrewd maid", explains that "Freyja" has not eaten or slept in eight days from eagerness to arrive. When Þrymr tries to kiss the bride and recoils from the burning eyes staring back, Loki says the same: eight sleepless nights from longing. The scheme works exactly as planned. Mjöllnir is produced to sanctify the bride; Thor seizes it and kills Þrymr and every jötunn in the hall.

  In Reginsmál, Loki serves a different function: catalyst of larger tragedy. Traveling with Odin and Hœnir, Loki kills an otter with a stone, not knowing the creature is Ótr, son of Hreidmar, in disguise. The gods are captured and must ransom their lives by filling the otter's skin with gold. Loki borrows a net from the goddess Rán, catches the dwarf Andvari in the form of a pike, and takes all his gold, including the ring Andvarinaut. Andvari curses the gold as he hands it over, predicting it will cause the death of two brothers and strife between eight princes. Loki acknowledges the curse aloud as the gold is handed to Hreidmar, setting the chain of events toward future catastrophe.

• 6. The Death of Baldr and Its Price

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  Loki engineers the death of Baldr, described by the sources as the most beloved of the gods. The Prose Edda makes clear that Loki himself reminds Frigg of this in Lokasenna, and in Baldrs draumar the link between Loki's freedom and the onset of Ragnarök is drawn explicitly.

  The punishment that follows is designed to match the crime in intimacy and cruelty. Odin fathers a son, Váli, specifically to carry out the binding. The prose narrative following Lokasenna details that Loki is bound with the entrails of his own son Nari, while his other son Narfi is transformed into a wolf. Skaði, who had warned Loki in the flyting that this day would come, is responsible for fastening a venomous serpent above his face so that it drips venom down onto him. Sigyn, his wife, sits beside him holding a basin to catch the poison. When the basin fills she must carry it away to empty it, and during those moments the venom falls directly onto Loki, causing him to writhe with such violence that the earth shakes. The myth attributes earthquakes to this cause.

  The image of Sigyn holding her bowl appears in Völuspá stanza 35, where the völva sees her sitting "very unhappily" with her bound husband "under a grove of hot springs". The Gosforth Cross, dated to the mid-11th century and located in Cumbria, England, has been interpreted as depicting precisely this scene: a long-haired kneeling female figure holding an object above a prone, bound figure, with a knotted serpent above them.

• 7. Stone, Cross, and Folklore

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  In 1950, a semi-circular flat soapstone discovered on a beach near Snaptun, Denmark turned out to be a hearth stone carved around the year 1000 CE. It shows a mustachioed face with scarred lips. Hans Jørgen Madsen called it "the most beautifully made hearth-stone that is known". The identification as Loki rests on the scarred lips, which point to a story in the Prose Edda's Skáldskaparmál where the sons of Ivaldi stitch Loki's lips shut as a forfeit in a wager. The stone is now housed at the Moesgård Museum near Aarhus, Denmark.

  A fragmentary cross at St Stephen's Church in Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria, discovered in 1870 and made of yellowish-white sandstone, shows a horned, bearded, bound figure sometimes identified as Loki. A similarly horned figure found at Gainford in County Durham is now in the Durham Cathedral Library. These are tentative identifications, but the recurring motif of a bound horned figure in the Norse Christian border lands hints at how the mythology seeped into the material culture of the Viking diaspora.

  Far later and further north, Loki survived in Scandinavian folk memory in forms almost unrecognizable from the Eddic sources. Danish folklorist Axel Olrik, drawing on records from the beginning of the 20th century, catalogued three major themes in these folk traditions: Loki as an "air phenomenon", Loki connected with the "home fire", and Loki as a "teasing creature of the night". In Jutland, the shimmering heat-haze visible over flat spring landscapes was called "Lokke slår sin havre" ("Lokke is reaping his oats"), or "Lokkemand drives his goats". The Faroese ballad Loka Táttur, dating to the late Middle Ages, presents a Loki who helps a farmer and a boy escape a bet-winning jötunn, a figure sly but genuinely protective.

• 8. Scholars, Opera, and the Sea

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  Scholar Gabriel Turville-Petre wrote in 1964 that "more ink has been spilled on Loki than on any other figure in Norse myth", adding that this "in itself, is enough to show how little scholars agree, and how far we are from understanding him". The major theories span from Jacob Grimm's 1835 argument that Loki is a god of fire, to Sophus Bugge's 1889 claim that Loki is a variant of Lucifer, to Folke Ström's 1956 conclusion that Loki is a hypostasis of Odin, to Jan de Vries's 1959 reading of him as a classic trickster figure. Anna Birgitta Rooth concluded in 1961, by excluding all non-Scandinavian parallels, that Loki was originally a spider. Anne Holtsmark, writing in 1962, concluded that no conclusion could be made at all.

  Richard Wagner placed a version of Loki, named Loge from Old Norse loge meaning "fire", at the center of his opera cycle Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner's Loge is Wotan's assistant, an ally who privately dislikes the gods and considers them greedy. At the conclusion of Das Rheingold, Loge reveals his hope to turn into fire and burn Valhalla. By the final opera, Götterdämmerung, Valhalla is indeed set alight.

  In 2008, five black smokers discovered between Greenland and Norway became the most northerly hydrothermal vent field yet found. The discoverers named the formation Loki's Castle because its shape recalled a fantasy castle, and a University of Bergen press release noted that "Loki" was "an appropriate name for a field that was so difficult to locate". A mythological trickster, bound under the earth for engineering the death of a god, his name now attached to a structure that sits on the seabed in conditions almost impossible for most life to survive.