Here is the strange thing about Loki. He is the only figure in Norse myth who is Odin’s sworn blood-brother, the gods’ favorite problem-solver, the mother of the best horse in the world, and, at the end of everything, the one who sails against the gods. He does all of this in the same set of stories, and nobody who wrote those stories down ever stopped to explain him.
That is the fun of him, and it is also why people have argued about him for nearly two hundred years. This post is the starting point for the whole series: who Loki is in the sources, who his family is, what his name might mean, and what archaeology can (and cannot) tell us. I will keep the line between “the texts say” and “scholars guess” sharp, because with Loki it matters.
Where we actually meet Loki
Almost everything we know comes from Iceland, and almost all of it was written down after the Viking Age had ended. The two big sources are the Poetic Edda, a collection of anonymous poems whose main manuscript, the Codex Regius, was written in the 1270s, and the Prose Edda, a textbook for poets that the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson wrote or compiled around 1220. Loki turns up in both. In the Poetic Edda he stars in Lokasenna (“Loki’s Quarrel”) and Þrymskviða (the story of Thor’s stolen hammer) and appears in Völuspá, Baldrs draumar and a few other poems. In the Prose Edda he shows up in Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál.
There is older evidence too. The skald Þjóðólfr of Hvinir composed Haustlöng around the year 900, describing scenes painted on a shield, and one of them is Loki’s disastrous encounter with the giant Þjazi. There are also the Norwegian Rune Poem, a few other skaldic verses, and the carved stones below. What is striking is that Loki is always a figure in stories. As far as I can find, no source describes anyone praying or sacrificing to him, and standard overviews say he was unlikely to have been venerated.
The next post, Loki in the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, goes through them one at a time.
What does “Loki” even mean?
Nobody knows for sure, which is a good place to be honest about. For a long time the popular answer was that Loki is connected to Old Norse logi, “flame”, which made him a fire god. That idea goes back to Jacob Grimm in 1835, but it has not held up: modern summaries note that there is no sound linguistic basis for linking the two names.
The better-supported view starts from the later Scandinavian forms of the name, such as Danish Loke and Faroese Lokki, which point to a Germanic root *luk-, connected to loops, knots, hooks and things that lock. Swedish and Faroese words for cobweb (lockanät, lokkanet) literally mean “Loki’s net”. The scholar Eldar Heide has argued that in premodern thinking Loki was the causer of tangles, a “tangler”, which would fit the myth in which Loki invents the fishing net. It is a hypothesis, but it has the most going for it.
Loki also has a second name, Loptr, which most likely comes from lopt, “air”. Another name, Hveðrungr, appears in poetry and is also used for members of his family.
The family tree
This is the part of the guide where it helps to take notes. Snorri introduces Loki in Gylfaginning, chapter 33, and the paragraph is worth quoting in full, because it is the closest thing we have to an official character sheet:
Also numbered among the Æsir is he whom some call the mischief-monger of the Æsir, and the first father of falsehoods, and blemish of all gods and men: he is named Loki or Loptr, son of Fárbauti the giant; his mother was Laufey or Nál; his brothers are Býleistr and Helblindi. Loki is beautiful and comely to look upon, evil in spirit, very fickle in habit.
Gylfaginning 33, trans. Arthur G. Brodeur (1916)
Note the detail that surprises people who know Loki from the movies: his father is the giant Fárbauti, and his mother is Laufey. That is why Skáldskaparmál can call him “Loki Laufeyarson”, Laufey’s son. Marvel’s Loki Laufeyson, whose father is a Frost Giant king named Laufey, borrowed the name but swapped the parent. We will come back to that in the Marvel Comics and MCU posts.
His marriages and children go like this:
- Sigyn, his wife, who is the loyal one. They have a son named Nari or Narfi (Snorri calls him both).
- Angrboða, a giantess in Jötunheim, whose name means something like “she who offers grief” (some scholars think the name is a late invention). Together they have three children: the wolf Fenrir, the world serpent Jörmungandr, and Hel, ruler of the dead.
- Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse, whom Loki bore after taking the form of a mare.
- Váli, a second son whom the gods turn into a wolf in the story of Loki’s punishment.
I will take the monster children and the horse in their own post, Fenrir, Jörmungandr, Hel and Sleipnir, and the binding story in The Death of Baldr. For now, just notice how odd the family is. One of his brothers’ names, Helblindi, turns up in Grímnismál‘s long list of Odin’s names, which is the kind of detail that makes scholars wonder how tangled up Loki and Odin really are.
Odin’s blood-brother
The relationship that matters most in the sources is with Odin. In Lokasenna, when Loki barges into Ægir’s feast and is told he is not welcome, he does not appeal to hospitality. He appeals to a promise:
Remember, Othin, in olden days
Lokasenna 9, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (Wikisource edition, dated 1923)
That we both our blood have mixed;
Then didst thou promise no ale to pour,
Unless it were brought for us both.
Odin gives way at once and tells Víðarr to pour Loki a drink. Bellows notes that there is no other account of this blood-brotherhood, so the stanza is all we have, but it explains why the gods tolerate Loki. In the Skáldskaparmál story and in Þjóðólfr’s Haustlöng, the travelers who run into trouble with Þjazi are Odin, Loki and Hœnir, and it is Loki, naturally, who makes the mistake. The drawing below is an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript drawing of exactly that trio.
Image: Odin, Loki and Hœnir, from the Icelandic manuscript SÁM 66 (1765–66) by Jakob Sigurðsson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Snorri’s handbook for poets adds a list of the ways a skald could refer to Loki in a verse. It reads like a rap sheet: “Evil Companion and Bench-Mate of Odin and the Æsir”, “Thief of the Giants”, “Harmer of Sif’s Hair”, “Contriver of Baldr’s Death”, “the Bound God” (Skáldskaparmál, trans. Brodeur).
The trickster who fixes his own messes
Snorri sums up Loki’s job in one sentence: “he would ever bring the Æsir into great hardships, and then get them out with crafty counsel.” Three stories show the pattern.
Þjazi and Iðunn
In Skáldskaparmál, Odin, Loki and Hœnir are wandering in the mountains, hungry, and cook an ox that will not cook. An eagle in the oak above them says he is the cause and offers to fix it if he gets his fill of the meat. He takes both hams and both shoulders. Loki, angry, drives a pole at the eagle, and the pole sticks to the bird’s back and Loki’s hands stick to the other end. The eagle, who is the giant Þjazi, drags him over the rocks until Loki promises to lure the goddess Iðunn and her apples out of Asgard. He does it with a story about finding better apples in a wood. Without the apples the Æsir grow “hoary and old”, so the gods threaten Loki with death until he borrows Freyja’s hawk-plumage, flies to Jötunheim, turns Iðunn into a nut and carries her home with Þjazi in pursuit. The gods set fire to wood shavings on the wall, the eagle’s feathers catch, and Þjazi dies. Loki caused the crisis, and Loki ended it.
Image: “Þjazi carries Loki away” (published 1906) by Lorenz Frølich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sif’s hair and the wager
In another story, Loki cuts off all of Sif’s hair “for mischief’s sake”. Thor would have broken every bone in him, so Loki swears to get new hair made out of gold, and goes to the dwarfs known as the sons of Ívaldi. They make the hair, and also the ship Skíðblaðnir and the spear Gungnir. Then Loki bets his head with the dwarf Brokkr that Brokkr’s brother Sindri cannot make three more treasures as good. Sindri makes the golden boar Gullinbursti, the ring Draupnir and the hammer Mjöllnir, while a fly keeps biting Brokkr to spoil the work (Snorri does not say who the fly is, but it is usually read as Loki). The gods judge the hammer the best, and Loki loses. When Brokkr comes for his head, Loki points out he promised the head, not the neck, and the dwarf has to settle for sewing Loki’s lips shut with his brother’s awl. Thor’s hammer exists because Loki was a nuisance.
Thor in a wedding dress
In Þrymskviða, the giant Þrymr steals Thor’s hammer and demands Freyja as his wife. Loki borrows Freyja’s feather-cloak, flies to Jötunheim, comes back with the ransom terms, and then cheerfully dresses as Thor’s bridesmaid so the two of them can get the hammer back at the wedding. When Thor balks at the bridal dress, Loki says, more or less, be quiet or the giants will move into Asgard. It is easily the funniest of the Eddic poems, and Loki is the hero of it.
A god, a giant, or something else?
The Loki in these stories sits oddly between categories. He is counted among the Æsir, yet his parents are giants. He is a shapeshifter like several other gods, but he takes more shapes: a salmon, a fly, a mare, and possibly the old woman Þökk in the Baldr story. Scholars have been trying to place him for a long time. Gabriel Turville-Petre wrote in 1964 that “more ink has been spilled on Loki than on any other figure in Norse myth”, which shows “how little scholars agree”.
A short, not exhaustive list of the major theories, as they are usually summarized:
- Jacob Grimm (1835) thought of Loki as a god of fire.
- Folke Ström (1956) argued that Loki is a kind of aspect of Odin, a “hypostasis” of him.
- Jan de Vries (1959) read him as a classic trickster figure.
- Anna Birgitta Rooth (1961) argued that the original Loki was a spider
- John Lindow points out that Loki, Fenrir and Jörmungandr are all dangerous beings who live with the gods for a while, get bound or cast out, and are destined to break loose at the end of the world. Lindow treats this as a recurring “bound monster” pattern.
My own reading, for what it is worth: the sources stack up over centuries for different audiences. The Loki of Haustlöng is a hapless companion, the Loki of Lokasenna a tormenter, the Loki of Gylfaginning a villain. They may not all be the same person.
What the carved stones say
A few objects might show Loki as people in the Viking Age imagined him, and each comes with a caveat.
- The Snaptun Stone. Found in 1950 on a beach near Snaptun, Denmark, this is a soapstone slab carved around the year 1000 with a mustachioed face whose lips are scarred. It was a hearth stone, used to protect a bellows from the fire. The face is usually identified as Loki because of the Skáldskaparmál episode in which Brokkr’s awl pierces Loki’s lips to sew his mouth shut after the wager. It is now at the Moesgaard Museum near Aarhus. This is a good identification, but it is still an interpretation.
- The Kirkby Stephen “Loki Stone”. A fragment of a late 10th-century cross in Cumbria, England, found in 1870, shows a bound, horned, bearded figure. It is “sometimes theorized” to be the bound Loki. A similar figure from Gainford is kept at Durham.
- The Gosforth Cross. This mid-11th-century cross, also in Cumbria, has a panel that has been read as Sigyn, kneeling and holding a vessel over a bound figure with a knotted serpent above. Another interpretation, but a nice one: a sculptor in Viking-age England seems to have known the story of the venom and the bowl.
Image: The “Loki Stone” at St Stephen’s Church, Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria (a late 10th-century carving; photo 2024) by Simon Burchell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
One last thing I find delightful: Loki outlived the religion. In Denmark he became Lokke, and the folklorist Axel Olrik collected Jutland sayings such as “Lokke is reaping his oats”, which describe the shimmer of heated air over a spring field. In the late medieval Faroese ballad Loka Táttur, Loki, Odin and Hœnir help a farmer and his boy escape a giant who won a bet, and Loki is on the side of the good guys.
Where to go next
Pick your next stop:
- Loki in the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, for what the primary sources actually say and when they were written.
- The Death of Baldr, the story that turns Loki from a nuisance into the gods’ enemy.
- Fenrir, Jörmungandr, Hel and Sleipnir, Loki’s remarkable children.
- Loki and Ragnarök, the end of the world and his part in it.