Loki

This page is about the Norse god Loki. For other uses of the word see Loki (disambiguation).

This picture, from an 18th century Icelandic manuscript, shows Loki with his invention - the fishing net.

Loki Laufeyjarson is the god of mischief in Norse mythology, a son of Fárbauti and Laufey. He is described as the "contriver of all fraud". Loki is in a sense both a god and a Jotun (comparable to the Titans and Gigantes of Greek mythology). He mixed freely with the gods for a long time, even becoming Odin's blood brother. The composer Richard Wagner presented Loki under an invented Germanized name Loge in his operas Das Rheingold and Die Walküre.

Character

The trickster god is a complex character, a master of guile and deception. Loki was not so much a figure of unmitigated badness as a kind of celestial con man, 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. Others compare him to Hermes, who tricked Apollo and also often broke boundaries. Loki can at times be reminiscent of the Chinese Monkey King whose persona in myth underwent changes over the centuries.

Loki is an adept shape-shifter, with the ability to change both form (examples include transmogrification to a salmon, horse, bird, flea, etc.) and sex. According to some scholarly theories Loki is conceived of as a fire spirit, with all the potential for good and ill associated with fire. However, this view is probably due to linguistic confusion with logi "fire", as there is little indication of it in myth where Loki's role is predominantly associated with Odin, either as Odin's wily counterpart or antagonist. Ström (1956) identifies the two gods to the point of calling Loki "a hypostasis of Odin", and Rübekeil (2003) suggests that the two gods were originally identical, deriving from Celtic Lugus (the name of which would be continued in Loki).

Most gods seem to be very much rooted in their day to day routines. All gods follow a strict pattern of behaviour. Thor kills trolls, Odin learns, Heimdall guards day and night, and so forth. But Loki is unique. Loki is the only god that thinks. He always gets gods into trouble and then again he gets them out out trouble. He is not an evil god, and perhaps not really a trickster. His nature is to experiment new things, just for the fun of it. He makes great mistakes like the great serpent or Fenris, but he also gives gods their precious possesions: Thor's hammer, the Skidbladnir, etc. Loki may mean technology, invention. Loki blindly seeks out things that may prove deadly or rewarding. As opposite to Odin which means wisdom, sacrifice, prudence and even stagnation. Loki is unique because he is both evil and good. His misdeeds or good deeds are never planned, but end up bad or good. It must be noted that without Loki most stories cannot be told as he figures in most of them as the reason the story started in the first place. He's unpredictable and original.

Children

File:IdunandlokibyJohnBauer.jpg

Iðunn and Loki, by John Bauer

Loki was the father (and in few instances the mother) of many creatures, men and monsters.

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 Angrboda, he had three children:

Jörmungandr, 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.

While he was in the form of a mare Loki also gave birth to Sleipnir, the eight-legged steed of Odin.

Scheming with fellow gods

Loki occasionally works with the other gods. For example, he tricked the unnamed hrimthurs who built the walls around Asgard, out of being paid for his work by distracting his horse while 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 Iðunn. Finally, in Þrymskviða, Loki manages, with Thor at his side, to get Mjolnir back when the giant Thrym secretly steals it, in order to ask for fair Freya as a bride, in exchange.

Slayer of Baldr

Loki may have overplayed his hand when, disguised as a giantess, he arranged the murder of Baldr (he used mistletoe, the only plant which had not sworn to never harm Baldr, and made a dart of it, which he tricked Baldr's blind brother Höðr into throwing at Baldr, thereby killing him), 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 Baldr's death.

The gods, bereft at the loss of Baldr, travelled to the underworld to bargain for Baldr's life; there, Hel told them that the only way to ensure the god's return was to have everything in the world weep for him. The gods went through the land, and convinced not only men, women and animals to weep for Baldr, but also rocks and trees. Finally, they arrived at a cave in which a giantess dwelled. The gods were unable to convince her to cry for Baldr, and so he remained in the underworld.

When the gods discovered that the giantess had been Loki in disguise, they hunted him down and he was forced to flee. He hid by night as a salmon beneath a waterfall, and by day, perhaps trying to anticipate how the gods might catch him, he idly wove nets and burnt them. One day the gods found his fireplace at night, and found a net in the fire. From its design they created another, which they used to catch Loki. This may be both the first example of reverse engineering in mythic history, and the origin of the fish net.

The gods bound him to three rocks with the entrails of either his son Fenrisulfr or Vali. 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 along with the other giants and his monster children.

Friend to man

Not all lore depicts Loki as a malevolent being. An 18th century ballad (that may have drawn from a much earlier source) 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 Hœnir, 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
Nynorsk - Norwegian form: Lokkje
German form: Lohho

References

Folke Ström, Loki. Ein mythologisches Problem, Göteborg (1956).
Ludwi Rübekeil, Wodan und andere forschungsgeschichtliche Leichen: exhumiert, Beiträge zur Namenforschung 38 (2003), 25–42.

External links

Loki is also known as the abbreviated name of the town Lokichokio situated in the northwestern part of Kenya.