The Binding of Loki

By the time the gods came for him, Loki knew there was no talking his way out. He had guided the mistletoe dart that killed Baldr, watched the one giantess who could have undone that death — Þökk, who was almost certainly Loki himself in disguise — refuse to weep for him, and then, astonishingly, gone back to Ægir's hall and read every god present their crimes to their faces before Thor's hammer finally silenced him. That was the last patience the Æsir had. Loki ran.

He built himself a house on a mountainside with doors facing in all four directions, so he could watch for pursuers from any approach, and spent his days, when the gods drew near, as a salmon hiding in the falls of Fránangr. It was in that house, idle by the fire with nothing better to do, that he made his fatal mistake: he invented the fishing net, twisting and knotting cord into the pattern that would one day be used against every fish in the sea. When he spotted the gods approaching, he burned the net in the fire and dove into the river as a salmon — but he burned it a beat too late. Among the gods hunting him was Kvasir, in this telling the wisest of the Æsir, and Kvasir read the shape of the net in its own ashes, unburned enough to reconstruct. His own cleverness, reverse-engineered by someone cleverer, is what finally caught him: netted on the third pass after two escapes, gripped at last by Thor's bare hand at the tail — which the myth offers as the reason a salmon's body narrows so sharply just above the fin.

Why was Loki bound?

There is no trial, no formal charge read aloud, no council weighing his guilt — after Baldr's death and the insults at Ægir's feast, judgment was already decided before the net closed on him. The gods dragged him to a cave and made the punishment as total as the crime. They took his own two sons by Sigyn, Váli and Narfi, and turned Váli into a wolf, who tore his brother Narfi apart. Narfi's entrails were then hardened into iron chains, and with his own child's body the gods bound Loki across three flat stones — one beneath his shoulders, one beneath his loins, one beneath his knees — pinned so completely he cannot move at all.

Above his face, Skaði — whose father Þjazi had died at the gods' hands and who had married into Asgard on the promise of vengeance never fully paid — fixed a venomous serpent, positioned so its poison drips continuously onto him. It is the one act in the whole punishment credited to a name, and Skaði's choice to add this final cruelty herself reads as a settling of her family's older accounts alongside the gods'. Only one figure stays by him through it: Sigyn, his wife, kneels at his side holding a bowl above his face to catch the venom before it falls. But the bowl is not bottomless. When it fills, she must turn away to empty it, and in that gap the poison strikes Loki directly — and his convulsions, the myth says, are what men on the surface of the earth feel as earthquakes.

What happens to Loki at Ragnarök?

Nothing about this binding is offered as justice restored or a wrong made right; it is simply what was left once justice stopped being the point and vengeance took over. Völuspá, reciting the whole doomed sequence of history toward its end, lists the bound god among the fixed sights along the road to the world's final battle — his suffering is not a resolution but one more scheduled stop before Ragnarök. The sources agree that Loki lies chained until that day arrives and, in most tellings, breaks free exactly when the world starts to end: he steers the ship Naglfar, crewed with the dead of Hel, to the battlefield, and meets Heimdallr there, where the two kill each other — closing, at last, the circle that opened the moment he cut a sprig of mistletoe and put it in blind Höðr's hand.

In the primary sources

The fullest narrative — the burned net, Kvasir's reconstruction, the salmon chase, the cave, Narfi and Váli, Skaði's serpent, and Sigyn's bowl — comes from Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning in the Prose Edda, told as the direct aftermath of the death of Baldr. The Poetic Edda corroborates the outline in two places: the prose passage appended to the end of Lokasenna describes the binding in terms close to Snorri's, confirming it circulated before Snorri wrote, and Völuspá references the bound figure and the earthquakes from his writhing as part of its longer prophecy of the end of the world. Between the two, the binding sits as one of the best-attested punishments in the mythology, cited by both the poets and the prose mythographer as settled fact rather than invention.