Narfi and Váli Lokason

When the gods finally hunted Loki down after Baldr's death, mere binding was not sentence enough. They took his two sons by Sigyn and turned Váli into a wolf; the wolf tore his brother Narfi apart, and the gods bound Loki with his own son's entrails, which hardened into iron. Punishment, in the mythology's endgame, has stopped observing rules the gods once kept.

The brothers exist only for this scene, and that is the horror of it: two names invented to die, so the myth can weigh what the gods became on the road to Ragnarök. Sigyn — their mother — stays in the cave anyway, holding the bowl over the man chained in her child.

The hunt for Loki

The scene belongs to the mythology's darkest sequence, set in motion by the death of Baldr. After Loki engineers Baldr's killing and then, in Lokasenna, gate-crashes Ægir's feast to insult every god and goddess in turn, the prose that closes that poem tells what happens next: Loki flees, builds a house on a mountain with doors facing every direction so he can watch for pursuit, and by day takes the shape of a salmon to hide in a waterfall called Fránangr. The gods track him anyway. Loki is caught in his own net — invented, in one of the myth's bitterest ironies, to prove that no snare could hold a salmon, and then used against him — and dragged to a cave to be bound for the rest of the mythological timeline, until Ragnarök breaks his chains.

The binding

It is at this point that Narfi and Váli enter the story, and their entire recorded existence is contained in a single sentence of Snorri's prose. The gods, wanting bonds strong enough to hold their prisoner until the end of the world, took Loki's two sons by his wife Sigyn and transformed Váli into a wolf. The wolf then killed and tore apart his own brother Narfi, and the gods used Narfi's entrails as rope, binding Loki across three stone slabs — the cords turning to iron the moment they touched him. Snorri notes the gods did this deliberately, as though the horror of the material mattered as much as its strength: this is not a punishment worked with ordinary chains but one built from the prisoner's own family, and inflicted by making one son the murder weapon against the other.

Sigyn stays beside her bound husband afterward, holding a bowl above his face to catch the venom a serpent drips there, only leaving to empty it — and when she does, the venom that falls on Loki in her absence makes him writhe so violently the earth shakes. The tableau of grief is complete: a mother who has just lost both sons in one act stays anyway, at the side of the man responsible for the whole catastrophe.

Two names, one purpose

Nothing else is told about either brother — no personality, no earlier appearance, no life before this scene. Some manuscripts even vary the name of the victim between Nari and Narfi, suggesting the tradition itself was not entirely settled on the details. That thinness is, in a sense, the point critics and readers keep returning to: these are figures invented, seemingly, purely to be destroyed, so that the myth can dramatize how far the gods are willing to go once their patience with Loki runs out. Earlier punishments in the mythology — even Loki's own earlier scrapes, like Brokkr sewing his lips shut — carry a note of comeuppance-as-comedy. This one has none. It is staged with the same cold formality the gods later show when binding Fenrir with Gleipnir: a captive tricked or overpowered, then held by something that should not exist.

A second Váli — and a real point of confusion

Careful readers of the mythology run into a genuine puzzle here: there is another, entirely different Váli in the sources — the son Odin fathers on the giantess Rindr for the sole purpose of avenging Baldr, who grows to full size in a single day and kills blind Höðr. That Váli is one of the surviving gods named in Ragnarök's aftermath. This Váli — Loki's son, turned wolf, killer of his own brother — shares nothing with the avenger but a name. The coincidence has long struck scholars as curious: two figures called Váli, both entangled in the consequences of Baldr's death, one an instrument of vengeance and the other an instrument of punishment, appearing within the same short stretch of mythological narrative. Whether this reflects a single figure split by a confused tradition, a deliberate echo, or simple coincidence in a culture with a limited stock of names, no source says — it remains one more thread the sources leave frayed.

In the primary sources

Gylfaginning, in Snorri's Prose Edda, gives the fullest version: the transformation of Váli into a wolf, the killing of Narfi, and the binding of Loki with the entrails. The prose epilogue to Lokasenna in the Poetic Edda gives a shorter, earlier account of the same events, naming the sons (as Nari or Narfi and Áli or Váli in different manuscripts) and confirming the essential shape of the punishment, though with less detail than Snorri supplies. No skaldic verse or independent saga tradition adds anything further; the brothers' entire existence is bounded by these two closely related prose accounts.