Loki

Loki is neither fully god nor fully giant, and never fully anything. Son of the jötunn Fárbauti, he lives among the Æsir as Odin's sworn blood-brother, and for much of the mythology he is the engine of the plots: he causes the problem, and his cleverness solves it. It is Loki's scheming that wins the gods Mjölnir, Gungnir, Skíðblaðnir, Draupnir, and Sif's golden hair; Loki who, as a mare, gives birth to Odin's horse Sleipnir.

But his brood with the giantess Angrboða — the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Jörmungandr, and half-dead Hel — are the monsters of Ragnarök. The turning point is the death of Baldr: Loki guides blind Höðr's hand to kill the shining god with mistletoe, then prevents his release from Hel. For this the gods bind him in a cave with the entrails of his own son, a serpent dripping venom onto his face; his wife Sigyn holds a bowl over him, and when she empties it his writhing shakes the earth.

Neither god nor giant

Loki's parentage runs backwards. Everywhere else in the mythology, a god takes a giantess; Loki is the child of the giant Fárbauti ("Cruel-striker") and a mother, Laufey or Nál, who seems to belong to the gods' side — which is why, uniquely, he carries his mother's name: Loki Laufeyjarson. He has a giant's blood, a place at the gods' table, and no fixed loyalty to either. Snorri introduces him in Gylfaginning with a shrug of wonder: handsome to look at, evil in temper, very changeable in his ways, possessing beyond others the kind of cunning called sly, "and he brought the Æsir into great trouble, and often got them out of it with his tricks."

His bond with Odin is old and binding. In Lokasenna Loki forces his way into the gods' feast by reminding Odin of it: in the dawn of days they blended blood together, and Odin swore never to drink ale unless it was brought to them both. Odin, the god of oaths and their loopholes, orders a place made for him. Whatever Loki is to the other gods, to Odin he is a debt that cannot be repudiated — and scholars have long suspected the two travelled together in more lost myths than the surviving ones show.

The problem-solver

For the first long stretch of mythic time, Loki's mischief pays the gods dividends. When he crops Sif's hair, his repair job ends with the dwarves forging the six great treasures, Mjölnir among them — the arms race that equips Asgard is Loki's fault twice over (see the tale of the ring Andvaranaut for how his improvisations run darker among mortals). When a master-builder offers to raise Asgard's wall in exchange for the sun, the moon, and Freyja, it is Loki's counsel that accepts the wager — and Loki, transformed into a mare, who lures away the builder's stallion Svaðilfari when the work runs dangerously on schedule. Some months later Loki returns with a foal: eight-legged Sleipnir, the best of horses, which he gives to Odin. No other myth in world literature makes its trickster the literal mother of the king's warhorse.

When the giant Þjazi extorts him into luring Iðunn and her apples out of Asgard, the greying gods force Loki to undo it, and he does — flying to Jötunheimr in Freyja's falcon cloak Valshamr, carrying Iðunn home as a nut with the eagle-giant burning behind him. When Þrymr steals Thor's hammer, Loki manages the whole bridal charade in Þrymskviða, improvising cover for Thor's appetite and blazing eyes. The pattern is exact: Loki digs the pit, Loki builds the ladder, and the gods keep him because the ladders keep working.

Why did Loki kill Baldr?

The sources give no motive, and the absence is the abyss at the centre of the mythology. Snorri says only that when the gods made a game of hurling weapons at the invulnerable Baldr, "it vexed Loki." He went to Frigg disguised as an old woman, teased out the one exemption — the young mistletoe, thought too small for an oath — and cut the sprig. He did not throw it himself; he put mistletoe in blind Höðr's hand and aimed it, so that the gods' own game and Baldr's own brother did the killing. Then, when all creation wept to ransom Baldr from Hel, one giantess in a cave — Þökk, "Thanks" — refused, and Snorri reports what everyone guessed: it was Loki. The death of Baldr is where the trickster's mischief becomes malice with no exit; scholars still argue whether envy, fate, or the sheer structural need for the world to end best explains it, and the texts refuse to say.

Lokasenna is the aftermath in miniature. Loki crashes the sea-giant Ægir's feast and works down the benches insulting every god and goddess in turn — cowardice, unmanliness, adultery — until he tells Frigg to her face that he is the reason Baldr never rides home. Only Thor's arrival, hammer in hand, moves him from the hall.

The binding

The gods' patience ends. Loki flees to a mountain, builds a house with four doors, and hides by day as a salmon in the falls — but he outsmarts himself, idly inventing the fishing net by the fire and burning it too late. The gods read the shape in the ashes, weave their own, and it is Thor who catches the leaping salmon by the tail, which is why (Snorri notes) salmon taper toward the back.

The punishment is the mythology's cruellest scene, told in Gylfaginning and the prose of Lokasenna. Loki's son Váli is turned into a wolf and rips apart his brother Narfi; with Narfi's entrails, turned to iron, the gods bind Loki across three stones. Skaði — whose father Þjazi died of Loki's schemes — fixes a serpent above his face. Sigyn stays, holding a bowl against the dripping venom; when she leaves to empty it, the poison strikes, and Loki's convulsions are the earthquakes. There he lies, says the binding of Loki, until the end of all things.

At Ragnarök

He does not wait quietly. When the fetters break, Loki comes against the gods as the helmsman of Naglfar, the ship built of dead men's nails, bringing the hosts of Hel to the plain of Vígríðr. Völuspá sails him in from the east with "Muspell's people," and Snorri gives him his final opponent: Heimdallr, the ever-watchful, his oldest structural opposite — the two once fought in seal-shape over the necklace Brísingamen. Watchman and infiltrator kill each other, and the world burns down around the mutual wound.

In the primary sources

Loki is everywhere. In the Poetic Edda he owns Lokasenna outright, drives the plots of Þrymskviða and (as sharp-eyed sidekick) Reginsmál, and appears in Völuspá's visions of the binding and the last battle. In the Prose Edda, Gylfaginning carries his children, the wall of Asgard, Baldr's death, and the binding, while Skáldskaparmál gives the treasure-forging, the Iðunn abduction (paralleled in the ninth-century skaldic poem Haustlöng), and the journey to Geirröðr. Tellingly, no place-name, no personal name, and no known temple attests any cult of Loki — the Norse told stories about him constantly and worshipped him, as far as the evidence shows, never.

Legacy

Loki left no weekday and almost no place-names, but a long shadow. Folklore kept him as a household presence — Icelandic idiom blamed shimmering heat-haze on "Loki passing over the fields" — and the tenth-century Gosforth Cross in England already carved his bound figure with Sigyn's bowl. Modern culture has made him its favourite Norse export: the ambivalent insider-outsider, the necessary saboteur, endlessly reinterpreted wherever a story needs the clever one nobody can trust.