Tonight's story is about the most dangerous person in the nine worlds, and I will tell you now, before we begin, that he is not a monster. It would be easier if he were. Monsters you can bar the door against. But Loki — Loki the sly, Loki the shape-changer, Loki Laufey's son — was funny, and helpful, and quick, and welcome at every feast; and the fires he lit were warm long before they were ruinous; and everyone who ever trusted him had good reasons, right up until the morning they did not. His story is the longest joke in the world, the kind where you laugh and laugh, and then, quite suddenly, you stop. Settle in. We will take it from the very beginning, and we will be fair to him, which is more than the gods were, and more than he was to anyone at all.
He came from outside. Remember that, because it explains half of everything. His father was a giant called Farbauti — the name means Dangerous-Striker, and the old ones said he was the lightning. His mother was called Laufey, the leafy island, slender as a needle; and the wise have always liked the picture in those two names: lightning strikes the dry leaves, and what is born is fire. Small fire. Bright fire. The fire that cooks your supper and lights your hall and dances for you — and that asks, quietly, every single night of its life, whether it might be allowed to eat the house. That was Loki: a lit match walking. And he carried, all his days, his mother's name and not his father's — Loki Laufeyjarson, the only god named for his mother — as if even his parentage preferred not to say the obvious out loud.
How he came to Asgard, no poem troubles to tell; but how he stayed, we know exactly. Odin and he swore blood-brotherhood, in the oldest and most binding way: they opened their veins and let their blood run together into the same footprint, and from that hour the Allfather could not sit to drink unless drink was poured for Loki too. Think about what each of them was buying. Loki got a seat at the highest table in the worlds — the outsider, inside at last. And Odin? Odin, who traded an eye for wisdom, did not swear oaths idly. He looked at this quick, laughing creature of the enemy's blood and he saw a tool no honest god could be: someone who could think around corners, go where gods could not go, do what gods must not be seen doing. The wise old god took out fire insurance, and the fire signed it. Both of them, in the end, would have cause to remember that footprint.
And for a long age — let us be fair, as we promised — Loki earned his seat many times over. Nearly every treasure the gods possess, they possess because of him; the trouble is that they nearly did not, and the trouble began, as it usually did, with Loki bored. One night, for no reason a sensible person could name, he crept to where Sif slept — Sif, Thor's wife, whose golden hair was the wonder of Asgard, the ripe wheatfield made a woman — and he cut it all off. To the scalp. Why? Because it was beautiful and he could. That is the truest sentence anyone has said about him, so hold onto it. Thor caught him, of course — Thor always caught him — and the poems say Loki was 'promising with both hands' by the time the thunder-god had counted every bone he intended to break. What he promised was better hair: hair of real gold, living gold, spun by the dwarves who could make anything.
So down he went to the dark smithies of the dwarves, where his story so often turns, and the sons of Ivaldi made the golden hair — and, warming to the audience, threw in two more marvels: the spear Gungnir, that never stops in its thrust, and the ship Skidbladnir, that always finds a wind and folds up like a napkin. Any sane errand-runner goes home at that point. Loki looked at three treasures and thought: I could double this. He found two more dwarves, the brothers Brokk and Sindri, and wagered his own head that they could not forge three finer things. And then — this is the purest Loki in all the tales — having made the bet, he cheated against himself. As Sindri worked, a fly kept biting the bellows-hand: the hand of Brokk, pumping steadily. A fly with clever eyes. It bit at the boar, and failed; bit at the ring, and failed; and at the hammer it bit Brokk's eyelid to the blood — and the handle of the hammer came out short. Out of that forge came Gullinbursti, the golden boar; Draupnir, the ring that breeds rings; and Mjolnir, the thunderbolt itself, flawed exactly one fly's worth. The gods judged the hammer the greatest treasure in the world, 'the best defence against the frost-giants' — and awarded Brokk the head of the god who had procured it. And here Loki produced the finest legal argument in mythology: the head, certainly, was forfeit — but not one scrap of the neck, which had never been wagered. The dwarves, out-lawyered, settled for sewing his lips shut with an awl. For a while, Asgard was very quiet. It never lasted. The stitches tore, the mouth resumed, and the gods kept the treasures. Follow the ledger, because it matters later: humiliation to Sif; hammer to Thor; glory to Loki's cleverness; and pain, always, to Loki's body. That was the arrangement. He was the fire: he could bring you anything, so long as he was also allowed to burn.
Once you know that pattern you know half his biography, and we can walk the great tales quickly, like a gallery. It was Loki who saved the gods from the builder of Asgard's wall: when a lone mason offered to raise an unbreakable wall in a single winter for the price of the sun, the moon, and the goddess Freyja, it was Loki who advised taking the bet — and when the mason's tireless stallion Svadilfari made the impossible schedule possible, and the gods convened to discuss whose idea this had been, it was Loki who fixed what Loki had broken: a pretty mare trotted out of the woods that evening, and the stallion remembered urgent business, and the wall missed its deadline by three stones. The mason turned out to be a giant, as they so often do, and met the hammer. And months later Loki returned from an absence nobody asked about, leading a grey foal with eight legs: Sleipnir, best of horses, which he gave to Odin. Read that sentence again and be fair to him, as we promised: to save the gods from a bad contract he himself had blessed, the trickster became a mare, bore a foal, and handed his blood-brother the finest gift one god has ever given another. There is no one else in any mythology who would do all of that in one story.
It was Loki, too, who got Idun back — after selling her, admittedly. Cornered in the mountains by the eagle-giant Thjazi and held for ransom, he bought his life with a promise to deliver the goddess of the apples of youth; and the gods began to grey and wither, and traced the matter, as ever, to one person; and Loki borrowed Freyja's falcon cloak, flew to the giant's hall, turned Idun into a nut, and flew for home with the eagle's wingbeats filling the sky behind him and the gods' kindling-fires roaring up at the wall at just the right moment. Thjazi burned; Idun was restored; and when the giant's daughter Skadi came armed and grieving to demand redress, it was Loki — this is true, and almost sweet — who won the settlement for the gods by making the unlaughing woman laugh, with a rope, a goat, and his own dignity, in an arrangement I will let you ask your parents about. And when Thor's hammer vanished and the giant Thrym demanded Freyja as its price, it was Loki who flew the reconnaissance, Loki who proposed the bridal veil, Loki who talked the enraged thunder-god into the dress, and Loki — in a bridesmaid's apron, improvising like a jazzman — whose quick answers about the bride's appetite and burning eyes kept the whole doomed wedding upright until the hammer landed in the right lap. Time after time: the crisis arrives, often with his own fingerprints on it, and the solution is always the same size as the crisis, and always his. The gods got used to it. That was their mistake, and perhaps it was his tragedy: nobody ever asked what it cost, or where the anger went. Fire, banked and banked and banked, does not go out. It goes down, and waits.
Because there was another Loki, and the gods knew it and looked away. Far to the east, in the Ironwood, he kept another family. The giantess Angrboda — the name means Bringer-of-Grief, and no one ever pretended otherwise — bore him three children. The first was a wolf-cub, Fenrir. The second was a serpent, Jormungandr. The third was a girl, Hel, half of her lovely and half of her the blue-black of a three-days corpse. When prophecy told the gods what these children would grow to be, Odin had them fetched. The serpent he hurled into the world-ocean, where it grew until it circled all the lands and bit its own tail. The girl he cast down into the mist below the worlds and made her queen of the unglorious dead — a kingdom for a punishment, or a punishment for a kingdom. And the wolf they kept, and raised in Asgard, and bound — you know that story, and what it cost the one honest god who paid for it. Now: count what the gods did, that day, to the children of Loki, and say honestly whether the fire needed any more banking. The poems never make the excuse for him. But they set the facts side by side, and they let you do the arithmetic, and they were written by people who knew that the worst men in their villages had all, once, been boys.
So we come to the pivot, and you have heard it, but never from this side. Baldr the beautiful, Odin's son, the light of every hall — Baldr began to dream of death, and Frigg took her famous oaths from all creation, and the gods made their delighted game of hurling weapons at the boy nothing would hurt. And through that laughing crowd walked Loki, and nobody watched him go, because he was one of them, wasn't he; he had always been one of them, hadn't he. There is a woman at Fensalir asking kind questions of Frigg — the woman is Loki in a borrowed shape, and Frigg, poor Frigg, glad of the sympathy, mentions the one thing in creation too young to swear: a mistletoe sprig, west of Valhalla. There is a hand cutting it. There is a friendly voice at the edge of the games, beside blind Hodr, the brother left out of the fun: 'Why not join in? Do Baldr honour, as the others do. I will guide your arm.' And the world's most helpful person guided it — and the dart went through the god of light, and down went the sun of Asgard, dead in the trampled grass. In the silence afterward no one even looked at Loki. That is the most frightening detail in the whole mythology. It did not occur to them yet — not yet — that the friend of every crisis had finally manufactured the one no cleverness could fix.
He could not stop, of course. Whatever had come loose in him was all the way loose now. When Hermod rode to Hel and won her bargain — Baldr may return if every thing in the world weeps for him — everything wept: people, beasts, iron, stones; you can still see the stones weep, the old ones said, when frost comes out of them in the sun. Everything wept except one giantess in a cave, called Thokk, who said the dead may keep the dead, and let Hel hold what she has. And Thokk, all the poems agree, was Loki, wearing one last borrowed shape to lock the door he had shut. Why? He had loved Baldr too, as much as he loved anyone; every feast he had ever sat at, that light had lit. I do not know, little one. The poems do not know. Perhaps burnt things want company. It is the one motive he never explained with a joke.
But he did give the gods an explanation of another kind, at a feast in the sea-giant Aegir's hall, and it is one of the most terrible scenes in any literature, because it is only talking. The gods sat at their ale, subdued, in the sacred peace of the hall, and Loki walked in uninvited — worked himself in, actually, calling on the old oath of the mingled blood: Odin could not drink unless drink was poured for Loki. So drink was poured, and then Loki, standing in that firelight, turned slowly around the room and told the truth about everyone in it. Every god, every goddess, in order: this one's cowardice, that one's adultery, this one's shameful magic, that one's brother; the war-god's missing hand — 'and it was my son who took it.' Almost nothing he said was false; that was the horror of it; he was the memory of the household, the keeper of every secret the family smiled over, and now the fire was reading the letters everyone thought burnt. They tried to shout him down and he filed their outbursts as evidence. Only one thing ended it: a rumble in the earth, a heaviness in the air, and Thor at the doorway, hammer in fist, four times inviting Loki to consider the shape of his skull. Against the one argument he could not out-talk, Loki drained his cup, called down fire on the hall and everyone in it — a curse and a forecast — and walked out into the dark, and out of the fellowship of the gods forever.
They hunted him, then, at last and all together. He knew they would. He built himself a house on a mountainside with a door in every wall so he could see them coming from every direction, and by day he wore the shape of a salmon and lay in the pool below the waterfall called Franang, deep and cold and silver. And in the evenings, alone by his fire, restless as ever — even now, even hunted, the hands had to be making something — he took twine and knotted it, crossing and looping, into a thing no one in the world had ever seen: the first fishing net. The cleverest creature alive had invented, in his last free hours, the perfect instrument for catching himself. When he saw the gods coming up the valley he threw it in the fire and dove for the pool — but the ash held the pattern, a char-drawn diagram in perfect squares, and the gods studied the ashes of his mind, and understood, and made another. Twice he leapt the net; the third time, as he arched glittering over the top rope, a hand closed on him mid-air — Thor's — and the salmon writhed and slid until the fist reached the tail and held. That, the old ones would tell you, is why the salmon narrows at the tail to this very day: the grip of the thunder-god, printed on a whole species, the fingerprints of the day the laughing stopped.
What the gods did then, I will say quietly, because the poems say it quietly, and no one has ever pretended it was justice. They took him to a cave under the roots of the mountains. They took his two sons by his faithful wife Sigyn — Vali and Narfi, boys with no crime in them at all — and they turned Vali into a wolf, and the wolf tore his brother, and then there was one changed creature fled into the hills and one dead boy; and with the sinews of his own child the gods bound Loki across three sharp stones, and the bindings turned to iron as they touched him. And Skadi — who had laughed once, long ago, at his rope and his goat, and whose father he had led to the burning — Skadi fixed a serpent to the cave-roof above his face, so that venom fell, drop by drop, onto the bound god, forever. When it strikes, he convulses, and the whole earth shakes: that is what earthquakes are, the old ones said. The sons of Ymir shrug in their sleep, and the bound god screams under the mountain, and the two tremors are one tremor.
And now I must tell you about the bowl, because without the bowl this is only a story about wickedness punished, and it is something stranger and sadder than that. Sigyn stayed. His wife — the woman whose sons the sentence had spent, who owed him nothing, whom he had betrayed with a giantess and embarrassed before every feast in the world — Sigyn did not go home with the gods. She took a bowl, and she stood beside the stones, and she held the bowl over her husband's face, catching the venom drop by drop before it could fall. She is standing there now. That is the picture the myths leave us and never explain: the worst creature in the nine worlds, and bending over him, patient as candlelight, the most faithful. Only when the bowl brims must she turn away to empty it, and in those few seconds the drops strike home, and the earth shudders — so that even the world's trembling, if you follow it all the way down, is measured out by the emptying of one loyal woman's bowl. Nobody has ever written a truer picture of what it is to love someone ruinous. When the ground shakes, someone's wife has stepped away for a moment. She always comes back. It never helps, and she always comes back.
There he lies tonight, while you are being tucked in: under the mountain, on the stones, the serpent ticking above him like a dreadful clock, the bowl filling, the earth occasionally flinching. And there he lies until the end, when everything breaks loose at once — the wolf's fetter, the serpent's patience, and Loki's bonds with them. On the last morning he does not slink to the battlefield; he comes as a king at last, at the helm of the terrible ship Naglfar, built of dead men's nails, ferrying the hosts of the unquiet dead — his daughter's people, his true constituency, the great parliament of everyone the sunlit worlds threw away. And on the plain of Vigrid, in the smoke of the world's ending, he meets the one opponent that was always waiting for him: Heimdall, the watchman, the seer of everything, the god who had proposed the bridal veil in the good old days when they solved problems together — Heimdall, who is everything Loki is not: patient, sleepless, single, true. The far-seer and the shape-shifter, vigilance and deceit, the guard and the thief, and they kill each other, of course. Neither could ever have died any other way. Fire and watchfulness go out of the world in the same breath, and the flames of Surt cover the rest.
And when the sea gives back the green earth, and the young gods gather in the new grass to talk over the old days — Baldr alive among them, remember, laughing in the light his murderer could not put out after all — Loki is not there, and no one grieves, and something is missing all the same. The new world has no trickster in it. Perhaps that is why it stays peaceful; perhaps that is why there are no new stories from it. For here at the end, little one, I will tell you the secret the old poets knew and never said above a whisper: every tale you have loved in all these nights — the hammer in the bridal lap, the eight-legged foal, the apples, the wall, the net — every single one exists because the fire got loose in it. He was the plot. The gods were good, and goodness keeps the house standing, but it is the match that makes the story. That is not a reason to forgive him; the boy in the cave and the bright god on the pyre are reasons enough never to do that. It is only a reason to understand why, when the stitches tore and that mouth began again, even the gods — even knowing everything — leaned in a little to listen. Keep your own fires banked, my love: told stories, warm hearths, mischief small and kind. And if the ground far away should tremble some night, you will know it is only an old, old story turning over in its sleep — a bowl being emptied, a debt being paid, drop by drop, under the mountains, until morning. Goodnight.