Most of us first get exposed to mythology
through illustrated kid's books. This gives us the false impression that mythology
is like a book - written down and not particularly prone to change. But that's more like… what mythology fossilizes
into over time. The actual living mythology looks very different
from the carefully articulated skeletons that we put in the museums. Mythology is stories, and stories change with
every telling. If you're passing stories down generationally
through folklore and oral tradition, things change a lot. Especially the characters. And in mythology, the characters are gods. So the gods end up evolving alongside their
society. Every time a myth of a god gets written down,
it's like a photograph of that god in that single moment of their development, or like
a single frame from an animation. That single frame might be very cool and interesting,
but if we can find enough of those keyframes and put them in the right order, we can try
and trace out what the full animation might've looked like and get a feel for how this god
actually evolved over time. When we do a deep dive like this, I usually
go as far back as I can to try and find the earliest stories so we can trace this evolution,
and watch as the gods we're familiar with now start out as wildly unfamiliar figures
before growing and changing with their societies to eventually become the figure we recognize
today. Which brings us to our first problem. What do we recognize as Loki these days? Sources are very contradictory. He shows up in a lot of modern stories - frequently
a shapeshifter or illusionist, and usually an antagonist, but that's about the only semi-consistent
quality he gets. Sometimes he's a jotunn like his father, sometimes
he's a rebellious kid cuz odin is his father, sometimes he's working with odin, sometimes
he's a tragic, gothic prince of darkness, sometimes he's a sniveling coward, sometimes
he's a full-on good guy with a tricksy streak, sometimes he's just a sassy lil kid, sometimes
he's literally satan, and sometimes he's confidently described as a fire deity even though he probably
isn't, my bad So while previous deep-dives have had an easy
starting point, cuz we have a clear image of where the deity in question ends up, Loki's
wildly inconsistent modern portrayal complicates the issue. We can still look back to where he started,
but we don't have a clear image of what he's gonna become. Which is just like him, honestly. He could stand to be a little more considerate
about these things. But looking back to where he stared isn't
as easy as I made it sound. The other main complication here come to us
courtesy of Christianity, and the stubborn refusal of the norse to actually use their
existing writing system to write their mythology down before the monks showed up. Our pre-christian sources are sparse to nonexistent,
and christianity has this frustrating habit of retconning other people's religions out
of existence. So inconsiderate! Won't someone think of the scholars?! So instead of diving into the earliest mythology,
because we don't have any from that far back, uh... nobody tell Blue, but we're gonna try
starting with the real history about as far back as we can go - the end of the ice age,
when the glacial ice pack finally receded from Scandinavia and the region entered the
Nordic Stone Age. This period of history is pretty solidly in
the "fog of ages" zone, where basically all we know about the people who lived there is
how they preferred to knap their flint. A series of stone-age societies cycled in
and out of this region from 12,000 BCE until around 2800 BCE, when the indo-european Battle-Axe
Culture broke onto the scene and hung out with the coastal Pitted Ware Culture for a
thousand years or so until 1700 BCE, when the societies fused together and entered the
Nordic Bronze Age. This new culture practiced agriculture and
domesticated animals, maintained trade with our friends over in Mycenaean Greece, had
a ton of wealth by the standards of the era, and were really into boats. Between all the rock carvings of ships and
their boat-shaped burial monuments, we can already see how these proto-norsemen were
on track to becoming the seafaring vikings we know and love. Now they didn't seem to have a writing system
at this point, so all the theories about their mythology are pretty fragmentary and not very
well-sourced. But we know from their art that they cared
about three things: animals, boats, and the sun. They seem to have made a mythological connection
between the movement of the sun and the movement of animals, and specifically they decided
the sun was being pulled by a horse, like a chariot. This is noteworthy because it actually survived
into Norse mythology in the characters of Skinfaxi and Hrimfaxi, the horses that pull
the chariots of the sun and moon. While plenty of mythologies conflate the sun
and moon with chariots, the person in the chariot usually gets more press than the animal
pulling it. Anyway, around 500 BCE there was a bit of
a technological leap, and Scandinavia entered the iron age, working with bog iron they extracted
from peat. A little bit of local climate change seems
to have nudged the norsemen a little ways south, which probably helped take them to
the next big jump just around 0 CE - when the romans arrived. The transition from the pre-roman iron age
to the roman iron age was pretty painless, since for the scandinavians it basically just
meant another trade route. The romans gave them coins, vessels, weapons,
all that good stuff. But the Romans got something very valuable
for us - they actually wrote some stuff down. In roughly 98 CE, General Tacitus wrote the
Germania, an ethnography of the germanic peoples they made trade with, and noted that they
seemed to worship a pantheon of gods led by Mercury, honored with animal and human sacrifices
on a specific day of the week. He also mentioned worship of Mars, Hercules,
and Isis. Now, that classic roman syncretism is in full
swing here, but it doesn't take a comparative mythology scholar to work out that this "mercury"
is the tricksy traveler Odin, worshipped on Odin's day, aka Wednesday, and that Mars and
Hercules are most likely Tyr and Thor, Tyr mapped to Mars because they're both war gods
and Thor to Hercules probably because they're both giant-slayers. Unfortunately Isis could theoretically be
any of the norse goddesses, but Frigg or Freya is probably the best bet. Regardless, this is the first solid written
confirmation of the Norse pantheon we know and love. It's fragmentary and filtered through a highly
biased lens, but it gives us something to work with. Unfortunately, it doesn't give us Loki. And what exactly that means is a little unclear. He could have been a relatively minor figure
in the pantheon, not worth Tacitus's time to mention - and since he only listed the
hugely important major players with days of the week named after them, that's not too
far-fetched. But it's also possible that Loki didn't exist
yet. And that's weird. This is also around when the norse writing
system first appears - Futhark runes first get used around 150 CE, theoretically derived
from an Old Italic script, though it's not 100% clear how they got from the Italian peninsula
all the way up to Scandinavia. Mythologically, Odin receives the forbidden
knowledge of magic runes by ritualistically sacrificing himself to himself on Yggdrasil
the world tree and getting a sweet powerup, which I guess is as good an explanation as
any. (Step up your game, duolingo)
Anyway that trade situation continues til around 400 CE when the Roman empire accidentally
plugs a powerbar into itself and collapses into the ocean, and the Scandinavians basically
don't notice. But they sure notice what happens next, as
the 700s CE is when the monks show up. Christian missionaries roll up to scandinavia,
and the norse hate it so much that apparently it kicks off the viking age in retaliation,
officially beginning in 793 when vikings ransack and burn Lindisfarne Abbey, taking all their
shinies, killing and enslaving the monks and firmly establishing their reputation as terrifying
for the next thousand years. The viking age continued for around three
centuries, but while the vikings were out viking, the christianization of Scandinavia
continued behind them, and by 1100 the area was almost fully christianized. And THEN, after ALL THAT, we finally get the
first reference to Loki. Around 1200, Icelandic politician and historian
Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda, the first written compilation of norse mythology,
apparently in service of his main political goal at the time, which was getting Iceland
to unify with Norway under the rule of king Hakon the Fourth. He didn't succeed and Hakon had him assassinated
a couple decades later, but that doesn't matter right now, because this motivation completely
reframes his role in compiling the Prose Edda. Iceland and Norway were fully christianized
at this point, but by consolidating their shared "pagan" history and mythology, Snorri
could give them a single cultural identity to promote their unification under Hakon. Sure, we're Iceland and you're Norway, but
we're all Norsemen, right? Bring it in! So that's why the Prose Edda begins with a
prologue describing the Christian story of Genesis, and reframes the Norse gods as trojan
heroes who fled the fall of Troy, settled in Scandinavia and were accepted as divine
kings thanks to their superior technology. That's right - Snorri Sturluson Ancient Aliens'd
himself. Anyway, with that bit of christianity-approved
justification out of the way, Snorri dives into what we hope is some proper pre-Christian
mythology. And this is where we get our first look at
Loki. Now Loki pops up all over the place in the
Prose edda. He's referred to with the epithet "backbiter"
and described as fickle-minded, the inventor of lies, and beautiful but "evil in disposition". So, basically classic Femme Fatale. He's summed up in one sentence as regularly
causing problems for the Aesir, but just as regularly helping them out with his clever
tricks and schemes. Basically the token chaotic neutral teammate
who causes problems for shits and giggles but then cleans up his mess when he has to. He has three children with a giantess in Jotunheim,
and he keeps them a secret from the Aesir - but they find out eventually, and unfortunately
for Loki, there's a prophecy going on. These children are destined to cause some
serious problems for the Aesir when Ragnarok rolls around, so Odin deals with them. Loki's daughter, Hel, is cast into Nifelheim,
and while she becomes the super powerful queen of the dead, it's pretty clear she can't really
leave. His son, Jormungandr, is cast into the ocean
- where he grows to enormous size. And his other son, the Fenris-Wolf, is too
powerful for the Aesir to take head-on, so instead they take him in to keep an eye on
him, and he lives alongside them in Asgard for a while, even becoming close friends with
Tyr. But as he grows bigger and stronger, the Aesir
get more and more worried, and eventually come up with a scheme - framing it as a game,
they tie up Fenris with stronger and stronger chains, though they can't find anything that
holds him for long. Eventually, they commission the dwarves for
a chain made of impossible things and ask Fenris if they can try it on him - but he's
starting to get understandably suspicious, so he agrees on the condition that one of
them puts their hand in his jaws. If they betray him, they lose the hand. The Aesir are obviously reluctant, but Tyr
agrees - and when Fenris can't break the chain and realizes the Aesir betrayed him, he bites
off Tyr's hand. No word on how Loki felt about all this, but
we can assume Not Great. There's another story where a disguised giant
offers to build the Aesir a fortress, but as payment he wants the sun, the moon, and
the goddess Freya. The aesir agree cuz they want that fortress,
but they also really don't wanna pay for it, so they force Loki to sabotage the construction
so the giant won't finish in time. Loki does this by turning into a mare and
quote-unquote "distracting" the giant's horse, and when the giant realizes what's happening
he returns to his true, giant form to file a formal complaint with his battleaxe - at
which point Thor kills him. Loki later gives birth to a healthy eight-legged
foal, and that's how Odin got his faithful steed Sleipnir. And before we all judge Loki, let's consider
who's more irresponsible - the guy who gives birth to a horse, or the guy who rides his
nephew into battle? I'm just saying, I know which one I wouldn't
trust as a babysitter. And as one more core worldbuilding myth, Snorri
recounts the events triggering Ragnarok, where Loki arranges for Baldr's death by mistletoe
and flees from the angry Aesir, living in hiding and incidentally inventing the fishing
net in his spare time. When the Aesir find him he burns the net and
turns into a salmon, hiding in a nearby waterfall, but one of the aesir deduces his fishing-net
invention from the ash pattern and recreates it, using the net to then capture him. Foiled by his own cleverness one final time,
Loki is imprisoned under the earth and tortured by a snake, causing earthquakes whenever he
wiggles. Now there's a bunch of other stories about
Loki - his wager with the sons of Ivaldi, his adventure with Thor dealing with Utgard-Loke,
and an interesting prequel to the Volsunga saga where he steals gold from a dwarf to
repay a debt, including a cursed magic ring, and passes the ring off to the guy who forced
him to pay the debt in the first place, kicking off a chain of murder and misfortune for the
jerk in question and leaving Loki consequence-free for a change. But basically all the stories follow a very
specific format - the Aesir make Loki fix a problem, whether or not he caused it, and
Loki makes it work through a combination of cunning trickery, slapstick comedy and the
occasional pregnancy. But you also might notice that the Aesir don't
really come across as all that good here. They break their oaths, cheat their way out
of debts, torment and abuse Loki even on the rare occasion where the problem wasn't his
fault. They're not painted as particularly divine. Snorri's retelling portrays the gods as flawed,
fallible, and extremely human, which makes sense if he's trying to forge a historical
cultural identity without getting too deep into the currently-taboo religion that cultural
identity is made from. And there's something kinda… Christian about the way Loki's represented
in this era - and not in the way you might expect from his modern portrayal. Beyond the Prose edda, this era also has the
Poetic edda, a compilation of poems collected around the same time. The Poetic Edda contains the Lokasenna, the
Flyting of Loki, an additional bit of detail from the precursor to Ragnarok where Loki
calls out the Aesir on their failings and sins, and how they all like to heap blame
on him when really they're just as bad as he is. At the end of that poem, they bind and imprison
him, but they never really prove him wrong. Now the portrayal of Loki in the Eddas kinda
resonates with the biblical concept of the scapegoat. While nowadays that term means someone who's
blamed for everything, in the Old Testament the "scapegoat" is part of a cleansing ritual. Two goats are taken, one is sacrificed, and
the other is driven into the wilderness - that one's the scapegoat, and it carries the sins
of the people away with it, leaving them ritually purified of their failings at the cost of
two goats. Christianity later added some Jesus-flavoring
to the scapegoat concept, with the idea that Jesus himself is kind of a scapegoat for the
sins of all of humanity - but unlike the goat, he does it on purpose as a willing agent,
which is deliberately separating him from the scapegoat concept. But this portrayal of Loki kind of lines up
with that. The Aesir do a lot of bad stuff, but then
they turn around and blame Loki for it, or they make him fix it for them, absolving themselves
of the consequences. Written two hundred years post-christianization,
it wouldn't be too surprising if this biblical concept worked its way into Snorri's framing
of this character, giving Loki a biblical context he wouldn't have originally had. And between his role as scapegoat and his
torture and imprisonment for speaking a truth the Aesir didn't want to hear, it also has
the wildly unexpected consequence of… kind of making this version of Loki…… a Jesus
figure. …
…Didn't see that one coming. So since these eddas already show some major
structural hallmarks of christianization, both the obvious with the genesis stuff and
the inobvious with the thematic parallels, we're once again stuck in a position where
the only information we have about Loki is very… untrustworthy. Go figure. Now this isn't quite all we have from this
era. Along with all the pillaging and burning,
the Viking Age saw the creation of a lot of runestones - carved rocks that don't tend
to feature written mythology but frequently show images of some familiar stories. Mjolnir was a very common symbol on runestones,
and we have a handful of runestones from between the 700s and the 1000s that show a few familiar
sights - Odin capturing a salmon, a bound figure under a snake, a face with scarred
lips, etcetera. While these still post-date the monks' arrival,
they do show a figure whose role lines up with Loki's description in the Eddas, and
they were carved at least a couple hundred years before Snorri got his hands on them. Although, fun fact, one of those theoretical
Loki images shows a bound figure with horns - and was carved on a cross. Once again, the christianity's baked in. Still, while our knowledge is fragmentary
and incomplete, this at least corroborates some of Snorri's stories. Now there's some other fun stuff about Loki's
character that we can glean from these eddas. The Poetic Edda mentions very briefly that
at one point, Loki finds a half-burned heart of some unnamed evil woman, eats it, and becomes
pregnant, later giving birth to the vaguely-described "evils that plague man". This story is never brought up anywhere else
and we have no idea whose heart it was or what evils it created, but this tiny four-line
anecdote puts Loki in the role of the folkloric mother of monsters, a not-uncommon motif ascribing
all the evils of the world to some unlucky usually lady who initially gave birth to them
or set them free - Gaia, Pandora, Echidna, Tiamat, Lilith, it's a theme that shows up
sporadically all over the place. And speaking of themes, Loki has one more
unexpected role. There's a very common Indo-European narrative
of a prophecy (guitar sting) where someone, usually a king, learns a prophecy of their
future doom at the hands of a child, usually a direct descendant or other close relative. The doom-ee responds poorly and imprisons
the child - or their parent, if the child isn't born yet - which inadvertently causes
the child to later play out the exact role the prophecy foretold. It happens with Oedipus, it happens with Balor
and Lugh, it happens with Perseus, it even happens with Krishna - and it happens with
Odin, Loki, and Loki's kids. Since we tend to think of Loki as the bad
guy, or at least the one to blame when things go wrong, it's easy to miss this - but Odin
slots perfectly into the role of antagonist in that quintessential proto-indo-european
prophecy structure. He hears the prophecy of ragnarok, and in
trying to forestall it, he inadvertently gives Loki's children the exact powers and motives
they need to fulfill that prophecy. Hel had no power over the dead until she was
exiled to their realm, and when Loki marches in Ragnarok, he brings her army of the dead
with him. Jormungandr wasn't the world-serpent until
he was cast into the ocean, making him large enough to eventually kill Thor. And Fenris-Wolf was perfectly happy to live
among the Aesir in peace with his best buddy Tyr until they betrayed him, and when he breaks
those unbreakable chains, he kills Odin himself. And where does Loki fit in all this? Well, he's in good company with characters
like Danae, Devaki and Eithne, the unfortunate mothers to the prophecy children who are imprisoned,
tormented, and otherwise live quite unhappy lives until their children reappear to fulfill
the prophecy and kill their tormenter. Which… lines up uncomfortably well with
the start of Ragnarok. The only thing making Loki unsympathetic in
this situation is the fact that his prophecy children cause the literal apocalypse - but,
and hear me out on this one, Snorri might not have intended to frame Ragnarok as a bad
thing. Loki may be a back-biter and a trickster,
but at this point in his development, he's in a surprisingly sympathetic role. He helps out more than he hurts, with the
noteworthy exception of the death of Baldr and the onset of Ragnarok - but even that
story is kinda suspicious. There are plenty of theories about it, but
one of them suggests that Baldr's death is actually a ploy by Odin. Odin received a lot of human sacrifices, at
least in the mythology, and he's sort of died a few times, sacrificing himself to himself
for power and knowledge. And Baldr's death by mistletoe has some suspicious
mythological resonances with other stories of sacrifices to Odin - there's a story about
a legendary king, Vikar, whose ships are becalmed because Odin requires a blood sacrifice, and
Vikar's name is drawn every time they draw lots. Vikar doesn't wanna die, so his counselor
assures him that they won't really kill him - they'll do the setup of the sacrifice, but
instead of actually stabbing him, they'll use a harmless tree branch and, like, a really
soft noose. But when they do, the branch suddenly turns
into a spear and the king is really killed - trying to fool Odin with a fake, harmless
sacrifice isn't very wise. So when Baldr is killed by a weapon made from
a harmless little mistletoe branch, it lines up alarmingly well with this story of a tricksy
sacrifice to Odin. And we gotta remember, Baldr doesn't stay
dead. He comes back after Ragnarok. And Odin knows this because he knows the prophecies
of Ragnarok. It's also noted in the text that nobody knows
what Odin whispered in the dead Baldr's ear, but why would he whisper in a dead guy's ear
at all? Baldr is killed in a way that closely resembles
a sacrifice to Odin, and comes back even better than before - something Odin famously did
to himself to gain knowledge and power. And with all that for context, Loki's role
in the death starts looking a lot weirder. And for that matter, Loki's relationship with
Odin is a subject of academic debate. The poetic edda describes them as blood-brothers,
but some scholars suggest that Loki might actually be an aspect or a reflex of Odin,
some offshoot deity playing a specific and unknown role. They are both tricksters and masters of disguise,
and if I had to pick a norse god to map to Mercury or Hermes, the trickster god and thief,
I'd probably pick Loki instead of Odin. Baldr's death smells of lost mythological
context and ritual implications. There's more going on here than we know - and
that means Loki's role in the death is similarly mysterious. Anyway this is unfortunately in the category
of "we'll probably never really know what was up with that", but it's still valuable
information just to know this story probably shouldn't be taken one hundred percent at
face value. Loki does a lot of dumb stuff, but casual
god-murder is a bit outside his regular wheelhouse. And here's another weird angle - because of
Snorri's authorial biases, his very conspicuous framing of the Norse gods in the strict past
tense and his extremely careful separation of these pagan myths from the christian faith
they'd adopted, Loki killing Baldr and triggering the twilight of the old gods might've been
originally presented by Snorri as kind of… a good thing. There's this biblical concept of cleansing
armageddon - that the world gets too messed up and sinful that your only option is to
burn the bad stuff to the ground and start over. And while Ragnarok is almost certainly a pre-christian
concept, Ragnarok as a huge deal and the central focus of the narrative might've been a christian
modification. The idea that the old gods were messed up
and had to die so a shiny new world could take over - with a shiny new christian god,
in some translations - would've been very appealing for someone trying to appeal to
a shared cultural history without superseding their shared religious identity. So what might've been a footnote or a highly
contextualized ritual in the original folkloric space could've ballooned into being loki's
defining act - killing baldr and kicking off a cleansing apocalypse to make way for the
new world. And again, as we've discussed, Odin has a
lot of themes about dying and then being reborn even better. And it's another facet of Loki's character
that's not nice, but from Snorri's perspective was probably still fundamentally good. All in all, the Eddas don't exactly paint
a flattering portrait of Loki, but he still comes across as unconditionally necessary. He solves problems nobody else can handle,
he gives the gods a scapegoat so they can maintain their own perceived flawlessness
and never introspect enough to meaningfully improve, and he ends their imperfect world
to make way for the new one. All good things from the perspective of someone
living in that new world. So that's… potentially Snorri's angle, though
it's impossible to know for sure. But he's not the only christian historian
with an opinion on Loki - and amusingly, while the Eddas seem to frame him as a necessary
nuisance, some of its later translators apparently missed the mark on that one, and interpreted
Loki's role as trickster, deceiver, and father of lies as making him a Satan parallel - something
Snorri himself never did. For instance, back in 1880, hilariously-named
Norwegian philologist Sophus Bugge theorized that all the stories in the Eddas were actually
Christian with basically no pre-existing mythological basis, and Loki was just literally satan. And while that theory was soundly rejected
by basically everyone, Loki As Satan wasn't so easily scrapped. It's not the most baseless analog - he's the
token malevolent divinity, the god who betrays the other gods. He's not that hard to parallel with a fallen
angel or a Judas figure. Except these interpretations hinge on his
role in the death of Baldr as the ultimate, unforgivable betrayal, and completely ignore
every other story about him. Some of these translations add prologues that
refer to Loki as a "vile serpent", which is totally made-up - his only major epithets
in the Edda are "backbiter" and "Laufey's son", and he's never a snake. He and snakes don't really get along. If Snorri wanted to make Loki a Satan figure,
he would've made him a Satan figure. But because Snorri put focus on Ragnarok for
his own reasons, later analysts also focused on Ragnarok, and without the context Snorri
had of "cleansing the old world to make way for the one we live in now", it looks like
a very bad thing, a tragedy. And it looks like it's all Loki's fault. With this perspective shift tipping Loki from
"necessary nuisance" into "fully antagonistic", Loki's complex and surprisingly sympathetic
framing from the Eddas gives way to a much more basic one - cartoon lucifer. He's still a liar and a trickster, but his
role as problem-solver withers away, and gets replaced with some more satanic implications
of being a manipulator and evil tempter. Which is hilarious, because mythological Loki
literally can't manipulate his way out of a box. But with Loki placed in explicit opposition
to the Aesir, another possibility opens up - because the Aesir still don't come across
as all that heroic. Violent, oathbreaking, perpetually drunk,
it doesn't take much work to frame them as structurally problematic - especially if you
add the subtextual implication that, on top of all their other flaws, they'd have to be
idiots to keep someone like Loki around. But if the Aesir are bad, then Loki, their
opposition, has the opportunity to be good. Loki makes an easy rebel against the system,
since he's basically just an agent of chaos. And with a little tweaking, he's not hard
to rework into a misunderstood rebel antihero. Even post-satanization, Loki still kinda walks
the line between sympathetic and unsympathetic. Loki's character is fundamentally transgressive. He breaks rules and crosses boundaries. He's pretty much the only Norse god who changes
gender on the regular, and even his heritage crosses a line - a Jotunn father and an Aesir
mother, mixed parentage no-one else seems to share. He travels a lot, accompanying Thor on the
occasional journey but more often borrowing Freya's feather cloak to travel to Jotunheim
or the realm of the dwarves. He doesn't fit easily into any one realm,
and his divine domain is also a bit… uncertain. That's a weird thing to overlook, right? He's a god - but why was he worshipped? Tyr and Odin, gods of war, were prayed and
sacrificed to for victory in battle; Freya and Njord, gods of fertility, were sacrificed
to for peace and a good year; Thor, god of storms and rain, was sacrificed to in times
of famine or disease. But I can't find any big sacrifices to Loki,
or any agreement on what, exactly, he was the god of. Lies and trickery were his personality, not
his deific domain - Thor wasn't the god of getting drunk and hitting stuff. The gods were worshipped because they played
a role in the day-to-day lives of the norse. What was Loki's? Unfortunately, it's really hard to tell. If he wasn't getting festivals or big dramatic
blood sacrifices, it wasn't really gonna be written down. Maybe he was worshipped in smaller, more domestic
ways, maybe he was one of those antagonistic gods that people would pray against - but
there's almost nothing to go on here. This is around the time where, with no other
clues to go on, I'd wanna dive into the etymology of his name to find what he originally meant
on the most basic level or to see if he was based on an older god - but, unfortunately,
that information doesn't really exist either. Loki's name is short and simple and the etymology
is a subject of furious debate. Due to its similarity to the old norse word
logi, meaning fire, some people have suggested that he was a fire god - and while he might
have been some sort of hearth spirit, more on that later, he doesn't seem to have been
a fire god. The words are similar, but not cognate. Plus, in the myth of Utgard-Loki, he loses
an eating contest to Logi, the personification of fire. That wouldn't make any sense if they were
supposed to be the same being. So it's not logi - what else could it be? Well, there's a few possibilities. It might be derived from the proto-germanic
root luk-, a root used for words related to loops, like knots, hooks and locks. It also sees use in words for spiders and
spider-related things - in Swedish and Faroese, the word for "cobweb" is literally "Loki's
net". So… is Loki a spider? While possible, and delightfully creepy, that
particular spin doesn't really have much evidence in the folklore. But Loki doesn't need to be a spider to have
something to do with knots or nets. Loki's name could mean something a lot more
basic, like "entangler", which would fit pretty well with his mythical role of inventing the
fishing net, which was then used to trap him - he entangles other people and himself in
equal measure. This also makes sense if "Loki" is more like
a title than a name. Utgard-Loki, the illusionist giant faced by
Loki and Thor, is very confusing on paper. He has no apparent relation to Loki, and they
don't seem to know each other, but his name, Utgard-Loki, means "Loki of the Outyards". If Loki itself means "entangling one", then
the distinction makes more sense - Utgard-Loki entangles them in illusions and impossible
tasks, "the entangler of the outyards". If it's a catch-all term for tricksters and
ensnarers, it would help explain why these otherwise unrelated characters share such
a unique name. Loki's name has also survived in some folk-phrases
in Scandinavia - like mirages and other heat-based distortions are sometimes described as "Loki
sowing his oats or herding his goats". If the term has retained elements of trickery
or illusion, it makes sense to use it in that context. But the folk customs can tell us more about
him than just his name. Loki might not have gotten big feasts or dramatic
society-wide sacrifice days, but elements of his nature seem to have lingered in the
day-to-day folk customs, painting a rather more domestic picture. Some phrases describe Loki as responsible
for heat-hazes, sudden flares of a fire, cobwebs, and other kinds of ephemera often attributed
to small nature spirits called vaettir. Some other surviving Scandinavian traditions
involve tossing a child's baby teeth into the hearth fire and asking Loki to watch over
the kid. Particularly interesting, a lot of phrases
and traditions about hearthfires and tending to them seem to work in a Loki reference. Now, this doesn't automatically mean that
the Loki associated with the hearth has any relation to the god Loki - as we've already
discussed with Utgard-Loki, he wasn't the only Loki running around - but there's some
pretty compelling evidence compiled in this essay <Loki, the Vätte, and the Ash Lad:
A Study Combining Old Scandinavian and Late Material> that suggests they're actually probably
the same figure, and further that the hearth-spirit Loki might've been adapted later into medieval
Norwegian folklore as an unlikely hero called the Ash-Lad, a clever but lazy dude who tends
the hearth all day until forced into a heroic adventure. If this is true, it suggests that Loki's divine
role was as a mischievous but ultimately benevolent protector of the home and family - which,
honestly, does resonate pretty plausibly with how many kids he canonically has. But unfortunately, like everything else about
loki, this is pretty confusing and hard to pin down. The connection is possible, but it's kind
of impossible to conclusively prove. So where does that leave us? Loki has so many stories, but every single
one of them has either a biased narrator, an incomplete narrative, or both. It's nearly impossible to find consistent
threads, we don't know when he first showed up or what role he played in the society,
we can't connect him to any precursor deities, we can barely even get a read on his personality. Loki is a mass of contradictions. And you know what? That's okay. This is one of many ways that gods can develop
- they end up splintering over time. Usually the only gods with one perfectly consistent
linear narrative are the ones who had that purposefully constructed by someone with an
agenda. But in a living mythology a god is worshipped
day to day. They play a role in a human life. And people's lives change, and so their needs
change. The role a god plays can change a lot over
time as the society changes. Without an artificially constructed coherent
canon for Loki, we can't really get a good look at a linear narrative for him - but the
fact that gods have linear narratives at all is usually an artificial addition from other
people. Loki is extremely confusing… and that's
okay. Nobody ever said he had to be simple. And the sad truth is that, sometimes, information
gets lost, and once it's gone, we can never get the full picture. Trying to fill in the gaps with information
that isn't there is a recipe for conspiracy theories. And to be honest, I don't think there's anything
more quintessentially Loki than getting centuries worth of scholars at each other's throats
trying to figure out his one true nature. Can't a guy shapeshift in peace? Uh, real quick, before we go, we've got a
brand new pin for you guys - and this one isn't a Greek god! You can snag this snazzy new Loki pin from
our Crowdmade shop for a limited time only, and it comes with this nifty sticker set! And I'm gonna say this in absolute seriousness:
I think this is the greatest thing I've ever created. Okay thanks bye! [I'm Looking Through You]
This actually makes so much sense, especially the whole "trying to avoid a prophecy only to get caught in said prophecy" with Loki being some sort of mischievous but all in all guardian of the world. And am I the only one who can't even begin to imagine how long it must take for Red to research this, like, I could barely find where to read a proper translation of the Iliad and Red just digs through information eons ago and puts it all in a perfect timeline. And she connects everything up at the end. Wow.
What I find interesting is that there is actually a very similar figure to Loki in Christianity (although I think it is mostly from the book of Enoch, which is apparently a bunch of bullshit). An angel named Azazel was cast from heaven and chained to a rock for gifting mankind several things, from weapons like swords and spears, to cosmetics like jewellery, as well as fire itself. As punishment he was chained to a rock and had his eyes covered so that he couldn't look out at the world.
This reflects Loki gifting a spear to Baldur's brother which lead to his death, and being chained to a rock and blinded. Azazel gifted weapons to humanity, notably the spear, which was used to kill Jesus. Azazel is also often called 'the Scapegoat', which as seen in Red's video, Loki is often attributed as.
Azazel is also compared to Prometheus as he was also the one who gifted mankind weapons and fire.
The probably isn't a real connection between the three figures, but the similarity is interesting nonetheless.
Talk about synergistic timing!
So if Loki isn't documented until after Christianization, is it possible that Snorri added Loki, to represent the Christian influence on Norse culture? I can see some value in Snorri pointing out that his own culture was becoming entangled by Christian influences.
The sacred text!