This article is about a god. But not just any god “Hijacked by Jesus” and forced into the role of villain. Oh no. This god starred as the villain and/or antihero in another god’s heroic quest to prove his worth. I am, of course, talking about Loki.
In the Norse tradition, they mostly associated Loki with change granted through the medium of chaos. He has no clear origin story or specific role that any scholar can determine. He just appears in the texts full formed and ready for mischief.
One of the more common and most accepted points in the scholarship of Norse culture is that the more Christian the areas surrounding the texts, the more villainous Loki becomes.
And for all anyone cares to understand, Loki’s just evil. That’s how the media portrays him. That’s how many scholars end their arguments. And that’s the conclusion Christian scholars make when it comes to praising Odin (God the Father) or Thor (God the Son).
I’d like to point out I’m not shitting on Christianity. I’m merely stating that a lot of the scholars come from a Christian background and look at the Old Norse myths through the Christian lens. And we all know how well that turns out.
If we want to understand the past, we can’t look at it from the contemporary worldview. This episode aims to present an opinion not focused on how evil Loki is when compared to the morals of our own religions, but through the focus of his actions alone.
So let’s get started.
Thing Marvel Got Wrong About Loki
You’re probably most familiar with the Loki from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Thor movies. Well, with the source material, there’s not much Marvel gets right. About as accurate as the Arthurian legends are to real history.
Take, for example, Loki’s name. In the comics, Loki has the patronymic Laufeyson. Meaning “son of Laufey.” Because, in the comics, Loki’s father is Laufey, the king of the Frost Giants. This is wrong.
In the myths themselves, it’s Loki’s mother who’s named Laufey. Loki takes the matronymic Laufeyjarson. His father is a jötunn named Fárbauti, we don’t hear much about him. It was uncommon but not unusual for the Norse people to be associated with their mother if their father was less successful or out of the picture. It was also common practice to have a similar sounding wording in tales, and Laufeyjarson flows better with Loki than the name Loki Fárbautason.
Let us also remember that Loki was the blood-brother of Odin, rather than his adopted son. Yes, you heard that right. In the myths, Loki swears himself to Odin as his brother with a blood oath. He is not, as Marvel has us believe, an abandoned baby Odin adopts after a nasty war with the Frost Giants. (Though Loki is a jötunn, they got that much right.) Doesn’t that sit terribly when we think about what brings us to Ragnarök?
The thing we must remember about the comics is that they pick and choose what they want to present. Just because Loki has the name Laufeyjarson, doesn’t mean he was conventional and named himself after his father. What they get right isn’t comparable to what they changed in the name of a telling a good story.
A Christian Wrote Pagan Myths Long After Norse Conversion
And while we’re on the topic of telling a good story, we can’t talk about Loki without mentioning the man who wrote it all down in the first place.
Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda in the early thirteenth century in Iceland. This is, for comparison, around the same time as King John signing the Magna Carta in England. Before this, much of the Norse myths were oral tradition. Like Beowulf, this was a spoken tale and written down centuries after. And Christianity spread to Iceland by the end of the tenth century, two centuries after the Norse made it to Iceland.
My main gripe with this is simple. When it comes to writing anything down, we want it to make sense. And what makes sense to most people is contextualising the information to something you already know. For Snorri Sturluson and many early Christians, this is identifying the figures of your religion with the ones in the other religions.
In the Norse culture, we see Odin as God the Father and Thor as God the Son. This makes sense in how Odin is king of the gods and Thor is his son. If the Aesir, the gods, are the almighty good, then we need someone for them to defeat. We need someone to represent all that is evil in the world. We need a trickster to tempt us, a snake in the grass, a villain. And Loki is occasionally associated with snakes.
So by turning the Norse myths into something understandable for Christians, we’re misrepresenting a culture in its entirety. The Norse people didn’t have the same morals and beliefs as the Christians who tell us the tales of the gods. To think everyone sees the world as we do is remarkably egotistical of us.
Loki As a Bringer of Change
To understand how the Vikings saw the world, we need to look at how they explained natural phenomena. We turn to what their gods presided over, the monsters who populated the dark corners of the world, and their apocalypse stories.
Many myths are about how the Asgardians subjugate the rest of the Nine Realms to their rule. They’re like the colonial powers who’re too lazy to do the actual ruling, but like the power of being in charge. The other inhabitants are intelligent enough to get on with life and pay little attention to the Aesir. At least until the Aesir come knocking on their walls, wanting to go on quests.
And then we have the jötunn. They start off as intelligent beings living in the north, aren’t necessarily “giant” in size, nor particularly frost-like. But the more Christian we get, the more demonised they become. We see individual jötnar as potential allies, but the entire race as an enemy. Many jötnar are responsible for nature being as uncontrollable as it is.
Loki walks the fine line as the son of a jötunn and a blood-brother to an Aesir. He’s accepted into the halls of Asgard, but not fully regarded as one of them. Loki is voluntold to fix a load of problems, even if he wasn’t the one to start it. (Read: that incident with the horse Svaðilfari when Odin didn’t want to pay to have a wall repaired.)
Is it not out of the question to accept the Aesir are the dominating force of humanity’s culture, and the wild nature of the earth is the jötnar? This makes Loki a bringer of change. Loki, a trickster refusing to fit into neat little boxes, heralds in the earth reclaiming land from the humans who seek to control it.
Loki Was the Only God to Keep His Promise
You might think I’m being hyper-critical of the Norse gods, a Loki-sympathiser, as it were. Maybe I am. But if Loki is the evil god we’re all led to believe, why is there a ballad in existence where Loki’s cunning puts him in a better light than the rest of the gods?
The Faroese ballad Loka Táttur dates to the late Middle Ages. It’s a tale where a giant wins a bet with a farmer and demands the farmer’s son as payment. While Loki is as cunning as usual, he’s portrayed as a benevolent god.
Here’s a summary:
The farmer asks Odin for help. Odin conceals the boy in a newly spouted field of grain as a single grain on an axe in the middle of the field. But the giant’s hand brushes the grain. Odin returns the boy to his father and claims his work is done. The farmer then asks Hœnir for help. Hœnir turns the boy into a feather on the head of one of seven swans to fly over the lake. But the giant wrenches the feather from the swan. Hœnir returns the boy to his father and says he’s done his job.
Then the farmer calls to Loki for help. Loki has the farmer build a boathouse with a wide opening with an iron stake. He rows out to sea to catch a flounder and turns the boy into a grain in the middle of the fish’s egg. When the giant asks Loki where he’s been all night, Loki says he was rowing. Then Loki and the giant fish, where the giant catches three flounders and Loki demands the black one. The giant refuses and starts inspecting the eggs. The boy is afraid, so Loki has him sit behind him and hide from the giant until they make it back to shore. But the giant sees the boy when the make shore and chases him. The boy runs into the boathouse. The giant gets caught in the opening and stabbed with the iron stake. Loki ensures the giant doesn’t regenerate and tells the father the giant’s dead. He’s done the job asked of him.
This isn’t the only story where Loki has protected children when other gods have refused to help further than the bare minimum. And a god who protects children can’t be entirely evil. A common point in all the stories involving Loki is that, once he makes a promise, he keeps it.
The Patron of Queer Children
Loki never stuck to one biological form. There was that time he spent eight years as a milkmaid and gave birth to several children. It’s also confusing whether it was him or his second wife, Angrboða, who gave birth to Jörmungandr, Fenrir and Hel.
Not to mention how many times he’s shapeshifted into a woman just because he could. He’s often seen as the antithesis of what the macho Norse culture considers to be the ideal man. He’s the epitome of an effeminate, pretty male who would rather pull pranks than engage in combat.
Because of this, Loki has become an icon of sorts to the queer community, even before Tom Hiddleston starred in Thor. He’s occasionally known as a god of fatherhood (see the Faroese ballad) and many parentless children claimed Loki as the missing parent.
What’s interesting to note is that one reason the Christian writers cast him as the villain is because he’s a slender, effeminate-looking man who relies on trickery and magic over courage and forthrightness. It didn’t help that, reading between the lines, he’s a bisexual who enjoys being penetrated so much he willingly turns into a woman for it. Pregnancy was an acceptable exchange for the pleasure.
It’s hard to claim that one god is inherently evil for the crime of daring to not even try to fit in. That’s not even mentioning the queerbaiting modern adaptations take when poorly representing anything not strictly cis-het. I’ve linked an article in the resources section about this. Though as this is a rarely talked about topic, with little in the way of sources to further study, Martinelli admits a lot is observation of the myths and personal conclusions.
Conclusion
I hope I’ve presented you with something to think about.
I want to leave you with a question. Is Loki a bad guy, or a victim of a new religion looking for scapegoat gods?
We often consume retellings of the same stories with the same narrative from one point of view. If history is written from the point of view of the victors, then how much of history are we missing out on?
If we look at specific gods through the lens of our current society, we’ll end up with figures like Marvel’s Loki. By focusing on everything through a Christian perspective, we’re doing a disservice to cultures which weren’t necessarily Christian at the time of the events we’re talking about. Snorri Sturluson is just one example of this.
The archaeological evidence suggests the Norse people didn’t view the world through the same lens as the later Christian writers. The Faroese story mentioned earlier suggests the Norse people believed the world was more human against nature rather than morally right and wrong.
Loki, by design, doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. He’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, a challenger of societal norms. Perhaps this is why he gets progressively more villainous the later through the myths we go.
And how can we say we know the past when we only see the world as if everyone thinks like we do?
Resources and Links
- “Norse Mythology” by Neil Gaiman (2017). A fantastic retelling of the original myths. He said he tried to avoid later attestations while writing it.
- “Loki’s gender fluidity and bisexuality in Norse mythology and in modern adaptations by Alice Martinelli (2022).” An academic article (possibly a dissertation) on the topic of Loki and his portrayal in multiple forms of media.
