Loki
Loki is the shape-shifting trickster of Norse myth, a giant’s son counted among the gods, who helps them and harms them by turns and leads the giants against them at Ragnarök. His best-known image, on the Snaptun stone from Denmark, is a face with its lips sewn shut.
Meaning
Loki, said LOH-kee in English (Dictionary.com), is the son of the giant Farbauti and of Laufey in Snorri’s Prose Edda, “beautiful and comely to look upon, evil in spirit, very fickle in habit”, a master of the wisdom called sleight who would bring the gods into great hardships “and then get them out with crafty counsel”. Store norske leksikon calls him a trickster and a shape-shifter: he becomes an old giantess, a fly and a mare, and borrows Freyja’s falcon skin to fly into the land of the giants; Lex adds that he can change his sex. He is Odin’s blood brother, the husband of Sigyn and, by the giantess Angrboda, the father of the wolf Fenrir, the Midgard serpent and Hel. Lex makes a point the stories alone would hide. Loki appears in no rite, was tied to no sanctuary and gives his name to no person or place, and Lex concludes that he was a figure of the myths who was never worshipped as a god, though after Odin and Thor he is the one who appears in them most often. Like the other gods’ stories, his were written down by Christian writers at the start of the Middle Ages, the National Museum of Denmark notes. Some Heathens pray to him today, and The Troth, an American Heathen organisation, lifted its own restriction on hailing him in 2019.
Origin and history
What survives of Loki outside the poems shows the myths rather than a cult. The Snaptun stone, a Viking Age stone of Norwegian soapstone dated about 750–1050 and found on the beach at Snaptun on Horsens Fjord in east Jutland, is carved with a man’s face whose mouth is sewn shut. Store norske leksikon and the National Museum of Denmark both read it as Loki after the dwarf Brokk stitched his lips; it is on display in Horsens Museum. The Gosforth cross, a ring-headed stone cross 4.4 metres tall in the churchyard at Gosforth in Cumbria, which Danmarkshistorien places among the Scandinavian settlers in England in the first half of the 900s, has a scene that Store norske leksikon reads as Loki bound in the cave with Sigyn.
What Loki was is still argued, Lex says. Some historians of religion, among them the Dutch scholar Jan de Vries, see a trickster; others a Norse counterpart of the Christian devil, a reading helped by Snorri calling him “slanderer”, a word also used of Satan; others the demonic side of Odin. Jens Peter Schjødt sees “a god in development” who grows worse and worse as Ragnarök nears. His name is disputed too: it has been linked with lugi, “flame”, which would make him a fire god, and with the verb lúka, “to close”, the one who closes the whole world at Ragnarök.
The lips sewn shut
The face on the Snaptun stone fits a story in Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál. Loki wagered his head against the dwarf Brokk, and lost when the gods judged that “the hammer was best of all the precious works”, Mjölnir, and gave sentence “that the dwarf should have his wager”. Loki told the dwarf Brokk that he might have the head, “but not the neck”. So, in Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s translation, Brokk “would have bored a hole in Loki’s lips and stitched his mouth together, but the knife did not cut”; he used his brother’s awl instead. “He stitched the lips together, and Loki ripped the thong out of the edges.” Store norske leksikon adds that Loki carried the scars for the rest of his life.
Mother of Sleipnir
Loki’s shape-changing gave the gods one of their treasures. A giant offered to build a wall round Ásgard in a single winter, and asked for nothing less than Freyja, the sun and the moon. When the work went too fast, Loki turned himself into a mare and lured the builder’s stallion Svaðilfari away into the woods, and the wall was not finished in time. The foal Loki bore was grey with eight legs: Odin’s horse Sleipnir. Lex points out that he both harms and helps the gods here, since it was he who had let the wager be made.
The binding of Loki
Snorri lays Baldr’s death on Loki. The gods hunt him down; he hides in a waterfall as a salmon, and Thor catches him by the tail, “and for this reason the salmon has a tapering back”. In Snorri’s account the gods turn Loki’s son Vali into a wolf, Vali tears apart his brother Narfi, and the gods bind Loki over three stones with Narfi’s entrails. Skadi fastens a venomous serpent above his face. His wife Sigyn “stands near him and holds a basin under the venom-drops”, but when she goes to empty it the venom falls on him and he writhes so hard “that all the earth trembles: ye call that ‘earthquakes’”. There he lies until Ragnarök, when, Lex says, he is set free to lead the giants against the gods; in Snorri he and Heimdall kill each other. Lex compares the punishment with that of Prometheus in Greek myth, though his came from an eagle that pecked at his liver.
Loki in Heathenry today
Whether to honour Loki is a live question among Heathens. In 2008 The Troth adopted a policy not to promote the worship of beings “hostile to the Aesir and Vanir, to humanity, and/or to the cosmological order”. Loki was not named, but the policy was generally read to include him, and it became known as the “Loki Ban”. The ban on hailing Loki was lifted on 1 January 2019, and in June 2023 the whole policy was withdrawn. The Troth now writes that people pray to Thor for overcoming obstacles, “or pray to Loki to transform their obstacles into a path”.
Loki in the Avengers films
In Marvel’s Avengers films, Store norske leksikon notes, Loki is a supervillain based on Norse mythology who tries to take over the world, played by Tom Hiddleston; the Loki of the myths is as often the gods’ companion as their enemy.
Read next
- Next in Norse gods and their symbolsSkadiSkadi was a giantess counted among the Norse gods, the goddess of hunting and skiing who lives in the mountains and hunts with a bow. She married Njord, chosen by his feet, and went back to her father’s mountain hall, Thrymheim.
- Loki, as a mare, is the mother of Odin’s eight-legged horseSleipnirOdin’s eight-legged horse in Norse myth, grey and the best of all horses, able to cross between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
See also
Baldr, Hel, Thor, Heimdall, Idun, Odin.
Sources
- Loke (Store norske leksikon), Ellen Næss, Store norske leksikon, Loke
- Snaptunstenen (Store norske leksikon), Roger Pihl, Store norske leksikon, Snaptunstenen
- Loke (Lex), Finn Stefánsson; Jens Peter Schjødt, Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon, Loke
- The Viking gods, National Museum of Denmark
- The old religion, National Museum of Denmark
- Anglo-skandinavisk stenskulptur: Gosforth-korset (Danmarkshistorien), Danmarkshistorien (Lex)
- The Prose Edda (Brodeur translation), Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (trans.), 1916, American-Scandinavian Foundation (Internet Archive), Gylfaginning, chapters XXXIII, XXXIV and L; Skáldskaparmál, chapter XXXV
- FAQs, Sistema Plastics, What about Loki?
- Gods, The Troth, Why do Heathens worship the Gods?
- Loki (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com
- Avengers (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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