August 9, 2026
Last time I promised you the problem the gods kept inviting to dinner. Here he is — and I want to start with the strangest thing about him, which is where the old tellers seated him. Not outside the wall with the giants. Not below with the dead. At the table.
Snorri introduces him with a phrase that should be impossible:
Also numbered among the Æsir is he whom some call the mischief-monger of the Æsir, and the first father of falsehoods, and blemish of all gods and men: he is named Loki. — Gylfaginning, Brodeur translation (1916)
Read that again. Numbered among the Æsir — counted as one of the gods — and, in the same breath, the first father of falsehoods. The old North did not resolve that contradiction, because the old North did not think it was one. He is, Snorri adds, “beautiful and comely to look upon, evil in spirit, very fickle in habit.” Trouble, in these tellings, does not arrive looking like trouble. It arrives charming, funny, and already seated.
And he is not merely a guest. In the Lokasenna, when the gods try to bar him from a feast, Loki produces his credential — and it silences the room:
Remember, Othin, in olden days That we both our blood have mixed; Then didst thou promise no ale to pour, Unless it were brought for us both. — Lokasenna, Bellows translation (1923)
Blood-brotherhood with Odin himself. The highest god swore it, once, in the old days the poem does not explain. Whatever Loki is, the door cannot be closed on him, because the door was sworn open. The gods’ problem is not that trouble got in. It is that trouble is family.
Here is what the retellings flatten: nearly everything the gods own, Loki got them. Thor’s hammer exists because Loki cut off Sif’s hair and then, to pay for the joke, went to the dwarfs and came back with the treasures of the age. Asgard’s wall stands because Loki talked the gods into a mad bargain with its builder — and when the bargain went wrong, it was Loki, in the shape of a mare, who lured away the builder’s stallion and later, Snorri tells us without blinking, bore Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir. The best horse among gods and men has Loki for a mother.
That is the pattern, told over and over: Loki causes the problem, Loki is sent to fix the problem, and the fix leaves the gods richer than before. He is not the villain of these stories so much as their engine. Nothing moves until he moves. The old tellers understood something uncomfortable about stories — and maybe about households — which is that the one who makes the trouble and the one who makes things happen are very often the same person.
But the ledger has another column. With the giantess Angrboda, Loki fathered three children: a serpent, cast into the sea to circle the world; a daughter, Hel, sent down to rule the dead; and a wolf.
If you were with me for the fifth telling, you know the wolf. Fenrir — the one the gods raised at home, the one only Týr dared feed, the one bound at the cost of a hand — is Loki’s son. The gods looked at prophecy, took the monsters into their own keeping, and hoped management would beat fate. They bound the son with a ribbon. And in the end, they bound the father too.
Loki’s mischief finally crossed a line that even sworn blood could not cover — a death at the heart of the family, and I am going to keep that story for its own telling, because it deserves nothing less. What matters here is the shape of what followed. The seeress of the Völuspá, cataloguing the world’s sorrows, saw him:
One did I see in the wet woods bound, A lover of ill, and to Loki like; By his side does Sigyn sit, nor is glad To see her mate: would you know yet more? — Völuspá, Bellows translation (1923)
Snorri gives the grim particulars: bound in a cave with bonds made from the entrails of his own son, a serpent fixed above his face dripping venom, and his wife Sigyn beside him holding a basin to catch it. When the basin fills, she must turn away to empty it — and the venom falls.
Then he writhes against it with such force that all the earth trembles: ye call that “earthquakes.” — Gylfaginning, Brodeur translation (1916)
Notice the symmetry the old tellers built and never point at. The wolf, bound by craft, waits for the end. The father, bound in the dark, waits for the same end. The gods did not destroy their trouble — they never destroy their trouble. They tied it down, twice, inside the family, and called it handled. Earthquakes are the reminder of how that is going.
When Ragnarök comes, the tellings say, all bonds break. The wolf comes loose. And Loki comes loose — sailing with the hosts of the dead, standing at last openly on the other side of the field, where he and Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, slay each other.
That is the full arc of him: numbered among the Æsir at the beginning, arrayed against them at the end, and indispensable every step between. The old North’s honest answer to why keep such a one at the table is that the stories do not run without him — the treasures, the walls, the horse, the hammer, all of it has his fingerprints. The gods kept the problem because the problem was also the engine. They knew what it would cost. They kept him anyway.
Every family has a story like that. The old tellers just had the nerve to write it down.
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Sources: Gylfaginning, in The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916); Lokasenna and Völuspá, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923), with reference to Benjamin Thorpe (1866). Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: Baldr — the shining god everyone loved, the mother who asked everything in the world to spare him, and the one small thing she skipped.