Loki in the Medieval Sources: Sources and Corrections

No medieval text makes Loki Odin's brother or his son. One Eddic poem has Loki claim that he and Odin once mixed their blood, and Odin does not deny it. Snorri says Loki gave birth to the eight-legged foal himself. The oldest poem about Baldr's death has the mistletoe but never names Loki in the killing. The fire god is Jacob Grimm's idea of 1835, and no place name, sacrifice or prayer to Loki has ever been found. This page gives the source for every slide, and says plainly what is still disputed.

Every factual claim in the cover and the five content slides of our Loki carousel, with its source. Section numbers match the number at the top of each slide.

Slide by slide

Cover. Odin told his own son to stand up so Loki could sit down

The scene is in Lokasenna, the poem in which Loki insults the gods one by one at a feast in Ægir's hall. Refused a seat by Bragi, Loki turns to Odin, and Odin's whole answer, in Edward Pettit's open-access translation, is: "Arise, then, Víðarr, and let the wolf's father sit at the feast, lest Loki address us with insulting words in Ægir's hall!" Víðarr is Odin's son. The wolf is Loki's son Fenrir, whom Snorri gives him by the giantess Angrboða. Odin hands Loki his own son's seat, and calls him the wolf's father before he calls him Loki. Like nearly everything about Loki, the poem survives only in a manuscript written in Christian Iceland two to three centuries after the Viking Age: the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda, of about 1270 to 1280. Runes carved in the Viking Age itself are older than all of it, and our rune translator writes any name in them.

Sources: Lokasenna, the stanza beginning Rístu þá, Viðarr (st. 10 in Guðni Jónsson's edition; stanza numbers differ between editions, so we name the edition each time); Codex Regius, GKS 2365 4to; Edward Pettit, The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition (Open Book Publishers, 2023), CC BY-NC 4.0, Lokasenna chapter; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (Oxford UP, 2001), Introduction, for the date of the manuscript.

01. Not father and son

No medieval source makes Loki Odin's son, adopted or otherwise, and he is not Odin's brother either: Odin's brothers are Vili and Vé. What Lokasenna has is stranger. Loki has killed a servant and been driven out of the hall. He comes back and asks, in Pettit's translation: "Do you recall it, Óðinn, when in ancient days we two blended blood together? You said you wouldn't taste ale, unless it were brought to us both!" Odin does not argue. He tells Víðarr to stand up.

This is the only source for the blood-brotherhood. It rests on one stanza of one poem, which survives in one manuscript, and the claim is Loki's, made in a poem whose whole genre is accusation. Odin's silence is good evidence. It is still silence. Nobody can date the poem: Pettit writes that it clearly existed by about 1225, when Snorri knew it, but that we cannot say confidently whether it began in heathen or Christian times. John Lindow thinks it likely that Odin entered the blood-brotherhood to head off future mortal conflict with Loki, and adds: "If so, Odin failed." That is one scholar's reading, not a statement in any text.

Sources: Lokasenna, the stanza beginning Mantu þat, Óðinn (st. 9 in Guðni Jónsson's edition), Old Norse blendum blóði saman; Pettit 2023, Lokasenna chapter, for the translation, the single manuscript and the dating; Lindow 2001, p. 219.

02. The horse: the text says he bore the foal

In Gylfaginning, written about 1225, Snorri Sturluson tells how a builder offered to wall the gods' stronghold in one winter for Freyja, the sun and the moon, and how it was Loki who advised letting him use his stallion Svaðilfari. With the wall nearly done, a mare ran out of a wood and whinnied at the stallion, and the two horses ran all night. Then Snorri writes: En Loki hafði þá ferð haft til Svaðilfœra at nokkvoru síðar bar hann fyl, Loki had had such dealings with Svaðilfari that somewhat later he bore a foal. It was grey, it had eight legs, and it is Sleipnir. The Old Norse keeps the masculine pronoun: bar hann fyl, he bore a foal. Snorri never says in so many words that Loki became the mare; that is an inference, though a fair one.

The gods do not treat childbearing as a funny story about a horse. In Lokasenna Odin tells Loki, in front of everyone, that he spent eight winters under the earth as a milking cow and a woman and bore children there, which Odin reckoned the nature of an argr, an unmanly man. That is a different episode from the horse. Later in the same poem Njörðr returns to it: a woman taking lovers is a small matter, but a male god who has given birth has no business at the feast.

Only Snorri says Loki bore Sleipnir. The one poetic parallel, in Hyndluljóð, which survives only in Flateyjarbók of the late fourteenth century, uses the verb gat, and Lindow notes that there it is not absolutely clear Loki played the female role. In Snorri's own list of poetic names for Loki in Skáldskaparmál, he is Sleipnir's kinsman, Sleipnis frænda, not his mother.

Sources: Snorri, Gylfaginning ch. 42 in Guðni Jónsson's edition; Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2nd ed. (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2005), p. 36, which is the Old Norse quoted; the English is our own literal rendering. Lokasenna st. 23 (Odin) and st. 33 (Njörðr) in Guðni Jónsson's edition, the Njörðr passage summarised after Pettit's synopsis; Hyndluljóð, the stanza beginning Ol vlf Loki vid Angrbodu in the Flateyjarbók text; Skáldskaparmál, the kennings for Loki (ch. 23 in Guðni Jónsson's edition); Lindow 2001, s.v. Sleipnir, p. 275.

03. The famous crime: the oldest poem does not name him

Völuspá, in the Codex Regius, has the mistletoe, mjór ok mjök fagr, mistilteinn, slender and very fair. It has Höðr, who shoots: Höðr nam skjóta. It has Frigg weeping in Fensalir. It does not name Loki anywhere in the killing. He appears only after the killing, already bound, and even there the poem speaks of a captive "like to malevolent Loki in form" (Pettit), not flatly of Loki.

Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, finished in Denmark after 1216, tells the story as a rivalry between Baldr and Höðr over a woman; as Lindow notes, neither Loki nor Frigg appears in it, and there is no mistletoe. Only Snorri, in Gylfaginning, has both: Loki goes to Frigg in the likeness of a woman, learns that the mistletoe seemed to her too young to swear the oath, and Höðr shoots at tilvísun Loka, at Loki's direction. The Poetic Edda does tie Loki to the death once, outside Völuspá: in Lokasenna he tells Frigg, in Pettit's translation, "I brought it about that you'll never again see Baldr riding to halls!", and Snorri's list of names for Loki calls him ráðbani Baldrs, the one who planned Baldr's death. Snorri wrote about a century and a half after the Viking Age. Jan de Vries saw the gap in 1933 and left it open: one possibility, he wrote, is that Loki is "an intruder upon the myth".

One more caution. The mistletoe of the poem is a slender growth standing taller than the fields, and Pettit notes that many scholars have struggled to square it with the bushy plant that now bears the name.

Sources: Völuspá, the Baldr stanzas (31 to 33 in Pettit's Codex Regius text) and the stanza of the bound captive (34 in Pettit, 35 in Guðni Jónsson's edition), with Pettit's note on mistilteinn; Snorri, Gylfaginning ch. 49 in Guðni Jónsson's edition; Lokasenna, the stanza beginning Enn vill þú, Frigg (st. 28 in Guðni Jónsson's edition), Pettit 2023 for the translation; Skáldskaparmál, the kennings for Loki (ch. 23 in Guðni Jónsson's edition); Saxo, Gesta Danorum Book 3, as summarised in Lindow 2001, Introduction, p. 27 (the linked text is Oliver Elton's public-domain translation of Books 1 to 9); Jan de Vries, The Problem of Loki, FF Communications 110 (Helsinki, 1933), ch. IX.

04. Not a fire god: fire ate the trough as well

In Gylfaginning, at the hall of Útgarða-Loki, Loki is set against Logi, whose name means flame, in an eating contest. Loki eats all the meat. Logi eats the meat, the bones and the wooden trough. The one time a medieval text sets Loki against fire, fire is somebody else, and fire wins.

The fire god begins with Jacob Grimm, whose Deutsche Mythologie (1835) first tied the two names together. In the English translation of its fourth edition he calls Logi the natural force of fire and Loki the same thing with "a shifting of the sound, a shifting of the sense", and writes that "the merging of Logi into Loki must be of high antiquity". Beyond the likeness of the two names, his support was Danish and Icelandic folk idiom recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not medieval myth, and Grimm himself derived the name Loki from a root meaning to shut, not from fire. Wagner turned the idea into Loge in the Ring cycle. Jan de Vries went through the case in 1933 and concluded that "the evidence for this character of the god is extremely slight"; in the eating contest, he wrote, Loki "loses because he is inferior to the voracious element".

"Trickster" is a different kind of label: a genuine and productive scholarly reading, but a category fitted to Loki in the twentieth century from North American and African traditions. De Vries's own comparisons were the Tsimshian Raven and the Menomini Manabus. Neither label is medieval.

Sources: Snorri, Gylfaginning ch. 46 in Guðni Jónsson's edition; Lindow 2001, s.v. Útgarða-Loki, and p. 219 on Wagner and the trickster reading; Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie (1835), quoted from Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass from the 4th edition (London, 1882), vol. I, ch. XII, pp. 241 to 243; de Vries 1933, ch. VIII, pp. 160 to 162, and ch. XII.

05. The map remembers everyone else: nothing is named after him

Stefan Brink, working from place names, lists the gods who were objects of an actual cult in Scandinavia: Óðinn, Þórr, Freyr, Ullr, Njörðr, Týr, and probably Freyja. Then: "Gods and goddesses such as Loki, Heimdallr, Bragi, Gefjon, and Iðunn never occur in Scandinavian place names, which may indicate that there was never an actual cult of these deities." Jan de Vries wrote in 1933 that "we never hear of any sacrifices made to him", and E. O. G. Turville-Petre in 1964 that "there is nothing to suggest that Loki was ever worshipped". The place names sometimes offered as Loki's, Lockbol, Lockesta and Lokkethorp, were collected by Axel Olrik in 1909, and Olrik rejected them in his next sentence: probably not a naming after the god at all, he wrote, but after a small troll-like being of the same name.

The honest caveat is de Vries's own, in the same book. Heimdallr, Hœnir and several goddesses are in the same position, and "it would be a rather rash conclusion to say that they also had never received any veneration or worship." Brink's word is "may". So this is a real finding and a weak inference. It shows there is no evidence of a public cult. It does not show that nobody believed in him. The poems give him no home either: Grímnismál, the poem that lists the gods' halls, never mentions Loki.

Sources: Stefan Brink, "How uniform was the Old Norse religion?", in Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World, ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills (Brepols, 2007), p. 125; de Vries 1933, pp. 27, 204 and 294; E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North (London, 1964), p. 126; Axel Olrik, "Loke i nyere folkeoverlevering II", Danske Studier 1909, p. 83.

What we do not claim

• That Loki is a giant and not a god. Snorri calls him an áss, a god, more than once, and his list of poetic names includes inn slægi áss, the sly god. His father Fárbauti is a giant, and tenth-century verse already calls Loki Fárbauti's son. Snorri introduces him as one "reckoned among the Æsir". Whether that makes him a god, a giant or neither is a reading, not a statement in the texts.
• That the blood-brotherhood is proven. It is one stanza of one poem in one manuscript, and Odin's answer is silence.
• Which of Loki's sons was killed at his binding. The prose at the end of Lokasenna and Snorri's Gylfaginning swap the brothers, and Snorri gives Loki one son in one chapter and two in another. We say only "his son".
• That the Poetic Edda nowhere connects Loki with Baldr's death, or that Snorri made up Loki's part. Our claim is narrower: Völuspá's account of the killing does not name him.
• That nobody ever worshipped Loki. The finding is no evidence of a public cult. Eldar Heide (2011) reports small nineteenth-century food "sacrifices" (his quotation marks) made into the fire to a household spirit called Lokke in Telemark, though he argues that figure is distinct from the Loki of the Eddas.
• That "trickster" is a wrong reading. It is a useful modern one. It is just not medieval.

Corrections

None yet. If you find an error, tell us, with a citation.

Frequently asked questions

Is Loki Odin's brother?

No. No medieval text makes Loki Odin's brother or his son; Odin's brothers are Vili and Vé. In the poem Lokasenna, Loki asks Odin whether he remembers that the two of them mixed their blood in ancient days, and Odin does not deny it. That one stanza is the only source for the oath.

Did Loki kill Baldr?

In Snorri's Edda, written about 1225, Loki arranges it: he learns that the mistletoe never swore not to harm Baldr, and Höðr shoots it at Loki's direction. The older poem Völuspá has the mistletoe and Höðr but does not name Loki in the killing, and Saxo's Danish history has neither Loki nor mistletoe. The Poetic Edda does blame him once, outside Völuspá: in Lokasenna, Loki tells Frigg he is the reason she will never again see Baldr ride home.

Was Loki worshipped by the Vikings?

There is no evidence that he was. No place name, sacrifice or prayer to Loki has ever been found, and the standard studies from Jan de Vries (1933) to John Lindow (2001) find no evidence of a cult. That is not proof nobody believed in him: Heimdall has no place names either.