Loki: The God Who Would Not Be Bound
He could become a mare, a fly, an old woman — and still could not escape the fate he himself helped set in motion. This is the story of the trickster who broke a god's world, and paid for it in a cave beneath the earth.
In the sagas of the Norse gods, Loki is never quite what he seems. Son of the jötunn Fárbauti and the goddess Laufey, brother to Helblindi and Býleistr, he belongs to neither camp fully — jötunn by blood, Æsir by adoption, and trickster by nature. He is married to Sigyn, with whom he has two sons, Narfi (also called Nari) and Váli. But his family sprawls further and stranger: with the jötunn Angrboða he fathers three beings who will shape the end of the world — Hel, ruler of the dead; the wolf Fenrir; and the world-serpent Jörmungandr.
Loki's strangeness is not only in his children but in his own body. He is a shapeshifter, appearing across the old sources as a salmon, a mare, a fly, and possibly as an old woman named Þökk. In one of the odder tales, Loki takes the form of a mare to distract the stallion Svaðilfari, is impregnated by him, and gives birth to the eight-legged horse Sleipnir — a gift, in the end, to Odin.
For a time Loki moves easily among the gods, sometimes helpful, often mischievous, always unpredictable. But his mischief curdles into something darker when he engineers the death of Baldr, the beloved son of Odin, tricking the blind god Höðr into striking the fatal blow. It is the one betrayal the gods cannot forgive.
The punishment is severe and strange. Odin's son Váli binds Loki with the entrails of one of Loki's own sons — in the Prose Edda, Narfi is killed by another of Loki's sons, also named Váli, and it is Narfi's entrails that become the chains. The goddess Skaði places a venomous serpent above the bound god, its poison dripping down toward his face.
Sigyn, his wife, does not abandon him. She sits beside him holding a bowl to catch the venom before it can touch him. But the bowl fills, and when she must empty it, the poison falls freely, and Loki writhes in agony. The old Norse believed this convulsing god beneath the earth was the true cause of earthquakes.
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