Deities

Loki

LOH-kee

Norse Deities

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Loki." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/deities/loki.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Loki. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/deities/loki

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-loki,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Loki},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/deities/loki},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The cunning trickster and shape-shifter, blood-brother of Odin, of giant descent, at once companion and betrayer of the gods. His schemes both furnish the Aesir their greatest treasures and bring about their deepest griefs, above all the death of Baldr, for which he is bound beneath a venom-dripping serpent. At Ragnarok he breaks free to lead the enemies of the gods.

Facts

Belief

Theology

Polytheistic: many gods 1

Sources

Textual Note

The Eddic poem Lokasenna stages Loki crashing a feast of the gods and hurling accusations of cowardice and infidelity at each guest in turn, a text scholars read as a showcase of his role as the gods' licensed and dangerous truth teller. 1

Disputed

Pantheon Family

Aesir 1

Loki's parents in the Eddic sources are the jotunn Farbauti and, in most accounts, Laufey, making him a jotunn by blood who nonetheless lives among the Aesir in Asgard. John Lindow's Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001) records that Snorri Sturluson's thirteenth-century Prose Edda counts Loki among the Aesir in its formal listing, but that modern scholars of Old Norse religion, working from the same corpus of Eddic poetry alongside Snorri's prose, are divided on whether that listing reflects a genuine mythological status as a tribe member or Snorri's own systematizing of a figure the older poetic sources treat more ambiguously, an outsider admitted into Aesir company rather than one of them by nature. The method is philological, comparing Snorri's thirteenth-century systematization against the older Poetic Edda verses it draws on. Because the Poetic Edda itself never states Loki's tribal status as plainly as Snorri's prose does, the classification remains a matter of scholarly judgment rather than a point the sources settle outright.

Identity

Gender

Gender-fluid across the tradition 1

Attestation

Era of Attestation

800 to 1200 CE 1

Veneration Today

Historically attested; no continuous cult 1

Historicity

Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 1

Cult

Attributes and Iconography

Norse art and later illustration sometimes show Loki with his lips sewn shut, a detail drawn from the Prose Edda's account of the dwarf Brokkr stitching his mouth closed with an awl as punishment after Loki cost him a wager over the forging of Mjolnir and the other treasures of the gods. 2

Worship and Practice

Unlike most other major figures of the Norse pantheon, Loki has left no attested cult sites, votive inscriptions, or place names dedicated to him in the archaeological or runic record, an absence scholars have long found striking given his prominence in the surviving mythological narratives. 1

Practice

Lineage

By the giantess Angrboda he fathers three monstrous children, the wolf Fenrir, the world serpent Jormungandr, and Hel, ruler of the dead, all three of whom the gods bind or banish once a prophecy foretells the danger they pose. 2

Function

Domain / Function

Trickster 1

Domain / Function

Chaos and adversary 1

Attributions

Mythic Association

Norse tradition holds Loki responsible for engineering the death of Baldr and binds him in punishment beneath a serpent dripping venom until the events of Ragnarok. 1

History

Historical Note

Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda recounts that at Ragnarok, Loki will slip free of the bonds the gods used to punish him for Baldr's death and lead the forces of chaos against the Aesir, ending in a final confrontation in which he and Heimdall kill one another. 2

Origins

Origin of the Name

Loki's name has resisted a fully agreed etymology, with proposed derivations from words for knot or loop failing to win the kind of consensus reconstructed for most other Norse gods' names, and Rudolf Simek concludes that no theory so far accounts for the name convincingly. 3

Position Profile

Key Text

The Prose Edda recounts Loki's punishment after orchestrating the death of Baldr, bound with the entrails of one of his own sons beneath a serpent whose venom drips onto his face, causing the earthquakes the Norse attributed to his writhing, a captivity ended only at Ragnarok. 2

Learn More

Neither God nor Giant, and Useful to Both

Loki is the hardest figure in Norse myth to classify, and that is the point of him. He is counted among the Aesir and is Odin's sworn blood-brother, yet he is the son of a giant, and he moves between the two worlds that every other figure belongs firmly to one of. He is not a god of anything in particular, there is no cult of Loki, no evidence he was worshipped, but a principle of change, trickery and reversal loose inside the divine order.

For much of the mythology he is genuinely useful. His cunning gets the gods out of trouble as often as into it: he recovers Thor's stolen hammer, he tricks the builder of Asgard's wall out of his payment, and in doing so, shape-shifted into a mare, he becomes the mother of Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir. He changes sex and shape freely, which the sources treat as one of his defining and unsettling traits.

But Loki is also the father, by a giantess, of three monsters who will destroy the gods: the wolf Fenrir, the world-serpent Jormungandr, and Hel, who rules the dead. The trickster and the doom of the gods are, in his person, the same being.

The Death of Baldr, and the God Who Is Bound

The turn comes with the death of Baldr. Baldr, the beloved and shining god, is protected by an oath sworn by all things not to harm him, all but the mistletoe, thought too young to swear. Loki learns this, and it is Loki who guides the blind god Hodr to throw a mistletoe dart that kills Baldr; when a chance arises to weep him out of the realm of the dead, Loki, disguised, refuses the tears, and Baldr stays dead. This is the moment Loki crosses from mischief into malice, and after it the gods hunt him down.

His punishment is one of the stark images of the mythology: Loki is bound with the entrails of his own son across three stones, with a serpent fixed to drip venom onto his face; his wife Sigyn holds a bowl to catch it, and when she turns to empty it and the venom falls, his writhing shakes the earth, the Norse explanation of earthquakes. There he lies until Ragnarok, when he breaks free to lead the enemies of the gods against them.

Modern retellings have softened Loki into a charming rogue. The medieval sources are darker and more ambivalent: an insider who becomes the agent of the end.

In the Texts

Voluspo 17-18 (Bellows)The Poetic Edda (Voluspo and other lays)creation, humanity

Then from the throng | did three come forth, From the home of the gods, | the mighty and gracious; Two without fate | on the land they found, Ask and Embla, | empty of might. Soul they had not, | sense they had not, Heat nor motion, | nor goodly hue; Soul gave Othin, | sense gave Honir, Heat gave Lothur | and goodly hue.

Lothur, generally identified with Loki.

The Poetic Edda (Voluspo and other lays). translated by Henry Adams Bellows.

About This Passage

Correspondences & Relations

Archetypes

The Jester

Pantheons

Norse

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Gosforth Cross

This source names Loki directly: "rather than as rival traditions: Loki bound beneath a serpent with his wife Sigyn catching its venom, a figure identified as the god Vidarr, Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent, a horned bearer..."

Source Gosforth Cross (Wikipedia)

Gosforth Cross (Wikipedia)

This source names Loki directly: "naming among the Norse figures Loki bound with a serpent above him and Sigyn catching its venom, a figure identified as Vidarr, Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent, and the god Heimdall holding his..."

Source Gosforth Cross (Wikipedia)

Husdrapa

This source names Loki directly: "Serpent, and Heimdall's fight with Loki over the necklace Brisingamen."

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Loki (Wikipedia)

This source names Loki directly: "community maintained article on Loki gathers, with citations, his role in the Poetic and Prose Eddas as a shape shifting trickster among the Aesir, his part in the deaths of Baldr and his eventual..."

Source Loki (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Norse

Loki is a trickster figure central to Eddic myth, without clear evidence of cult worship in his own right.

Source Dictionary of Northern MythologyRudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall

Snaptun Stone (Wikipedia)

This source names Loki directly: "identification of the carved face as Loki from its scarred lips, a detail tying the object to the tale in Skaldskaparmal in which the sons of Ivaldi sew Loki's mouth shut."

Source Snaptun Stone (Wikipedia)

Snaptun Stone, File Record (Wikimedia Commons)

This source names Loki directly: "A Wikimedia Commons file record, "Lokistone.jpg", captioned "The Snaptun stone, depicting Loki."

Source Snaptun Stone, File Record (Wikimedia Commons)

The Death of Baldr

Children

Fenrir

Gylfaginning names Fenrir among the three children Loki fathered on the giantess Angrboda.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Hel

Hel is the daughter of Loki by the giantess Angrboda.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Jormungandr

The world serpent is the second of Loki and Angrboda's three children in Gylfaginning.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Sleipnir

Loki, in the form of a mare, bore Sleipnir to the stallion Svadilfari. It is the one case where Loki is the mother rather than the father.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Depicted In

Gods and Titans

Confirmed card in the deck's corrected multi-pantheon scope (Norse); jrriveracorner.wordpress.com full card list, corroborated independently for this figure.

Source Gods and Titans (official deck site)Stacey Demarco and Jimmy Manton

Snaptun Stone (Moesgaard Museum, near Aarhus)

The stone's sole carved figure, identified as Loki by his scarred lips in Viking Age Scandinavian craft's own telling of the myth, on display at Moesgaard Museum near Aarhus.

Source Snaptun Stone (Wikipedia)

Additional Source Snaptun Stone, File Record (Wikimedia Commons)

Member Of

The Aesir

This edge names simple group membership rather than a contested claim in its own right. Loki's own pantheon-family fact already carries the dispute over whether Snorri's classification of him as an Aesir reflects genuine mythological status or Snorri's own systematizing, in full.

Source Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and BeliefsJohn Lindow

Opposed By

Heimdall

Heimdall and Loki are long opposed; at Ragnarok the two watchmen of the gods' boundaries meet in the final battle and kill one another.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Skadi

When the gods bind Loki for Baldr's death, it is Skadi who fastens a venomous serpent above his face to drip poison on him, vengeance for Loki's part in her father Thjazi's death.

Source The Prose EddaSnorri Sturluson

Passages on This

Voluspo 17-18 (Bellows)

Lothur, generally identified with Loki.

Related To

Ran

Ran's net, used to gather the drowned into her hall beneath the waves, is borrowed by the gods to catch Loki when he takes the form of a salmon.

Source The Poetic EddaAnonymous (Codex Regius)

Same Figure, Narrative Entry

Loki

Sibling Of

Odin

Loki's own description: "blood-brother of Odin." A sworn oath-bond rather than birth kinship, the closest honest fit in the closed relation vocabulary; the note preserves the distinction.

Source Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and BeliefsJohn Lindow