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October 23rd, 2017 
Awake Goy By Magnus Magnusson
Loki is one of the most intriguing figures in the Norse pantheon. There is no evidence to suggest that he ever inspired a cult, or was worshipped as a god. He had no relationship at all with the world of men, and though he lived in Asgard among the gods, he was probably not of divine origin himself. The myths about him are inconsistent; in the oldest traditions he was the son of a giant, yet somehow became a close companion of the gods — he even entered into a pact of blood-brotherhood with Wotan. It has been suggested that the name ‘Loki’ is cognate with Latin lux, meaning ‘light’, and hence with Lucifer; in fact, in the later traditions from the Viking Age Loki does appear in a semi-Satanic guise. Generally, his position amongst the gods and his attitude towards them is ambiguous; he is both ally and foe.
Snorri Sturluson was well aware of the complexity of this character and his position:
There is yet another to be counted amongst the Aesir, whom some call the slander-bearer of the gods, the father of lies, and the disgrace of all gods and men. He is called Loki or Lopt [Air, Sky-Travler], the son of the giant Farbauti [Cruel Smiter]… Loki is handsome to look upon, but evil of temper and extremely fickle in matter. He excels all others in guile and slyness, and resorts to wiles in everything. Time ans again he brought the gods into grave trouble, but usually he also rescued them by his wiles.”
There is a curious dualism here, and some commentators have seen Loki as a fire-spirit, sometimes the friend but potentially the foe of the world, handsome but treacherous, useful but dangerous. He was essentially a literary personification.
According to the earliest sources his misadventures are caused by his own weaknesses. He is a coward, and vulnerable to threats and pressures of the giants, who frequently blackmail him into putting the gods into difficult situations from which, as a rule, he later manages to extricate them by his wiles. In the later traditions, however, where his ‘Satanic’ qualities are emphasized, he is used as a means of reconciling the apparent contradictions of good and evil coexisting among the gods in Asgard. It is Loki, in fact, who precipitates Ragnarok, and who thus emerges as the implacable enemy of the gods and the world.
One story will suffice to illustrate the early concept of his fecklessness and cowardice — and his capacity to recover. It is a justly celebrated story, contained in one of the poems of the Elder Edda, the prymskvida (Thrym’s Lay). The story tells how Thor lost and regained his hammer, with Loki’s help.
One morning Thor woke up in Asgard to find that his mighty hammer, Mjollnir, was missing. His anguish knew no bounds, and he bellowed for Loki to tell him the news. (In other sources there is a suggestion that it was Loki himself who had stolen the hammer and given it to Thor’s traditional enemies, the giants.) Loki was sent off to Giantland to seek the hammer, wearing Freyja’s magic flying feather-coat. There he met Thrym, the king of Giantland, sitting on a mound plaiting leashes of gold for his hounds and trimming the manes of his horses. Thrym told him that he had hidden Thor’s hammer deep underground, and would only give it back if he were given Freyja to wife.
When Thor heard the news he charged into Freyja’s bower and ordered her to put on the bridal veil at once and drive with him to Giantland. But Freyja flew into a rage at the suggestion, and refused to marry the giant. The gods met in council, and it was suggested by Heimdall that Thor himself should dress up as the bride and go and fetch the hammer. Thor was suitably reluctant to be thought a sissy, but was eventually persuaded when Loki offered to accompany him as his bridesmaid. Heavily disguised in bridal clothes, the unlikely pair drove off to Giantland in the goat-drawn chariot with rumbles and flashes of lightning.
There was great rejoicing in Giantland when the chariot was sighted, and the bridal feast was set. The ‘bride’ whose gargantuan appetite was a recurring feature of the myths, promptly wolfed down a whole ox and eight salmon, washed down with three tons of mead. In some surprise, Thrym remarked that he had never before seen a maiden with such a voracious appetite and thirst, but Loki slyly accounted for this by saying that Freyja had been so excited at the prospect of the wedding that she had neither eaten nor drunk for a week.
Satisfied by this explanation, Thrym tried to steal a kiss, and lifted the bride’s veil, only to be startled by the terrible blazing eyes that glared at him. Loki had to step in quickly once again to explain that Freyja’s eyes were fiery because she had not slept for a week in anticipation of the wedding. Finally, Thrym called for the wedding to be consecrated in the traditional way, with Thor’s hammer being laid in the bride’s lap while bride and bridegroom made their vows. This was the moment Thor had been waiting for. As soon as he felt the shaft of Mjollnir within his grasp his heart laughed in his breast and he started to lay about Thrym in his usual manner, killing him with all his giant family and all the wedding guests before returning to Asgard in triumph.
Alone among the denizens of Asgard, Loki was imbued with wit and a mordant sense of humor. One of the lays in the Elder Edda is called Lokasenna (Loki’s Taunting), and tells the story of a divine dinner-party that got out of hand. All the gods and goddesses were present, except Thor, who was away killing giants. Loki had violated the sanctuary of the hall by killing one of the servants and was thrown out. Eventually he was allowed back in, however, and he celebrated his return by hurling abuse at all the gods in turn. Wotan was called a transvestite who dabbled in sorcery, and who often awarded victory in battle to cowards instead of to the brave. Loki claimed that Freyja had been a mistress of all the gods, even her own brother. He even boasted that he had seduced Thor’s wife, Sif, and Njord’s wife, Skadi – even though Skadi had known that he had been responsible for her father’s death. At the end of the dinner, Thor returned and drove Loki out with his hammer, and the hail of accusations was cut short. This was the last dinner of the gods which Loki attended, and during its course it became clear that the gods knew perfectly well that Loki was to be their arch-enemy.
Retaliatory references were made to Loki’s own unnatural sexual practices. Loki had three monstrous off-spring by the giantess Angrboda (Distress-Bringer): the wolf Fenrir, the World Serpent, and the ruler of the Otherworld, Hel. Wotan refers to him at the dinner as ‘the father of the wolf’, but Loki was also the parent (the mother, in fact), of Wotan’s marvelous flying horse, Sleipnir, which had eight legs.
The story of Sleipnir’s birth is given by Snorri in Gylfaginning. When the gods had established Midgard and Asgard, a builder arrived and offered to build a great wall for Asgard that would be secure against the giants. The terms he offered were these: that if he completed the work in one winter, he would be rewarded with the goddess Freyja, and the sun and the moon. The gods eventually agreed, at Loki’s prompting, on condition that he did all the work unaided, and that if the work were not completed by the first day of summer, he would not get paid. The builder asked only that he should be allowed to use his stallion. Svadilfari (Hazard-Farer), and Loki strongly urged that this should be accepted. The builder began work on the first day of winter and the gods were astonished to see the huge blocks of stone the stallion could drag. With only three days left before the end of winter the work had progressed so well that only the gate was left to be put in place, and now the gods became alarmed. They blamed Loki for making this disastrous bargain, and threatened him with death unless he came up with a way of breaking the contract. To save his skin, Loki accordingly swore to do the builder out of his agreed payment, by whatever means. That same evening, when the builder and his stallion were carting stones, a mare came galloping out of the forest and whinnied at the stallion. The stallion broke free from his traces and ran off in pursuit of the mare, With the stallion missing, there was no chance of finishing the work in time. The builder, enraged, revealed himself as a Rock Giant in disguise, whereupon Thor killed him with his Hammer. Soon afterwards, Loki (the mare had been Loki in disguise) gave birth to a grey foal with eight legs – Sleipnir.
The presence of Loki in the Norse pantheon allowed the poets and myth-makers a vehicle for abusing the gods, or laughing at them, which argues a more wholesome respect for them than an attitude of craven servility. It was, if anything, a Homeric attitude. But there was no jesting about the culmination of Loki’s treachery in Asgard. It was Loki who precipitated the final horror of Ragnarok by his part in the slaying of the White God, Wotan’s favorite son, Baldur. For this crime, Loki was seized by the gods, bound with the entrails of his own son and fettered deep inside an underground cavern, while serpents fastened to the roof dripped venom onto his face. His faithful wife, Sigyn, crouched beside him, catching the venom in a bowl, but whenever she had to turn to empty the bowl, the venom splashed on his face, and Loki would writhe in such paroxysms of anguish that the earth would quake and volcanoes would belch fire. At Ragnarok, however, Loki would break free, and steer the ship carrying the sons of Muspell, the demons of destruction, from the cast. During the battle, he and Heimdall would kill one another.
Snorri wrote of Baldur in Gylfaginning:
[Hel] is preeminent, and everyone praises him. He is so beautiful and bright that he glows with radiance, and one plant is so white that it is likened to Baldur’s brow [the ox-eye daisy]; it is the whitest of all plants, and from it you can remark his beauty both of hair and body. He is the wisest of the gods and the fairest spoken and the most gracious, but such is the nature that his judgment never holds. His home is Breidablik [Broad Splendor], which is the sky, and nothing unclean is allowed there.
Baldur was the beloved of the gods. But he dreamed that his life was threatened, and so his father, Wotan, descended to the Otherworld and forced a dead sibyl to come to life and tell him the future. He was told that Baldur would be killed, and this would lead to Ragnarok. Meanwhile, the other gods resolved that oaths should be demanded of all objects to spare Baldur. His mother, Frigg collected pledges from fire, water, all metals, stones, the earth, trees, all sickness, all poisons, beasts, bards and serpents, that they would never harm Baldur. Since Baldur was now impervious to wounds. He used to entertain the gods by letting them shoot arrows at him, strike at him with swords or pelt him with stones, knowing that nothing would hurt him.
But there was one living organism from which Frigg had not bothered to exact the oath: a slender shoot called mistletoe which grew not from the ground but on a tree, the oak. She had thought it too young and feeble to matter. Loki, consumed with spite against the popular Baldur, disguised himself as an old woman and wormed this information out of Frigg. He then conceived his plan. One of the gods, Wotan’s son Hod, was blind, and souls take no part in this sport of pelting Baldur for fun. So Loki cut a sprig of mistletoe in the shape, and invited him to join in the play; he put the missile in Herod’s hand, and directed his aim. The shaft of mistletoe pierced Baldur’s body, and Baldur fell dead to the ground
This was the greatest tragedy that had ever befallen gods and men. The gods were struck dumb with horror. No vengeance could be taken on the spot, for it was such a holy place. When they tried to speak they could only weep, but Wotan had the bitterest grief to bear, for he knew better than the others what a disaster the death of Baldur was.
When the gods recovered their senses, Frigg promised her love an undying gratitude to anyone who would undertake to ride down to Hel and offered a ransom for the release of Baldur. It was another of Wotan’s sons, Hermod the Valiant, who volunteered; he mounted Wotan’s horse, Sleipnir, and galloped away.
Meanwhile the gods took Baldur’s body down to the seashore, planning to launch Baldur’s great ship, Hringhorni, as a funeral pyre. But the ship was too heavy for the gods to move, so they sent word to Giantland for the giantess, Hyrrokin, who came riding on a wolf ship: flames shot from the rollers, and all the world trembled.
When Baldur’s body was carried on board, his wife, Nana, died of grief and was laid on the pyre beside him. Thor hallowed the pyre with a hammer. All the gods attended: Wotan with Frigg, his Valkyries and his ravens; Frey in his chariot drawn by the golden boar; Heimdall on his horse Golden-Forelock; Freyja in her chariot pulled by cats, and a great host of Frost Giants and Rock Giants. Wotan laid on the pyre his gold armring, Draupnir, from which eight rings of similar weight dripped every ninth night. Baldur’s horse, too, was led to the pyre in all its harness.
Meanwhile, Hermod rode Sleipnir for nine nights and days through deep, dark dales down the perilous road to the Otherworld until he reached the bridge that resounded only under the feet of the living. The maiden who guarded it told him that netherward and northward lay the way to Hel. Hermod rode on until he reached the Gates of Hel, which Sleipnir cleared in one mighty leap. Then he rode to the Hall of Hel, where he dismounted; when he entered, he found his brother Baldur seated on a throne of honor.
Next morning, Hermod told Hel of the grief of the gods, and asked her to allow Baldur to ride back with him to Asgard. But Hel wanted to make sure that Baldur was as well-loved as everyone claimed. She would only release Baldur, she said, if all things in the world, both animate and inanimate, would weep for him – but if anyone refused, then Baldur must stay.
When Hermod returned to Asgard with the news, the gods sent messengers to every corner of the world to ask all things to ‘weep Baldur back from Hel’. Everyone and everything did so, both men and beasts, earth and stones and trees and metals. On their way home, thinking that their errand was complete, the messengers came across an old witch crouching in a cave who called herself Thokk. They asked her to weep for Baldur, but she replied:
Thokk will not weep dry tears for the funeral of Baldur; alive or dead, I loved not the Old One’s son. Let Hel keep what she has.
Everyone knew that the old witch must have been none other than Loki, who had wrought so much mischief amongst the gods.
Now Ragnarok was at hand. Loki had been caught and bound, but now broke free. The universe was consumed in a holocaust of destruction. But after Ragnarok, Baldur returned from the dead to a new and revitalized heaven:
Unsown fields will grow rich with corn, all ills will get better, Baldur will come.
The story of his death is the only myth about Baldur recounted by Snorri Sturluson. In it, Baldur appears as the perfect, innocent martyr, a portrait with definite Christian overtones.
There are faint echoes in ancient place-names of a cult of Baldur, which was presumably a fertility/warrior cult. But, as with Loki, Baldur’s significance in the Norse pantheon of the Viking Age lay not in his relationship with mankind, but as a catalyst in the myths surrounding Ragnarok, the end of the world.
Source Article from http://www.renegadetribune.com/loki-baldur-father-lies-shining-god/
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