Who is Loki? Guide to the Norse Trickster God

Loki is not really a god. He is a giant by blood, adopted into Asgard, kept there because Odin has sworn brotherhood with him, and tolerated by the other gods only up to a point. He is the Norse tradition’s most complicated figure - part helper, part saboteur, occasionally hilarious, ultimately catastrophic. When Ragnarok comes, Loki is on the other side.

Key Takeaways

Loki is the Norse trickster god, a shapeshifter who moves between forms and between allegiances, and is treated as one of the Aesir despite being a giant by blood.
His role in the pantheon is contradictory: he causes problems that only he can solve, gets the gods into trouble and then rescues them from it, and sometimes creates trouble no one can fix.
He is the father of three monstrous children by the giantess Angrboda: the wolf Fenrir, the world serpent Jormungandr, and Hel, ruler of the underworld.
He is also the mother of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse, whom he bore after transforming into a mare during the building of Asgard’s walls.
His greatest crime is causing the death of Baldur, Odin’s shining son, using the god’s one vulnerability - a sprig of mistletoe.
For Baldur’s death and for his insults at Aegir’s feast, Loki is bound beneath the earth with the entrails of his own son, tormented by venom until Ragnarok breaks his chains.
At Ragnarok, Loki leads the enemies of the gods against Asgard, kills the watchman Heimdall, and is killed by him in return.

Who is Loki?

Loki is the Norse trickster god, the son of the giant Farbauti and Laufey. He is not related to the Aesir by blood, but Odin swore brotherhood with him early in the tradition’s timeline, and that oath is what keeps him inside Asgard. The other gods do not particularly like him. They put up with him because he is useful, and because Odin says so.

Definition - Loki

The Norse trickster god, sworn brother to Odin, and one of the most morally ambiguous figures in world mythology. Loki is a giant by parentage but lives among the Aesir gods. He is a shapeshifter, a schemer, and a source of both invention and disaster in the Norse tradition.

Loki has no fixed domain in the way the other gods do. Thor has thunder. Freyr has fertility. Freyja has love and war. Loki has cunning, wordplay, disguise, and the willingness to solve problems by whatever means the moment allows. If Norse mythology has a category for “the god of doing whatever needs doing, regardless of how it looks afterwards,” Loki fills it.

Loki’s ambiguous place among the gods

Loki is one of the Aesir functionally, not by ancestry. He eats at their table, marries the goddess Sigyn, has a son by her named Nari, and is called on when the gods need something impossible. He is also the source of most of their problems.

The pattern repeats. Loki causes a crisis, by boasting, by scheming, by getting himself into a corner, and then Loki is the one sent to fix it. He turns himself into a fly, a mare, a salmon, an old woman. He talks his way into and out of trouble with equal ease. The gods complain about him constantly, and rely on him constantly, and never resolve the contradiction. Read Loki’s shape-shifting adventures.

Where he becomes something else is when his mischief crosses into malice. That line is crossed, catastrophically, at Baldur’s death.

Loki’s family and children

Loki is a father seven times over in the tradition. With his wife Sigyn, he has the son Nari (sometimes called Narfi) and a second son, Vali. With the giantess Angrboda, he fathers three of the most terrifying beings in Norse mythology: the wolf Fenrir, the world serpent Jormungandr, and Hel, ruler of the underworld where those who did not die in battle go. Read the tale of Loki’s children.

He is also, uniquely, a mother. During the building of Asgard’s walls, a giant offered to complete the work in exchange for the sun, the moon, and the goddess Freyja. The gods accepted only because Loki assured them the work could not be finished on time. When the giant, aided by his enormous stallion Svadilfari, came close to succeeding, Loki solved the problem by transforming into a mare, luring Svadilfari away, and eventually returning to Asgard with the eight-legged foal Sleipnir, whom he gave to Odin.

The children matter because they set up Ragnarok. Fenrir is destined to kill Odin. Jormungandr is destined to kill Thor. Hel presides over the realm from which most of the Norse dead cannot return. Every one of Loki’s Angrboda-children is a fate the gods try, and fail, to prevent.

Loki as helper: forcing solutions the gods need

For all his troublemaking, Loki is responsible for many of the gods’ most valuable possessions. Some of them exist only because Loki caused a problem and then had to fix it.

The forging of Thor’s hammer Mjolnir is the clearest example. Loki cut off the goddess Sif’s golden hair as a prank, and Thor demanded he replace it. Loki went to the dwarves, the master craftsmen of the nine worlds, and provoked a competition between two teams of them. The results included Sif’s new hair of pure gold, Odin’s spear Gungnir, Freyr’s ship Skidbladnir, Odin’s ring Draupnir, Freyr’s boar Gullinbursti, and Thor’s hammer Mjolnir. Loki lost the bet he had wagered on the outcome and had his lips sewn shut as payment, but the gods came out enormously ahead.

When the goddess Idun and her golden apples of youth were stolen by a giant, Loki was the cause and also the rescuer, borrowing Freyja’s falcon-cloak to fly into the giant’s stronghold and bring Idun back. Read the story of Idun and the golden apples. When Thor’s hammer itself was stolen by the giant Thrym, Loki devised the plan by which Thor recovered it, dressed as a bride, at a giant wedding. Read the story of the theft of Thor’s hammer.

The pattern is consistent enough that some readers of the Norse tradition have argued Loki should be understood not as a villain but as the necessary disruptor, the friction the gods need, in small doses, to keep working.

Loki’s greatest crime: the death of Baldur

The tradition’s tolerance for Loki ends with Baldur. Baldur was the most beloved of Odin’s sons, so beautiful and so kind that his mother Frigg extracted an oath from every substance in creation not to harm him. She missed only one: mistletoe, which she thought too young to bother swearing.

Loki discovered the exception. He fashioned a dart from mistletoe wood, brought it to a gathering where the gods were amusing themselves by throwing weapons at the invulnerable Baldur, and gave the dart to Baldur’s blind brother Hodr, guiding his aim. Baldur fell. The gods stood in silence.

Frigg sent an emissary to the world of the dead to plead for Baldur’s return. Hel agreed to release him if every living thing in the nine worlds would weep for him. Every living thing did, except one giantess in a cave, who refused. The giantess was Loki in disguise. Read the story of Baldur’s death and the mistletoe.

That was the end of Loki’s welcome in Asgard.

Loki’s punishment: the binding beneath the earth

Loki fled. He built a house with four doors, one on each wall, so that he could watch every direction, and by day he became a salmon and hid in a nearby waterfall. The gods came for him, caught the salmon, and dragged him back.

They took him to a cave beneath the earth. There they bound him to three stones with the entrails of his own son Nari, whom they killed for the purpose. A serpent was fastened above his head to drip venom onto his face. His faithful wife Sigyn stands beside him with a bowl to catch the poison. When the bowl fills and she must empty it, the venom falls on Loki’s face and his convulsions shake the earth. This is the Norse explanation for earthquakes.

He will stay there until Ragnarok.

Loki at Ragnarok

When Ragnarok comes, Loki breaks free. He does not return to the gods’ side. He captains the ship Naglfar, made from the untrimmed fingernails and toenails of the dead, and sails at the head of the enemies of Asgard: the giants, the fire-demons of Muspelheim, his own monstrous children.

Loki’s final duel is with Heimdall, the watchman of the gods who has been his rival for the whole tradition. They kill each other. Neither returns.

Loki’s earlier appearance at the feast in Aegir’s hall, the flyting in which he stands before the assembled gods and insults every one of them, one by one, with intimate and often devastatingly accurate accusations, is often read as the moment the war between Loki and Asgard becomes irreversible. Read Loki’s flyting in Aegir’s hall. The binding follows soon after. And after the binding, Ragnarok.

Loki compared to other tricksters

Trickster figures appear in most world mythologies, but Loki is unusual for the arc his tradition gives him. Most tricksters continue. Loki ends.

Tradition	Trickster	Common form	Fate
Norse	Loki	Shapeshifter, humanoid	Bound beneath earth, then dies at Ragnarok fighting the gods
Greek	Hermes	Herald, thief, psychopomp	Full Olympian, no punishment
Yoruba	Eshu (Elegba)	Crossroads figure	Lives on in Yoruba and diasporic worship
Akan	Anansi	Spider, man	Central storyteller across West African tradition
Multiple Native American nations	Coyote	Coyote, man	Continues; role varies by nation

Most trickster figures are permanent. Their disruption is a feature of the world, not a phase of it. Loki is the exception. The Norse tradition treats his trickery as tolerable up to a point, and then not, and then as the fuse for the end of everything.

Read the stories

Loki appears in nearly every major Norse story, either as prime mover or as saboteur. If you want to see him in action:

Loki resists interpretation. He is not evil in the medieval Christian sense, and he is not a comic figure in the Greek Hermes sense. He is a set of contradictions the tradition kept together in one body: the god who gave Thor his hammer and the god who caused Baldur’s death, the one who fixed problems and the one who ended the world. What the Norse understood about Loki is what the tradition preserves without resolving.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Loki really a god?

Not by ancestry. Loki is the son of two giants, Farbauti and Laufey, which technically makes him one of the enemies of the Aesir gods. He is treated as an Aesir god because Odin swore brotherhood with him, and that oath keeps him inside the pantheon regardless of what he does. When the oath’s protection finally breaks, at Ragnarok, Loki reveals which side he was actually on.

Who are Loki’s children?

Loki fathers seven children in total. With his wife Sigyn, he has Nari and Vali. With the giantess Angrboda, he fathers Fenrir the wolf, Jormungandr the world serpent, and Hel, the goddess who rules the underworld. He is also the mother of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse, whom he bore after transforming into a mare during the building of Asgard’s walls.

Why is Loki bound beneath the earth?

For engineering the death of Baldur. When Baldur’s death could not be undone, the gods hunted Loki down, brought him to a cave beneath the earth, and bound him there with the entrails of his own son Nari. A serpent drips venom onto his face. His wife Sigyn holds a bowl to catch the venom, and when she must empty it, Loki convulses hard enough to shake the earth. He remains bound until Ragnarok.

Did Loki really give birth to Sleipnir?

Yes. During the building of Asgard’s walls, the giant who was doing the work relied on his enormous stallion Svadilfari for hauling stone, and it became clear the giant was going to finish on time and win the impossible price he had been promised. Loki transformed into a mare, lured Svadilfari away for a night, and returned to Asgard some time later with the foal Sleipnir. Loki is the mother; Svadilfari is the father.

Is Loki good or evil?

Neither, and the tradition seems designed to resist that question. Loki is the reason the gods have Thor’s hammer, Odin’s spear, Freyr’s ship, and Sleipnir. Loki is also the reason Baldur dies and the world ends. He is not a moral figure. He is a force of change, mostly beneficial in small doses and catastrophic in large ones, and the Norse tradition seems comfortable with that ambiguity in a way most later traditions are not.

What is Loki’s role in Ragnarok?

Loki leads the enemies of the gods. When his chains break, he captains the ship Naglfar, built from the untrimmed nails of the dead, and sails at the head of an army of giants and fire-demons against Asgard. He kills the watchman Heimdall in single combat, and is killed by him. His children Fenrir and Jormungandr kill Odin and Thor. The old world ends with all of them dead.