Wanner, Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth Loki Odinn and the Limits of Sovereignty

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, Óðinn, and the Limits of Sovereignty

Author(s): Kevin J. Wanner

Source:

History of Religions, Vol. 48, No. 3 (February 2009), pp. 211-246

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Kevin J. Wanner

C U N N I N G I N T E L L I G E N C E
I N N O R S E M Y T H : L O K I ,
Ó

I N N , A N D T H E

L I M I T S O F
S O V E R E I G N T Y

0018-2710/2009/4803-0002$10.00

A leading theme in studies of ancient Greece has long been the revolution
in thought of

logos

against

muthos

, of the challenge posed by, in terms

ﬁrst attested in and perhaps set by Plato (427/8–348/7 BC), a philosophical
discourse of the abstract, atemporal, and universal, suited to accounts of
the realm of being, to a poetic discourse of the concrete, historical, and
particular, suited to exploring the world of becoming.

Les ruses d ’in-

telligence: La mètis des grecs

, a collection of essays published in 1974 and

translated in 1978 as

Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society

Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant called attention to another
important rivalry in the history of Greek thought, one that because it was
less dramatic, concentrated, and overt has been less noticed by scholars.

This second contest was between the kind of intelligence extolled by the
classical philosophers—and by dominant strains of Western and Christian
thought since—and a kind discussed by Detienne and Vernant under the
native heading of

tis

is most simply translated as “cunning,”

For an account that reviews and criticizes scholarly discourses on this transition, see

Bruce Lincoln, “

Mythos

among the Greeks,” pt. 1 in

Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology,

and Scholarship

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3–43.

Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant,

Les ruses d ’intelligence: La mètis des grecs

(Paris: Flammarion et Cie, 1974), and

Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society

trans. Janet Lloyd (Hassocks, UK: Harvester, 1978); all subsequent references are to the
English translation of this work.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

212

although it carries the wider sense of an intelligence or mode of thinking
and operating that is practical, situational, or, in Michel de Certeau’s sense
of the term, tactical in nature.

As described in Detienne and Vernant’s

introduction to their collection,

tis

refers to

forms of wiley intelligence, of effective, adaptable cunning[,] . . . a complex but
very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine
ﬂair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance,
opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years. It is applied
to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situa-
tions which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation
or rigorous logic . . . [It is] a type of intelligence which, although it continued to
operate in large areas such as politics, the military art, medicine and the skills
of the artisan, nevertheless appears to have been displaced and devalued in com-
parison with what henceforth represented the key element in Greek learning.

Although Detienne and Vernant here suggest that philosophers disparaged

tis

for the same reason that they rejected or tried to tame the myths of

the poets—namely, that it was ill suited for thinking and talking about the
realm of being—they also propose that

tis

was problematic because it

gave the lie to the dichotomous structure of reality that philosophers had
so laboriously delineated in their struggles against the religious and peda-
gogical authority of the poets.

In the intellectual world of the Greek philosopher . . . there is a radical dichotomy
between being and becoming, between the intelligible and the sensible. . . . These
contrasting concepts . . . form a complete system of antinomies deﬁning two
mutually exclusive spheres of reality. On the one hand there is the sphere of
being, of the one, the unchanging, of the limited, of true and deﬁnite knowl-
edge; on the other, the sphere of becoming, of the multiple, the unstable and the
unlimited, of oblique and changeable opinion. Within this framework of thought
there can be no place for

tis

is characterised precisely by the way it

operates by continuously oscillating between two opposite poles. It turns into
their contraries objects that are not yet deﬁned as stable, circumscribed, mutually
exclusive concepts but which appear as Powers in a situation of confronta-
tion. . . . When the individual who is endowed with

tis

, be he god or man, is

confronted with a multiple, changing reality whose limitless polymorphic powers
render it almost impossible to seize, he can only dominate it . . . if he proves him-
self to be even more multiple, more mobile, more polyvalent than his adversary.

Michel de Certeau,

The Practice of Everyday Life

, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1984), xix, 35–37.

Detienne and Vernant,

Cunning Intelligence

, 3–5.

Ibid., 5; and for a discussion of places in his works in which Plato disparages such prac-

tical or situational intelligence, see 315–16.

History of Religions

213

Apart from their impact on scholarship on ancient Greece, Detienne’s

and Vernant’s studies have inspired a small but signiﬁcant set of researches
into instances of “metic” intelligence in other contexts. Among the more
notable of these are Burton L. Mack’s efforts to uncover the original,
Cynic-sage character of Jesus of Nazareth’s outlook and message and
Lisa Raphals’s work on Chinese thought and religion.

There has yet

to appear, however, any substantial application of the French scholars’
insights to the study of Norse culture and myth.

This article attempts

such an application. In it, I focus on two ﬁgures of Norse myth, as they are
known from textual sources mostly produced or preserved by medieval
Icelanders, who embody the qualities of metic intelligence described
by Detienne and Vernant. I will also compare the role that Detienne and
Vernant reveal cunning intelligence to play in Greek myth to the role it
plays in Norse myth. To summarize, Detienne and Vernant conclude that
cunning intelligence—the only power ultimately capable of resisting or
overcoming superior force—is treated in Greek myth as necessary to the
maintenance of sovereignty: the supreme god, Zeus, is able to absolutize
his authority and eternalize his reign only once he has incorporated, quite
literally, the embodiment of this power. In Norse myth, I will argue,
the same relationship between cunning intelligence and sovereignty is
posited, namely, that control over the former is required for those who
would epitomize the latter. The outcome of events is, however, very dif-
ferent: rather than cunning intelligence being assimilated to the mytho-
logical sovereign, it remains partially and perhaps principally invested in
a ﬁgure who is ultimately instrumental in resisting and overcoming the
sovereign and his order.

In performing my comparisons, I neither intend nor attempt to connect

Greek and Norse myths historically or genetically. While I do not deny
the possibility or even the likelihood that these connections exist, I agree
with Jonathan Z. Smith that attempts to establish such links are generally
of use to apologetic agendas that seek to privilege one of the two terms
being compared as either the source of the other or the closer to some
putative and often hypothetical original. In such an enterprise, what rules
“is an overwhelming concern for assigning value, rather than intellectual

Burton L. Mack,

A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins

(Philadelphia:

Fortress, 1988), esp. 67–69, 158–59, 181–84; Lisa Raphals,

Knowing Words: Wisdom and

Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1992).

Though I have not made an exhaustive search, I have noticed in studies of Norse

myth only one passing reference to Detienne and Vernant’s work on cunning. Oddly enough,
it appears in a discussion of

órr, a god rather lacking in this form of intelligence; see

Margaret Clunies Ross, “

órr’s Honour,” in

Studium zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift für

Heinrich Beck

, ed. Heiko Uecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 48–76, esp. 66 n. 21.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

214

signiﬁcance, to the results of comparison.”

By contrast, academic “com-

parison . . . brings differences together within the space of the scholar’s
mind for the scholar’s own intellectual reasons. It is the scholar who makes
their cohabitation—their ‘sameness’—possible, not ‘natural’ afﬁnities or
processes of history.”

My purpose, then, in comparing is to consider how

similar yet not identical phenomena arise from and interact with different
contexts and actors to test certain hypotheses. More speciﬁcally, my goal
in this article is to compare how two sets of myths depict attempts by
sovereign ﬁgures to control and/or harness the powers of cunning intelli-
gence, and to speculate about how differences in the outcome of these
attempts might reﬂect differences in the myths’ contexts and the interests
of their producers/consumers. I have been inspired by Detienne’s and
Vernant’s analyses of Greek materials, just as I take advantage of some
of their conclusions.

masters of

tis

among the norse gods

The ﬁgure that ﬁrst springs to mind when we are looking for examples of
cunning intelligence at work in Norse myth is Loki. As Icelander Snorri
Sturluson (1178/9–1241) writes in his

Edda

(ca. 1220–25), a handbook

of poetry and myth that is our most accessible native source for pre-
Christian Norse religion, “That one is also numbered among the

æsir

[sing.

áss

; the principal “tribe” of Norse gods] who some call slanderer

of the

æsir

and originator of deceits and blemish of all gods and men. He

is called Loki, or Loptr, son of Fárbauti the giant. His mother is Laufey,
or Nál. . . . Loki is handsome and fair in appearance, evil in character,
very changeable in his ways. He possessed that intelligence in greater
degree than other men that is called cunning [

slœg

], and tricks for every

occasion. He brought the

æsir

constantly into great difﬁculty, and often

he extricated them with his schemes.”

Before considering the attributes

here assigned to Loki, some discussion of what sort of being he is sup-
posed to be is needed. John Lindow, in his guide to Norse myth, makes
much of the fact that Snorri states that “Loki is ‘also numbered among

Jonathan Z. Smith,

Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and

the Religions of Late Antiquity

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 46.

Ibid., 51. For further remarks on why analogy rather than genealogy (or homology)

is the proper method for academic comparison, see Jonathan Z. Smith,

Relating Religion:

Essays in the Study of Religion

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 24–25, 92–94.

“Sá er enn tal

r me

Ásum er sumir kalla rógbera Ásanna ok frumkve

a ﬂær

anna ok

vömm allra go

a ok manna. Sá er nefndr Loki e

a Loptr, sonr Fárbauta jötuns. Mó

ir hans er

Laufey e

a Nál. . . . Loki er frí

r ok fagr s

num, illr í skaplyndi, mjök fjölbreytinn at háttum.

Hann haf

Âá speki um fram adra menn er slœgd heitir, ok vælar til allra hluta. Hann kom

Ásum jafnan í fullt vandrædi ok opt leysti hann Âá med vælrædum” (Snorri Sturluson,

Gylfa-

ginning 33, in Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes [Oxford: Clarendon,
1982], 26–27). All translations, unless noted otherwise, are my own.

History of Religions

215

the æsir,’ that is, he is counted as one of them even though he may actually
not be one.”

The factor that Lindow and others point to that makes Loki

a putative rather than real

áss is that “he has a giant father, Fárbauti”; two

tenth-century poems call Loki “mögr Fárbautis” (Fárbauti’s son), although
only Snorri identiﬁes Fárbauti as a “jötunn” (giant; pl.

jötnar).

How-

ever, another of the major

æsir, Tyr, also has, according to one source, a

giant father, and no one among the mythmakers or interpreters seems to
doubt that he is a real

áss, although Lindow is vexed by this datum, writing

that “how Tyr got a giant for a father is one of the true mysteries of this
mythology.”

One way to get around the mystery is perhaps simply to

admit that the categories of

æsir, jötnar, and vanir (a second “tribe” of

gods whose few named members are called

áss or ásynja as often as vanr

vanadís) are constructed identities with “ﬁctional boundaries of differ-

ence” and that the mythos in fact recognizes them as such, if only through
its inconsistencies.

Even if, after all, Loki’s and Tyr’s having giant fathers

and membership among the

æsir is an unusual combination, most of the

gods whose parentage is known are of “mixed race,” usually having an
áss father and giant mother. Given, then, that the sources do not seem con-
sistently to align mythic beings’ genealogies with their social identities,
Loki’s ancestry will not be treated by me as a key to his nature or function.
All

æsir are nominal æsir, as far as I am concerned here.

Setting questions of ancestry and identity aside, we notice that the

key traits of Loki according to Snorri’s description are that he is cun-
ning, prone to trickery, resourceful, and duplicitous. A shorter descrip-
tion from later in Snorri’s

Edda presents a similar set of qualities, stating

that Loki in poetry is called “bölva smidr, hinn slœgi Áss, rœgjandi ok
vélandi godanna” (maker of mischiefs, the cunning

áss, calumniator and

tricker of the gods).

While only the ﬁrst of the kennings, or poetic

John Lindow,

Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 216, s.v. “Loki.”

Ibid. The two tenth-century poems are Êjódólfr of Hvinir’s

Haustlöng and Úlfr Uggason’s

Húsdrápa.

Lindow,

Norse Mythology, 298. The source for a giant as Tyr’s father is stanza 5 of the

eddic poem

Hymiskvida, in Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denk-

mälern, vol. 1, Text, ed. Gustav Neckel, 5th ed. rev. [ed. Hans Kung] (Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
1983 [originally published in 1914]); subsequent references to

Hymiskvida and to all other

eddic poems, except

Fjölsvinnsmál, by stanza and page number are to this edition (although

I have adopted normalized spellings of the poems’ titles).

Karen Swenson,

Performing Deﬁnitions: Two Genres of Insult in Old Norse Literature,

Studies in Scandinavian Literature and Culture 3 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991), 69.

Snorri Sturluson,

Skáldskaparmál [The language of poetry; this is the second major

section of Snorri’s

Edda] 16, in Edda: Skáldskaparmál, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2 vols. (London:

Viking Society for Northern Research, 1998), 1:20; all subsequent page-number references to
Skáldskaparmál are to vol. 1 of this edition. This translation is slightly adapted from Snorri
Sturluson,

Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Everyman, 1987), 77.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

216

circumlocutions, listed here is attested elsewhere, the poems that were
Snorri’s major source also ascribe to Loki qualities that can be labeled
metic; they convey an ambivalent view of his character and deeds.

eddic poems, anonymous works focusing on mythological or legendary
themes and composed between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, Loki is
often linked to the word

læ, which can be translated into English in a

number of ways, from neutral terms such as “craft,” “art,” or “skill” to the
more negative ones of “fraud,” “treason,” “harm,” “bane,” “evil,” “woe,”
“misfortune,” or “ruin.” In short, taking Jan de Vries’s entry for

læ in his

Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch as our guide, this term has a
threefold sense of “cunning” (in German,

List), “deception” (Betrug),

and “injury” (

Schaden or Verlust).

Loki is twice—in

Lokasenna (Loki’s

calumny) and in

Hymiskvida (Hymir’s poem)—called by the word lævíss,

which means literally “wise in

læ” but has been translated as “crafty,”

“sly,” “baleful,” “wicked,” and “calamitous.” In

Völuspá (The seeress’s

prophecy), he is called by the word

lægiarn, which literally translates as

“eager for

læ” but has been rendered as “guileful,” “malignant,” and “evil-

loving.”

Völuspá contains two further likely linkages of Loki with læ:

in stanza 25, the

æsir convene in a moment of crisis to determine “who

had blended all the air with

læ,” and in stanza 18, a god named Lódurr,

whom many scholars equate with Loki, endows the ﬁrst pair of humans
with “lá . . . oc lito góda.”

Although the matter is not uncontroversial,

Loki is called

bölvasmidr in Lokasenna 41, in Edda, Neckel ed., 104.

Jan de Vries,

Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961), 371,

s.v. “læ.”

Lokasenna 54, in Edda, Neckel ed., 107; Hymiskvida 37, in ibid., 95; Völuspá 35, in

ibid., 8. Loki is also said to have forged a sword called

lævateinn, “læ-wand,” in the under-

world (

Fjölsvinnsmál [Sayings of Fjölsvidr] 26, in Die Lieder der Edda, ed. Barend Sijmons

and Hugo Gering, 3 vols. [Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1903–31], 1:207). Further,
there is reference to a

læva lundr, “tree of deceit (or poison),” which is either a kenning for

Loki or for something he uses—e.g., a wand—against Idunn in

Haustlöng 11 (The “Haust-

löng” of Êjódólfr of Hvinir, ed. and trans. Richard North [Enﬁeld Lock, Middlesex: Hisarlik
Press, 1997], 7). The various translations for

læ and related terms have been taken from

Richard Cleasby and Gudbrandur Vigfússon,

An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed., with

a supplement by William A. Craigie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1874); Geir T. Zoëga,

A Concise

Dictionary of Old Icelandic, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 4 (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2004 [originally published in 1910]); Beatrice La Farge and John Tucker,
Glossary to the Poetic Edda Based on Hans Kuhn’s “Kurzes Wörterbuch” (Heidelberg: Carl
Winter, 1992);

The Poetic Edda, trans. Lee M. Hollander, 2nd ed. rev. (Austin: University of

Texas Press, 1962);

The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1996); and

The Poetic Edda, vol. 2, Mythological Poems, ed. and trans. Ursula Dronke

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).

“hverir hefdi lopt alt lævi blandit” (

Völuspá 25, in Edda, Neckel ed., 6; and see 5); here

and throughout this article, I provide only the stanza number and do not indicate line divisions
in poetry citations). While Jan de Vries rejects identiﬁcation of Loki and Lódurr, he does
review the arguments of those who favor it (see his

The Problem of Loki, Folklore Fellows

Communications 110 [Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1937], 36–37, 49–55, and

Alt-

History of Religions

217

some treat the term

lá as identical with læ, in which case (assuming Lódurr

is in fact identical to Loki) this ﬁgure not only typiﬁes this quality but
also supplies humanity with it.

As ﬁnal examples, taken from the corpus

of skaldic poems (which typically are differentiated from eddic poems by
their more ornate form and ascription to named poets), Loki is called
“bragdvíss” (wise in tricks) in Êjódólfr of Hvinir’s

Haustlöng; “ﬁrna

slœgr” (terribly sly) in Úlfr Uggason’s

Húsdrápa; and “drjúgr at ljúga”

(proﬁcient at lying) in Eilífr Gudrúnarson’s Ê

órsdrápa.

Although we have not yet considered any narratives about him, it is clear

from these descriptions of Loki that he embodies many of the qualities
discussed by Detienne and Vernant under the heading of

metis. Thus, it

is not surprising that while scholars’ interpretations of the core Loki or
ur-Loki have varied enormously—he has been seen as everything from
an elemental spirit of ﬁre, water, or air to a trickster or culture-hero, to a
chthonic demon of death, to, most infamously, a spider—many have
viewed the trait of cunning as fundamental to his character.

But while

Cleasby and Gudbrandur Vigfússon,

Icelandic-English Dictionary, 403.

Haustlöng 5, North ed. and trans., 4; for the stanzas from Húsdrápa and Êórsdrápa, see

Skáldskaparmál 16 and 18, Faulkes ed., 20 and 26; translations from Edda, Faulkes trans.,
77 and 83. The ﬁrst poem is from ca. 900, the latter two from the tenth century. Descriptors
for Loki used by Snorri and the poets are echoed in the relatively late, prose

Sörla Âáttr

(Sörli’s tale; this text is found in a fourteenth-century manuscript as part of

Óláfs saga Trygg-

vasonar en mesta), which nicknames him “Loki læuiss” and (like Snorri) says that of all beings
Loki has the greatest “

slægd” (cunning); see Sörla Âáttr, in Flateyjarbók: En samling af norske

konge-sagaer, ed. Gudbrandur Vigfússon and C. R. Unger, 3 vols. (Oslo: P. T. Malling, 1860–
68), 1:275.

In the late 1930s, Willy Krogmann wrote of Loki, based mainly on considerations of

etymology and runic evidence, that “his cunning must in the future be regarded as the major
trait of his character” (muss seine Arglist in Zukunft als der Hauptzug seines Wesens betrachtet
werden) (“Loki,”

Acta Philologica Scandinavica 12 [1937–38]: 59–70, quote at 70). Many

have echoed this general judgment before and since. It may be noted here that Georges
Dumézil argued in a book-length study, based partly on an extended but in the end rather
inessential comparison with the Ossetian ﬁgure Syrdon, that Loki ought to be regarded as a
Norse personiﬁcation of the abstract psychological quality “impulsive intelligence.” Dumézil
describes Loki as “inventive and resourceful, yet he does not look far ahead: abandoning
himself entirely to the moment and to his impulse . . . he is surprised by the results of his
actions, but tries at once to make them good” (Er ist erﬁnderisch und ﬁndig, doch er blickt
nicht weit: Ganz dem Augenblick und seinem Impuls, . . . hingegeben wird er von den
Folgen seiner Handlungen überrascht, versucht sie aber sofort wiedergutzumachen) (

Loki,

trans. Inge Köck [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959], 123). While
Dumézil’s core idea, that Loki is in many ways best regarded as a mythic personiﬁcation of
an abstract mental quality, is clearly not far removed from my own, his understanding ulti-
mately contradicts my view that Loki is a metic ﬁgure, an instantiation of what Detienne and
Vernant call “informed prudence” (

Cunning Intelligence, 11). Dumézil, to the contrary, char-

acterizes the rather ill-deﬁned and passive

áss Hœnir, whom I discuss near the end of the last

section of this article, as the instantiation of prudent intelligence and, thus, as Loki’s opposite

germanische Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols. [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1957], 2:271–72), as does Folke
Ström, who accepts their equation (see his

Loki: Ein mythologisches Problem, Göteborgs Uni-

versitets Årsskrift 62, no. 8 [Göteborg: Elander, 1956], 52–54). For a more recent discussion
by a scholar who accepts the identiﬁcation, see

Poetic Edda, Dronke ed. and trans., 2:125.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

218

Loki’s ranking as Norse myth’s paradigmatic instantiation of metic intel-
ligence might, therefore, seem secure, there is a ﬁgure of equal if not
greater importance to the overall mythos who gives Loki a run for this
distinction. This is the chief god, Ódinn. While no passage ascribes metic
qualities to Ódinn as explicitly and succinctly as those from Snorri’s

Edda

do for Loki, we ﬁnd when looking at the stories that are told about each
that almost every activity and trait that make Loki a model of cunning
apply also to Ódinn.

One ability considered by Detienne and Vernant essential to masters of

metis is the changing or masking of form or aspect. Metis is a “power
of metamorphosis” as well as of “disguise. In order to dupe its victim it
assumes a form which masks, instead of revealing, its true being. In

metis

[

sic] appearance and reality no longer correspond to one another but

stand in contrast.”

It is true that Ódinn and Loki do not exhibit identical

powers or habits of transformation. To some extent, it is appropriate to
view Loki as the greater master of metamorphosis and Ódinn as the master
of disguise. In other words, while Loki’s transformations are usually
physical, Ódinn’s often involve just changes of outﬁt or sometimes just
changes of name rather than of form. A reason for this difference may be
that while Loki is rarely concerned with concealing his identity as such,
Ódinn frequently seeks to do so, because the success of his “mission” often
depends on his foes’ not recognizing him until the right moment.

This

difference fades from view, however, when we consider instances in which
these two gods adopt animal forms: Loki becomes a ﬂy to distract a dwarf
from his forging and becomes a salmon to try to escape from the

æsir

who want to punish him for Baldr’s death, while Ódinn transforms into a
snake to gain entry through a small hole into a cave.

Loki and Ódinn

even in one case engage in the same particular animal transformation
when, on separate occasions, each ﬂees in the shape of a bird with a stolen
(or recovered) treasure in his beak from a giant who, also in bird’s form,

Detienne and Vernant,

Cunning Intelligence, 20–21.

For a discussion of narratives of such missions of Ódinn, see Kevin J. Wanner, “God on

the Margins: Dislocation and Transience in the Myths of Ódinn,”

History of Religions 46,

no. 4 (2007): 316–50, esp. 329–30.

For Loki’s transformations, see

Skáldskaparmál 35, Faulkes ed., 42; Gylfaginning 50,

Faulkes ed., 48–49; for Ódinn’s transformation, see

Skáldskaparmál G58, Faulkes ed., 4.

(

Loki, 224–31). I argue, however, that Loki is ultimately shown by the mythos to have the

most forethought of any of the

æsir or, at least, that his plans are the ones that ultimately

come to fruition. As for the other interpretations of the ur-Loki I have mentioned, most have
been offered by a certain number of scholars, and these schools of thought have been re-
viewed many times; see, e.g., Ström,

Loki, 7–8; de Vries, Problem of Loki, 10–27, and Alt-

germanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:265–67; and Stefanie von Schnurbein, “The Function
of Loki in Snorri Sturluson’s

Edda,” trans. Lilian Friedberg, History of Religions 40, no. 2

(2000): 109–24, esp. 112–13.

History of Religions

219

pursues him to Ásgardr.

In each of these cases, the transformation attains

for the god an end apart from or beyond that of mere disguise.

Ódinn and Loki are also alike in that both switch gender and/or take on

feminine qualities. There is only one story of Ódinn’s appearing as a
woman: in the Dane Saxo Grammaticus’s

Gesta Danorum (early 1200s),

Ódinn (Othinus), here euhemerized as a decadent monarch of Byzantium,
uses magic to adopt several disguises in his efforts to trick or force a re-
luctant princess to have sex with him, ﬁnally attaining this end while in
the form of a female physician.

Loki, on the other hand, transforms into

a female, either in appearance or in reality, on each of the four occasions
when he adopts an alternative humanoid form: for example, in

Loka-

senna, Ódinn accuses Loki of having been “eight winters . . . beneath
the earth, a woman milking cows, and there you bore children, and I con-
sider that an unmanly quality [

args adal]”; and in another eddic poem,

rymskvida (Êrymr’s poem), both Loki and the god Êórr disguise them-

selves in drag in order to retrieve Êórr’s stolen hammer at a feast of the
giants.

Even if, however, Loki is the main gender bender of the pair, it

should be noted that Ódinn does not escape being labeled as womanish.
In

Lokasenna, Loki responds to Ódinn’s accusation that Loki is “unmanly”

by stating that the chief god had beaten drums like a witch on an island,
“and I considered

that an args adal.”

Loki is not alone, moreover, in

calling Ódinn unmanly: in

Ynglinga saga (ca. 1225), the ﬁrst of a col-

leciton of kings’ sagas long ascribed to Snorri Sturluson, Ódinn, here a
Trojan king who has colonized the North, is said to practice the art of

seidr,

from which “ﬂows such great effeminacy [

ergi] that it seems to men not

without shame to practice it.”

Thus, for both Loki and Ódinn, identity, species, and gender are ﬂuid

categories. Such malleability and adaptability are, however, but means to
ends for metic actors. For Detienne and Vernant,

metis represents above

Loki does so in

Haustlöng 12, North ed., 6; Ódinn does so in the story of the mead of

poetry in

Skáldskaparmál G58, Faulkes ed., 4–5.

See book III in

Saxonis Grammatici Gesta Danorum, ed. Alfred Holder (Strassburg:

Karl J. Trübner, 1886), 78–80; for translation, see Saxo Grammaticus,

The History of the

Danes: Books I–IX, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson, trans. Peter Fisher, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1996), 1:76–78.

“átta vetr vartu fyr iord nedan kyr mólcandi oc kona, oc heﬁr Âú Âar born borit, oc

hugda ec Âat args adal” (

Lokasenna 23, in Edda, Neckel ed., 101; translation slightly modiﬁed

from

Poetic Edda, Larrington trans., 88). For Loki and Êórr dressing in drag, see Êrymskvida

15–20, in

Edda, Neckel ed., 113–14. For the two instances of Loki’s adopting a female human-

oid form, see this article’s next section, “The Relationship between Cunning and Sovereignty
in Greek and Norse Myth.”

“oc hugda ec Âat args adal” (

Lokasenna 24, in Edda, Neckel ed., 101; emphasis added).

“fylgir svá mikil ergi, at eigi Âótti karlmönnum skammlaust vid at fara” (

Ynglinga saga 7,

Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Adalbjarnarson, 3 vols. [Reykjavík: Hid íslenzka fornritafélag,

1941–51], 1:19).

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

220

all a universal technique for inverting the normal result of any contest:
“In every confrontation or competitive situation . . . success can be won
by two means, either thanks to a superiority in ‘power’ in the particular
sphere in which the contest is taking place . . . or by the use of methods of
a different order whose effect is, precisely, to reverse the natural outcome
of the encounter. . . . [

Metis] is, in a sense, the absolute weapon, the only

one that has the power to ensure victory and domination over others, what-
ever the circumstances, whatever the conditions of the conﬂict.”

Singly

or together, Ódinn and Loki habitually confront adversaries stronger than
themselves. Both are repeatedly taken hostage by

jötnar, or by men, or,

in Loki’s case, by the other

æsir.

So long as such encounters remain

straightforward contests of might or physical ability, neither ever triumphs
alone. Victory or extrication from such situations comes for both through
one of two means: either they wait for the arrival or rely on the action of an
ally with sufﬁcient strength to overcome their foes—this is almost always
the thunder-god Êórr—or else they plan or watch for the moment when
their cunning can reverse the trajectory of the contest or end it in their
favor. This pivotal act can take many forms. In some instances, as I have
described, they adopt a shape that allows them to make an unexpected
escape or entry; in other instances, they wait for the opportune moment
to cast off a disguise or assumed form; sometimes, they arrange a
timely distraction; often, they use their mouths or wits, bargaining with
their captors, deploying clever or sophistic arguments, or telling riddles
or outright lies; ﬁnally, in cases in which their enemies seem to have
gotten the better of them, they ﬂee with a parting curse, which invariably
comes true.

The evidence I have presented thus far is, I hope, sufﬁcient to persuade

that although there are differences in the nature, scope, and applications

Detienne and Vernant,

Cunning Intelligence, 13.

Ódinn is taken hostage by a human king in the eddic poem

Grímnismál and, along with

Loki, by the giant Hreidmarr for the killing of his son Otr, as narrated in

Völsunga saga 14

(

Völsunga saga: The Saga of the Volsungs; The Icelandic Text according to MS Nks 1824 b, 4

ed. and trans. Kaaren Grimstad [Saarbrücken: AQ-Verlag, 2000]), in the prose introduction
and ﬁrst nine verses of

Reginsmál, in Edda, Neckel ed., 173–75, and in Skáldskaparmál 39–

40, Faulkes ed., 45–46. Loki is also taken captive by the giant Êjazi in

Haustlöng 8–9, North

ed., 4–6, and by the

æsir in the giant-builder episode and after the klling of Baldr (in Gylfa-

ginning 42 and 50, Faulkes ed., 34–36 and 48–49, as well as in Lokasenna’s prose epilogue
(however, A. G. van Hamel has offered reasons for regarding this epilogue as originally sepa-
rate material; see his “The Prose-Frame of

Lokasenna,” Neophilogus 14 [1929]: 204–14).

Many references to Ódinn’s or Loki’s use of such tactics have already been given.

Among instances in which Ódinn reveals his identity to great effect are the climaxes of the
eddic poems

VafÂrúdnismál and Grímnismál. There are many instances of each god’s use of

types of verbal cunning: for Ódinn’s cursing enemies as he departs, see

Grímnismál 53, in

Edda, Neckel ed., 68; and chap. 9 in Saga Heidreks Konungs ins Vitra: The Saga of King
Heidrek the Wise, ed. and trans. Christopher Tolkien (London: Nelson, 1960), 44; for Loki’s
curses, see

Lokasenna 65 and Reginsmál 6, in Edda, Neckel ed., 109 and 175.

History of Religions

221

of their powers, Loki and Ódinn share a set of abilities and traits that
make them both paradigmatic instantiations of cunning intelligence as
this is deﬁned by Detienne and Vernant in their studies of Greek culture
and myth. Having established this, I seek in the remainder of this article to
answer a major question: Why are metic qualities or powers so prominent
in Norse myth? Or, to frame this question slightly differently, Why do
two of the three most central and active ﬁgures of these myths (the other
being Êórr) so eminently embody this brand of intelligence? Although—
as my discussion will suggest and (occasionally) explicitly argue—one
cannot really understand one of these gods apart from the other, I will
focus more heavily on Loki than on Ódinn in what follows, for two reasons.

First, in a previous article I examined myths of Ódinn in some detail,

emphasizing the themes of marginality and transience that pervade them:
both the god and the order he protects are shown to cling to existence
precariously. All victories are tactical and temporary, serving perhaps to
stave off but never to thwart the inevitability of

ragnarök, the “doom

of the gods,” in which both god and world order will meet their end.

I stressed, in short, how distinctly non-Platonic Norse notions of deity
and cosmos are, lacking as they do the qualities of eternity, stasis, and
perfection.

The second, and more important, reason is that despite the overlap in

their customary powers and the uses to which they put them, there is a
clear difference in the way in which Ódinn’s and Loki’s characters and
deeds are evaluated in existing sources. This disparity, I think, is not, as
has often been claimed, primarily moral in nature. While it can be con-
ceded that our sources on the whole take a more positive view of Ódinn
than of Loki, differences in their moral evaluations of these characters
should not be exaggerated. Indeed, if Loki is the most disparaged of the
gods, Ódinn runs a close second. In sources poetic and prose, pre- and
postconversion, vernacular and Latin, Ódinn is routinely described as de-
ceitful, capricious, and engaging in dishonorable and shameful behavior.

While Loki is called “bölva smidr,” one of Ódinn’s pseudonyms, attested
in multiple sources, is “Bölverkr” (Doer of evil).

Lokasenna, when

For my earlier article, see n. 24 above. While Snorri uses the spelling

ragnarøkr, “twi-

light of the gods,” I use the more usual

ragnarök (except when I am quoting him).

Ström,

Loki, 81–82; H. R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (London:

Penguin, 1964), 50; E. O. G. Turville-Petre,

Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of

Ancient Scandinavia (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), 50–53; and Wanner, “God on
the Margins,” 330–31, 336–37: all these studies cite and summarize primary materials that
raise moral questions about (or openly condemn) Ódinn’s character or actions, most often in
the context of his dealings with warriors, kings, and nobles.

For the name “Bölverkr,” see

Gylfaginning 20, Faulkes ed., 22; Skáldskaparmál G58,

Faulkes ed., 4; and the eddic poems

Hávamál 109 and Grímnismál 47, in Edda, Neckel ed.,

34 and 66–67.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

222

Loki publicly accuses Ódinn of practicing unmanly arts, neither Ódinn
nor any of the

æsir present defend him against this charge; indeed,

Ódinn’s own wife Frigg seems to conﬁrm its validity when she implores
the pair to maintain silence concerning “what you two

æsir engaged in in

days of yore.”

Furthermore, although Loki will ultimately turn on his

longtime allies, it should not be overlooked that Ódinn is repeatedly rep-
rimanded for betraying his chief followers—kings and warrior-heroes.
Another accusation Loki levels against Ódinn in

Lokasenna is that “often

you gave, that which you should not give, victory to the less worthy,” and
Helgakvida Hundingsbana önnur (The second poem of Helgi Hundingr’s
slayer) offers this damning judgment of the chief god: “Ódinn alone causes
all evil, because he bore runes of strife between kinsmen.”

Even the

guileless Êórr conﬁrms Loki’s and others’ judgments on Ódinn’s character
when in the eddic poem

Hárbardsljód (Hárbardr’s song) he calls his father

“ragr” (a pervert) and his mind “illr” (evil).

The distinction, then, in

the sources’ evaluations of Loki and Ódinn does not seem to be that one
is evil while the other is good. Instead, the difference is that, while both
ﬁgures possess and deploy metic intelligence in similar ways, it is only
Loki whose character is explicitly and fundamentally deﬁned as “cunning”
or “sly.” Another question, then, that I will seek to answer in the rest of
this article is, Why is this so? Preliminarily, my hypothesis is that Loki
may be regarded as Norse myth’s principal or primordial manifestation of
metic powers and abilities, while Ódinn’s are best described as secondary
or even derivative. If this hypothesis can be demonstrated, it has pro-
found implications for the interpretation of these ﬁgures’ interrelation-
ship and mythic functions.

Attempting to say anything new and substantial about Loki’s role in

Norse myth is a daunting task. Studies of Loki are legion, lengthy, and less
than uniﬁed in their conclusions. Titles of articles such as Anne Holts-
mark’s “Loki—en omstridt skikkelse i nordisk mytologi” (Loki—a con-
troversial ﬁgure in Norse mythology), Jens Peter Schjødt’s “Om Loki
endnu engang” (About Loki once again), and Jan de Vries’ “Loki . . . und
kein Ende” (Loki . . . and no end) testify to scholarly fatigue and despair
at ever coming to grips with “the problem of Loki” (another of de Vries’s
titles).

This has hardly stopped anyone from trying, however. Two

“hvat iÂ æsir tveir drygdot í árdaga” (

Lokasenna 25, in Edda, Neckel ed., 101).

“opt Âú gaft, Âeim er Âú gefa scyldira, inom slævorom, sigr” (

Lokasenna, 22, in Edda,

Neckel ed., 101); “einn veldr Ódinn öllo bölvi, Âvíat med siﬁungom sacrúnar bar” (

Helgakvida

Hundingsbana önnur 34, in Edda, Neckel ed., 158).

See

Hárbardsljód 27 and 21, in Edda, Neckel ed., 83 and 81.

Anne Holtsmark, “Loki—en omstridt skikkelse i nordisk mytologi,”

Maal og Minne 62

(1962): 81–89; Jens Peter Schjødt, “Om Loki endnu engang,”

Arkiv för nordisk ﬁlologi

96 (1981): 49–86; Jan de Vries, “Loki . . . und kein Ende,” in

Festschrift für Franz Rolf

Schröder zu seinem 65. Geburtstage September 1958, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Heidelberg:
Carl Winter, 1959), 1–10; for de Vries’

Problem of Loki, see n. 19 above.

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History of Religions

223

factors may account for both the impasse and the industry in Loki studies:
the complexity and contradictions of the data and the often uncontrolled
subjectivity of the selection and sorting of these data by scholars. A
desire to respect the intricacies of the former while avoiding the pitfalls
of the latter has resulted in a row of studies aiming at exhaustion, that
dutifully catalog all the elements of Loki’s mythos before attempting a
synoptic distillation of the fundaments of his character and/or function.

This exercise has been repeated so often that Loki studies threaten to
reach the point at which—as Jonathan Z. Smith has warned biblical
scholarship—its analytic map simply replicates the territory under analysis
and thus loses “both utility and . . . cognitive advantage.”

In my analysis,

then, I will not hesitate to leave elements of Loki’s mythos aside, and I
will resist the temptation to account for every anomalous datum relative
to my thesis. I also will not treat earlier studies in much detail, although
to those who know them it will quickly become clear that I agree, on at
least a point or two, with almost everyone who has weighed in on the
topic of Loki.

As in bible studies, this ground has been sufﬁciently

worked over that I doubt whether much could be said that is genuinely
new and simultaneously founded in the sources.

If the perspective I offer on Loki has any claim to originality, it is in

my alignment of this ﬁgure with a speciﬁc interest group. Part of my jus-
tiﬁcation, then, for taking another pass at Loki is that earlier treatments
have considered the motivation of the story logic or the actors in the
myths but have lacked sufﬁcient consideration of the motivations of those
who produced our sources for Loki’s character and exploits. In studies of
Loki, relatively little attention has been paid to questions such as those
posed by Bruce Lincoln in the fourth of his “theses on method” for the
study of religion: “The same destabilizing and irreverent questions one
might ask of any speech act ought be posed of religious discourse. The
ﬁrst of these is ‘Who speaks here?’, i.e., what person, group, or institution
is responsible for a text, whatever its putative or apparent author. Beyond

Among the twentieth-century studies attempting such comprehensive treatments are

de Vries,

Problem of Loki; Ström, Loki; Dumézil’s 1959 edition of Loki (see n. 22 above),

which is a translated and expanded version of the original French edition (

Loki [Paris:

Maisonneuve, 1949]); Anna Birgitta Rooth,

Loki in Scandinavian Mythology, Skrifter

utgivna av Kungliga humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund 51 (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup,
1961); and Schjødt, “Om Loki endnu engang.”

Smith,

Relating Religion, 209.

One method of explaining Loki to which I do not pay much attention is the etymo-

logical. Although Loki’s name has been understood in many ways—it has been derived from
or connected with, e.g., Old Norse

logi, “ﬁre”; Swedish locke, “spider”; and even the name

“Lucifer”—and although I lack the expertise to weigh options against one another on strictly
linguistic grounds, I favor connecting “Loki” with Old Norse

lúka (pp. lokinn), meaning

“to end,” “ﬁnish,” or “close” (see discussions in de Vries,

Problem of Loki, 13–15, and Alt-

germanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:265), since this solution dovetails with my theory that
Loki functions to render sovereignty impermanent.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

224

that, ‘To what audience? In what immediate and broader context? Through
what system of mediations? With what interests?’ And further, ‘Of what
would the speaker(s) persuade the audience? What are the consequences
if this project of persuasion should happen to succeed? Who wins what,
and how much? Who, conversely, loses?’ ”

In the present case, such

questions become, To whom do we owe the extant mythos of Loki?
What were they doing, or aiming to do, through its construction? In short,
Whose god was Loki? To experts in Norse myth, this may seem an odd or
even nonsensical question, given that one of the few points of consensus
among Loki scholars is that this god “had no cult.”

To many, he is best

thought of not as a god at all but as an “epical ﬁgure”—or, to use a
marvelously literal Norwegian term, a

gjennomgangsﬁgur, a cipher

whose purpose is to supply a connecting thread for story cycles, ﬁlling
whatever roles are needed along the way. He has been regarded, in short,
as “more at home in a novellistic tale than in a real myth.”

This view is

not without merit or support; one of the earliest extant kennings for Loki,
sagna hrærir, can be translated “mover (or rouser) of tales.”

Never-

theless, I do not think it gives enough credit to the coherence of Loki’s
portrait. It also tends to discourage consideration of this ﬁgure’s ideo-
logical uses. Others who have treated Norse myth as ideology—that is,
as a rhetorical discourse that seeks to establish, express, reinforce, contest,
and/or transform social, political, and material realities and relations—
have tended to shy away from identifying Loki with any particular set of
real-world actors or partisans. In contrast, I contend, and will attempt to
demonstrate in this article, that many of the characteristics of Loki and
his myths are better understood if he is regarded as a god—or, if using
this term for him is objectionable, as an imagined ﬁgure whose qualities
and actions embody key elements of the outlook and the interests of

Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,”

Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8,

no. 3 (1996): 225–27, quote at 225–26.

Among many examples of this consensus, see Dumézil,

Loki, 1, 219; de Vries, Problem

of Loki, 203–4, and Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:265; Turville-Petre, Myth and
Religion, 126; Davidson, God and Myths, 163; Ström, Loki, 11; Anne Holtsmark, Norrøn
mytologi: Tro og myter i vikingtiden (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 1970), 146; and von
Schnurbein, “Function of Loki,” 110.

de Vries,

Problem of Loki, 78. For Loki as an epic rather than religious ﬁgure, see

Dumézil,

Loki, 1–2; Ulf Drobin, “Myth and Epical Motifs in the Loki-Research,” Temenos:

Studies in Comparative Religion 3 (1968): 19–39; Holtsmark, “Loki—en omstridt skikkelse,”
87–88, and

Norrøn mytologi, 155 (it is from Holtsmark’s work that I take the term gjennom-

gangsﬁgur); Jerold Frakes, “Loki’s Mythological Function in the Tripartite System,” in The
Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology, ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (New
York: Routledge, 2002), 159–75, esp. 162–63; and Rooth,

Loki in Scandinavian Mythology,

193, 209, 213–14, 219. Some, like de Vries (

Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:255–60)

or Hermann Schneider (“Loki,”

Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 55 [1938]: 237–51), have

tried to separate out the epical from the genuinely mythological in the Loki material.

Haustlöng 9, North ed. and trans., 6.

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History of Religions

225

those who produce claims and stories about him (but, then, what else is
any god?)—of poets.

the relationship between cunning and sovereignty

in greek and norse myth

In both Greek myth and Norse myth, the operations of cunning intelligence
are depicted as essential to the establishment and continuing exercise of
power, yet the ﬁnal results of their incidence and application are very dif-
ferent. To compare the role played by metic intelligence, its bearers, and
their relation to power in Greek myth versus Norse myth, I will begin by
focusing on what Detienne and Vernant call the myth about sovereignty
related in Hesiod’s

Theogony (ca. 730–700 BC).

In thus characterizing

this poem’s subject, Detienne and Vernant refer not to a limited expression
of sovereignty, to authority instantiated or exercised by this or that entity,
but to sovereignty as such, which by deﬁnition is universal and unimpeach-
able. The

Theogony, in their view offers a myth in which “the established

order” attains both “stability and permanence.”

While in Platonic phi-

losophy such a pure or ideal notion must be represented abstractly, myth
permits it to receive concrete form, which in Hesiod’s case is the god Zeus.

M. L. West, editor and translator of the

Theogony, similarly perceives at

the core of Hesiod’s poem a “Succession Myth”—or, perhaps better,
what we might call an End-of-Succession Myth—that traces the process
through which Zeus’s power is rendered absolute and everlasting. The
poem’s climax, West writes, “puts a stop to the chain of revolutions, and
ensures that Zeus shall not be overthrown in his turn.”

Though Zeus

attains this status by usurping the place of his father, he need not fear the
same fate for himself: “In Greek myth, the son stronger than Zeus is a
threat that does not materialize.”

While Zeus is shown by Hesiod to possess wits and strength of his own

from the start, his rule becomes permanent only after he has co-opted and
in some cases incorporated the powers of others. One key power acquired
by Zeus is that of lightning, or the thunderbolt, given to him by the
Cyclopes. Once Zeus possesses this weapon, none can overcome him in

Detienne and Vernant,

Cunning Intelligence, 6, 58. On the dating of this poem, see

Hesiod, Theogony

and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1988), vii; and Hesiod,

Theogony, ed. M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1966), 44–45.

Detienne and Vernant,

Cunning Intelligence, 306.

West, note to lines 881–1020, in Hesiod,

Theogony, West ed., 397. On the “Succession

Myth,” see discussions in ibid., 18, 37; and Hesiod,

“Theogony” and “Works and Days,”

West trans., xi. On this theme in Hesiod, see also G. S. Kirk,

Myth: Its Meaning and Func-

tions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970), 173.

West, note to lines 886–900, in Hesiod,

Theogony, West ed., 401.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

226

direct combat, though he takes out added insurance by keeping Kratos
and Bie, “Strength” and “Domination,” always at his side.

Zeus remains

vulnerable, however, to oblique challenges, to the threat of

metis. The way

in which Hesiod has the god gain ﬁnal control over this power is none too
subtle—Zeus marries and then swallows its personiﬁcation. West presents
this incorporation in his prose translation of the

Theogony, in what in his

opinion are its last genuinely Hesiodic lines:

Zeus as king of the gods made Metis his ﬁrst wife, the wisest among gods and
mortal men. But when she was about to give birth to the pale-eyed goddess
Athene, he tricked her deceitfully with cunning words and put her away in his
belly on the advice of Earth and starry Heaven. They advised him in this way
so that no other of the gods . . . should have the royal station instead of Zeus.
For from Metis it was destined that clever children should be born: ﬁrst a pale-
eyed daughter . . . with courage and sound counsel equal to her father’s, and
then a son she was to bear, king of gods and men, one proud of heart. But Zeus
put her away in his belly ﬁrst, so that the goddess could advise him of what was
good or bad.

In this way, observes Vernant, Zeus becomes “the incarnation of the
cunning foresight that allows him to thwart the plan of anyone who
might hope to surprise him, to catch him off guard. . . . All is well once
Zeus swallows Metis and thereby becomes the Metioeis—the god who is
fully

metis [sic]: resourcefulness personiﬁed. . . . Once Zeus is enthroned

and established, nothing and no one can set him aside and sit on his
throne.”

Zeus alone achieves this status since, as Detienne and Vernant

remark, “whatever the strength of a man or a god, there always comes a
time when he confronts one stronger than himself. Only superior

metis

can give supremacy the two qualities of permanence and universality
which turn it into truly sovereign power. . . . Thanks to the

metis within

him Zeus is now forewarned of everything . . . that is in store for him.
For him there is no gap between a plan and its fulﬁllment such as enables
the unexpected to intervene in the lives of other gods and mortals.”

Thus Zeus, in a move philosophers must view as ironic, has elevated
himself into the sphere of being through mastery of the force that ensures
successful negotiation of the realm of becoming. He has effectively
become an ideal form: “Zeus is no ordinary king. By marrying, master-

Hesiod,

Theogony, line 385, West ed., 126.

Hesiod,

Theogony, lines 886–900, in “Theogony” and “Works and Days,” West trans.,

29; and see Hesiod,

Theogony, West ed., 144–45. On these lines as the last genuinely

Hesiodic of the

Theogony, see ibid., 398–99.

Jean-Pierre Vernant,

The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths, trans.

Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 28, 69.

Detienne and Vernant,

Cunning Ingelligence, 13–14.

One Line Long

History of Religions

227

ing and swallowing Metis he becomes more than simply a monarch: he
becomes Sovereignty itself.”

Despite Plato’s frustrations with the anthropomorphic qualities and

passions of the gods of the poets, then, the chief god in Hesiod manages
to attain one quality worthy of the philosopher’s notions of deity: that of
permanence or stability. The same cannot be said, however, of Ódinn, who
is in every way a less impressive ﬁgure than Zeus. This is less true, how-
ever, if the two are compared in the preliminary stages of their careers.
According to their respective cosmogonies, neither Zeus nor Ódinn be-
longed to the ﬁrst generation of beings. Neither were they always rulers.
To attain power, both had to rise up violently against their progenitors,
from whom they and their allies are from then on nominally (or, as the
myths would have it, tribally or racially) distinguished. Just as Zeus over-
throws and imprisons his father (Kronos) and the other Titans and then
reigns as king of the Olympian gods, so Ódinn kills his grandfather (the
jötunn Ymir) and then rules over the cosmos, which he has fashioned
(with the help of his two brothers) from Ymir’s dismembered corpse, as
chief of the

æsir.

Clearer differences between Zeus and Ódinn emerge when the measures

each takes to attain sovereign power are compared. Zeus, as we have
seen, receives from the Cyclopes the thunderbolt, and he swallows Metis.
He thus takes immediate control of both strength and cunning, wielding
the paradigmatic symbol of the former with his own hands and literally
incorporating the latter. Ódinn’s situation is different. As for physical
strength, Ódinn is himself without it, or else rarely displays it. Although
a god of war, Ódinn intervenes in battle as a general or sorcerer rather
than as a champion or soldier—although one ﬁnds in Saxo or in Snorri’s
more euhemeristic moments vague statements about Ódinn as a participant
in battle, there are few speciﬁc reports of his exploits and none that are
particularly noble.

His major contributions to warfare are strategic,

as when he teaches kings the devastating “wedge-shaped” formation, or
magical, as when he inspires

berserkr frenzies or casts his spear over

opposing armies to ﬁll them with fear and/or to dedicate their about-to-
be-slain to himself.

He himself is only ever in one real ﬁght, which he

Ibid., 109, see also 68; and Vernant,

Universe, 28.

Saxo provides one of the few references to Ódinn personally (and ignobly) commit-

ting violence in battle; see bk. 8 in

Saxonis Grammatici Gesta Danorum, in Holder ed., 263.

Although aside from at

ragnarök, Snorri does not describe Ódinn participating in battle in

his

Edda, in chap. 2 of Ynglinga saga, Ódinn the Trojan king is called a “hermadr mikill”

(great warrior) (

Heimskringla, Bjarni Adalbjarnarson ed., 1:11), although even here he still

acts mainly as a war leader or a source of inspiration for others in battle.

On the wedge formation, see

Reginsmál 23, in Edda, Neckel ed., 179; and Saxonis

Grammatici Gesta Danorum, Holder ed., 32; on Ódinn’s inspiration of berserkr frenzies, see
Ynglinga saga 6, in Heimskringla, Bjarni Adalbjarnarson ed., 1:17; on Ódinn’s spear, see
Völuspá 24, in Edda, Neckel ed., 6.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

228

loses, badly (more on this shortly). Yet despite Ódinn’s lack of physical
prowess, he, like Zeus, has at his disposal an instrument of supreme force.
This is Mjöllnir, the hammer of Ódinn’s son Êórr. Like Zeus’s thunder-
bolt, Mjöllnir is a weapon without peer—Êórr never fails to kill whatever
he strikes—and indeed it is also probably nothing other than a symbol for
the power of lightning and storm. Although Ódinn does not himself wield
this weapon, he does not lack control over it. The quintessential “dumb
áss,” Êórr does not operate as an independent agent. A creature of the
status quo, he appears content to remain in his role as defender of Midgardr
and Ásgardr and to use his hammer only against giants, trolls, or other
enemies of the gods and humans. In short, Êórr poses no threat to the
sovereignty of Ódinn, who, as demonstrated most clearly in

Hárbardsljód,

is more than able to outwit his son if need arises or simply when he feels
like harassing him.

Ódinn therefore has his cosmos’s ultimate implement of brute force

under control and thus seems prepared to counter any straightforward
threats of violence short of the ﬁnal apocalyptic host of

ragnarök, at

which point all bets are off (more on this at the end of this section). But
what of cunning, the one power that, according to Detienne and Vernant,
must inevitably overcome superior might? This is a quality that, as I have
described, Ódinn possesses to an extreme degree, and yet he is matched
in it, if not exceeded, by Loki. Why does Ódinn as sovereign tolerate a
rival in this arena? Or, in extramythological terms, Why this redundancy
in character and function among the

æsir? Two answers have been most

commonly given by scholars to the question, If Ódinn, then why Loki?
These answers do not exclude one another and, indeed, have often been
offered together. The ﬁrst is that it behooves Ódinn and the other gods
within the framework of the preserved myths to keep Loki around; having
many talents but few scruples or inhibitions, Loki is more able and/or will-
ing than they to cross boundaries in order to gain beneﬁts or right things
gone wrong. A myth that is often used to support this hypothesis is that
of the giant-builder in

Gylfaginning (The deluding of Gylﬁ), the ﬁrst

major part of Snorri’s

Edda. In this story, Loki is blamed by the æsir for

allowing a giant to use his magically industrious horse to assist in build-
ing a new wall for Ásgardr in a set period of time, for which the giant’s
payment will be the sun, the moon, and the goddess Freyja. Under threat
of death, Loki prevents the job from being ﬁnished on schedule by trans-
forming himself into a mare and distracting the giant’s helper. The

æsir

and their cosmos are thus saved from catastrophe, and the gods also get
some added bonuses: they get a security fence to protect the borders of
their homeland for free (in the end, the giant is not paid anything for his
labor, since Êórr smashes in his head once his true nature has been re-
vealed), and as a result of his dalliance with the stallion, Loki gives birth

History of Religions

229

to the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, “the best horse among gods and men,”
which is given to Ódinn.

In myths like this, Loki clearly acts as a liminal ﬁgure who, employing

often drastic or questionable means, helps the

æsir to maintain in their

dealings with others what Margaret Clunies Ross, following Marshall
Sahlins, labels a standard of “negative reciprocity,” by which she means
that they seek to preserve “their own hierarchical superiority” through
“stratagems like theft and duplicity rather than the open and public deal-
ings one might expect between social groups.”

In line with this reasoning,

Loki has been understood to act as an intermediary who obtains beneﬁts
for the gods while preventing or reversing their dispossession by other
sorts of beings.

While there is much to recommend this common inter-

pretation of Loki’s character and function, I question whether he is in this
respect really so different from his fellow deities. After all, all of the gods
active in the myths work to uphold this ideal of negative reciprocity, and
they often suffer injury to themselves or their reputations in doing so, as
when Tyr sacriﬁces his hand to bind the Fenrisúlfr, when Freyr surrenders
his sword in return for his servant Skírnir’s forcing the giantess Gerdr to
marry him, or when Êórr on multiple occasions violates the rules of hos-
pitality in the halls of both

æsir and jötnar in order to address threats to

the mythic status quo. Thus, even if Loki does often provide a scapegoat
for or a solution to problems generated in the gods’ dealings with others,
he does not free the other

æsir either from enforcing standards of negative

reciprocity or from suffering injuries or indignities in doing so.

The second common answer to the question, If Ódinn, then why Loki? is

that Loki’s character developed and expanded in late paganism alongside,
and owing to an elevation of, Ódinn’s position in the pantheon—that, in
effect, Loki took center stage in those stories and performed those actions
no longer deemed ﬁtting for a ﬁgure now regarded as chief of the gods.

“hestr beztr med godum ok mönnum” (

Gylfaginning 42, in Faulkes ed., 35). Many think

there is a brief allusion to the myth of the giant-builder in

Völuspá 25–26, in Edda, Neckel ed.,

6. Loki’s giving birth to Sleipnir is also mentioned in

Hyndluljód 40, in Edda, Neckel ed., 294.

Margaret Clunies Ross,

Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern

Society, vol. 1, The Myths, Viking Collection 7 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994),
143; for her use of the concept of negative reciprocity (see 101), Clunies Ross cites Marshall
Sahlins, “On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange,” in

The Relevance of Models for Social

Anthropology, ed. Michael Banton, A.S.A. Monographs 1 (London: Tavistock, 1965), 139–
236, esp. 148.

See Schjødt, “Om Loki endnu engang,” 63, 83; and von Schnurbein, “Function of Loki,”

117–19.

On theories of Ódinn’s and Loki’s developing personae in “late paganism,” a term which

many use—rightly enough, I think—as a periodization covering even the earliest extant
sources, and the effects that developments of one character may have had upon the other, see
de Vries,

Problem of Loki, 197–99; Ström, Loki, 84–94; and Frakes, “Loki’s Mythological

Function,” 171.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

230

A scholar who has offered both hypotheses while taking this second one to
its extreme is Folke Ström, who suggests “dass Loki eine Hypostase Odins
ist.”

Ström elaborates: “In his quality as a secondary Ódinn-ﬁgure, Loki

has been given a wealth of more offensive myths, which, had they been
about Ódinn, would have injured religious feeling in that moment when
he had attained his position as father of the gods.”

This is, I think, overall

a weaker argument, not only because it relies on speculation about what
the myths were like before their recorded versions but also because Ódinn
hardly maintains a pristine moral reputation in the extant mythos, as my
discussion above has demonstrated. Further, Ström’s theory of collapsing
gods, in which the “Norse Pantheon becomes ultimately reduced to one
male and one female deity,” has been considered by most too radical—as
Ulf Drobin acerbically but accurately describes the results of Ström’s
analysis of the myth of Baldr’s death, one ends up with Ódinn-Ódinn
conspiring with Ódinn-Loki to instigate Ódinn-Hödr to kill Ódinn-Baldr.
Nevertheless, Ström is certainly right to stress that Ódinn and Loki
approach dramatic and functional identity in the preserved myths, espe-
cially insofar as cunning and duplicity are for each among “den offenbar
konstitutiven Eigenschaften seines Wesens.”

What I think is needed to understand where the signiﬁcant differences

in Loki’s and Ódinn’s mythic qualities and functions lie is a consideration
not of the historical development of their myths but, rather, of the intra-
mythical development of their relationship. Another aspect of Ström’s
analysis that has been criticized is his suggestion that while there may be
an extramythological or historical explanation for Loki’s assimilation to
Ódinn, within the framework of the existing myths Loki is always and
essentially one and the same as Ódinn.

These two ﬁgures ought not to

be regarded, however, as in the Nicene conception of the Christian Father
and Son, as eternally begetting and begotten

hypostaseis of a single and

static divine

ousia. Ódinn and Loki are, rather, distinct and temporally

conditioned beings whose association is provided in the extant myths with
a beginning as well as an end. As Lindow has summarized Loki’s career:

Ström,

Loki, 85.

“In seiner Eigenschaft als sekundäre Odinsﬁgur ist Loki mit einem Schatz anstössiger

Mythen begabt worden, die, hätte es sich um Odin gehandelt, das religiöse Gefühl verletzt
hätten im dem Augenblick, wo er seine Stellung als Göttervater erreicht hatte” (ibid.; Ström
presents his evidence for these claims on 62–95).

Ström,

Loki, 82; and see Drobin, “Myth and Epical Motifs,” 27. For other critical re-

actions to Ström’s thesis, see de Vries, “Loki . . . und kein Ende,” 6; Anatoly Liberman,
“Snorri and Saxo on Útgardaloki, with Notes on Loki Laufeyjarson’s Character, Career, and
Name,” in

Word Heath, Wortheide, Ordheidi: Essays on Germanic Literature and Usage

(1972–1992) (Rome: Il Calamo, 1994), 176–234, esp. 230, and “Some Controversial Aspects
of the Myth of Baldr,”

Alvíssmál 11 (2004): 17–54, esp. 38. One scholar who has come near

to Ström in positing Ódinn’s and Loki’s identity is Schneider (see his “Loki,” 248–51).

See Schjødt, “Om Loki endnu engang,” 57.

History of Religions

231

“It seems that Loki’s allegiance is for the most part with the æsir during
the mythic present, but that in the mythic past . . . and in the mythic
future . . . he is unabashedly against them.”

There are, thus, two ques-

tions to address now: What are the roots and the nature of Ódinn’s and
Loki’s alliance? When and why does it fall apart?

To begin to answer these questions, I return to my comparison of Norse

with Greek myths, looking now to identify an analogue for Loki that will
help to illuminate his relationship to and role vis-à-vis Ódinn, regarded
as an analogue for Zeus. While it was once fairly common for Loki to
be likened to the ﬁre-stealing, quasi-divine ﬁgure of Prometheus, a com-
parison especially favored by those who wished to see Loki as a trickster
or culture hero such as anthropologists have often identiﬁed in Native
American or African religions, I will argue that a more instructive ana-
logue for Loki is the goddess Metis.

A number of scholars have read

the sources to suggest that Ódinn’s association with Loki dates from the
world’s ﬁrst days and that it was conceived as a strategy through which
the shaper of the cosmos sought to neutralize a power that would other-
wise be inimical to himself and his order. As de Vries writes, “The blood-
brothership with Ódinn, and his resulting admission into the world of the
gods, tamed the dangerous and demonic power of Loki, and through that
his intellectual gifts were placed in the service of the world-maintaining
powers.”

Here de Vries calls attention to a relatively neglected datum

from Loki’s résumé. In

Lokasenna, Loki compels Ódinn to allow Loki to

stay at a feast he has crashed by reminding Ódinn of their ancient bond:
“Do you remember that, Ódinn, when we two in days of yore blended
blood together? You said you would not taste ale, unless to us both it was
borne.”

This passage provides the basis for my contention that the most

suggestive Greek parallel for Loki is not Prometheus the forward-thinking
metis-user but, rather, the goddess who is the primal instantiation of metis

Lindow,

Norse Mythology, 21.

Interpretations of Loki as a “trickster” or “culture hero” have depended on his procuring

of treasures and weapons for the gods (

Skáldskaparmál 35, Faulkes ed., 41–43); his invention

of the net, which is then used against him by the

æsir (Gylfaginning 50, Faulkes ed., 48–49);

his ambiguous identity; and his sometimes crudely sexual escapades, as when he ties a goat’s
beard to his testicles to make the giantess Skadi laugh (

Skáldskaparmál G56, Faulkes ed., 2).

Perhaps the most recent scholar to champion vigorously this understanding of Loki is de Vries
in

Problem of Loki (11, 16–18, and all of chap. 7, 251–81, where he also discusses most of

the older scholarship that adopted this view), although he later abandoned this interpretation
under the inﬂuence of Dumézil’s

Loki (see de Vries, “Loki . . . und kein Ende,” 9, and Alt-

germanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:266–67).

“die Blutsbrüderschaft mit Odin und seine dadurch erfolgte Aufnahme in die Götter-

welt, die gefährliche Dämonie Lokis gemildert und dadurch seine intellektualen Gaben in
den Dienst der die Welt erhaltenden Mächte gestellt wurden” (de Vries, “Loki . . . und kein
Ende,” 4; see also Lindow,

Norse Mythology, 219).

“Mantu Âat, Ódinn, er vid í árdaga blendom blódi saman; ölvi bergia léztu eigi mundo,

nema ocr væri bádom borit” (

Lokasenna 9, Edda, Neckel ed., 98).

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

232

itself.

If Zeus swallowed Metis—which some conjecture he is supposed

to have accomplished by getting her to take the form of water or some
other liquid

—as a way to incorporate the power of cunning intelligence

and thereby eternalize his sovereignty, then Ódinn’s mixing of Loki’s
bodily ﬂuid with his own can be read as an effort to attain the same aim.
Such an interpretation of this act has been offered by Schjødt, who suggests
that it be understood as part of Ódinn’s quest to defend his supremacy
and the cosmic order by acquiring different kinds of wisdom and skills,
particularly from the underworld or the dead.

Reading the verse from

Lokasenna in which Loki is said to have been “eight winters . . . beneath
the earth, a woman milking cows” as referring to time he spent procuring
his own powers of transformation and deception, Schjødt argues that the
blending of blood with Loki resulted in Ódinn’s becoming “able to control
certain of those skills that Loki had acquired through his stay in the under-
world, and in this way he is himself able to change sex and shape.”

Thus Ódinn, like Zeus, seems to derive at least part of his mastery of

metic abilities from a commingling of substance with a more primordial
bearer of such mastery. Because Ódinn’s assimilation of this power is
less than total, however, his reign will be less than permanent, his sover-
eignty less than deﬁnitive. Ódinn does not imbibe Loki whole, as Zeus
does Metis, but merely blends some of Loki’s bodily ﬂuid into his own,
thereby leaving Loki, and the powers he epitomizes, autonomous. And
while it is true that what ﬁnally does in Ódinn and his allies is the over-
whelming show of force at

ragnarök by the giants and monsters that the

æsir have long exploited and kept at bay, this defeat in battle is preceded
and enabled by a loss of control over and ﬁnal breach with Loki. According
to Snorri, this occurs when Loki orchestrates the catastrophe that marks

The analogous pair of Ódinn:Zeus::Loki:Prometheus works well if one takes Aeschylus’s

Prometheus vinctus rather than Hesiod as the basis for comparison of Greek with Norse
myth because, as Detienne and Vernant observe, “in Aeschylus’ version, which deliberately
ignores the ﬁgure of Metis, Prometheus takes her place and plays the role which Hesiod assigns
to the goddess” (

Cunning Intelligence, 59). In Aeschylus, metis remains less fully harnessed

by Zeus, and his sovereignty depends upon making a deal with Prometheus, who remains his
rival in the arena of cunning intelligence (see the further discussion of this source in

Cunning

Intelligence, 58–61, 82–83). Still, the fact remains that even here Zeus’s combination of
force and cunning sufﬁces to render his sovereignty permanent, which is not something ever
accomplished by Ódinn.

See Hesiod,

Theogony, West ed., 403; and Vernant, Universe, 27–28.

Schjødt, “Om Loki endnu engang,” 56–57, 78–79.

“Odin bliver istand til at beherske visse af de færdigheder, som Loke har fået gennem

sit ophold i underverdenen, og således selv kan skifte køn og ham” (ibid., 56). For the quo-
tation from

Lokasenna, see n. 28 above. Although it does not really effect his point, it may be

noted that Schjødt, reading

mólcandi as an intransitive verb, takes this verse from Lokasenna

to suggest that Loki spent his time in the underworld “partly in the form of a woman and
partly in the form of a cow” (dels i skikkelse af en kvinde og dels i skikkelse af en ko) (“Om
Loki endnu engang,” 51–52; see also 52 n. 8).

History of Religions

233

the initial step or turning point in the crumbling of the gods’ order—
namely, the killing of Ódinn’s and Frigg’s son Baldr.

Gylfaginning relates

near its end how Baldr, earlier described as best and brightest of the

æsir,

praised and loved by all, was disturbed by dreams portending his death.

To prevent their coming to pass, Frigg secured an oath from all things,
animate and inanimate, not to harm her son. The gods then amused them-
selves by chucking weapons and other normally dangerous objects at the
seemingly impervious Baldr, until Loki, having disguised himself as a
woman and learned from Frigg what one thing had not taken the oath,
directs Ódinn’s blind son Hödr to throw mistletoe at Baldr, which passes
straight through him, striking him dead. Snorri calls this “the greatest
misfortune that has been committed among gods and men” and reports that
“Ódinn bore this injury worst to the extent that he perceived most what
great deprivation and loss was in Baldr’s death for the

æsir.”

Although

Hödr, for his part in the deed, is quickly slain by a son of Ódinn born
specially for the purpose, Loki is not immediately seized or punished,
because, according to Snorri’s pretty conspicuous rationalization, the
place where Baldr was killed is a “gridastadr” (sanctuary).

Loki is thus

able to compound his crime after Hel, his daughter and the ruler of the
eponymous realm of the dead, agrees to let Baldr return to the lands of
the living only “if all things in the world, living and dead, weep for him.”

The one entity that refuses to do so is a

gygr (a giantess or troll woman)

with the strange name of Êökk (Thanks), whom the

æsir ﬁnd in a cave:

“And this men guess, that there has been Loki Laufeyjarson, who has
done most evil among the

æsir.”

Finally, the gods capture and punish

Loki, binding him to three sharp rocks with the guts of his son Narﬁ and
enlisting a snake to drip poison on his face: “There he will lie in bonds
until

ragnarøkr,” the events of which Snorri immediately recounts.

Drawing from a number of poetic sources, he reports that Loki will break
free to lead the forces of destruction, among which are his sons the
world-engirdling serpent Jörmungandr, whose spewing poison will kill
Êórr, and the wolf Fenrir, who will swallow Ódinn. Thus, whereas Zeus
swallows

metis incarnate and thereby makes his regime everlasting, pre-

venting the birth of any progeny clever enough to overthrow him, Ódinn

Gylfaginning 22 and 49, Faulkes ed., 23 and 45.

“ok heﬁr Âat mest óhapp verit unnit med godum ok mönnum . . . En Ódinn bar Âeim

mun verst Âenna skada sem hann kunni mesta skyn hversu mikil aftaka ok missa Ásunum var
í fráfalli Baldrs” (

Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 46).

Ibid.

“ef allir hlutir í heiminum, kykvir ok daudir, gráta hann” (

Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes

ed., 47).

“En Âess geta menn at Âar haﬁ verit Loki Laufeyjarson er ﬂest heﬁr illt gert med Ásum”

(

Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 48).

“Êar liggr hann í böndum til ragnarøkrs” (

Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 49).

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

234

ends up being swallowed by the offspring of the instantiation of cunning
intelligence, whose substance he had incorporated only incompletely.
Loki himself is one of the last to fall before the world is consumed by ﬁre
and sinks into the sea.

Thus, Ódinn’s “deal with the devil” appears to end in ruin. If Loki was

a primordial force that Ódinn sought to domesticate in order to establish
or sustain his own authority, then his imperfect assimilation of this power
left open the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, that it would betray and
destroy him and that which he protected. The story does not end here,
however. While Ódinn and Loki are out of the picture, according to Snorri
and

Völuspá, the main source for his outline of cosmic history, from the

wreckage of

ragnarök a new world will rise in which Baldr and Hödr,

alongside other of the

æsir, will reunite and dwell together in peace

and plenty.

Regardless of whether this resurrection motif is considered

genuinely pagan or inﬂuenced by Christianity, many have argued in
light of it that in Norse eschatology Loki essentially plays Judas to
Ódinn’s God-the-Father and Baldr’s Christ. In other words, they suggest
that Baldr’s killing ought to be understood as having been engineered by
Loki with the assent, perhaps even at the order, of Ódinn as a sacriﬁce to
renew the cosmos.

While I agree that the passing of the current order

and the rise of a new one is presented as a necessary good by the extant
mythos, I disagree that Ódinn is meant to have any part in making or any
desire in seeing this come to pass. Rather than elevate him nearer to the
status of the providential, self-sacriﬁcing, and omniscient Christian god,
I prefer to see Ódinn as a failed Zeus—that is, as a self-interested being
who desires but ultimately is unable to render himself and his regime
permanent. In short, I take Snorri at his word when he says that Ódinn
was the most dismayed of the

æsir at Baldr’s death and what it por-

tended. I do so not because I regard Snorri as a sure witness to northern
paganism but because he was a member of that interest group for which
I think extant Norse myths most immediately speak, that of court poets,

Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 53–54; Völuspá 59–65, Edda, Neckel ed., 14–15.

This interpretation has a long history, but some of its more recent proponents include

Ursula Dronke and Yvonne S. Bonnetain: see Dronke, “

Völuspá and Sybilline Traditions,” in

Latin Culture and Medieval Germanic Europe, ed. Richard North and T. Hofstra, Germania
Latina 1 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1992), 3–24, esp. 15–16; and

Poetic Edda, Dronke ed.

and trans., 2:53, 94–95 (where she explicitly likens Loki to Judas); Bonnetain, “En er Âetta sá
Loki Laufeyjarson, Âá líkadi honum illa, er Baldr sakadi ekki,” in

International Scandinavian

and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber—ein runder Knäuel, so rollt’ es
uns leicht aus den Händen, ed. Michael Dallapiazza et al. (Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 2000),
73–85, esp. 75–78. Jan de Vries offers a similar view, although he places the sacriﬁce in the
context of warrior-cult practice, in which it is not the world that is to be resurrected but the
initiate; he has some trouble explaining Loki’s place in this mythologized rite (see his “Der
Mythos von Balders Tod,”

Arkiv för nordisk ﬁlologi 70 [1955]: 41–60, esp. 58–59). Ström

offers an interpretation of Baldr’s myth similar to that of de Vries (see

Loki, 103–15).

History of Religions

235

hirdskálds. In the ﬁnal part of this article, I will explain how and why

I have reached this conclusion.

myths of kings and myths of poets

The Origins of Greek Thought, Vernant writes that “Greek theogonies

and cosmogonies . . . told of the progressive emergence of an orderly
world. But also, and above all, they were myths of sovereignty. They
exalted the power of a god who ruled over all the universe. . . . If the
world was no longer given over to instability and confusion, it was be-
cause the god no longer had to ﬁght battles against monsters and rivals;
his supremacy was now so manifestly assured that no one could ever ques-
tion it again.”

Conceding, however, that this vision of a world subjugated

to the will of a single, immortal power would have been badly out of step
with the democratic impulses of the emergent Greek polis and agora,
Vernant argues that it has come down to us essentially as a fossil of Near
Eastern and Mycenaean monarchic ideology preserved through oral poetry
and ending up in Hesiod and Homer. Such myths thus offer a “memory of
the divine king,” “an image that in the Mycenaean age conveyed social
realities and corresponded to ritual practices. . . . But in the Greek world
it could be no more than a survival.”

Medieval Scandinavia had no comparable memories of supreme, cen-

tralized sovereignty for its myths to reﬂect, or else these were far dimmer
than for the Greeks. This fact may go some way toward explaining why
Ódinn, as a symbol of sovereign power, is so much less successful than
Zeus in absolutizing his regime. In my earlier article on Ódinn (see n. 24
above), I argued that in northern Europe the reality of kingship as a frag-
mented, decentralized, and itinerant institution helps to explain why
Ódinn’s myths center around themes of marginality and transience. Poets
too, I argued, had their situation as well as interests reﬂected in these
myths, perhaps to an even greater extent than did kings: since most, and
after 900 all, known

hirdskálds were Icelanders who plied their trade in

the mobile courts of Scandinavia or the British Isles, they were required
by their profession to lead a doubly decentered existence, constantly
on the move while remaining far from their native land and their own
homes.

Jean-Pierre Vernant,

The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1982), 108.

Ibid., 30, 116.

On Icelanders’ monopolization of court poetry, see Faulkes’s introduction to

Edda,

Faulkes trans., xii–xiii; Roberta Frank,

Old Norse Court Poetry: The Dróttkvætt Stanza,

Islandica 42 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 23; Hans Kuhn,

Das Dróttkvætt

(Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1983), 284–85; E. O. G. Turville-Petre,

Origins of Icelandic Liter-

ature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 43, and Myth and Religion, 21.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

236

While textual evidence for Norse myth survives almost entirely in

poetry or in writings based on poetry, this body of material has not often
been speciﬁcally interpreted as expressing the poets’ interests.

Sources

for Norse myth have sometimes been read as reﬂecting the ideology of
the class of Scandinavian male aristocrats as a whole; although these
sources cannot be treated as a univocal expression of any one viewpoint,
this perspective provides a valid and fruitful basis for interpretation.

needs to be emphasized, however, that the aristocratic or elite class was
not in itself uniﬁed. By this, I do not mean only that it was split (as of
course it was) into political, familial, or territorial factions but also that
there was a division between, to borrow terminology from the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu, holders of different forms of capital relevant to success
within elite ﬁelds of practice.

Kings and nobles can be regarded as priv-

ileged holders of material capital (wealth, land, etc.), social capital (net-
works of followers and supporters, foreign alliances, etc.), and symbolic
capital (possession of and power to give titles and other tokens of worth
and recognition), while poets’ expertise enabled them to produce and
disseminate a major form of cultural capital.

The continued capacity,

however, for skalds’ poetry to function as capital—that is, as a resource
convertible into material or symbolic beneﬁts—depended upon recogni-
tion of its value by its primary consumers. Thus, the relationship between
poets and kings was symbiotic, but it was also potentially antagonistic. I
described this relationship in my article on Ódinn as hinging on the fact
that “each group had something the other wanted owing to its dominance
in one of two arenas of experience. Simply put, kings held the edge in

Indeed, many who recognize how much we depend on poets for information on Norse

myth lament the distorted view of religion or cult that they have afforded us; e.g., Holtsmark
writes that the existing mythos often amounts to “a poet’s fantasy about the gods’ lives[,] . . .
or it is a poet’s interpretation of sacred places and things” (en dikters fantasi over gudenes
liv. . . . Eller det er en dikters tolkning av hellige steder og ting) (“Loki—en omstridt
skikkelse,” 84), and Schneider argues that because the Loki we know is “a creature of poetic
invention” (ein Geschöpf dichterischer Erﬁndung), the only way to discover the “eigentlichen”
Loki is to determine which of his qualities are “vordichterisch” (“Loki,” 238–39). For recent
summary accounts of sources for Norse myth, see Lindow,

Norse Mythology, 9–30; and Peter

Orton, “Pagan Myth and Religion,” in

A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and

Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 302–19, esp. 306–11.

See, e.g., Clunies Ross,

Prolonged Echoes, 1:50 and 103–7.

Pierre Bourdieu develops and uses these concepts in all his major works; see esp.

Dis-

tinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984); and

The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

For an extended application of Bourdieu’s categories and methods to medieval Scandi-

navian materials, see Kevin J. Wanner,

Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of

Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia, Toronto Old Norse–Icelandic Series 4 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2008); on the relationship of kings and poets as holders of dif-
ferent forms of capital, see esp. 54–57.

History of Religions

237

terms of space, skalds in terms of time. Recognizing this allocation of
advantages helps us to understand the essence of their transactions: kings
provided poets with a space in which to operate and prosper, while poets
supplied kings with a means to extend their names and reputations in
time.”

Because he was a patron of kings and poets, Ódinn had the po-

tential to symbolize both sides of this relationship not only in terms of
what united them but also in terms of what divided them. There was thus
a potential conﬂict of interests posed by his every appearance in myths
produced by poets and consumed by rulers. As I argued, the sources tended
to try to resolve this conﬂict in the poets’ favor: in myths of Ódinn “a
certain bias emerges. . . . [The] representative or embodiment of margin-
ality . . . [tends to come] out on top over a representative or . . . victim of
ephemerality. . . . In other words, those who lack (initially) control over
space [i.e., the court] consistently trump those who lack control over time
[i.e., the means of preserving one’s and others’ memories]. . . . In addition,
then, to understanding Ódinn and his career as reﬂecting the social situation
of poets and kings . . . we may perceive in them something of a veiled
threat or assertion of superiority directed from the primary producers to
the primary consumers of his myths.”

In short, Ódinn was a god both

of kings and of poets, but when a choice had to be made, he was more
often depicted as assisting the latter—and very frequently as betraying
the former.

In turning now to argue that Loki serves in extant sources as a god

or symbol more unilaterally aligned than Ódinn with the perspective
and interests of poets, I run up against the obstacle already mentioned—
namely, that, as Lindow has put it, “Everyone agrees that there was never
any cult of Loki.”

If by “cult” one has in mind a body of adherents who

gather at dedicated sites to rehearse myths about and perform rites directed
at speciﬁc objects of veneration, then I think this claim is correct; by call-
ing Loki a god of poets, I do not mean to suggest that skalds actively wor-
shipped him or that they consciously and collectively regarded him as a
patron or bestower of beneﬁts. If, after all, one is looking for gods who
held such a relationship with or meaning for poets, there are much better
candidates: not only Ódinn, who was thought to have seized the art of
poetry (in the form of mead) from the giants and dispensed it to those he
found worthy or capable of versifying, but also Bragi, a minor

áss and

attendant of Ódinn in Valhöll and at feasts, who is probably the apoth-
eosis of history’s ﬁrst known skald, the ninth-century Norwegian Bragi

Wanner, “God on the Margins,” 345.

Ibid., 349.

Lindow,

Norse Mythology, 219.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

238

Boddason.

It is true that the representation and types of inspiration that

these two gods offered poets could be regarded as incomplete or lopsided.
They do not, for example, offer much to the skald who wished to compose
or deliver blame. Loki has on occasion been described as playing the role
of blame-poet, or “scold” (a term cognate with Old Norse

skáld ) in the

gods’ court.

The only real support for Loki in this role, however, is

Loka-

senna, in which he castigates—in verse of course—the gods and god-
desses one by one, laying bare their foibles and failings until Êórr arrives
and drives him off with the threat of violence. If, moreover, this poem is
read as a mythical tableau of blame-poetry’s performance in the court,
then it surely illustrates the least successful potential outcome of this act.
Not only do the targets of the blame refuse to recognize many of its claims
or to rectify their character or behavior accordingly, they also, if one looks
to

Lokasenna’s prose epilogue, retaliate against its bearer when they later

seize Loki and bind and torture him.

Even if, then, it is possible to think

that Loki in his willingness and ability to berate the king of the gods and
his guests provided aspiring scolds with some inspiration, or at least with
a model of audacity, such poets could hardly have hoped for their efforts
to have met with similar results.

I have, at any rate, something subtler but hopefully more signiﬁcant in

mind when I say that Loki can be regarded as a god of poets or as a focal
point for expression of the interests of this group. In my view, Loki is the
ﬁgure who, on the plane of myth—of narrative ideology

—makes the

poet’s art have a real purpose and worth. Loki ensures that poetry will
serve even among the gods that function which, though I have largely set
it aside in my discussion thus far, provides poetry’s central claim to value
in all times and places in which it is regarded as more than mere art or
pastime: the function of memorialization. In Snorri Sturluson’s

Háttatal

(List of meters, ca. 1220), a monumental joint panegyric for King Hákon
Hákonarson and Earl Skúli Bárdarson of Norway, he boasts that the praise
that he has composed for them “will live forever unless humanity passes

On the relationship between the historical and the mythical Bragi, see Sigurdur Nordal,

Icelandic Culture, trans. Vilhjálmur T. Bjarnar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990),
187–88; and Turville-Petre,

Myth and Religion, 185–86.

On Loki as “Spottdichter,” see de Vries, “Loki . . . und kein Ende,” 8.

The same punishment that in

Gylfaginning Loki receives for keeping Baldr in Hel (see

n. 80 above) seems in

Lokasenna’s epilogue to be meted out to Loki in retaliation for his

calumny in Ægir’s hall (on this epilogue, see n. 32 above).

A more positive, if human, model for poets extending blame is Sigvatr Êórdarson, whose

Bersöglisvísur (Outspoken verses) persuades a king to rectify his behavior, avoid rebellion,
and earn his nickname “the good”: see Snorri Sturluson,

Magnúss saga ins góda 16, in

Heimskringla, Bjarni Adalbjarnarson ed., 3:26–31.

On myth as “

ideology in narrative form,” see Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 147 (emphasis

in original).

History of Religions

239

away or the worlds end.”

In the mortal realm, then, praise-poetry does its

job if it preserves the memory of its subjects while the present world(s)
and human race exist. But what of a divine sovereign, whose life span
matches, at least, that of the present cosmos? What need does he have of
memorial praise?

Returning for a moment to ancient Greece, I note that Gregory Nagy

has described Greek cult and epic alike as forms “of a

cultural institution

that is predicated on the

natural process of death.”

Such a thought is

expressed already in Homer’s

Odyssey, where we read: “That is the gods’

work, spinning threads of death through the lives of mortal men, and all
to make a song for those to come.”

100

Nagy develops this point further,

deriving a corollary pertinent to divinity: “The hero must experience death.
The hero’s death . . . gives him his power—not only in cult but also in
poetry. . . . Not even the lofty Olympians can match that, since they cannot
die.”

101

Here at last is an arena in which Ódinn triumphs over Zeus—only

Ódinn will die. This is, to be sure, a dubious sort of prize. For one thing,
from a Platonic, Christian, and perhaps even Hesiodic viewpoint, it
disqualiﬁes him as a true god—mortal divinity is an oxymoron in such
(most?) systems of thought.

Norse myth tellers and mythographers seem, however, to have been less

concerned by the contradiction—at least so far as we can judge. Yet even
among human heroes and kings it often seems a matter of uncertainty
whether fame and reverence ought to be chosen over, if not immortality,
then a longer life. As Nagy observes, Homer between his two epics has
the same character express preference for both choices.

102

In the

Iliad,

Achilles resolutely opts for

kléos over nóstos, “fame” over “homecoming”:

“If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but
my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride,
my glory dies.”

103

In the

Odyssey, however, his shade expresses regret at

having made this choice: “No winning words about death to

me, shining

Odysseus! By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—some dirt-
poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over
all the breathless dead.”

104

“Âat mun æ lifa nema öld farisk, bragni<n>ga lof, eda bili heimar” (Snorri Sturluson,

Háttatal 96, in Edda: Háttatal, ed. Anthony Faulkes [Oxford: Clarendon, 1991], 38).

Gregory Nagy,

The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 184 (emphasis in original).

100

Homer,

Odyssey, bk. 8, lines 579–80; translation from Homer, The Odyssey, trans.

Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 210.

101

Nagy,

The Best of the Achaeans, 9.

102

Ibid., 35.

103

Homer,

Iliad, bk. 9, lines 412–15; translation from Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert

Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), 265.

104

Homer,

Odyssey, bk. 11, lines 488–91, Fagles trans., 265 (emphasis in original).

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

240

Ódinn, I think, is a less conﬂicted character than Achilles. To judge by

his constant efforts to gather intelligence, skills, and forces that might hold
off or even avert

ragnarök, it seems clear that he would choose long—or,

in his case, immortal—life over a heroic and celebrated end. In short,
he would prefer literal to ﬁgurative immortality. Ódinn is a ruler who
desires to possess true sovereignty, of the type attained by Zeus in the
Theogony: personal, unlimited, and everlasting. He refuses, therefore, to
settle for lesser means of sustaining sovereignty available to mortal
kings, for neither the genealogical “immortality” provided by dynastic suc-
cession nor the intellectual “immortality” provided by forms of cultural—
above all, poetic—commemoration. Ultimately, however, Ódinn is not
permitted to decide his own fate—rather, it is Loki who decides for him.
Deciding to get rid of Ódinn is, moreover, an act that serves clearly to
distinguish the two ﬁgures, the one deed that Loki, but never Ódinn, can
perform.

Having made this claim, I am now in a position to complete my response

to the question posed in the previous section, namely, “If Ódinn, then
why Loki?” or, to put it another way, In what factor or quality does the
signiﬁcant difference between these two mythic ﬁgures lie? My answer is
that, simply, it lies in the relationship between the two as actors in the
mythic world, in which the crucial difference between them is rank, or
the legitimate possession of authority, which Ódinn has and Loki lacks.
Ódinn’s rank, or power, clearly does not insulate him from accusations
of perﬁdy or selﬁshness; from the perspective of those within as well as
those outside the myths, he is often seen as a deceiver and betrayer. Yet
the fact that no one is ranked above him in the Norse cosmos gives his
actions a certain de facto, if not de jure, justiﬁcation and legitimacy. It
hardly matters that Ódinn’s position at the top of the hierarchy is recog-
nized by the sources as contingent and thus as precarious. Accordingly,
as Bourdieu reminds us, power can always be understood as “legitimate
imposture,” as the result of a misrecognition of arbitrary conditions as
natural.

105

Thus our sources for Norse myth might be admired for their

relatively clear-sighted perception of the nature of authority. What does
matter is that since Ódinn is positioned there, or so long as he is, his
interests stand the best chance of being (mis)recognized as universal
interests. By preserving himself, Ódinn can claim to preserve that which
he rules and those who identify with him and that order. Ódinn may betray
or deceive other sovereigns—whether of the human or the giant realms—

105

Pierre Bourdieu,

Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino

Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 214;
and

Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2000), 242–43.

History of Religions

241

but Loki in turning on Ódinn betrays sovereignty itself or at least that
entity who most aspires to attain, and comes nearest to attaining, the status
of ideal sovereignty. It is from this perspective, as a betrayer of some-
thing that sits higher than himself, that Loki can be or was perceived as
more “evil” or “malicious” or “perverted” than Ódinn, I contend. It is
probably also for this reason that the term

læ, with its three core meanings

of “cunning,” “betrayal,” and “injury,” is so often associated with Loki
but not with Ódinn (although we should not discount the equally compel-
ling demands of alliteration in poetry).

It is crucial to recognize, however, that Loki’s betrayal of Ódinn is far

from a wholly negative act or set of actions, particularly from the vantage
point of poets and their interests. Although Loki engineers Ódinn’s per-
sonal downfall, he is also the ﬁgure most responsible for securing for
Ódinn both of the forms of compensatory “immortality” with which those
who fail—or who, being mortal, must fail—in their efforts to attain true
or absolute sovereignty have to make do. In short, it is Loki who ensures
both that Ódinn has an heir to succeed and remember him and that there
is something about him that is worth remembering. Stated generally,
these are the three conditions—someone that is gone, something about
that someone to be remembered, and someone to remember it—required
for poetry to function as vehicle of memorialization. Indeed, the impor-
tance of court poets and their products hinged on the interruption of sov-
ereignty and the succession of generations—for if a king never dies and
is never succeeded, then there is nothing that needs commemorating.
These points apply especially to skaldic verse as it was practiced in
medieval courts. While those who discuss skaldic poetry, myself included,
like to emphasize (and occasionally bemoan) its rigid meter and stereo-
typed forms of expression, it is wrong to characterize its content as
generic or nonspeciﬁc. As Anatoly Liberman observes, skalds typically
were concerned to communicate the “concrete fact.”

106

Their poetry was,

to rework a famous phrase of Claude Lévi-Strauss, an “art of the con-
crete”;

107

it recorded and celebrated (or, less often, decried) speciﬁc things

done by speciﬁc actors at speciﬁc times and places. This is one reason
why skaldic poems, particularly court poems, can be of so little interest to
modern audiences. Such verse characteristically spoke to nothing beyond
its context of production and delivery. Any relevance it was expected to
have in the future, and thus the worth it was accorded in the present of its

106

Anatoly Liberman, “The Formulaic Mind and the Skalds,” in

Word Heath, Wortheide,

Ordheidi, 51.

107

Lévi-Strauss refers many times to primitive or mythic thought as a “science of the con-

crete”; see, e.g., Claude Lévi-Strauss,

The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1962), 16.

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

242

producer and ﬁrst auditors, depended on the expectation that an audience
would continue to exist who considered it important to recall this originary
context. Skaldic court poetry’s value, therefore, lay not chieﬂy in aesthetics
or ﬂattery but in its capacity to commemorate. And for this value to hold,
in the long run or short term, its subjects must die, or be expected to.

Returning to Loki and Ódinn, we see the former securing for the latter

an heir in the person of Baldr. Baldr, as many have noted, is a remark-
ably colorless and passive ﬁgure with only one real myth to his name, in
which his role is basically to show up, die, and come back. As I stated
above, I disagree with those who understand Baldr as an “Odinic” sacri-
ﬁce or who consider Loki complicit in Ódinn’s plans to renew or restore
the cosmos. One fact that speaks against their interpretation is that when
Baldr is killed, he goes to Hel rather than to Valhöll.

108

Valhöll is the

afterlife site where men chosen either through sacriﬁce or through death
in battle go to await

ragnarök, when they will become Ódinn’s army.

109

Baldr, however, is trapped in the realm of the dead that Ódinn does not
control and that is ruled by Loki’s daughter. That Loki intended to place
and keep Baldr here is indicated by the words (probably taken from a lost
eddic poem) that he speaks to the

æsir while in the form of Êökk: “haldi

Hel Âví er heﬁr” (Let Hel hold what she has).

110

While this outcome dis-

tresses the

æsir, and especially Ódinn, it effectively keeps Baldr from

having to take part in the cataclysmic battles of

ragnarök, in which Val-

höll’s residents will all perish (this is, admittedly, not a new experience
for them, but this time it will be for real) along with the major gods. Baldr
too, then, has, like Loki, at least one vital mythological function to per-
form: he must survive and succeed Ódinn by making the transition to the
new world.

111

That he does so is due to the choices and actions of Loki.

108

De Vries admits to having difﬁculty making this datum ﬁt his theory that the myth of

Baldr’s death symbolizes initiation into a warrior cult (see his “Der Mythos von Balders
Tod,” 60 n. 1).

109

Gylfaginning 20 and 38–41, Faulkes ed., 21 and 32–34.

110

Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 48; translation from Edda, Faulkes trans., 51.

111

Gro Steinsland has argued that Baldr himself ought to be regarded as the major symbol

in Norse myth of kings’ fated transience: “Baldr’s death is a projection of the kings’ death
and, therefore, in the end, a projection of the fateful relations that govern the world. . . . Baldr’s
death constitutes the mythical model for the king’s death” (Balders død er en projeksjon av
kongenes død og dermed i siste hånd en projeksjon av de skjebnemessige forhold som styrer
verden. . . . Balders død danner den mytiske modell for kongens død) (

Det hellige bryllup og

norrøn kongeideologi: En analyse av hierogami-myten i “Skírnismál,” “Ynglingatal,”
“Hályegjatal” og “Hyndluljód” [Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1991], 236, 261). Steinsland does
not, however, address how Baldr’s being slated to return from death ﬁts in with her theory.
Clunies Ross sees this myth as symbolizing a dynastic crisis, one in which it is Loki’s role to
ﬁnd a “means of destroying the dominant line of succession” among the

æsir (Prolonged

Echoes, 276; see also 268–77). In my view, Loki does not destroy or arrest but, rather, acti-
vates or realizes succession.

History of Religions

243

The sources also assign Loki responsibility for ensuring that once Ódinn

is gone there will be something about him worth remembering. As medi-
eval and modern commentators on Norse myth (not to mention its many
characters who experience or hear reports of the chief god’s exploits)
afﬁrm, while many of Ódinn’s deeds are memorable, there is little in his
career of which he ought to be proud. It is perhaps for this reason that
memories of Ódinn that are said to survive

ragnarök are rather limited.

In Snorri’s

Edda, Baldr and the other reborn gods “all sit down together”

in a land that has risen on its own and ordered itself “and [they] talk with
each other and remind themselves of their

rúnar [mysteries or runes] and

talk about those happenings that once had occurred, about the Midgards-
ormr and about Fenrisúlfr.”

112

Or, as

Völuspá puts it, they “talk about the

mighty earth-encircler, and there remind themselves about great events,
and about Fimbultyr’s [Ódinn’s] old

rúnar.”

113

According to these reports,

Baldr’s and his companions’ reminiscences in the resurrected world
focus on two topics. The ﬁrst is knowledge that had been accumulated by
the old world’s ruler; this might be thought to have been transmitted partly
by Ódinn himself, in the words that he whispered in Baldr’s ear when his
son lay on his funeral pyre.

114

The other topic centers around the circum-

stances of the demise of the old king and his allies which, like the act of
killing and sequestering Baldr in Hel, are to be ascribed largely to Loki.
Not only did Loki lead the force of

jötnar that makes the ﬁnal assault on

the gods’ home, but, according to

Völuspá in skamma (Short Völuspá) he

also gave birth to all the worlds’ giantesses and thus can be accounted a
literal progenitor of this army.

115

At any rate, two of his immediate off-

spring, and the only two ﬁgures mentioned as explicit objects of memory
in the post-

ragnarök world, were the direct agents of Ódinn’s and Êórr’s

deaths. Even, then, in the new world from which he is absent, Loki remains
the

sagna hrœrir, the “rouser of tales.”

Finally, there is a ﬁgure who, though I have yet to mention him, will

help to round out my argument that myths that center around Ódinn and
Loki’s relationship and its eschatological climax are reﬂective of poets’
interests. This is Hœnir, another “enigmatic god” whose one indisputable

112

“Setjask Âá allir samt ok talask vid ok minnask á rúnar sínar ok rœda of tídindi Âau er

fyrrum höfdu verit, of Midgardsorm ok um Fenrisúlf” (

Gylfaginning 53, Faulkes ed., 53–54).

113

“Finnaz æsir á Idavelli oc um moldÂinur, mátcan, dœma, oc minnaz Âar á megindóma

oc á Fimbultys fornar rúnar” (

Völuspá 60, in Edda, Neckel ed., 14).

114

VafÂrúdnismál 54, in Edda, Neckel ed., 55.

115

“vard Loptr qvidugr af kono illri, padan er á foldo ﬂagd hvert komit” (Loptr was

impregnated by an evil woman, from whence is come every giantess [or ogress, or witch]
on the earth) (

Hyndluljód [Völuspá in skamma is part of this poem]) 41, in Edda, Neckel

ed., 294).

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

244

quality is his “close connection” to both Ódinn and Loki.

116

This trio

appears as traveling companions in two myths, that of the giant Êjazi’s
theft of the goddess Idunn and that of Otr’s ransom, which forms a pre-
lude to the Völsung legend.

117

Hœnir does very little in either of these

stories (though the same could be said of Ódinn), but many references to
him emphasize his relationship to Loki and/or Ódinn. Among the ken-
nings for Loki that appear in Êjódólfr’s

Haustlöng (ca. 900), our main

source for the story of Idunn’s theft and one of the oldest extant sources
for Norse myth generally, are “vinr Hœnis,” “hollr vinr Hœnis,” and
“hugreynandi Hœnis” (Hœnir’s friend, Hœnir’s loyal friend, trier of
Hœnir’s courage); it may also be noted that Hœnir is not among the

æsir

castigated by Loki in

Lokasenna.

118

In his

Edda, Snorri states that while

most of the

æsir may be referred to as “sonr Ódins” (Ódinn’s son), Loki

and Hœnir can each be called “sinni eda sessi Ódins” (Ódinn’s comrade or
table-companion), while the latter is “máli Ódins” (Ódinn’s conﬁdante).

119

One gets the sense from these kennings that Loki and Hœnir come the
nearest among the

æsir to being accounted Ódinn’s peers and that Hœnir

was especially privy to Ódinn’s knowledge or experiences.

Accepting scholars’ equation of Lódurr with Loki, we also ﬁnd this

trio acting together in

Völuspá to create man and woman from two logs

found on the seashore. Each of the three gods provides the ﬁrst human
pair with some vital endowment: “önd gaf Ódinn, ód gaf Hœnir, lá gaf
Lódurr oc lito góda.”

120

There is least agreement on how to understand the

gifts given by Lódurr: many suggest something like “craft” (or, alterna-
tively, “blood” or “vital warmth”) for

lá and “good color” or “good looks”

for

lito góda; at any rate, these terms seem to have to do with qualities or

functions of the body rather than of the intellect or soul.

121

Ódinn’s bequest

önd is usually translated as “spirit” or “breath” and may refer to an

animating principle.

122

Ódr, Hœnir’s gift, can (like önd ) be translated as

“spirit” or “soul” but also as “inspiration,” “frenzy,” “ecstasy,” or other
terms conveying a sense of high mental excitement. Some think it stands

116

Lindow,

Norse Mythology, 179, 180. As Lindow describes this god, s.v. “Hœnir,” much

of the scholarship on him has revolved around attempting, mainly on the basis of a few lines
from

Skáldskaparmál, to establish his identity with some variety of bird, such as a stork,

crane, or rooster.

117

The myth of Êjazi’s theft is known from

Haustlöng and Skáldskaparmál G56, Faulkes

ed., 1–3; for references to the story of Otr’s ransom, see n. 32 above.

118

Haustlöng 3, 7, and 12, North ed., 2, 4, and 6.

119

Skáldskaparmál 4–5, 8–13 (for sons of Ódinn), and 15–16 (for Hœnir and Loki),

Faulkes ed., 14, 17, and 19–20.

120

Völuspá 18, in Edda, Neckel ed., 5.

121

Schjødt, “Om Loki endnu engang,” 59.

122

For

önd translated as “breath,” see de Vries, Problem of Loki, 29; on its identity as an

animating principle, see

Poetic Edda, Dronke ed. and trans., 2:123.

History of Religions

245

for the idea of a higher soul that survives death and that humans do not
share with lower life forms.

123

However one translates

ódr in this verse, it has been thought strange

that Hœnir, and not Ódinn, is the one to supply humans with this quality—
ódr is, after all, the root word of Ódinn’s name. An answer to this puzzle
may be suggested through a consideration of Hœnir’s second appearance
in

Völuspá. Near the poem’s end, three gods are identiﬁed as reappearing

after

ragnarök: Baldr, Hödr, and Hœnir.

124

Hœnir’s presence here has also

puzzled many, since if one considers those gods named as survivors in
Völuspá alongside those given in another eddic poem, VafÂrúdnismál (Say-
ings of VafÂrúdnir), which lists Ódinn’s sons Vídarr and Váli and Êórr’s
sons Módi and Magni, then Hœnir is the only one who is not a member of
the younger generation of gods—on the contrary, he dates to the origins
of the previous cosmic order.

125

As Lindow observes, it is ordinarily the

second generation of the

æsir “whose actions span this world and the next,”

while “the major gods of the Odinic world are not to survive but are to
be replaced.”

126

Perhaps this is why Hœnir is omitted from the combined

list of survivors in

Gylfaginning.

127

Hœnir’s reappearance at the end of

Völuspá may be connected, however, to his association earlier in the
poem with

ódr, which has, in addition to those translations given above,

another, more concrete sense. As Ström writes, “In poetry,

ódr is above

all an expression for the poet’s gift; more concretely expressed, it is the
poem itself, the composed product.”

128

Since, then, neither Ódinn nor,

presumably, his mead of poetry will pass over into the new world, it makes
sense that some part of the power of poetic art and inspired wisdom re-
main separate from or invested in a ﬁgure other than Ódinn, one who will
be able or permitted to make the transition to the new world.

Viewed in this light, Hœnir stands in the same relationship to Ódinn in

terms of the powers of

ódr as Loki does in terms of the powers of metic

or cunning intelligence. Each is a primordial and independent instantia-
tion of one of his key attributes, hardly distinguishable from him until the

123

De Vries understands

ódr to refer to “mental faculties of a higher order, such as poetic

genius, ecstasy” (

Problem of Loki, 29; here citing his Contributions to the Study of Othin,

Folklore Fellows Communications 94 [Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1931], 30–31).
On

ódr as that “which does not die, but is continually renewed in another life,” see Poetic

Edda, Dronke, ed. and trans., 2:124.

124

Völuspá 62–63, in Edda, Neckel ed., 15.

125

VafÂrúdnismál 51, in Edda, Neckel ed., 54–55.

126

John Lindow,

Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Myth-

ology, Folklore Fellows Communications 227 (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia,
1997), 145.

127

Gylfaginning 53, Faulkes ed., 53–54

128

“In der Poesie is der

ódr vor allem ein Ausdruck für die Dichtergabe, konkreter ausge-

drückt ist er das Gedicht selbst, das gedichtete Produkt” (Ström,

Loki, 56).

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

246

time comes to accomplish a purpose that he cannot. The king must die,
while the source or muse of poetic inspiration must live on. Because Ódinn
cannot do both, Hœnir takes up the latter role. He satisﬁes the condition
that even though Ódinn cannot be immortal,

ódr must be. A last datum

concerning Hœnir that may be illuminated by this interpretation of his
character or function is that in

Ynglinga saga he is handed over to the vanir

in an exchange of hostages along with another

áss, Mímir, whose name

relates to terms for “memory.”

129

The

vanir make Hœnir a chieftain, but

they soon discover that unless Mímir is with him he never says anything
other than “Let others decide.”

130

Feeling cheated, the

vanir cut off Mímir’s

head and send it to Ódinn, who embalms it and consults it for wisdom; the
saga does not report what becomes of Hœnir. This story reveals Hœnir,
like any good praise-poet or conveyer of the power of

ódr, to be little

more than memory’s mouthpiece.

My analysis has thus led me to conclude that Folke Ström was not

far off the mark when he argued that many ﬁgures of Norse myth can be
regarded as offshoots of various qualities of Ódinn—for most purposes
even as interchangeable with this god. I would yet emphasize that how-
ever close these ﬁgures approach to identity with Ódinn, each has at least
one proper and vital function to fulﬁll in the myths. Ódinn’s purpose is to
die and to be remembered. Hœnir’s is to allow that memory to be con-
veyed across the worlds or generations. Baldr’s is to remain and remember.
And Loki’s is to make sure it all happens. It is from this perspective that
I have argued that Loki can be understood as a god of poets. If the
Theogony is at its core a myth of kings, a myth in which sovereignty
becomes the permanent possession of an unimpeachable, ideal ruler,
then the stories that center around Loki might be read as relating a myth
of poets, one that insists on the inevitability, even among the gods, of
sovereignty’s loss and transmission, and thus on the universal need for
agents and instruments of memorialization.

Western Michigan University

129

De Vries,

Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 387; Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of

Northern Mythology, trans. Angela Hall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 216; and Lindow,
Norse Mythology, 232.

130

“rádi adrir” (

Ynglinga saga 4, in Heimskringla, Bjarni Adalbjarnarson ed., 1:13; trans-

lation from Snorri Sturluson,

Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, trans. Lee M.

Hollander [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964], 8).

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