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

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, inn, and the Limits of Sovereignty Author(s): Kevin J.
Wanner Source: History of Religions, Vol. 48, No. 3 (February 2009), pp. 211-246 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/598231 . Accessed: 19/08/2011 19:58
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Kevin J. Wanner
C U N N I NG I N T E L L I G E NC E I N NO R S E M Y T H : L O K I , DI N N , A N D TH E LIMITS OF S OV E R E I G N T Y
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 rst attested in and perhaps set by Plato (427/8348/7 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.1 In Les ruses d intelligence: La mtis 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.2 This second contest was between the kind of intelligence extolled by the classical philosophersand by dominant strains of Western and Christian thought sinceand a kind discussed by Detienne and Vernant under the native heading of metis. Metis is most simply translated as cunning,
1 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), 343. 2 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les ruses d intelligence: La mtis 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.
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Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth
although it carries the wider sense of an intelligence or mode of thinking and operating that is practical, situational, or, in Michel de Certeaus sense of the term, tactical in nature.3 As described in Detienne and Vernants introduction to their collection, metis refers to
forms of wiley intelligence, of effective, adaptable cunning[,] . . . a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine air, 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, situations 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 comparison with what henceforth represented the key element in Greek learning.4
Although Detienne and Vernant here suggest that philosophers disparaged metis for the same reason that they rejected or tried to tame the myths of the poetsnamely, that it was ill suited for thinking and talking about the realm of beingthey also propose that metis 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 pedagogical 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 dening 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 denite knowledge; 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 metis. Metis 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 dened as stable, circumscribed, mutually exclusive concepts but which appear as Powers in a situation of confrontation. . . . When the individual who is endowed with metis, 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 himself to be even more multiple, more mobile, more polyvalent than his adversary.5
3 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix, 3537. 4 Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence, 35. 5 Ibid., 5; and for a discussion of places in his works in which Plato disparages such practical or situational intelligence, see 31516.
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Apart from their impact on scholarship on ancient Greece, Detiennes and Vernants studies have inspired a small but signicant set of researches into instances of metic intelligence in other contexts. Among the more notable of these are Burton L. Macks efforts to uncover the original, Cynic-sage character of Jesus of Nazareths outlook and message and Lisa Raphalss work on Chinese thought and religion.6 There has yet to appear, however, any substantial application of the French scholars insights to the study of Norse culture and myth.7 This article attempts such an application. In it, I focus on two gures 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 intelligencethe only power ultimately capable of resisting or overcoming superior forceis 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 different: rather than cunning intelligence being assimilated to the mythological sovereign, it remains partially and perhaps principally invested in a gure 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
6 Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), esp. 6769, 15859, 18184; Lisa Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 7 Though I have not made an exhaustive search, I have noticed in studies of Norse myth only one passing reference to Detienne and Vernants work on cunning. Oddly enough, it appears in a discussion of rr, a god rather lacking in this form of intelligence; see Margaret Clunies Ross, rrs Honour, in Studium zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift fr Heinrich Beck, ed. Heiko Uecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 4876, esp. 66 n. 21.
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signicance, to the results of comparison.8 By contrast, academic comparison . . . brings differences together within the space of the scholars mind for the scholars own intellectual reasons. It is the scholar who makes their cohabitationtheir samenesspossible, not natural afnities or processes of history.9 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 specically, my goal in this article is to compare how two sets of myths depict attempts by sovereign gures to control and/or harness the powers of cunning intelligence, and to speculate about how differences in the outcome of these attempts might reect differences in the myths contexts and the interests of their producers/consumers. I have been inspired by Detiennes and Vernants analyses of Greek materials, just as I take advantage of some of their conclusions. masters of metis among the norse gods The gure that rst springs to mind when we are looking for examples of cunning intelligence at work in Norse myth is Loki. As Icelander Snorri Sturluson (1178/91241) writes in his Edda (ca. 122025), a handbook of poetry and myth that is our most accessible native source for preChristian Norse religion, That one is also numbered among the sir [sing. ss; the principal tribe of Norse gods] who some call slanderer of the sir and originator of deceits and blemish of all gods and men. He is called Loki, or Loptr, son of Frbauti the giant. His mother is Laufey, or Nl. . . . 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 [slgd], and tricks for every occasion. He brought the sir constantly into great difculty, and often he extricated them with his schemes.10 Before considering the attributes here assigned to Loki, some discussion of what sort of being he is supposed 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
8 Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 46. 9 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), 2425, 9294. 10 S er enn taldr med sum er sumir kalla rgbera sanna ok frumkveda rdanna ok vmm allra goda ok manna. S er nefndr Loki eda Loptr, sonr Frbauta jtuns. Mdir hans er Laufey eda Nl. . . . Loki er frdr ok fagr synum, illr skaplyndi, mjk fjlbreytinn at httum. Hann hafdi speki um fram adra menn er slgd heitir, ok vlar til allra hluta. Hann kom sum jafnan fullt vandrdi ok opt leysti hann med vlrdum (Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning 33, in Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes [Oxford: Clarendon, 1982], 2627). All translations, unless noted otherwise, are my own.
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the sir, that is, he is counted as one of them even though he may actually not be one.11 The factor that Lindow and others point to that makes Loki a putative rather than real ss is that he has a giant father, Frbauti; two tenth-century poems call Loki mgr Frbautis (Frbautis son), although only Snorri identies Frbauti as a jtunn (giant; pl. jtnar).12 However, another of the major sir, 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 ss, 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.13 One way to get around the mystery is perhaps simply to admit that the categories of sir, jtnar, and vanir (a second tribe of gods whose few named members are called ss or synja as often as vanr or vanads) are constructed identities with ctional boundaries of difference and that the mythos in fact recognizes them as such, if only through its inconsistencies.14 Even if, after all, Lokis and Tyrs having giant fathers and membership among the sir is an unusual combination, most of the gods whose parentage is known are of mixed race, usually having an ss father and giant mother. Given, then, that the sources do not seem consistently to align mythic beings genealogies with their social identities, Lokis ancestry will not be treated by me as a key to his nature or function. All sir are nominal sir, as far as I am concerned here. Setting questions of ancestry and identity aside, we notice that the key traits of Loki according to Snorris description are that he is cunning, prone to trickery, resourceful, and duplicitous. A shorter description from later in Snorris Edda presents a similar set of qualities, stating that Loki in poetry is called blva smidr, hinn slgi ss, rgjandi ok vlandi godanna (maker of mischiefs, the cunning ss, calumniator and tricker of the gods).15 While only the rst of the kennings, or poetic
11 John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 216, s.v. Loki. 12 Ibid. The two tenth-century poems are jdlfr of Hvinirs Haustlng and lfr Uggasons Hsdrpa. 13 Lindow, Norse Mythology, 298. The source for a giant as Tyrs father is stanza 5 of the eddic poem Hymiskvida, in Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmlern, 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 Fjlsvinnsml, by stanza and page number are to this edition (although I have adopted normalized spellings of the poems titles). 14 Karen Swenson, Performing Denitions: Two Genres of Insult in Old Norse Literature, Studies in Scandinavian Literature and Culture 3 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991), 69. 15 Snorri Sturluson, Skldskaparml [The language of poetry; this is the second major section of Snorris Edda] 16, in Edda: Skldskaparml, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2 vols. (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1998), 1:20; all subsequent page-number references to Skldskaparml are to vol. 1 of this edition. This translation is slightly adapted from Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Everyman, 1987), 77.
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circumlocutions, listed here is attested elsewhere, the poems that were Snorris major source also ascribe to Loki qualities that can be labeled metic; they convey an ambivalent view of his character and deeds.16 In 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 l, 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 Vriess entry for l in his Altnordisches etymologisches Wrterbuch as our guide, this term has a threefold sense of cunning (in German, List), deception (Betrug), and injury (Schaden or Verlust).17 Loki is twicein Lokasenna (Lokis calumny) and in Hymiskvida (Hymirs poem)called by the word lvss, which means literally wise in l but has been translated as crafty, sly, baleful, wicked, and calamitous. In Vlusp (The seeresss prophecy), he is called by the word lgiarn, which literally translates as eager for l but has been rendered as guileful, malignant, and evilloving.18 Vlusp contains two further likely linkages of Loki with l: in stanza 25, the sir convene in a moment of crisis to determine who had blended all the air with l, and in stanza 18, a god named Ldurr, whom many scholars equate with Loki, endows the rst pair of humans with l . . . oc lito gda.19 Although the matter is not uncontroversial,
Loki is called blvasmidr in Lokasenna 41, in Edda, Neckel ed., 104. Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wrterbuch (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961), 371, s.v. l. 18 Lokasenna 54, in Edda, Neckel ed., 107; Hymiskvida 37, in ibid., 95; Vlusp 35, in ibid., 8. Loki is also said to have forged a sword called lvateinn, l-wand, in the underworld (Fjlsvinnsml [Sayings of Fjlsvidr] 26, in Die Lieder der Edda, ed. Barend Sijmons and Hugo Gering, 3 vols. [Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 190331], 1:207). Further, there is reference to a lva lundr, tree of deceit (or poison), which is either a kenning for Loki or for something he usese.g., a wandagainst Idunn in Haustlng 11 (The Haustlng of jdlfr of Hvinir, ed. and trans. Richard North [Eneld Lock, Middlesex: Hisarlik Press, 1997], 7). The various translations for l and related terms have been taken from Richard Cleasby and Gudbrandur Vigfsson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed., with a supplement by William A. Craigie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1874); Geir T. Zoga, 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 Kuhns Kurzes Wrterbuch (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). 19 hverir hefdi lopt alt lvi blandit (Vlusp 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 identication of Loki and Ldurr, he does review the arguments of those who favor it (see his The Problem of Loki, Folklore Fellows Communications 110 [Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1937], 3637, 4955, and Alt17
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some treat the term l as identical with l, in which case (assuming Ldurr is in fact identical to Loki) this gure not only typies this quality but also supplies humanity with it.20 As nal 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 brag d vss (wise in tricks) in j d lfr of Hvinirs Haustlng ; rna slgr (terribly sly) in lfr Uggasons Hsdrpa; and drjgr at ljga (procient at lying) in Eilfr Gudrnarsons rsdrpa.21 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 enormouslyhe has been seen as everything from an elemental spirit of re, water, or air to a trickster or culture-hero, to a chthonic demon of death, to, most infamously, a spidermany have viewed the trait of cunning as fundamental to his character.22 But while
germanische Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols. [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1957], 2:27172), as does Folke Strm, who accepts their equation (see his Loki: Ein mythologisches Problem, Gteborgs Universitets rsskrift 62, no. 8 [Gteborg: Elander, 1956], 5254). For a more recent discussion by a scholar who accepts the identication, see Poetic Edda, Dronke ed. and trans., 2:125. 20 Cleasby and Gudbrandur Vigfsson, Icelandic-English Dictionary, 403. 21 Haustlng 5, North ed. and trans., 4; for the stanzas from Hsdrpa and rsdrpa, see Skldskaparml 16 and 18, Faulkes ed., 20 and 26; translations from Edda, Faulkes trans., 77 and 83. The rst 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 Srla ttr (Srlis tale; this text is found in a fourteenth-century manuscript as part of lfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta), which nicknames him Loki luiss and (like Snorri) says that of all beings Loki has the greatest slgd (cunning); see Srla ttr, in Flateyjarbk: En samling af norske konge-sagaer, ed. Gudbrandur Vigfsson and C. R. Unger, 3 vols. (Oslo: P. T. Malling, 1860 68), 1:275. 22 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 [193738]: 5970, quote at 70). Many have echoed this general judgment before and since. It may be noted here that Georges Dumzil argued in a book-length study, based partly on an extended but in the end rather inessential comparison with the Ossetian gure Syrdon, that Loki ought to be regarded as a Norse personication of the abstract psychological quality impulsive intelligence. Dumzil 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 ernderisch und ndig, doch er blickt nicht weit: Ganz dem Augenblick und seinem Impuls, . . . hingegeben wird er von den Folgen seiner Handlungen berrascht, versucht sie aber sofort wiedergutzumachen) (Loki, trans. Inge Kck [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959], 123). While Dumzils core idea, that Loki is in many ways best regarded as a mythic personication of an abstract mental quality, is clearly not far removed from my own, his understanding ultimately contradicts my view that Loki is a metic gure, an instantiation of what Detienne and Vernant call informed prudence (Cunning Intelligence, 11). Dumzil, to the contrary, characterizes the rather ill-dened and passive ss Hnir, whom I discuss near the end of the last section of this article, as the instantiation of prudent intelligence and, thus, as Lokis opposite
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Lokis ranking as Norse myths paradigmatic instantiation of metic intelligence might, therefore, seem secure, there is a gure of equal if not greater importance to the overall mythos who gives Loki a run for this distinction. This is the chief god, dinn. While no passage ascribes metic qualities to dinn as explicitly and succinctly as those from Snorris Edda do for Loki, we nd 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 dinn. 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.23 It is true that dinn 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 dinn as the master of disguise. In other words, while Lokis transformations are usually physical, dinns often involve just changes of outt 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, dinn frequently seeks to do so, because the success of his mission often depends on his foes not recognizing him until the right moment.24 This difference fades from view, however, when we consider instances in which these two gods adopt animal forms: Loki becomes a y to distract a dwarf from his forging and becomes a salmon to try to escape from the sir who want to punish him for Baldrs death, while dinn transforms into a snake to gain entry through a small hole into a cave.25 Loki and dinn even in one case engage in the same particular animal transformation when, on separate occasions, each ees in the shape of a bird with a stolen (or recovered) treasure in his beak from a giant who, also in birds form,
(Loki, 22431). I argue, however, that Loki is ultimately shown by the mythos to have the most forethought of any of the sir 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 reviewed many times; see, e.g., Strm, Loki, 78; de Vries, Problem of Loki, 1027, and Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:26567; and Stefanie von Schnurbein, The Function of Loki in Snorri Sturlusons Edda, trans. Lilian Friedberg, History of Religions 40, no. 2 (2000): 10924, esp. 11213. 23 Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence, 2021. 24 For a discussion of narratives of such missions of dinn, see Kevin J. Wanner, God on the Margins: Dislocation and Transience in the Myths of dinn, History of Religions 46, no. 4 (2007): 31650, esp. 32930. 25 For Lokis transformations, see Skldskaparml 35, Faulkes ed., 42; Gylfaginning 50, Faulkes ed., 4849; for dinns transformation, see Skldskaparml G58, Faulkes ed., 4.
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pursues him to sgardr.26 In each of these cases, the transformation attains for the god an end apart from or beyond that of mere disguise. dinn and Loki are also alike in that both switch gender and/or take on feminine qualities. There is only one story of dinns appearing as a woman: in the Dane Saxo Grammaticuss Gesta Danorum (early 1200s), dinn (Othinus), here euhemerized as a decadent monarch of Byzantium, uses magic to adopt several disguises in his efforts to trick or force a reluctant princess to have sex with him, nally attaining this end while in the form of a female physician.27 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 Lokasenna, dinn accuses Loki of having been eight winters . . . beneath the earth, a woman milking cows, and there you bore children, and I consider that an unmanly quality [args adal]; and in another eddic poem, rymskvida (rymrs poem), both Loki and the god rr disguise themselves in drag in order to retrieve rrs stolen hammer at a feast of the giants.28 Even if, however, Loki is the main gender bender of the pair, it should be noted that dinn does not escape being labeled as womanish. In Lokasenna, Loki responds to dinns 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.29 Loki is not alone, moreover, in calling dinn unmanly: in Ynglinga saga (ca. 1225), the rst of a colleciton of kings sagas long ascribed to Snorri Sturluson, dinn, here a Trojan king who has colonized the North, is said to practice the art of seidr, from which ows such great effeminacy [ergi] that it seems to men not without shame to practice it.30 Thus, for both Loki and dinn, identity, species, and gender are uid categories. Such malleability and adaptability are, however, but means to ends for metic actors. For Detienne and Vernant, metis represents above
26 Loki does so in Haustlng 12, North ed., 6; dinn does so in the story of the mead of poetry in Skldskaparml G58, Faulkes ed., 45. 27 See book III in Saxonis Grammatici Gesta Danorum, ed. Alfred Holder (Strassburg: Karl J. Trbner, 1886), 7880; for translation, see Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes: Books IIX, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson, trans. Peter Fisher, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 1:7678. 28 tta vetr vartu fyr iord nedan kyr mlcandi oc kona, oc her ar born borit, oc hugda ec at args adal (Lokasenna 23, in Edda, Neckel ed., 101; translation slightly modied from Poetic Edda, Larrington trans., 88). For Loki and rr dressing in drag, see rymskvida 1520, in Edda, Neckel ed., 11314. For the two instances of Lokis adopting a female humanoid form, see this articles next section, The Relationship between Cunning and Sovereignty in Greek and Norse Myth. 29 oc hugda ec at args adal (Lokasenna 24, in Edda, Neckel ed., 101; emphasis added). 30 fylgir sv mikil ergi, at eigi tti karlmnnum skammlaust vid at fara (Ynglinga saga 7, in Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Adalbjarnarson, 3 vols. [Reykjavk: Hid slenzka fornritaflag, 194151], 1:19).
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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, whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions of the conict.31 Singly or together, dinn and Loki habitually confront adversaries stronger than themselves. Both are repeatedly taken hostage by jtnar, or by men, or, in Lokis case, by the other sir.32 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 sufcient strength to overcome their foesthis is almost always the thunder-god rror 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; nally, in cases in which their enemies seem to have gotten the better of them, they ee with a parting curse, which invariably comes true.33 The evidence I have presented thus far is, I hope, sufcient to persuade that although there are differences in the nature, scope, and applications
Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence, 13. dinn is taken hostage by a human king in the eddic poem Grmnisml and, along with Loki, by the giant Hreidmarr for the killing of his son Otr, as narrated in Vlsunga saga 14 (Vlsunga saga: The Saga of the Volsungs; The Icelandic Text according to MS Nks 1824 b, 4o, ed. and trans. Kaaren Grimstad [Saarbrcken: AQ-Verlag, 2000]), in the prose introduction and rst nine verses of Reginsml, in Edda, Neckel ed., 17375, and in Skldskaparml 39 40, Faulkes ed., 4546. Loki is also taken captive by the giant jazi in Haustlng 89, North ed., 46, and by the sir in the giant-builder episode and after the klling of Baldr (in Gylfaginning 42 and 50, Faulkes ed., 3436 and 4849, as well as in Lokasennas prose epilogue (however, A. G. van Hamel has offered reasons for regarding this epilogue as originally separate material; see his The Prose-Frame of Lokasenna, Neophilogus 14 [1929]: 20414). 33 Many references to dinns or Lokis use of such tactics have already been given. Among instances in which dinn reveals his identity to great effect are the climaxes of the eddic poems Vafrdnisml and Grmnisml. There are many instances of each gods use of types of verbal cunning: for dinns cursing enemies as he departs, see Grmnisml 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 Lokis curses, see Lokasenna 65 and Reginsml 6, in Edda, Neckel ed., 109 and 175.
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of their powers, Loki and dinn share a set of abilities and traits that make them both paradigmatic instantiations of cunning intelligence as this is dened 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 gures of these myths (the other being rr) so eminently embody this brand of intelligence? Although as my discussion will suggest and (occasionally) explicitly argueone cannot really understand one of these gods apart from the other, I will focus more heavily on Loki than on dinn in what follows, for two reasons. First, in a previous article I examined myths of dinn 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 ragnark , the doom of the gods, in which both god and world order will meet their end.34 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 dinns and Lokis 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 conceded that our sources on the whole take a more positive view of dinn 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, dinn runs a close second. In sources poetic and prose, pre- and postconversion, vernacular and Latin, dinn is routinely described as deceitful, capricious, and engaging in dishonorable and shameful behavior.35 While Loki is called blva smidr, one of dinns pseudonyms, attested in multiple sources, is Blverkr (Doer of evil).36 In Lokasenna, when
34 For my earlier article, see n. 24 above. While Snorri uses the spelling ragnarkr, twilight of the gods, I use the more usual ragnark (except when I am quoting him). 35 Strm, Loki, 8182; 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), 5053; and Wanner, God on the Margins, 33031, 33637: all these studies cite and summarize primary materials that raise moral questions about (or openly condemn) dinns character or actions, most often in the context of his dealings with warriors, kings, and nobles. 36 For the name Blverkr, see Gylfaginning 20, Faulkes ed., 22; Skldskaparml G58, Faulkes ed., 4; and the eddic poems Hvaml 109 and Grmnisml 47, in Edda, Neckel ed., 34 and 6667.
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Loki publicly accuses dinn of practicing unmanly arts, neither dinn nor any of the sir present defend him against this charge; indeed, dinns own wife Frigg seems to conrm its validity when she implores the pair to maintain silence concerning what you two sir engaged in in days of yore.37 Furthermore, although Loki will ultimately turn on his longtime allies, it should not be overlooked that dinn is repeatedly reprimanded for betraying his chief followerskings and warrior-heroes. Another accusation Loki levels against dinn in Lokasenna is that often you gave, that which you should not give, victory to the less worthy, and Helgakvida Hundingsbana nnur (The second poem of Helgi Hundingrs slayer) offers this damning judgment of the chief god: dinn alone causes all evil, because he bore runes of strife between kinsmen.38 Even the guileless rr conrms Lokis and others judgments on dinns character when in the eddic poem Hrbardsljd (Hrbardrs song) he calls his father ragr (a pervert) and his mind illr (evil).39 The distinction, then, in the sources evaluations of Loki and dinn does not seem to be that one is evil while the other is good. Instead, the difference is that, while both gures possess and deploy metic intelligence in similar ways, it is only Loki whose character is explicitly and fundamentally dened 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 myths principal or primordial manifestation of metic powers and abilities, while dinns are best described as secondary or even derivative. If this hypothesis can be demonstrated, it has profound implications for the interpretation of these gures interrelationship and mythic functions. Attempting to say anything new and substantial about Lokis role in Norse myth is a daunting task. Studies of Loki are legion, lengthy, and less than unied in their conclusions. Titles of articles such as Anne Holtsmarks Lokien omstridt skikkelse i nordisk mytologi (Lokia controversial gure in Norse mythology), Jens Peter Schjdts 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 Vriess titles). 40 This has hardly stopped anyone from trying, however. Two
hvat i sir tveir drygdot rdaga (Lokasenna 25, in Edda, Neckel ed., 101). opt gaft, eim er gefa scyldira, inom slvorom, sigr (Lokasenna, 22, in Edda, Neckel ed., 101); einn veldr dinn llo blvi, vat med siungom sacrnar bar (Helgakvida Hundingsbana nnur 34, in Edda, Neckel ed., 158). 39 See Hrbardsljd 27 and 21, in Edda, Neckel ed., 83 and 81. 40 Anne Holtsmark, Lokien omstridt skikkelse i nordisk mytologi, Maal og Minne 62 (1962): 8189; Jens Peter Schjdt, Om Loki endnu engang, Arkiv fr nordisk lologi 96 (1981): 4986; Jan de Vries, Loki . . . und kein Ende, in Festschrift fr Franz Rolf Schrder zu seinem 65. Geburtstage September 1958, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1959), 110; for de Vries Problem of Loki, see n. 19 above.
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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 Lokis mythos before attempting a synoptic distillation of the fundaments of his character and/or function.41 This exercise has been repeated so often that Loki studies threaten to reach the point at whichas Jonathan Z. Smith has warned biblical scholarshipits analytic map simply replicates the territory under analysis and thus loses both utility and . . . cognitive advantage.42 In my analysis, then, I will not hesitate to leave elements of Lokis 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.43 As in bible studies, this ground has been sufciently 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 gure with a specic interest group. Part of my justication, 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 sufcient consideration of the motivations of those who produced our sources for Lokis 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 rst 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
41 Among the twentieth-century studies attempting such comprehensive treatments are de Vries, Problem of Loki; Strm, Loki; Dumzils 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 Schjdt, Om Loki endnu engang. 42 Smith, Relating Religion, 209. 43 One method of explaining Loki to which I do not pay much attention is the etymological. Although Lokis name has been understood in many waysit has been derived from or connected with, e.g., Old Norse logi, re; Swedish locke, spider; and even the name Luciferand although I lack the expertise to weigh options against one another on strictly linguistic grounds, I favor connecting Loki with Old Norse lka (pp. lokinn), meaning to end, nish, or close (see discussions in de Vries, Problem of Loki, 1315, and Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:265), since this solution dovetails with my theory that Loki functions to render sovereignty impermanent.
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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? 44 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.45 To many, he is best thought of not as a god at all but as an epical gureor, to use a marvelously literal Norwegian term, a gjennomgangsgur , a cipher whose purpose is to supply a connecting thread for story cycles, lling 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.46 This view is not without merit or support; one of the earliest extant kennings for Loki, sagna hrrir, can be translated mover (or rouser) of tales.47 Nevertheless, I do not think it gives enough credit to the coherence of Lokis portrait. It also tends to discourage consideration of this gures ideological uses. Others who have treated Norse myth as ideologythat 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 godor, if using this term for him is objectionable, as an imagined gure whose qualities and actions embody key elements of the outlook and the interests of
44 Bruce Lincoln, Theses on Method, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8, no. 3 (1996): 22527, quote at 22526. 45 Among many examples of this consensus, see Dumzil, Loki, 1, 219; de Vries, Problem of Loki, 2034, and Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:265; Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion, 126; Davidson, God and Myths, 163; Strm, Loki, 11; Anne Holtsmark, Norrn mytologi: Tro og myter i vikingtiden (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 1970), 146; and von Schnurbein, Function of Loki, 110. 46 de Vries, Problem of Loki, 78. For Loki as an epic rather than religious gure, see Dumzil, Loki, 12; Ulf Drobin, Myth and Epical Motifs in the Loki-Research, Temenos: Studies in Comparative Religion 3 (1968): 1939; Holtsmark, Lokien omstridt skikkelse, 8788, and Norrn mytologi, 155 (it is from Holtsmarks work that I take the term gjennomgangsgur); Jerold Frakes, Lokis 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), 15975, esp. 16263; and Rooth, Loki in Scandinavian Mythology, 193, 209, 21314, 219. Some, like de Vries (Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:25560) or Hermann Schneider (Loki, Archiv fr Religionswissenschaft 55 [1938]: 23751), have tried to separate out the epical from the genuinely mythological in the Loki material. 47 Haustlng 9, North ed. and trans., 6.
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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 nal results of their incidence and application are very different. 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 Hesiods Theogony (ca. 730700 BC).48 In thus characterizing this poems 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 denition is universal and unimpeachable. The Theogony, in their view offers a myth in which the established order attains both stability and permanence.49 While in Platonic philosophy such a pure or ideal notion must be represented abstractly, myth permits it to receive concrete form, which in Hesiods case is the god Zeus. M. L. West, editor and translator of the Theogony, similarly perceives at the core of Hesiods poem a Succession Mythor, perhaps better, what we might call an End-of-Succession Myththat traces the process through which Zeuss power is rendered absolute and everlasting. The poems climax, West writes, puts a stop to the chain of revolutions, and ensures that Zeus shall not be overthrown in his turn.50 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.51 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
48 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), 4445. 49 Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence, 306. 50 West, note to lines 8811020, 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 Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 173. 51 West, note to lines 886900, in Hesiod, Theogony, West ed., 401.
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direct combat, though he takes out added insurance by keeping Kratos and Bie, Strength and Domination, always at his side.52 Zeus remains vulnerable, however, to oblique challenges, to the threat of metis. The way in which Hesiod has the god gain nal control over this power is none too subtleZeus marries and then swallows its personication. 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 rst 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: rst a paleeyed daughter . . . with courage and sound counsel equal to her fathers, 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 rst, so that the goddess could advise him of what was good or bad.53
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 Metioeisthe god who is fully metis [sic]: resourcefulness personied. . . . Once Zeus is enthroned and established, nothing and no one can set him aside and sit on his throne.54 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 fulllment such as enables the unexpected to intervene in the lives of other gods and mortals.55 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 886900, in Theogony and Works and Days, West trans., 29; and see Hesiod, Theogony, West ed., 14445. On these lines as the last genuinely Hesiodic of the Theogony, see ibid., 39899. 54 Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 28, 69. 55 Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Ingelligence, 1314.
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ing and swallowing Metis he becomes more than simply a monarch: he becomes Sovereignty itself.56 Despite Platos 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 philosophers notions of deity: that of permanence or stability. The same cannot be said, however, of dinn, who is in every way a less impressive gure than Zeus. This is less true, however, if the two are compared in the preliminary stages of their careers. According to their respective cosmogonies, neither Zeus nor dinn belonged to the rst 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 overthrows and imprisons his father (Kronos) and the other Titans and then reigns as king of the Olympian gods, so dinn kills his grandfather (the jtunn Ymir) and then rules over the cosmos, which he has fashioned (with the help of his two brothers) from Ymirs dismembered corpse, as chief of the sir. Clearer differences between Zeus and dinn 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. dinns situation is different. As for physical strength, dinn is himself without it, or else rarely displays it. Although a god of war, dinn intervenes in battle as a general or sorcerer rather than as a champion or soldieralthough one nds in Saxo or in Snorris more euhemeristic moments vague statements about dinn as a participant in battle, there are few specic reports of his exploits and none that are particularly noble.57 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 ll them with fear and/or to dedicate their about-tobe-slain to himself.58 He himself is only ever in one real ght, which he
Ibid., 109, see also 68; and Vernant, Universe, 28. Saxo provides one of the few references to dinn personally (and ignobly) committing violence in battle; see bk. 8 in Saxonis Grammatici Gesta Danorum, in Holder ed., 263. Although aside from at ragnark, Snorri does not describe dinn participating in battle in his Edda, in chap. 2 of Ynglinga saga, dinn 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. 58 On the wedge formation, see Reginsml 23, in Edda, Neckel ed., 179; and Saxonis Grammatici Gesta Danorum, Holder ed., 32; on dinns inspiration of berserkr frenzies, see Ynglinga saga 6, in Heimskringla, Bjarni Adalbjarnarson ed., 1:17; on dinns spear, see Vlusp 24, in Edda, Neckel ed., 6.
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loses, badly (more on this shortly). Yet despite dinns lack of physical prowess, he, like Zeus, has at his disposal an instrument of supreme force. This is Mjllnir, the hammer of dinns son rr. Like Zeuss thunderbolt, Mjllnir is a weapon without peerrr never fails to kill whatever he strikesand indeed it is also probably nothing other than a symbol for the power of lightning and storm. Although dinn does not himself wield this weapon, he does not lack control over it. The quintessential dumb ss, rr 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 sgardr and to use his hammer only against giants, trolls, or other enemies of the gods and humans. In short, rr poses no threat to the sovereignty of dinn, who, as demonstrated most clearly in Hrbardsljd, is more than able to outwit his son if need arises or simply when he feels like harassing him. dinn therefore has his cosmoss ultimate implement of brute force under control and thus seems prepared to counter any straightforward threats of violence short of the nal apocalyptic host of ragnark, 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, dinn possesses to an extreme degree, and yet he is matched in it, if not exceeded, by Loki. Why does dinn as sovereign tolerate a rival in this arena? Or, in extramythological terms, Why this redundancy in character and function among the sir? Two answers have been most commonly given by scholars to the question, If dinn, then why Loki? These answers do not exclude one another and, indeed, have often been offered together. The rst is that it behooves dinn 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 willing than they to cross boundaries in order to gain benets 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 Gyl), the rst major part of Snorris Edda. In this story, Loki is blamed by the sir for allowing a giant to use his magically industrious horse to assist in building a new wall for sgardr in a set period of time, for which the giants payment will be the sun, the moon, and the goddess Freyja. Under threat of death, Loki prevents the job from being nished on schedule by transforming himself into a mare and distracting the giants helper. The sir 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 rr smashes in his head once his true nature has been revealed), and as a result of his dalliance with the stallion, Loki gives birth
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to the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, the best horse among gods and men, which is given to dinn.59 In myths like this, Loki clearly acts as a liminal gure who, employing often drastic or questionable means, helps the sir 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 dealings one might expect between social groups.60 In line with this reasoning, Loki has been understood to act as an intermediary who obtains benets for the gods while preventing or reversing their dispossession by other sorts of beings.61 While there is much to recommend this common interpretation of Lokis 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 sacrices his hand to bind the Fenrislfr, when Freyr surrenders his sword in return for his servant Skrnirs forcing the giantess Gerdr to marry him, or when rr on multiple occasions violates the rules of hospitality in the halls of both sir and jtnar 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 sir either from enforcing standards of negative reciprocity or from suffering injuries or indignities in doing so. The second common answer to the question, If dinn, then why Loki? is that Lokis character developed and expanded in late paganism alongside, and owing to an elevation of, dinns position in the pantheonthat, in effect, Loki took center stage in those stories and performed those actions no longer deemed tting for a gure now regarded as chief of the gods.62
59 hestr beztr med godum ok mnnum (Gylfaginning 42, in Faulkes ed., 35). Many think there is a brief allusion to the myth of the giant-builder in Vlusp 2526, in Edda, Neckel ed., 6. Lokis giving birth to Sleipnir is also mentioned in Hyndluljd 40, in Edda, Neckel ed., 294. 60 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. 61 See Schjdt, Om Loki endnu engang, 63, 83; and von Schnurbein, Function of Loki, 11719. 62 On theories of dinns and Lokis developing personae in late paganism, a term which many userightly enough, I thinkas 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, 19799; Strm, Loki, 8494; and Frakes, Lokis Mythological Function, 171.
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A scholar who has offered both hypotheses while taking this second one to its extreme is Folke Strm, who suggests dass Loki eine Hypostase Odins ist.63 Strm elaborates: In his quality as a secondary dinn-gure, Loki has been given a wealth of more offensive myths, which, had they been about dinn, would have injured religious feeling in that moment when he had attained his position as father of the gods.64 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 dinn hardly maintains a pristine moral reputation in the extant mythos, as my discussion above has demonstrated. Further, Strms 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 radicalas Ulf Drobin acerbically but accurately describes the results of Strms analysis of the myth of Baldrs death, one ends up with dinn-dinn conspiring with dinn-Loki to instigate dinn-Hdr to kill dinn-Baldr. Nevertheless, Strm is certainly right to stress that d inn and Loki approach dramatic and functional identity in the preserved myths, especially insofar as cunning and duplicity are for each among den offenbar konstitutiven Eigenschaften seines Wesens.65 What I think is needed to understand where the signicant differences in Lokis and dinns mythic qualities and functions lie is a consideration not of the historical development of their myths but, rather, of the intramythical development of their relationship. Another aspect of Strms analysis that has been criticized is his suggestion that while there may be an extramythological or historical explanation for Lokis assimilation to dinn, within the framework of the existing myths Loki is always and essentially one and the same as dinn.66 These two gures 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. dinn 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 Lokis career:
Strm, Loki, 85. In seiner Eigenschaft als sekundre Odinsgur ist Loki mit einem Schatz anstssiger Mythen begabt worden, die, htte es sich um Odin gehandelt, das religise Gefhl verletzt htten im dem Augenblick, wo er seine Stellung als Gttervater erreicht hatte (ibid.; Strm presents his evidence for these claims on 6295). 65 Strm, Loki, 82; and see Drobin, Myth and Epical Motifs, 27. For other critical reactions to Strms thesis, see de Vries, Loki . . . und kein Ende, 6; Anatoly Liberman, Snorri and Saxo on tgardaloki, with Notes on Loki Laufeyjarsons Character, Career, and Name, in Word Heath, Wortheide, Ordheidi: Essays on Germanic Literature and Usage (19721992) (Rome: Il Calamo, 1994), 176234, esp. 230, and Some Controversial Aspects of the Myth of Baldr, Alvssml 11 (2004): 1754, esp. 38. One scholar who has come near to Strm in positing dinns and Lokis identity is Schneider (see his Loki, 24851). 66 See Schjdt, Om Loki endnu engang, 57.
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It seems that Lokis allegiance is for the most part with the sir during the mythic present, but that in the mythic past . . . and in the mythic future . . . he is unabashedly against them.67 There are, thus, two questions to address now: What are the roots and the nature of dinns and Lokis 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--vis dinn, regarded as an analogue for Zeus. While it was once fairly common for Loki to be likened to the re-stealing, quasi-divine gure of Prometheus, a comparison especially favored by those who wished to see Loki as a trickster or culture hero such as anthropologists have often identied in Native American or African religions, I will argue that a more instructive analogue for Loki is the goddess Metis.68 A number of scholars have read the sources to suggest that dinns association with Loki dates from the worlds rst days and that it was conceived as a strategy through which the shaper of the cosmos sought to neutralize a power that would otherwise be inimical to himself and his order. As de Vries writes, The bloodbrothership with dinn, 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.69 Here de Vries calls attention to a relatively neglected datum from Lokis rsum. In Lokasenna, Loki compels dinn to allow Loki to stay at a feast he has crashed by reminding dinn of their ancient bond: Do you remember that, dinn, when we two in days of yore blended blood together? You said you would not taste ale, unless to us both it was borne.70 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 (Skldskaparml 35, Faulkes ed., 4143); his invention of the net, which is then used against him by the sir (Gylfaginning 50, Faulkes ed., 4849); his ambiguous identity; and his sometimes crudely sexual escapades, as when he ties a goats beard to his testicles to make the giantess Skadi laugh (Skldskaparml G56, Faulkes ed., 2). Perhaps the most recent scholar to champion vigorously this understanding of Loki is de Vries in Problem of Loki (11, 1618, and all of chap. 7, 25181, where he also discusses most of the older scholarship that adopted this view), although he later abandoned this interpretation under the inuence of Dumzils Loki (see de Vries, Loki . . . und kein Ende, 9, and Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2:26667). 69 die Blutsbrderschaft mit Odin und seine dadurch erfolgte Aufnahme in die Gtterwelt, die gefhrliche Dmonie Lokis gemildert und dadurch seine intellektualen Gaben in den Dienst der die Welt erhaltenden Mchte gestellt wurden (de Vries, Loki . . . und kein Ende, 4; see also Lindow, Norse Mythology, 219). 70 Mantu at, dinn, er vid rdaga blendom bldi saman; lvi bergia lztu eigi mundo, nema ocr vri bdom borit (Lokasenna 9, Edda, Neckel ed., 98).
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itself.71 If Zeus swallowed Metiswhich some conjecture he is supposed to have accomplished by getting her to take the form of water or some other liquid72as a way to incorporate the power of cunning intelligence and thereby eternalize his sovereignty, then dinns mixing of Lokis bodily uid with his own can be read as an effort to attain the same aim. Such an interpretation of this act has been offered by Schjdt, who suggests that it be understood as part of dinns quest to defend his supremacy and the cosmic order by acquiring different kinds of wisdom and skills, particularly from the underworld or the dead.73 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, Schjdt argues that the blending of blood with Loki resulted in dinns becoming able to control certain of those skills that Loki had acquired through his stay in the underworld, and in this way he is himself able to change sex and shape.74 Thus dinn, 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 dinns assimilation of this power is less than total, however, his reign will be less than permanent, his sovereignty less than denitive. dinn does not imbibe Loki whole, as Zeus does Metis, but merely blends some of Lokis bodily uid into his own, thereby leaving Loki, and the powers he epitomizes, autonomous. And while it is true that what nally does in dinn and his allies is the overwhelming show of force at ragnark by the giants and monsters that the sir have long exploited and kept at bay, this defeat in battle is preceded and enabled by a loss of control over and nal breach with Loki. According to Snorri, this occurs when Loki orchestrates the catastrophe that marks
71 The analogous pair of dinn:Zeus::Loki:Prometheus works well if one takes Aeschyluss 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 gure 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, 5861, 8283). Still, the fact remains that even here Zeuss combination of force and cunning sufces to render his sovereignty permanent, which is not something ever accomplished by dinn. 72 See Hesiod, Theogony, West ed., 403; and Vernant, Universe, 2728. 73 Schjdt, Om Loki endnu engang, 5657, 7879. 74 Odin bliver istand til at beherske visse af de frdigheder, som Loke har fet gennem sit ophold i underverdenen, og sledes selv kan skifte kn og ham (ibid., 56). For the quotation from Lokasenna, see n. 28 above. Although it does not really effect his point, it may be noted that Schjdt, reading mlcandi 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, 5152; see also 52 n. 8).
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the initial step or turning point in the crumbling of the gods order namely, the killing of dinns and Friggs son Baldr. Gylfaginning relates near its end how Baldr, earlier described as best and brightest of the sir, praised and loved by all, was disturbed by dreams portending his death.75 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 themselves 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 dinns blind son Hdr 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 dinn bore this injury worst to the extent that he perceived most what great deprivation and loss was in Baldrs death for the sir.76 Although Hdr, for his part in the deed, is quickly slain by a son of dinn born specially for the purpose, Loki is not immediately seized or punished, because, according to Snorris pretty conspicuous rationalization, the place where Baldr was killed is a gridastadr (sanctuary).77 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.78 The one entity that refuses to do so is a gygr (a giantess or troll woman) with the strange name of kk (Thanks), whom the sir nd in a cave: And this men guess, that there has been Loki Laufeyjarson, who has done most evil among the sir.79 Finally, the gods capture and punish Loki, binding him to three sharp rocks with the guts of his son Nar and enlisting a snake to drip poison on his face: There he will lie in bonds until ragnarkr, the events of which Snorri immediately recounts.80 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 Jrmungandr, whose spewing poison will kill rr, and the wolf Fenrir, who will swallow dinn. Thus, whereas Zeus swallows metis incarnate and thereby makes his regime everlasting, preventing the birth of any progeny clever enough to overthrow him, dinn
Gylfaginning 22 and 49, Faulkes ed., 23 and 45. ok her at mest happ verit unnit med godum ok mnnum . . . En dinn bar eim mun verst enna skada sem hann kunni mesta skyn hversu mikil aftaka ok missa sunum var frfalli Baldrs (Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 46). 77 Ibid. 78 ef allir hlutir heiminum, kykvir ok daudir, grta hann (Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 47). 79 En ess geta menn at ar ha verit Loki Laufeyjarson er est her illt gert med sum (Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 48). 80 ar liggr hann bndum til ragnarkrs (Gylfaginning 49, Faulkes ed., 49).
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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 re and sinks into the sea. Thus, dinns deal with the devil appears to end in ruin. If Loki was a primordial force that dinn 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 dinn and Loki are out of the picture, according to Snorri and Vlusp, the main source for his outline of cosmic history, from the wreckage of ragnark a new world will rise in which Baldr and Hdr, alongside other of the sir , will reunite and dwell together in peace and plenty.81 Regardless of whether this resurrection motif is considered genuinely pagan or inuenced by Christianity, many have argued in light of it that in Norse eschatology Loki essentially plays Judas to dinns God-the-Father and Baldrs Christ. In other words, they suggest that Baldrs killing ought to be understood as having been engineered by Loki with the assent, perhaps even at the order, of dinn as a sacrice to renew the cosmos.82 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 dinn 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-sacricing, and omniscient Christian god, I prefer to see dinn as a failed Zeusthat 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 dinn was the most dismayed of the sir at Baldrs death and what it portended. 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., 5354; Vlusp 5965, Edda, Neckel ed., 1415. This interpretation has a long history, but some of its more recent proponents include Ursula Dronke and Yvonne S. Bonnetain: see Dronke, Vlusp and Sybilline Traditions, in Latin Culture and Medieval Germanic Europe, ed. Richard North and T. Hofstra, Germania Latina 1 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1992), 324, esp. 1516; and Poetic Edda, Dronke ed. and trans., 2:53, 9495 (where she explicitly likens Loki to Judas); Bonnetain, En er etta s Loki Laufeyjarson, lkadi honum illa, er Baldr sakadi ekki, in International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weberein runder Knuel, so rollt es uns leicht aus den Hnden, ed. Michael Dallapiazza et al. (Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 2000), 7385, esp. 7578. Jan de Vries offers a similar view, although he places the sacrice 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 Lokis place in this mythologized rite (see his Der Mythos von Balders Tod, Arkiv fr nordisk lologi 70 [1955]: 4160, esp. 5859). Strm offers an interpretation of Baldrs myth similar to that of de Vries (see Loki, 10315).
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or hirdsklds. In the nal part of this article, I will explain how and why I have reached this conclusion. myths of kings and myths of poets In 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 because the god no longer had to ght battles against monsters and rivals; his supremacy was now so manifestly assured that no one could ever question it again.83 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.84 Medieval Scandinavia had no comparable memories of supreme, centralized sovereignty for its myths to reect, or else these were far dimmer than for the Greeks. This fact may go some way toward explaining why dinn, as a symbol of sovereign power, is so much less successful than Zeus in absolutizing his regime. In my earlier article on dinn (see n. 24 above), I argued that in northern Europe the reality of kingship as a fragmented, decentralized, and itinerant institution helps to explain why dinns myths center around themes of marginality and transience. Poets too, I argued, had their situation as well as interests reected in these myths, perhaps to an even greater extent than did kings: since most, and after 900 all, known hirdsklds 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.85
83 Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 108. 84 Ibid., 30, 116. 85 On Icelanders monopolization of court poetry, see Faulkess introduction to Edda, Faulkes trans., xiixiii; Roberta Frank, Old Norse Court Poetry: The Drttkvtt Stanza, Islandica 42 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 23; Hans Kuhn, Das Drttkvtt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1983), 28485; E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 43, and Myth and Religion, 21.
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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 specically interpreted as expressing the poets interests.86 Sources for Norse myth have sometimes been read as reecting 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.87 It needs to be emphasized, however, that the aristocratic or elite class was not in itself unied. 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 elds of practice.88 Kings and nobles can be regarded as privileged holders of material capital (wealth, land, etc.), social capital (networks 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.89 The continued capacity, however, for skalds poetry to function as capitalthat is, as a resource convertible into material or symbolic benetsdepended upon recognition 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 dinn 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
86 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 poets fantasy about the gods lives[,] . . . or it is a poets interpretation of sacred places and things (en dikters fantasi over gudenes liv. . . . Eller det er en dikters tolkning av hellige steder og ting) (Lokien omstridt skikkelse, 84), and Schneider argues that because the Loki we know is a creature of poetic invention (ein Geschpf dichterischer Erndung), the only way to discover the eigentlichen Loki is to determine which of his qualities are vordichterisch (Loki, 23839). For recent summary accounts of sources for Norse myth, see Lindow, Norse Mythology, 930; and Peter Orton, Pagan Myth and Religion, in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 30219, esp. 30611. 87 See, e.g., Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes, 1:50 and 1037. 88 Pierre Bourdieu develops and uses these concepts in all his major works; see esp. Distinction: 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). 89 For an extended application of Bourdieus categories and methods to medieval Scandinavian materials, see Kevin J. Wanner, Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia, Toronto Old NorseIcelandic Series 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); on the relationship of kings and poets as holders of different forms of capital, see esp. 5457.
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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.90 Because he was a patron of kings and poets, dinn had the potential 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 conict 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 conict in the poets favor: in myths of dinn a certain bias emerges. . . . [The] representative or embodiment of marginality . . . [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 ones and others memories]. . . . In addition, then, to understanding dinn and his career as reecting 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.91 In short, dinn 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 latterand 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 dinn 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.92 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 specic objects of veneration, then I think this claim is correct; by calling Loki a god of poets, I do not mean to suggest that skalds actively worshipped him or that they consciously and collectively regarded him as a patron or bestower of benets. 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 dinn, 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 ss and attendant of dinn in Valhll and at feasts, who is probably the apotheosis of historys rst known skald, the ninth-century Norwegian Bragi
90 91 92
Wanner, God on the Margins, 345. Ibid., 349. Lindow, Norse Mythology, 219.
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Boddason.93 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 skld ) in the gods court.94 The only real support for Loki in this role, however, is Lokasenna, in which he castigatesin verse of coursethe gods and goddesses one by one, laying bare their foibles and failings until rr arrives and drives him off with the threat of violence. If, moreover, this poem is read as a mythical tableau of blame-poetrys 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 Lokasennas prose epilogue, retaliate against its bearer when they later seize Loki and bind and torture him.95 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.96 I have, at any rate, something subtler but hopefully more signicant 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 gure who, on the plane of mythof narrative ideology97makes the poets 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 poetrys 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 Sturlusons Httatal (List of meters, ca. 1220), a monumental joint panegyric for King Hkon Hkonarson and Earl Skli Brdarson of Norway, he boasts that the praise that he has composed for them will live forever unless humanity passes
93 On the relationship between the historical and the mythical Bragi, see Sigurdur Nordal, Icelandic Culture, trans. Vilhjlmur T. Bjarnar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 18788; and Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion, 18586. 94 On Loki as Spottdichter, see de Vries, Loki . . . und kein Ende, 8. 95 The same punishment that in Gylfaginning Loki receives for keeping Baldr in Hel (see n. 80 above) seems in Lokasennas epilogue to be meted out to Loki in retaliation for his calumny in girs hall (on this epilogue, see n. 32 above). 96 A more positive, if human, model for poets extending blame is Sigvatr rdarson, whose Bersglisvsur (Outspoken verses) persuades a king to rectify his behavior, avoid rebellion, and earn his nickname the good: see Snorri Sturluson, Magnss saga ins gd a 16, in Heimskringla, Bjarni Adalbjarnarson ed., 3:2631. 97 On myth as ideology in narrative form, see Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 147 (emphasis in original).
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away or the worlds end.98 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.99 Such a thought is expressed already in Homers 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 heros death . . . gives him his powernot 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 dinn triumphs over Zeusonly dinn 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 disqualies him as a true godmortal divinity is an oxymoron in such (most?) systems of thought. Norse myth tellers and mythographers seem, however, to have been less concerned by the contradictionat 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 klos over nstos, 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, Id rather slave on earth for another mansome dirtpoor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alivethan rule down here over all the breathless dead.104
98 at mun lifa nema ld farisk, bragni<n>ga lof, eda bili heimar (Snorri Sturluson, Httatal 96, in Edda: Httatal, ed. Anthony Faulkes [Oxford: Clarendon, 1991], 38). 99 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 57980; 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 41215; translation from Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), 265. 104 Homer, Odyssey, bk. 11, lines 48891, Fagles trans., 265 (emphasis in original).
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dinn, I think, is a less conicted character than Achilles. To judge by his constant efforts to gather intelligence, skills, and forces that might hold off or even avert ragnark, it seems clear that he would choose longor, in his case, immortallife over a heroic and celebrated end. In short, he would prefer literal to gurative immortality. dinn 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 succession nor the intellectual immortality provided by forms of cultural above all, poeticcommemoration. Ultimately, however, dinn is not permitted to decide his own faterather, it is Loki who decides for him. Deciding to get rid of dinn is, moreover, an act that serves clearly to distinguish the two gures, the one deed that Loki, but never dinn, 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 dinn, then why Loki? or, to put it another way, In what factor or quality does the signicant difference between these two mythic gures 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 dinn has and Loki lacks. dinns rank, or power, clearly does not insulate him from accusations of perdy or selshness; 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, justication and legitimacy. It hardly matters that dinns position at the top of the hierarchy is recognized 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 d inn 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, dinn can claim to preserve that which he rules and those who identify with him and that order. dinn may betray or deceive other sovereignswhether 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), 24243.
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but Loki in turning on dinn 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 something that sits higher than himself, that Loki can be or was perceived as more evil or malicious or perverted than dinn, I contend. It is probably also for this reason that the term l, with its three core meanings of cunning, betrayal, and injury, is so often associated with Loki but not with dinn (although we should not discount the equally compelling demands of alliteration in poetry). It is crucial to recognize, however, that Lokis betrayal of dinn is far from a wholly negative act or set of actions, particularly from the vantage point of poets and their interests. Although Loki engineers dinns personal downfall, he is also the gure most responsible for securing for dinn both of the forms of compensatory immortality with which those who failor who, being mortal, must failin their efforts to attain true or absolute sovereignty have to make do. In short, it is Loki who ensures both that dinn 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 conditionssomeone that is gone, something about that someone to be remembered, and someone to remember itrequired for poetry to function as vehicle of memorialization. Indeed, the importance of court poets and their products hinged on the interruption of sovereignty and the succession of generationsfor 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 stereotyped forms of expression, it is wrong to characterize its content as generic or nonspecic. As Anatoly Liberman observes, skalds typically were concerned to communicate the concrete fact.106 Their poetry was, to rework a famous phrase of Claude Lvi-Strauss, an art of the concrete;107 it recorded and celebrated (or, less often, decried) specic things done by specic actors at specic 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 Lvi-Strauss refers many times to primitive or mythic thought as a science of the concrete; see, e.g., Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 16.
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producer and rst auditors, depended on the expectation that an audience would continue to exist who considered it important to recall this originary context. Skaldic court poetrys value, therefore, lay not chiey in aesthetics or attery 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 dinn, we see the former securing for the latter an heir in the person of Baldr. Baldr, as many have noted, is a remarkably colorless and passive gure 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 sacrice or who consider Loki complicit in dinns 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 Valhll.108 Valhll is the afterlife site where men chosen either through sacrice or through death in battle go to await ragnark, when they will become dinns army.109 Baldr, however, is trapped in the realm of the dead that dinn does not control and that is ruled by Lokis 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 sir while in the form of kk: haldi Hel v er her (Let Hel hold what she has).110 While this outcome distresses the sir, and especially dinn, it effectively keeps Baldr from having to take part in the cataclysmic battles of ragnark, in which Valhlls 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 perform: he must survive and succeed dinn 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 difculty making this datum t his theory that the myth of Baldrs death symbolizes initiation into a warrior cult (see his Der Mythos von Balders Tod, 60 n. 1). 109 Gylfaginning 20 and 3841, Faulkes ed., 21 and 3234. 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: Baldrs death is a projection of the kings death and, therefore, in the end, a projection of the fateful relations that govern the world. . . . Baldrs death constitutes the mythical model for the kings death (Balders dd er en projeksjon av kongenes dd og dermed i siste hnd en projeksjon av de skjebnemessige forhold som styrer verden. . . . Balders dd danner den mytiske modell for kongens dd) (Det hellige bryllup og norrn kongeideologi: En analyse av hierogami-myten i Skrnisml, Ynglingatal, Hlyegjatal og Hyndluljd [Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1991], 236, 261). Steinsland does not, however, address how Baldrs being slated to return from death ts in with her theory. Clunies Ross sees this myth as symbolizing a dynastic crisis, one in which it is Lokis role to nd a means of destroying the dominant line of succession among the sir (Prolonged Echoes, 276; see also 26877). In my view, Loki does not destroy or arrest but, rather, activates or realizes succession.
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The sources also assign Loki responsibility for ensuring that once dinn is gone there will be something about him worth remembering. As medieval and modern commentators on Norse myth (not to mention its many characters who experience or hear reports of the chief gods exploits) afrm, while many of dinns 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 dinn that are said to survive ragnark are rather limited. In Snorris 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 rnar [mysteries or runes] and talk about those happenings that once had occurred, about the Midgardsormr and about Fenrislfr.112 Or, as Vlusp puts it, they talk about the mighty earth-encircler, and there remind themselves about great events, and about Fimbultyrs [dinns] old rnar.113 According to these reports, Baldrs and his companions reminiscences in the resurrected world focus on two topics. The rst is knowledge that had been accumulated by the old worlds ruler; this might be thought to have been transmitted partly by dinn himself, in the words that he whispered in Baldrs ear when his son lay on his funeral pyre.114 The other topic centers around the circumstances 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 jtnar that makes the nal assault on the gods home, but, according to Vlusp in skamma (Short Vlusp) 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 offspring, and the only two gures mentioned as explicit objects of memory in the post-ragnark world, were the direct agents of dinns and rrs deaths. Even, then, in the new world from which he is absent, Loki remains the sagna hrrir, the rouser of tales. Finally, there is a gure who, though I have yet to mention him, will help to round out my argument that myths that center around dinn and Lokis relationship and its eschatological climax are reective of poets interests. This is Hnir, another enigmatic god whose one indisputable
112 Setjask allir samt ok talask vid ok minnask rnar snar ok rda of tdindi au er fyrrum hfdu verit, of Midgardsorm ok um Fenrislf (Gylfaginning 53, Faulkes ed., 5354). 113 Finnaz sir Idavelli oc um moldinur, mtcan, dma, oc minnaz ar megindma oc Fimbultys fornar rnar (Vlusp 60, in Edda, Neckel ed., 14). 114 Vafrdnisml 54, in Edda, Neckel ed., 55. 115 vard Loptr qvid ugr af kono illri, pad an er foldo agd hvert komit (Loptr was impregnated by an evil woman, from whence is come every giantess [or ogress, or witch] on the earth) (Hyndluljd [Vlusp in skamma is part of this poem]) 41, in Edda, Neckel ed., 294).
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quality is his close connection to both dinn and Loki.116 This trio appears as traveling companions in two myths, that of the giant jazis theft of the goddess Idunn and that of Otrs ransom, which forms a prelude to the Vlsung legend.117 Hnir does very little in either of these stories (though the same could be said of dinn), but many references to him emphasize his relationship to Loki and/or dinn. Among the kennings for Loki that appear in jdlfrs Haustlng (ca. 900), our main source for the story of Idunns theft and one of the oldest extant sources for Norse myth generally, are vinr Hnis, hollr vinr Hnis, and hugreynandi Hnis (Hnirs friend, Hnirs loyal friend, trier of Hnirs courage); it may also be noted that Hnir is not among the sir castigated by Loki in Lokasenna.118 In his Edda, Snorri states that while most of the sir may be referred to as sonr dins (dinns son), Loki and Hnir can each be called sinni eda sessi dins (dinns comrade or table-companion), while the latter is mli dins (dinns condante).119 One gets the sense from these kennings that Loki and Hnir come the nearest among the sir to being accounted dinns peers and that Hnir was especially privy to dinns knowledge or experiences. Accepting scholars equation of Ldurr with Loki, we also nd this trio acting together in Vlusp to create man and woman from two logs found on the seashore. Each of the three gods provides the rst human pair with some vital endowment: nd gaf dinn, d gaf Hnir, l gaf Ldurr oc lito gda.120 There is least agreement on how to understand the gifts given by Ldurr: many suggest something like craft (or, alternatively, blood or vital warmth) for l and good color or good looks for lito gda; 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 dinns bequest of nd is usually translated as spirit or breath and may refer to an animating principle.122 dr, Hnirs gift, can (like nd ) 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. Hnir, much of the scholarship on him has revolved around attempting, mainly on the basis of a few lines from Skldskaparml, to establish his identity with some variety of bird, such as a stork, crane, or rooster. 117 The myth of jazis theft is known from Haustlng and Skldskaparml G56, Faulkes ed., 13; for references to the story of Otrs ransom, see n. 32 above. 118 Haustlng 3, 7, and 12, North ed., 2, 4, and 6. 119 Skldskaparml 45, 813 (for sons of dinn), and 1516 (for Hnir and Loki), Faulkes ed., 14, 17, and 1920. 120 Vlusp 18, in Edda, Neckel ed., 5. 121 Schjdt, Om Loki endnu engang, 59. 122 For nd 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.
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for the idea of a higher soul that survives death and that humans do not share with lower life forms.123 However one translates dr in this verse, it has been thought strange that Hnir, and not dinn, is the one to supply humans with this quality dr is, after all, the root word of dinns name. An answer to this puzzle may be suggested through a consideration of Hnirs second appearance in Vlusp. Near the poems end, three gods are identied as reappearing after ragnark: Baldr, Hdr, and Hnir.124 Hnirs presence here has also puzzled many, since if one considers those gods named as survivors in Vlusp alongside those given in another eddic poem, Vafrdnisml (Sayings of Vafrdnir), which lists dinns sons Vdarr and Vli and rrs sons Mdi and Magni, then Hnir is the only one who is not a member of the younger generation of godson the contrary, he dates to the origins of the previous cosmic order.125 As Lindow observes, it is ordinarily the second generation of the sir 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 Hnir is omitted from the combined list of survivors in Gylfaginning.127 Hnirs reappearance at the end of Vlusp may be connected, however, to his association earlier in the poem with dr, which has, in addition to those translations given above, another, more concrete sense. As Strm writes, In poetry, dr is above all an expression for the poets gift; more concretely expressed, it is the poem itself, the composed product.128 Since, then, neither dinn 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 remain separate from or invested in a gure other than dinn, one who will be able or permitted to make the transition to the new world. Viewed in this light, Hnir stands in the same relationship to dinn in terms of the powers of dr as Loki does in terms of the powers of metic or cunning intelligence. Each is a primordial and independent instantiation of one of his key attributes, hardly distinguishable from him until the
123 De Vries understands dr 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], 3031). On dr as that which does not die, but is continually renewed in another life, see Poetic Edda, Dronke, ed. and trans., 2:124. 124 Vlusp 6263, in Edda, Neckel ed., 15. 125 Vafrdnisml 51, in Edda, Neckel ed., 5455. 126 John Lindow, Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology, Folklore Fellows Communications 227 (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1997), 145. 127 Gylfaginning 53, Faulkes ed., 5354 128 In der Poesie is der dr vor allem ein Ausdruck fr die Dichtergabe, konkreter ausgedrckt ist er das Gedicht selbst, das gedichtete Produkt (Strm, Loki, 56).
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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 dinn cannot do both, Hnir takes up the latter role. He satises the condition that even though dinn cannot be immortal, dr must be. A last datum concerning Hnir 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 ss, Mmir, whose name relates to terms for memory.129 The vanir make Hnir a chieftain, but they soon discover that unless Mmir is with him he never says anything other than Let others decide.130 Feeling cheated, the vanir cut off Mmirs head and send it to dinn, who embalms it and consults it for wisdom; the saga does not report what becomes of Hnir. This story reveals Hnir, like any good praise-poet or conveyer of the power of dr, to be little more than memorys mouthpiece. My analysis has thus led me to conclude that Folke Strm was not far off the mark when he argued that many gures of Norse myth can be regarded as offshoots of various qualities of dinnfor most purposes even as interchangeable with this god. I would yet emphasize that however close these gures approach to identity with dinn, each has at least one proper and vital function to fulll in the myths. dinns purpose is to die and to be remembered. Hnirs is to allow that memory to be conveyed across the worlds or generations. Baldrs is to remain and remember. And Lokis 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 sovereigntys loss and transmission, and thus on the universal need for agents and instruments of memorialization. Western Michigan University
129 De Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wrterbuch, 387; Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. Angela Hall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 216; and Lindow, Norse Mythology, 232. 130 rdi adrir (Ynglinga saga 4, in Heimskringla, Bjarni Adalbjarnarson ed., 1:13; translation from Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, trans. Lee M. Hollander [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964], 8).

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

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

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Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, inn, and the Limits of Sovereignty Author(s): Kevin J.

2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/2009/4803-0002$10.00

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

One Line Long

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

One Line Long

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

One Line Long

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth

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