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Before the hammer. Before Valhalla. Before the Viking horns on helmets that history never actually wore, there was Loki. Born of giants, sworn to Odin by blood, present at every feast and never quite at home in any of them, Loki is the most interesting character in Norse mythology and the one who has proved most enduringly alive. He is the trickster who convinced the gods to let a giant build the walls of Asgard on terms that should have been impossible to fulfill, and then turned himself into a mare to prevent the terms from being met. He is the spiritual father of Mjolnir, the most important weapon in the Norse divine arsenal, which exists because Loki shaved Thor's wife's hair on a whim and then had to negotiate dwarf blacksmiths into creating an unintended masterpiece. He is the engineer of Baldr's death, carried out through the most precise and cold-blooded act of mythological intelligence on record: finding the one exception to a total protective system and placing it in the hands of a blind god who did not know what he was throwing. And he is the figure who, at Ragnarök, breaks free, leads the army of the dead, and is killed in return — the final accounting for everything he was and everything the world needed from him. This book traces Loki through the Icelandic manuscripts, centuries of scholarly interpretation, the comparative trickster traditions, the extraordinary cultural phenomenon of Tom Hiddleston's MCU portrayal, and the Disney+ series that culminated in the trickster's apotheosis as the holder of all possible stories.
Before the hammer. Before Valhalla. Before the Viking horns on helmets that history never actually wore, there was Loki. Born of giants, sworn to Odin by blood, present at every feast and never quite at home in any of them, Loki is the most interesting character in Norse mythology and the one who...
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