Loki, Gender, and Sexuality in Norse Society

What we know about Loki’s associations with Norse taboos

Loki is probably the most misunderstood and mischaracterized of all the Norse gods. With the recent re-popularization of Norse mythology and the resulting creative license the entertainment industry is taking with his character, that misunderstanding has been especially amplified. So I think it’s time for some source-material grounding.

It’s important to me to present Norse mythology through a lens that portrays ancient viewpoints as accurately as I can. But, at the same time, I recognize that a lot of people have incorporated Norse characters and themes into their own spirituality in modern times and I have no interest in trying to invalidate any spiritual connections people have made to this material. That said, if we want to understand Loki in the way the original storytellers and their primary audiences would have, then we must view him through their cultural lens and not our own. In this post I will be discussing ancient ideas as they were preserved, with no desire to influence anyone’s personal beliefs.

The Argr Man

There are no records from the Norse period that discuss anything like a recognized concept of non-binary sexual or gender identity in Norse society. There are, on the other hand, a good number of records that deal with gender roles and expectations, many of which include insults of the worst kind reserved for people (especially men) who violate those expectations.

The most famous of these insult words is the noun ergi (argr in adjective form, with ragr as a common metathesis¹). It is usually translated as “unmanliness”, although this translation fails to embody the real potency of the word, as well as the fact that it could be directed toward both men and women. From the contexts in which itʼs used, we learn that a man might have been accused of ergi for reasons of cowardice, any behavior considered feminine, and very specifically, taking the receiving role in male-male sexual intercourse.

One example illustrating the treatment ergi in the Norse period can be found in Króka-Refs saga, which relates the tale of a Greelandic settler from Iceland named Ref. In the tale, Ref is slandered by another man named Thorgils and his four sons who take it upon themselves to brand Ref with the nickname Refr inn ragi (Ref the Unmanly, using the metathesized form ragr). The sons accuse Ref of the unforgivably cowardly act of running away from a polar bear, while Thorgils himself claims that Ref “was a woman every ninth night and needed in those times a man” (var hann kona ina níundu hverju nótt ok þurfti þá karlmanns). Ref is only able to reclaim his good reputation by killing Thorgils and all four of his sons, after which people judged that Ref had effectively recovered from the accusations.

As Ström relates² in one of the preeminent papers written on this topic:

The society reflected in Old Norse literature possessed a hierarchy of values in which personal reputation or social prestige — what with a positively loaded word can be called honour — occupied the top of the ethical scale. According to this standard, honour could only be won, maintained and defended with the primary masculine virtue of unbounded courage that despised danger and death. The idealized system of norms is marked by a masculine, not to say a militant set of values.

In sharp contrast to honour we have its opposite, the shame of not having fulfilled the primary requirement of manly conduct. Lack of courage, patent physical cowardice, implied such a flagrant deviation from what convention demanded that it could be branded as a symptom of perversion – of an abnormal, that is to say feminine nature. The emphasis here should be placed on the word branded. As a rule the formulaic expressions (‘woman every ninth night’ and similar clichés) point to established symbols and current phraseology rather than to a genuine belief in the female sexual role of the accused³. The symbols and phrases were intended to strike a man where he was most vulnerable.

There is a particular English word beginning with the letter “f” and ending with the letter “t” that polite society tends to avoid at all costs as of 2023. It serves as a slur directed at people who do not conform to traditional sex/gender roles and is generally considered one of the worst words a person can use, thus I have not written it here in full. I am also old enough to remember an earlier time when this word was in frequent, if not constant use in American suburbia. Although it is an overtly sexually charged slur, it was often leveled at boys during my childhood for all types of “unmanly” behavior. For example, if a boy was challenged to a fight and opted not to engage, his challenger might hurl this slur at him as a consequence, hoping to goad him into participating, lest other boys might actually consider him such an f-word.

When considering both the meaning and the harsh potency of ergi and its various forms, this f-word is probably our closest English comparison, though that comparison is not perfect. In Norse society it was clearly far more acceptable to utter the word ergi, which had far greater ability to destroy someone’s reputation, which itself had far more serious real-world consequences, thus making it far less acceptable to allow the slur to go unavenged by the slurred individual. Also worth noting is the fact that Norse manly attitudes do not perfectly mirror traditional modern, western manly attitudes.

One particularly fascinating near-synonym for ergi in surviving literature is the idea of a seiðmaðr – a man who was considered argr for performing a feminine brand of magic called seiðr (which I will anglicize here as “seid”) involving divination and probably manipulation of other people. The practice of seid was not socially acceptable for men⁴ and typically turned any such man into the object of contempt. Skjern Runestone 2⁵, for instance, incorporates the concept of the seid-man as an insult/curse for anyone who might come along and damage the stone:

ᛋᛁᚦᛁ : ᛋᛅ : ᛘᚭᚾᚱ : ᛁᛋ : ᚦᚢᛋᛁ : ᚴᚢᛒᛚ : ᚢᛒ : ᛒᛁᚱᚢᛏᛁ

Siþi sa mannr æs þøsi kumbl of briuti.

A seid(-man) be the man who breaks this monument.

A similar pattern is repeated on the Saleby stone⁶ which names anyone who might break the stone as argri konu (an argr woman). It is unlikely that those who raised the stone believed that any future vandal would surely be a biological female, yet the word woman is used as a preemptive insult for anyone who might have nefarious intent.

As Króka-Refs saga illustrates, being called argr/ragr was serious enough that a Norse man was legally allowed to kill a person who had insulted him in this way, and we see this repeated in the Icelandic Grágás law code⁷ for example (parentheticals are my own):

There are three words—should exchanges between people ever reach such dire limits—which all have full outlawry as the penalty; if a man calls another ragr, stroðinn or sorðinn (both roughly meaning “sodomized”⁸). As they are to be prosecuted like other fullréttisorð⁹ and, what is more, a man has the right to kill in retaliation for these three words. He has the right to kill in retaliation on their account over the same period as he has the right to kill on account of women, in both cases up the next General Assembly. The man who utters these words falls with forfeit immunity at the hands of anyone who accompanies the man about whom they were uttered to the place of their encounter.

Quite simply, slandering a manʼs conformity to manliness, especially implying that he ever received penetrative sex, was so serious in Norse society that, under the right circumstances, he would be both allowed and expected to kill you for it.

This is in stark contrast to societies that have historically incorporated acceptable non-binary gender roles. For instance, Navajo (natively called Diné) society has historically conceptualized four genders, including masculine females and feminine males, both called nádleehi¹⁰. There are respected positions in society that can only be held by people in these roles, both roles are relatively gender-fluid, and sex between two people of any two different genders historically carried no stigma, regardless of their biological sex.

Ideas about sex and gender varied widely among ancient societies, however in surviving Norse literature, we find nothing like the Diné concept. There is no word for a person occupying a socially-accepted, non-binary gender role, and indeed no word for any such role. What we find instead are men, women, and their respective, rigid expectations. When men behave in an unmanly way, it is extremely shameful. They are mocked and insulted, become the object of curses, and can often only reclaim their reputation by publicly killing their accuser.

Humans, of course, are humans, regardless of the society they are born into. Some will feel disconnected from their prescribed gender roles. Some will experience same-sex attraction. So when we find literary or archaeological evidence of a person who didn’t conform to their societyʼs gender roles, it is hardly revelatory. It should be expected literally everywhere. But it certainly does not imply that any ancient society was progressive in their treatment of gender or sexuality from a twenty-first century perspective.

When it comes to mythical characters such as Loki, correctly understanding the treatment of gender and sexuality from the point-of-view of the people who authored the myths is necessary for understanding the intended nature of these characters, and how they would have been understood by their original audience.

So in the interest of gaining this type of understanding, letʼs start by talking about Thor.

Thor Breaks a Taboo

In the poem Þrymskviða, Thorʼs hammer is stolen by the jotun Thrym who demands marriage to Freyja as trade for returning it. Thorʼs immediate solution is to trade Freyja for the hammer, but Freyja balks at this idea. A council of the gods is held, and Heimdall, who “knew the future well like other Vanir” (st. 15) suggests dressing Thor up in full bridal attire and sending him to the wedding as though he were Freyja. Thor immediately protests this, claiming that “the gods will call me argr” (st. 17: mik munu Æsir argan kalla) if he allows himself to be dressed up like a bride.

Thor represents the epitome of the Norse manliness ideal and doesn’t want his reputation sullied. However, Loki reminds him that if the hammer is not recovered, the jotuns will overrun Asgard. Realizing that Loki is correct, and in his role as the protector of the gods, Thor concedes to the plan. The gods then dress Thor as a bride, with Loki volunteering to take on the role of Thorʼs handmaid. Together they fool Thrym and recover the hammer, which Thor then uses to kill all the jotuns in attendance at the wedding.

I relate this story here in order to illustrate the point that Thor, one of the manliest of Norse men, is attested as having violated a serious gender-related taboo in service of a functional goal that was contextually considered more important than avoidance of the taboo. Note that there was only a handful of scenarios in Norse society granting a woman legal grounds to divorce her husband, with cross-dressing being among them¹¹. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an extremely serious social offense.

This is an important point to remember when considering Lokiʼs motivations for his own behaviors. We need context to help us understand why decisions are made before we start applying labels to the characters making them.

The context in Þrymskviða, of course, is that Asgard is on the line as long as the hammer Mjollnir remains in the hands of the jotuns. Thatʼs a problem for both Thor and Loki, as well as all the rest of the Æsir, and the preservation of the world as a whole.

Being a shapeshifter, Loki takes the form of an actual woman in this poem, as opposed to simply donning a handmaidʼs attire. In light of our discussion up to this point, we should understand how the original audience of the poem was intended to react to this behavior. Thor becomes female in clothing whereas Loki becomes female in physicality, and it is this gender-role-nonconformity that brings an air of scandalous entertainment to the tale for the ancient Norse.

Norse poets were not afraid to play with grammatical gender poetically. To illustrate this idea, the composer of Þrymskviða has Loki speak to Thor in stanza 20 saying, “vit skulum aka tvau í Jǫtunheima”¹² (we two shall drive to Jotunheim). In this phrase, vit ... tvau is conjugated such that it implies a mix-gendered group of two, one male and one female. This is a poetic callback to stanza 12 wherein Thor utters these exact same words to Freyja, when he intends to trade her for the hammer– “we two (Thor and Freyja, male and female) shall drive to Jotunheim”. Loki’s repetition of this line in st. 20 is clearly meant to taunt Thor by cleverly illustrating how the tables have turned on him as he has now taken on the role of the bride in place of Freyja. Assuming this context of a clever provocation (which takes place before we are told Loki transforms himself into a woman), Loki appears to be referring to himself as male and to Thor as female for the purposes of the gibe¹³.

Throughout the corpus of surviving Norse mythology, Loki is referenced with male pronouns nearly exclusively. There is exactly one exception to this pattern, as we’ll see later. But throughout the mythology there are no instances where Loki is called by feminine pronouns in any lines of dialog, and no instances wherein authors switch Loki’s pronouns for identity reasons. In fact, the poem Þrymskviða avoids using pronouns entirely when referring to Loki after he takes on female form. However, we shouldn’t read too much into this because the poem also uses very clear feminine nouns to describe him while he is in female form, for example ambótt (an exclusively female servant) in stanza 26. On the other hand, Thor is still referred to by the poet as verr (man, st. 24) specifically while in his bridal disguise.

Although the Norse poets were aware that they could use gender in interesting ways poetically, it is worth noting that there are no other instances of gender being used in creative or unusual ways to describe Loki.

Loki as a Woman

Loki, being a prolific shapeshifter, has taken the form of a human-like woman a total of four times in surviving mythology. The first instance is in Þrymskviða as described above, two more are recounted in the story of Baldr’s death (Gylfaginning 49), and the last is recounted in the poem Lokasenna. Since weʼve already discussed Þrymskviða, letʼs talk about instances two, three, and four:

In the story of Baldr’s death, Loki notices that Baldr seems to be invincible. The gods are joyfully attacking Baldr for sport, using various types of weapons, and nothing seems to hurt him. Loki becomes upset about this for some unstated reason and resolves to learn whether Baldr has any weaknesses. He pays a visit to Baldrʼs mother, Frigg, “and change[s] himself into a womanʼs likeness” (ok brá sér í konu líki). Having deceived Frigg into believing that he is a trusty handmaid, he is able to coax from her the information that Baldr can be hurt by a sprig of mistletoe.

This is instance number two. Here, Lokiʼs transformation into a woman serves a functional goal as it did in Þrymskviða. It allows him to gain Frigg’s trust so that he can trick her into revealing Baldrʼs weakness. Because the transformation is designed in service of a goal, we do not have a clear reason to believe this is a reflection of Loki’s personal identity. That said, it’s worth noting that, unlike Thor, Loki is clearly willing to cross these types of boundaries without much hesitation.

Loki then brings the stated mistletoe to the place where the gods are gathered and tricks Baldr’s brother into “shooting” Baldr with a mistletoe “wand”, which kills him. Ultimately, Hel, who has charge over the afterlife realm where Baldr ends up, agrees to let Baldr return to life if every living thing and inanimate material on Earth will weep for his death, and almost all of them do. Unfortunately, there is one gýgr (a jotun/troll woman) found hiding out in a cave and “she” (the female pronoun used is hana) refuses to weep for Baldr. At the end of the story, it is revealed that people generally believe this gýgr was actually Loki, a suspicion that Loki seems to confirm in Lokasenna stanza 28 when he claims to be the reason Baldr can not be present at feasts with the other gods.

This is instance number three. Here, it is unclear what purpose Loki’s transformation into a female character serves. Any reason we might suggest — whether he does this because he enjoys being female sometimes, or perhaps because he believes it will make for a more convincing disguise — is purely speculative because we lack a contextual explanation. This is also the only instance in our source material where a feminine pronoun is used to describe Loki. In this context, Snorri has not yet revealed to us that the gýgr in question is Loki. If a masculine pronoun had been used here, it would have amounted to the grammatical equivalent of “there was a mysterious woman and he refused to weep for Baldr,” which would be just as grammatically incorrect in Old Norse as it is in Modern English. Loki’s transformation into female form requires a feminine pronoun grammatically in context, and it services a surprise revelation at the end of the story, so we can’t assume this to be a case of pronoun usage for purposes of personal identity either.

The fourth and final instance of Lokiʼs transformation into a human-like woman is mentioned in stanza 23 of Lokasenna wherein Odin directly accuses him of being argr:

[...] átta vetr vartu fyr jǫrð neðan, kýr mólkandi ok kona, ok hefr þú þar bǫrn borit, ok hugða ek þat args aðal.

Eight winters were you beneath the earth, a cow giving milk and a woman, and you have there born children, and I thought that an argr way to be.

This is instance number four. Unfortunately the phrase kýr mólkandi is somewhat ambiguous here, and that ambiguity is frustrating because it substantially affects the mythological “canon” of Lokiʼs behavior. As Schjødt explains¹⁴:

The text has kýr mólcandi¹⁵, which is problematical since it cannot be decided whether mólcandi is to be understood as transitive (‘milking a cowʼ) or intransitive (‘a milch cowʼ). In the first instance it would mean that Loki performed a womanʼs job, and in the second he would actually be the cow himself. In either case, however, an effeminate connotation is clear.

My opinion is that kýr mólkandi is probably intended to be intransitive here (i.e., a cow giving milk). The reason being, it is immediately followed by kona (woman) in the nominative singular, suggesting kýr (cow) might be in the nominative singular as well. Additionally, it provides a narrative that better mirrors Loki’s actions in other stories, which we’ll get to. It’s an admittedly weak clue, but it’s also the only clue I could gather. Jackson Crawford has said outright¹⁶ that this is a verb for “an animal producing milk, and not for a person milking a cow”, but I am unable to personally verify that. Either way, according to Odin, Loki spent some amount of time “below the earth” as a woman, and also maybe in the form of a lactating cow, which, to the uninitiated, only works if the cow has become pregnant and given birth.¹⁷

On that note, Odin mentions that Loki physically bore “children” (bǫrn is plural) while “there”, meaning that this is not a reference to Odinʼs horse, Sleipnir, and probably not a reference to the child(ren) he bore from eating the half-burned heart in Vǫluspá hin Skamma. What seems to me to fit the character of Loki the best, given how it would nicely mirror the story of Sleipnirʼs origin and his various other animal transformations, is that Loki gave birth to these children while in the form of a lactating cow. In that case the children themselves may also be cows, but this is just speculation because we lack necessary context. Those children, whoever they were, are never mentioned again as far as we can discern.

Because Loki has been attested as having been impregnated both in animal form and also by supernatural means in other sources, we unfortunately can not assume these children must have been the result of intercourse with a man while he was in the form of a human-like woman.

Of the four instances in which Loki takes the form of a woman, two of them are associated with clear, functional goals and two are so briefly described that we have no clear indication of why he did it. We can speculate, but we have to admit that we are speculating, no matter what we say about those instances.

In response to being called argr by Odin, itʼs worth noting that Loki immediately fires back the exact same insult:

En þik síða kóðu Sámseyu í, ok draptu á vétt sem vǫlur; vitka líki fórtu verþjóð yfir, ok hugða ek þat args aðal.

But they say you practiced seid on Samsø, and struck on a drum(?) like the seeresses; in the likeness of a wizard (i.e., a seid-man) you went among mankind, and I thought that an argr way to be.

The word seeresses here is translated from the Old Norse vǫlur, and references the socially-accepted role of certain female practitioners of seid magic. For Odin to do anything “like the seeresses” is decidedly unmanly. This is almost certainly a reference to the story recounted in Gesta Danorum¹⁸, originally written in Latin, wherein we are told that Odin dressed himself up as a medicine woman named “Wecha” (suspiciously similar to Lokasenna’s vitka “wizard”) in order to get close enough to the princess Rind to have his way with her, as he has been prophesied to do. That account by Saxo Grammaticus agrees that Odin’s use of “actors’ tricks and women’s duties” (not the assault itself) brings a shameful mark upon the gods’ reputations. Although this post is not about Odin, for what it’s worth, Loki is clearly not above using the word argr as a way to publicly shame someone else for their own unmanly actions.

Friggʼs response in stanza 25 confirms that both Loki and Odinʼs actions are indeed viewed as shameful, even among the Æsir who seem to violate Norse social guidelines pretty frequently:

Ørlǫgum ykkrum skylið aldregi segja seggjum frá, hvat it æsir tveir drýgðuð í árdaga; firrisk æ forn rǫk fírar.

You two should never talk publicly about your fates¹⁹, (of) what you two Æsir perpetrated in early days; let people leave behind prior fates.

A key word in my translation here is “perpetrated”. That word was carefully chosen as a translation for drýgðuð, which is a word that refers to an action performed “mostly in a bad sense²⁰”.

Loki’s Partners and Resulting Children

Since the release of season 1, episode 3 of Marvelʼs “Loki”, questions about the mythical Lokiʼs alleged bisexuality have been popping up like wildfires due to a bit of dialogue the writers included asserting that Loki has been with his fair share of princesses in the past “and some princes too”. However, in surviving source material, there are actually no attestations of Loki ever having sex with a man, expressing a desire for sex with a man, or engaging in any kind of romantic relationship with a man (at least, not with any humanoid man).

The closest we get to something like this is Odinʼs aforementioned accusation in Lokasenna about some unnamed children Loki bore, which, as we’ve discussed and will continue to see, would force us to interpret the text in a very particular way that does not mirror any other stories we have about Loki, in order to arrive at the conclusion that these were the result of sex with a man.

However! Loki did bear children in some way during those eight winters below the earth. If those children happen to be cows, we find ourselves with a theme that is nicely repeated in a particularly famous story wherein Loki becomes impregnated while in the form of a horse and gives birth to another horse. So letʼs talk about Sleipnir.

Loki as a Mare

In the story of the building of Asgard’s fortification (Gylfaginning 42), soon after the establishment of Midgard, a certain smiðr (smith) arrived at the settlement of the gods and offered to build them a borg (foritfication/stronghold/wall/town) there that would be good enough to defend against various types of jotuns. Being a jotun himself, the smith demanded payment in the form of Freyja (surprise!) as well as the sun and the moon, and asserted that he would finish his work within three seasons (meaning, in this context, a year and a half).

The gods counseled about this and came back to the smith with additional terms. He could have the payment he wanted if he could do all the work himself and have it finished by the first day of summer, a feat the gods believed would be impossible. The smith asked if he could at least be allowed the help of Svadilfari, his workhorse, and Loki advised that this would be fine, so the work began. As it happened, Svadilfari was such an amazing workhorse that it started to look like the smith would finish on time after all.

The gods, of course, did not want to hand Freyja, the sun, and the moon over to the smith. Since Loki had advised that Svadilfari should be allowed to participate in the work, this problem was determined to be Lokiʼs fault. Loki was confronted and told that he could either find some way to fix this problem or be killed. Loki became hræddr (afraid/frightened) at this and swore an oath that he would find some way to fix this problem hvat sem hann kostaði til (at whatever cost to himself).

That night, Loki transformed into a mare, sauntered out of the woods, and whinnied at Svadilfari who straightaway ripped off his straps and made a beeline straight for Loki, abandoning his work. The horses “ran all night” (hlaupa alla nótt) and when the smith realized he would no longer be able to finish his work on time, he went í jǫtunmóð (into a jotun-rage). The gods called upon Thor to take care of the raging jotun, which he quickly did with his trusty hammer. But Loki had by then had “such conduct” with Svadilfari that some time later he gave birth to a gray foal with eight legs: the best horse among gods and men, Odin’s steed Sleipnir.

We learn more about Sleipnir in various other stories and sagas. But we donʼt have any information on how quickly Loki gifted him to Odin after giving birth, or about whether Loki had any affection for Sleipnir or played any part in raising him.²¹

What we do have is Snorri Sturlusonʼs narrative detail that Loki had resigned himself to the idea that solving the Svadilfari problem would likely come at some “cost to himself,” and that he preferred this to being put to death. Unfortunately, the only detailed version of this story we have is related by Snorri in prose, rather than as a quote of source poetry.

If we take Snorri at his word (which is the only word we have), the story of Sleipnirʼs birth provides another instance wherein the contextual motivations given for Lokiʼs taboo conduct show that there is more to the story than something as simple as gender-fluidity or non-binary sexuality (which, to be honest, are both sort of insulting to infer from sex with a horse in the first place, so Iʼm not sure why people do that so frequently).

If we want a clue as to how Norse society viewed Lokiʼs behavior in this poem, we can take a look at the Gulathing law code²² from medieval Norway (emphasis added):

These are the [kinds of] insulting remarks that call for full atonement. The first is when a man says of another that he has given birth to a child. The second is when he says that the man has been used as a woman. The third is when he likens him to a mare or calls him a slut or a whore or likens him to any kind of female beast. For these [remarks] he shall pay the man full atonement; but the man may also seek satisfaction in blood and outlawry for the sayings that I have now enumerated, if he has asked witnesses to take note of them.

Itʼs interesting that the comparison to a mare is called out explicitly here alongside accusations of having given birth, since we have a surviving myth wherein a key plot point is that Loki becomes a mare and does exactly that. To accuse a man of Loki’s attested behavior then (or, of course, to compare him to any other kind of female beast), is a dire accusation, worthy of blood atonement.

Loki’s Children With Women

Strange animal children aside, Loki also has a wife, Sigyn, who is a member of the Æsir. With her, Loki has at least one child, though the story is a bit contradictory with regard to exactly how many there are – I tend to think there are two – and what their names are.

Loki has also fathered three children with the jotun woman Angrboda, namely Fenrir the wolf, Jorgumgand the World Serpent, and Hel the half-blue, half-skin-colored ruler of the dead.

In what is arguably the strangest account of Loki producing offspring yet, Loki once gave birth to at least one child after having become pregnant simply by eating the heart of a burned, evil woman. The entire account is extremely short and exists only in the part of Hyndluljóð we call Vǫluspá hin Skamma:

Loki át af hjarta lindi brenndu, fann hann halfsviðinn hugstein konu; varð Loptr kviðugr af konu illri; þaðan er á foldu flagð hvert komit.

Loki ate a heart from burned linden-wood, he found the spirit-stone (heart) half-charred; Loptr (Loki) became pregnant by the ill (evil) woman; thence have come all flagð (scary, evil, supernatural female beings) in the land.

Lastly, in Lokasenna stanza 40, Loki claims to have fathered a son by Tyrʼs wife. At this point in the poem, Loki has been insulting Freyr, and Tyr makes the mistake of trying to defend him. When he does, Loki replies:

Þegi þú, Týr, þat varð þinni konu, at hon átti mǫg við mér.

Silence yourself, Tyr, it so happened to your wife that she had a son with me.

Unfortunately, we donʼt know anything else about who Tyrʼs wife is or who that son might be. But Loki does go on to proclaim that he will not pay Tyr anything in compensation for fathering a child by his wife, indicating that this happened under unscrupulous circumstances.

Loki therefore has perhaps nine or ten children at minimum: one by way of Tyrʼs wife, at least one by way of a half-charred heart, one by way of Svadilfari the horse, three by way of Angrboda, two (in my opinion²³) by way of his own wife Sigyn, and at least two by some unknown means during those eight winters below the earth²⁴. No children are attested as having come from a union between Loki as a woman and some other man.

Loki’s Further Claims

At this point weʼll stay focused on Lokasenna, as it contains a few more juicy tidbits regarding Lokiʼs exploits. The quick run-down of this poem is as follows:

A jotun named Ægir prepares a great feast for the gods complete with ale that serves itself by the magical prowess of Ægir’s servants. Most of the big names are there, gods and elves alike, except Thor who is (as usual) somewhere in the east at the time. The guests decide to start praising Ægir’s two servants, Fimafeng and Eldir, for their exceptional serving abilities but Loki, in a repeat of his reaction to the praise heaped upon Baldr for invincibility, canʼt bear to tolerate this and he kills Fimafeng.

This upsets the other gods and they eject Loki from the feast. However, Loki returns to the feast, intent on spoiling everybodyʼs good time with discord and contention.

Loki is allowed back in to the feast and given a seat after reminding Odin of an oath he once swore never to partake of a drink that wasn’t served to both Loki and himself. Having taken his seat, Loki begins hurling insults at the other gods/elves²⁵, starting with Bragi, then moving on to Idunn, Gefjun, Odin, Frigg and Freyja (who are not the same person²⁶), Njord, Tyr, Frey, Byggvir, Heimdall, Skadi, Sif, and Beyla. Some of these characters insult him back. Others do not.

Finally, Thor arrives at the feast and threatens to kill Loki if he doesn’t stop insulting everyone. Admitting that Thor doesn’t make empty threats, Loki ends his tirade, leaves, and hides out in a waterfall in the form of a salmon. He meets a torturous fate after this, but the same fate is attested as having befallen him elsewhere after the death of Baldr. So Iʼll leave it to you to read further.

The interesting thing about this story for our purposes is that Loki claims (either directly or indirectly) to have slept with four different women over the course of his insults. If we accept Crawfordʼs assertion²⁷ that the word senna in Lokasenna occurs early enough in the linguistic record to retain some semblance of its root origin sannr (true), then we may be inclined to agree with him that all the insults spoken by Loki in this poem are in fact Loki’s truths. However, a careful reading of the text coupled with a greater understanding of the stories referenced by Loki in his insults indicates that, while in some ways true, Loki is also doing his best to portray events in a twisted context designed to make those events appear worse than they are portrayed elsewhere²⁸. But regardless of how true these claims are, the fact that he makes them is whatʼs important.

I’ve already mentioned that Loki claims to have fathered a son with Tyr’s wife in this poem. But Loki also claims here to have slept with Freyja, Skadi, and Sif. The claim about Freyja requires us to read into the subtext a little, but the claims about Skadi and Sif are more direct. Starting in stanza 30, Loki says to Freyja:

Þegi þú, Freyja, þik kann ek fullgǫrva, er-a þér vamma vant: ása ok alfa, er hér inni eru, hverr hefir þinn hór verit.

Silence yourself, Freyja, I know you full-well, you aren’t for want of blemishes (of behavior): of gods and elves, that are inside here, each has been your (man-)whore.

The implication here is indirect, but the claim that Freyja has slept with every god and elf in the room includes Loki as a part of that group. Next we move on to Loki’s exchange with Skadi in stanza 52:

Léttari í málum vartu við Laufeyjar son, þá er þú létz mér á beð þinn boðit; getit verðr oss slíks, ef vér gǫrva skulum telja vǫmmin vár.

Lighter in speech were you against Laufey’s son (Loki), when you let me be invited to your bed; such things become told about us, if we shall openly number our blemishes (of behavior).

Finally we have Lokiʼs exposé regarding himself and Sif, the wife of Thor, in stanza 54. In this bit, Sif has just offered Loki a drink and politely asked him not to find fault with her, hoping to be the one person in the hall he chooses to leave alone. But he does not choose to leave her alone:

Ein þú værir, ef þú svá værir, vǫr ok grǫm at veri; einn ek veit, svá at ek vita þykkjumk, hór ok af Hlórriða, ok var þat sá inn lævísi Loki.

Alone you would be, if you would be so, wary and unwelcoming toward a man; I know one (man), and I think I do know, a (man-)whore of Thor’s wife, and that was the crafty Loki.

Throughout Lokasenna, Loki hits each god with the hardest insults he can. He brings up Odinʼs argr behavior, Friggʼs dead son, Tyrʼs severed hand, Freyjaʼs indiscretion with her own brother, and the promiscuous behavior of several women, which tend to include his own liaisons with them. Many of these insults are explained in further detail in other surviving stories and the ones that arenʼt are presumed to be laid out in stories that have since been lost to history.

What are notably absent here, are any accusations of male characters having slept with Loki. He does not accuse any of the men of having slept with him, even though he shows himself willing to use ergi as an insult, and though various characters insult him with their own hard-hitters, not a single one accuses him of having slept with any men.

There is, of course, the potential argument to be made that Loki could have been the giving participant in some male-male sex act. There is some debate as to how a man in this position would have been perceived in Norse society and the disparity in treatment between active and passive partners might explain why any events like this, had they taken place, arenʼt used against Loki as insults. However, there is also no evidence in surviving literature that any events like this ever took place.

In the End…

Loki is the literary invention of a culture that did not espouse modern ideas about gender and sexuality. As I mentioned earlier, we are all free to interpret his behavior through whatever modern lens we want, but if we want to understand him the way the Norse people understood him, and if we want to teach others the truth about Norse mythology as the ancient Norse bequeathed it, we have to view him through their lens, not our own.

To the Norse people, Loki was a canonical man who often did things they would have considered shamefully unmanly. As a shapeshifter, he has been known to take the form of a woman on occasion, and in two of the four instances where this occurs, we are told he does so in order to accomplish a very specific goal. The other two instances do not give us enough information to understand why he does it. He has also born children in strange, supernatural ways, once or twice having been impregnated while in the form of an animal – something he didn’t want to do in the case of the fortification builder story, and viewed as an action that came at some cost to himself, but endured in order to avoid being executed.

Though he has been known to occasionally take on female form, Loki is called by masculine pronouns in all but one instance in the corpus where the use of a masculine pronoun would have been grammatically nonsensical. However, when he takes on female form, he is sometimes referred to with feminine nouns referencing the physical form he has temporarily assumed in that story.

In terms of sheer numbers, Loki appears in male form vastly more often than he does in female form. He begins every story in male form, and in most stories, never changes into female form at all. His moments as a female are treated in the sources as a shape-shifter’s deviations from his default shape, which is overwhelmingly portrayed and described as male.

Loki also has a wife, has fathered children with her, and has fathered children naturally with two other women. On top of that, he claims to have slept with a handful of additional women, but is never attested to have claimed, sought out, or openly desired any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with a man. Though hard-hitting insults abound, no characters have ever accused him of this behavior either.

Most of the Æsir clan and their extended membership are individuals with deep flaws (except maybe Thor). Theyʼre guilty of incest, promiscuity, perversion, cowardice, and even having their mouths used as urinals (Lokasenna stanza 34). Unlike the gods of certain other religions, their behavior is not used as a model for proper living. Lokiʼs behavior is no exception to this rule, and Gulathing seems to confirm that pretty strongly. His character has a strong association with ergi, but is that because the authors of his stories intended him to be non-binary or non-cis-gender?

The Loki we see in our sources is a product of a particular time and place in Scandinavia. Surely he is different in some ways from older religious concepts that came together to form his character during the late Viking Age and he would be somewhat more different today if ancient Norse paganism had not died out in the medieval period. With regard to the way Loki is portrayed in our sources, it isn’t accurate to refer to him with any modern terminology regarding gender and sexuality, and to be clear, that includes words such as straight and cis. In the same way that it is difficult (and arguably inappropriate) to describe gender in Diné society using outsider terminology, our modern concepts of gender and sexual identity would have been foreign to Norse people, and it is thus inaccurate and unfair to project any of our ideas, even the traditional ones, onto them.

Anthropologists will tell you that if you’re going to study a group of people, you need to look at them through their own lens. Through the ancient Norse lens, using vocabulary available to ancient Norse people, Loki is a man who engages in argr behavior. However, no one alive today is an ancient Norse person, so whatever Loki is to you is entirely up to you.

1. Metathesis refers to the transposition of sounds in a word. A good example in English is the way that some people pronounce the word nuclear as “nucular”. Metathesis is particularly common in Old Norse when it comes to words with high, negative potency.

2. Ström, Folke. Níð, Ergi and Old Norse Moral Attitudes. Viking Society for Northern Research, 1974. pp. 19-20

3. To clarify, the accusation that Ref “was a woman” every ninth night is designed to highlight the idea that Ref took upon himself the female sexual role on those nights when he “needed a man”. The accusation may be metaphorical or it may be a claim regarding physical transformation by magical means. Ström seems to subscribe to the metaphorical interpretation, but whether literal or metaphorical, the slanderous intent and resulting negative consequences of the accusation are the same. Ref is a man, and therefore any “transformation” into a woman, literal or metaphorical via sexual role-switching, results in the socially destructive branding of argr.

4. Fascinatingly, other forms of magic appear to have been entirely acceptable for men to practice. The notion of magic, more broadly referred to as galdr, is often attested as being performed by men, especially when it involved the carving and coloring of runes. See my post “Ancient Runes and Rune Magic.”

5. Introductory information at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skern_Runestone

6. Introductory information at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saleby_Runestone

7. Sørenson, Preben M.; Turville-Petre, Joan (transl.) (1983). The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society. Studies in Northern Civilization. Vol. 1. Odense University Press. p. 17.

8. Stroðinn is a metathesized form of sorðinn. See the root verb serða in the Cleasby & Vigfusson Dictionary of Old Icelandic, web version: https://cleasby-vigfusson-dictionary.vercel.app/word/serda.

9. Fullréttisorð refers to any defamation requiring the offender to pay full personal compensation to the offended. Normally, fullréttisorð carried a penalty of minor outlawry in Iceland, but in this case, the words being discussed are strong enough to warrant full outlawry as is described. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/lmnl/nordicheadword/displayPage/1548

10. Epple, Carolyn. (2008). “Coming to Terms with Navajo Nádleehí: A Critique of Berdache, ‘Gay,’ ‘Alternate Gender,’ and ‘Two‐spirit’”. American Ethnologist. 25. p. 267-290.

11. For instance, Laxdæla saga recounts an event wherein the character Gudrun is able to divorce her husband Thorvald for wearing a low-cut shirt. This in itself was considered too feminine for a man’s attire, illustrating again the rigidity of expected gender roles.

12. Readers may reference the facsimile of the page in question from the Codex Regius manuscript. https://www.germanicmythology.com/works/CodRegIMAGES/CR34.jpg. This reference is provided in order to illustrate the original spellings since some modern translators have taken upon themselves to “correct” the spelling for grammatical purposes, changing tvau to tvær. The form tvau can be found at line 14, word 2.

13. Alternatively, Loki may be referencing coming events wherein he will be transforming himself into a female while Thor remains male. However, this interpretation would somewhat undercut the cleverness of the insult in making a callback to the earlier stanza.

14. Schjødt, Jens Peter (2020). “Loki”. The Pre-Christian Religions of the North, vol. III: Conceptual Frameworks: The Cosmos and Supernatural Beings. p. 1257.

15. In case there is any confusion, mólcandi is the direct spelling found in the manuscript whereas mólkandi is the same word, but with normalized spelling.

16. See Crawford’s video “Lokasenna: The Norse Poem of Loki’s Locker Talk”.

17. See https://www.dairy.com.au/dairy-matters/you-ask-we-answer/is-it-true-that-cows-can-only-produce-milk-if-they-have-been-pregnant, which cites Sherwood, L., Klandorf, H. and Yancey, P. 2013. Animal Physiology - from Genes to Organisms. 2nd eds. Belmont: Cengage Learning.

18. Friis-Jensen, K., ed., and Fisher, P., trans., Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

19. In this context, past life events that had been fated to occur.

20. See the Cleasby & Vigfusson Dictionary of Old Icelandic, web version: https://cleasby-vigfusson-dictionary.vercel.app/word/drygja

21. In fact, in the story of Loki’s wolf-child Fenrir, Loki is remarkably absent from the raising process altogether (with the story naming the god Tyr as the only one who would dare to feed the wolf) and he is remarkably absent from the deceitful binding of his wolf-son by the other gods as well.

22. Larson, Laurence M. The Earliest Norwegian Laws, Being the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law. Columbia University Press. p. 143.

23. There is confusion within the source material as to the names of Loki’s children, as well as to whom the name Váli belongs. Certain information describes Vali as a son of Loki, but this is likely a mistake and is contradicted by information asserting that Vali is the son of Odin who slay’s Baldr’s brother Hod after the mistletoe incident. This leaves us with two names for Loki’s children, which are sometimes portrayed unconfidently as potentially two different names for the same individual, Nari and/or Narfi. However, we are also told that there are two sons of Loki who are punished alongside him at his eventual binding, and these are likely both sons of Sigyn because these would be Loki’s only legally legitimate sons.

24. Though, admittedly it is possible that some of these instances could overlap. The children Loki bore while below the earth for eight winters, for example, could be the same children he bore from eating the half-charred heart. There is no way to know for sure.

25. The text informs us that elves are present, but does not name anyone specifically as an elf.

26. See my post “Are Frigg and Freyja the Same Person?”

27. See again Crawford’s video as noted above.

28. For instance, Loki insults Thor by referencing the time the two of them met the literal (or at least illusorily literal) giant Skrymir. As this story is related in the Prose Edda, Thor and his companions decide to rest in a cave during the night but are surprised by loud thundering sounds coming from outside the cave. Thor positions his companions in a chamber behind him, placing himself in between his companions and whatever danger may be outside. In the morning, the group discovers that their cave is actually the enormous glove of a giant who had been snoring outside. When Loki references this event in Lokasenna, he describes Thor as cowering in the thumb of a glove, conveniently omitting the detail that he himself cowered in the thumb of the glove, hiding behind Thor.