Deity · Norse · c. 1270 CE
Loki
Also called Loptr, Hveðrungr · also recorded as Loki Laufeyjarson, Loki Laufeyson, Logi (per Wikidata)
Companion of the Aesir and their eventual destroyer — a figure whose slide toward the demonic is visible within the surviving texts themselves.
Well sourced
The Norse sources are late and Christian-redacted, which means the demonisation is caught partly in progress. In many episodes he is an awkward but indispensable ally who solves the problems he creates. By Ragnarok he steers the ship of the dead and leads the enemy host. Whether that trajectory is native or the work of thirteenth-century Christian compilers reaching for a devil is one of the genuinely open questions in Norse scholarship.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
None whatever — no temple, no place-name, no personal name formed on his. For a figure so central to the myths that is remarkable, and it is the strongest argument that he was a story rather than a god anyone served.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Gesta Danorum · c. 1200
- Named there as
- Utgarthilocus
- Rank
- Trickster
- Pantheon
- Norse
- Order
- Norse
- Base of operations
- None whatever — no temple, no place-name, no personal name formed on his. For a figure so central to the myths that is remarkable, and it is the strongest argument that he was a story rather than a god anyone served.
- Era
- c. 1270 CE
- Traditions
- Norse
- Placed in
- The Nine Worlds
Traits
- Domain
- Trickery, shape-changing, fire (by later association)
- Traditional form
- Shifting — salmon, mare, fly, old woman
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
Identified with
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Loki, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- social1
- transformation1
- malefic1
social
transformation
malefic
3 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 3 texts that names Loki, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
3 texts, all inside a single century
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Utgarthilocus, Loki
A bound giant in a stinking cave, found by Thorkillus' expedition and identified only by a hair pulled from his chin. Whether this figure is Loki, Útgarða-Loki, or a Danish conflation of the two is genuinely unsettled and the corpus does not settle it — what is worth having is that a Latin history written for a Christian court has the enemy chained underground and visited, which is the shape a bound spirit takes everywhere else in this corpus.
Where the biography is assembled: the companion who solves the problems he caused, the father of Hel, Fenrir and Jörmungandr by the giantess Angrboda, and finally the bound enemy under the dripping serpent with Sigyn holding the bowl. Snorri puts the arc in one place, and the arc is the demonisation.
Insults the gods at Aegir's feast, engineers Baldr's death, and is bound beneath a serpent until Ragnarok.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
Marvel Comics gave him a helmet in 1962 and the films gave him a following, and the modern reading — a charming trickster whose mischief is basically forgivable — is largely their doing. The medieval material does not support it for long: he is a companion who solves the problems he caused, then the killer of Baldr, then bound under a serpent until the end of the world, and Snorri sets that sequence out as a single downward arc. He also has almost no evidence of cult behind him. A god nobody worshipped, remembered chiefly through a comic, is an unusual kind of survival.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Loki?
Is Loki the same as Satan?
What rank is Loki?
How else is Loki spelled?
What is Loki said to do?
How old is Loki?
Nearest in the corpus
If Loki is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Odin
Allfather · Norse
Hangs himself on the world tree for nine nights to win the runes — a sovereign god who is also a liar, a sorcerer and a chooser of the slain.
Thor
Thunderer · Norse
The defender who kills giants and will meet Jormungandr at Ragnarok. Whatever the poems give Odin, Thor was by far the more widely worshipped.
Fenrir
The Bound Wolf · Norse
Loki's son, bound by a fetter made of impossible things at the cost of Tyr's hand, and fated to kill Odin when the binding fails.
Freyja
Lady of the Vanir · Norse
Goddess of love and of sorcery who takes half the slain — the other half, not Odin's, which is rarely remembered.
Hel
Ruler of the Dead · Norse
Daughter of Loki, and ruler of the realm that gave English the word 'hell'. Hers is cold, and nobody in it is being punished.
Jormungandr
World Serpent · Norse
The serpent that rings the world and bites its own tail — the Norse entry in the chaos-serpent pattern that runs from Tiamat to Leviathan.
The books behind Loki
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Prose Edda
Snorri Sturluson; tr. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur · c. 1220 · Old Norse
Read The Prose Edda in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Unknown author · Wikimedia file page
The Poetic Edda
Anonymous; compiled in Iceland · 13th c., from older oral material · Old Norse
Read The Poetic Edda in full ↗Cover: Public domain · The Elder or Poetic Edda; commonly known as Sæmund's Edda. Edited and translated with… · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.