bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.
He was amused and dangerous, neither good nor evil. Thor was the classroom bully raised to the scale of growling thunder and whipping rain. Odin was Power, was in power. Ungraspable Loki flamed amazement and pleased himself.
The gods needed him because he was clever, because he solved problems. When they needed to break bargains they had rashly made, mostly with giants, Loki showed them the way out. He was the god of endings. He provided resolutions for stories – if he chose to. The endings he made often led to more problems.
There are no altars to Loki, no standing stones, he had no cult. In myths he was the third of the trio, Odin, Hodur, Loki. In myths, the most important comes first of three. But in fairy tales, and folklore, where these three gods also play their parts, the rule of three is different; the important player is the third, the
He had a wife, in Asgard, Sigyn, who loved him, and two sons, Wali and Narwi.
But he was an outsider, with a need for the inordinate.
The thin child, reading and rereading the tales, neither loved nor hated the people in them – they were not ‘characters’ into whose doings she could insert her own imagination. As a reader, she was a solemn, occasionally troubled, occasionally gleeful onlooker. But she almost made an exception for Loki. Alone among all these beings he had humour and wit. His changeable shapes were attractive, his cleverness had charm. He made her uneasy, but she had feelings about him, whereas the others, Odin, Thor, Baldur the beautiful, were as they were, their shapes set, wise, strong, lovely.
Eastward the old one
in the Iron
Wood raises the wolves
of Fenrir’s race
one is destined
to be some day
the monstrous beast
who destroys the moon.
The Iron Wood was outside the walls of Asgard, outside the meadow of Midgard, a dark place, a devilish place, inhabited by things that were part-beast and part-human, or even part-god, or part-demon. The old one in the poem is Angurboda, Angrbo?a, bringer of anguish, a giant with a fierce face, a pelt of wolf-hair, clawed hands and feet, and sharp teeth. Loki played with her, rippling like flame over and in her body, pleasuring her against her will, clutching and clasping and escaping, invading and ungraspable. They spoke to each other in snarls and hissings. Sigyn would not have known this ferocious Loki or recognised his triumphant howl as his seed went in. Did he foresee the shapes of his children? One was a wolf-cub, armed already with an array of sharp teeth and a dark throat behind them. One was a supple snake, with a crown of fleshy feelers and teeth sharp as her brother’s, though fine as needles. She was dull gold with blood-red flickering over her scales as she stretched and coiled.
The third was a woman, or a giantess, or a goddess. She was a strange colour, or colours. Her form was uncompromising, straight-spined, with long legs, strong, capable hands, firm feet. Her face was, there was no other way of putting it, severe. She had carved cheeks and a wide, unsmiling mouth, inside which were strong sharp teeth, wolfish teeth, teeth for ripping. Her nose was fine and her brows were dusky, like smoke, like the lower world’s kenning for ‘forest’, seaweed of the hills. Her eye-sockets went back and back. Inside their caverns were unblinking dark, dark eyes, like pools of tar, or wells where no light was reflected. But the colour. Half of her was black, and half of her was blue. Half of her, those who saw her also reported, was living flesh, and half was dead. Sometimes the line between the black and the blue split her cleanly, running from the crown of her black head, down the long nose, the chin, the breastbone, the sex, to the space between the feet. But sometimes the black and the blue floated on and in each other. They were beautiful, like the last blue of the sky meeting the dark of the coming night. They were hideous, the colour of bruises on battered or moribund flesh. She slept naked, coiled and curled with her terrible kin, scales, fur, snout, fangs, lids over glaring eyes. They emitted a raucous hissing and purring. They delighted Loki. He fed them and watched them grow. Who knew what they might do? They grew, and grew.
Odin sat on his throne, Hlidskialf, holding his spear, Gungnir, surveying Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim and Ironwood. Two black ravens, Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory), told him what they had seen during their flight. He turned his fierce face towards Ironwood.
Loki was, in the beginning, in the days when the Gap was flooded by Ymir’s pouring blood, the foster brother of Odin. They had sworn blood-brotherhood, and ridden in the same boat over the blood. Now Odin imposed order, and Loki smiled at disorder. The gods knew that the three monsters were dangerous and would be more dangerous. Odin sent out a force to fetch them, Hermodur the bright, and the god of the hunt, Tyr. They crossed the bright bridge, Bifrost, which joins Asgard to other worlds, crossed the river Ifing and came to where Loki was, in the dark land of the Hrimthurses. They seized the three and carried them back to the steps of Hlidskialf. The wolf yawned. The snake coiled herself into a knot. Hel stood rigid, blue-black, staring.
Odin acted. He threw two of the three out into space. The small snake gleamed dully in the air, and fell, and flew, and fell, and came down on the surface of the bright-black ocean that surrounded Midgard. She stretched, and swam for a time, rising and falling on the waves. Then she sank, or plunged, and was out of sight. The gods applauded.
Odin took Hel and flung her towards Niflheim, the dark land of mists and cold. She remained rigid, like an arrow from a bow, a sharp-nosed missile, on and on, down and down, nine days falling through sunlight, moonlight and starlight, past the racing chariots of the Sun and the Moon, past the tips of firs and past their roots, into and through the lightless bogs and swamps of Niflheim, across the cold torrent of Gioll and into Helheim, where she was to rule over those human dead who were not fortunate enough to die in battle, a land of shadows. The bridge over Gioll was gold, and the perimeter fence of Hel was iron, high and impassable. Inside the dark hall a throne waited for the bruised, livid being, the goddess, the monstrous child, and a crown lay on a black cushion, made of white gold, and moonstones, pearls like congealed tears and crystals, like frost. When she took up the crown, and the wand which lay beside it, the dead began to flood into her hall like whispering bats, innumerable, insubstantial. She welcomed them, unsmiling. They wheeled about her, whistling weakly, and she had dishes brought, with the ghosts of fruits and flesh, and beakers, inside which were the ghosts of mead and wine, with ghostly bubbles at the rim.
And the wolf? Wolves run strongly through the forests of the mind. Humans heard the howling in the dark, an urgent music, a gleeful reciprocal chorus; the loping, padding, tireless runners are both out of sight and inside the head. There, too, are the bristling coat, the snout, the teeth, the blood. Firelight, and the light of the full moon, are reflected in inhuman eyes, glittering in the dark, specks of brightness in deep shadows. Humans respect wolves, the closeness and warmth of the pack, the ingenuity of the chase, the calling and growling, messages from the throat. Odin in Asgard had two tamed cubs at his feet, to which he threw the meat he did not
