The thin child shivered with fear and excitement at the thought of Odin, a god both sinister and dangerous. He was a damaged god, a one-eyed god who had paid with the other eye for the magical knowledge he had drunk from the fountain of Urd, in which the severed head of the Jotun, Mimir, told histories, stories, spells of power, runes of wisdom. Odin was a god who lurked, disguised as an old man in a grey cloak, with a hat pulled over his empty socket. He was a god who asked riddling questions and destroyed those who gave wrong answers. He carried a war-spear, Gungnir, carved with runes which unlocked the secrets of men, beasts and the earth. The spear was fashioned from a branch torn from Yggdrasil itself. It was lopped into shape. It left a wound and a scar.*
Odin was pictured in the Asgard book in the palace of King Geirod who had roped the wrists of the unknown visitor and set him to scorch between two fires. It was a good picture; the black, enigmatic figure squats between the flaming brands, neither smiling nor scowling, but brooding. After eight nights without food or drink, the visitor was given a horn of beer, and began to sing, louder and louder, a song of Asgard and the warriors in Valhöll, of Yggdrasil with its roots in the roots of the world. Then he revealed himself, and the king fell on his own sword. Odin was an unpredictable god who accepted sacrificed men in the form of ‘blood-eagles’, tied to tree-trunks, their lungs torn back through their ribs. He was a god who had himself endured torture, which had made him stronger, wiser, and more dangerous.
I know that I hung on a windy tree
Nine long nights
Wounded with a spear dedicated to Odin
Myself to myself, on that tree of which
no man knows
From where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor drink
from a horn,
Downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took
them
Then I fell back from there.
Nine mighty spells I learned . . .
Odin was the god of the Wild Hunt. Or of the Raging Host. They rode out through the skies, horses and hounds, hunters and spectral armed men. They never tired and never halted; the horns howled on the wind, the hooves beat, they swirled in dangerous wheeling flocks like monstrous starlings. Odin’s horse, Sleipnir, had eight legs: his gallop was thundering. At night, in her blacked-out bedroom, the thin child heard sounds in the sky, a distant whine, a churning of propellers, thunder hanging overhead and then going past. She had seen and heard the crash and conflagration when the airfield near her grandparents’ home was bombed. She had cowered in an understairs cupboard as men were taught to cower, flat on the ground, when the Hunt passed by. Odin was the god of death and battle. Not much traffic came through the edges of the small town in which the thin child lived. Most of what there was was referred to as ‘Convoys’, a word that the thin child thought was synonymous with processions of khaki vehicles, juddering and grinding. Some had young men sitting in the back of trucks, smiling out at the waving children, shaking with the rattling motions. They came and they went. No one was told where. They were ‘our boys’. The child thought of her father, burning in the air above North Africa. She did not know where North Africa was. She imagined him with his flaming hair in a flaming black plane, in the racket of propellers. Airmen were the Wild Hunt. They were dangerous. If any hunter dismounted, he crumbled to dust, the child read. It was a good story, a story with meaning, fear and danger were in it, and things out of control.
In the daytime, the bright fields. In the night, doom droning in the sky.
_________________
* This part of the story was first told by Richard Wagner.
Homo Homini Lupus Est
Then there was Loki. Loki was a being who was neither this nor that. Neither an Ase nor a Jotun, he lived neither in Asgard nor in Jotunheim. The Ases were single-minded beings. They concentrated on battles and food, or in the case of goddesses on beauty, jealousy, rings and necklaces. Iduna the fair lived in the green branches of Yggdrasil and grew the bright apples of youth, which she fed to the gods. Once, when a giant grabbed her and her apples, Loki took the shape of a falcon and carried them home in his talons. Alone among the gods, Loki was a shapeshifter. He ran across the meadows of Midgard in the shape of a lovely mare. This beast distracted the magic horse of the giant who built the walls of Asgard – so well, that she later gave birth to Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed. Loki was a pestering fly, who stole Freya’s golden necklace, Brisingamen. He was intimate with secret places. He disguised himself as an innocent farmgirl, milking cows; he shifted sex as he shifted shape. He was slippery. He wrestled Heimdall the herald in the form of a seal. He was a salmon, leaping up a waterfall, or sliding smoothly under the surface.
The Germans believed his name was related to Lohe, Loge, Logi, flame and fire. He was also known as Loptr, the god of the air. Later Christian writers amalgamated him with Lucifer, Lukifer, the light-bearer, the fallen Son of the Morning, the adversary. He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and 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 youngest son, Loki.
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