Loki's Web: His Children, His Lovers, and the Family Built for R…

No family in Norse mythology is more consequential than Loki's. His children include a wolf who will swallow Odin, a serpent who will poison Thor, a goddess who rules the dead, and a horse with eight legs who carries the greatest of the gods. His wife stays at his side through centuries of imprisonment. His son's bones become the chains that hold him.

Loki is the trickster, the shapeshifter, the necessary complication in the Norse world. But to understand him fully, you have to understand who he loved, who he fathered, and what those relationships cost — because the family Loki built is, in the most literal sense, the family that ends the world.

Who Is Loki, and How Did He Get Into Asgard?

Loki is the son of Fárbauti, a giant, and Laufey — also called Nál, meaning needle, possibly a reference to her slight or slender form. He is not one of the Aesir by blood. He is a jötunn, a giant, raised among the gods.

The reason he is in Asgard at all is one of the most important and least-discussed facts in Norse mythology: Loki and Odin are blood brothers. They swore a binding oath together, mixing their blood as a pledge. The nature of this oath is not fully recorded in the surviving sources, but one of its known terms is that Odin would never accept food or drink at a feast where Loki was not also served. This is not the oath of a servant and his master. It is the oath of equals.

Whatever the origin of this brotherhood — some scholars suggest it reflects an ancient mythological partnership between fire (Loki, whose name may connect to Old Norse words for fire or for tangle and knot) and wind or spirit (Odin, whose name connects to fury and inspired breath) — it means that Loki belongs in Asgard by right of oath, not by grace. The gods cannot simply throw him out. They are bound to him in the same way he is bound to them. This matters enormously for understanding everything that follows.

With Angrboda: The Three Who Will End the World

In the Ironwood — Járnviðr in Old Norse, a dark forest in the east — Loki lay with the giantess Angrboda. Her name means she who brings grief or the one who offers sorrow. Whatever her intentions, the union produced three children whose fates are woven into the structure of Ragnarök itself.

Fenrir

The firstborn was a wolf. He was called Fenrir, and he grew at a rate that alarmed even the gods. Brought to Asgard as a pup so the gods could keep watch over him, he became so large and so fierce that only Tyr had the courage to approach him. He was bound with the unbreakable ribbon Gleipnir — made from impossible things: the sound of a cat's footsteps, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain — at the cost of Tyr's right hand, which Fenrir bit off when he realised the binding would hold.

He lies still, on the island of Lyngvi, a sword propped in his open mouth, waiting. At Ragnarök he will break free. He will run with his upper jaw scraping the sky and his lower jaw dragging along the earth. He will swallow Odin. His death will come from Odin's son Viðarr, but not before he has done what he was always going to do.

Read more in our posts on Fenrir: The Wolf Who Will End the World and Fenrir Tattoo Meaning.

Jörmungandr

The second child was a serpent. Odin took one look at the prophecy and threw it into the ocean surrounding Midgard. This seemed like a solution. It was not. The serpent grew in the deep water until it encircled the entire world and could hold its own tail in its mouth. At that point it became Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, the World Encircler — a creature so vast that its body defined the boundary of the known world.

Jörmungandr and Thor are fated enemies, and their enmity runs through multiple myths: the fishing trip where Thor nearly hauled the serpent to the surface before Hymir cut the line, and the giant's hall where the serpent appeared in the form of a cat that Thor could barely lift one paw of from the ground. At Ragnarök they meet for the last and only time without intervention. Thor kills Jörmungandr. Then he takes nine steps and collapses — dead from the serpent's venom.

Hel

The third child was perhaps the strangest: a girl, half-living and half-dead. One side of her body was the colour and texture of living flesh. The other was blue-black, the colour of a corpse. Odin sent her to Niflheim, the world of mist and cold, and gave her authority over the realm of the dead. Her hall there is called Eljudnir — sprayed with snowstorms, or dampness. Her dish is called Hunger. Her knife is Famine. Her threshold is Precipice. Her servants are Ganglati and Ganglöt — Slow-moving and Slow-moving. Her bed is Sick-bed. Her curtains are Glimmering misfortune.

Hel rules with complete authority. All who die of illness, old age, or any cause other than honourable battle come to her — which means the vast majority of the dead belong to her, not to Odin. When the gods ask her to release Baldr after his death, she sets the condition: if every thing in the nine worlds weeps for him, she will let him go. Every thing does weep — every being, every stone, every plant — except one old giantess, who refuses. The giantess is Loki in disguise.

Hel keeps Baldr. And Loki keeps him kept.

The Mare and the Eight-Legged Horse: Sleipnir

This is the story most people do not expect, and it is one of the most remarkable things in Norse mythology.

Early in the days of Asgard, a craftsman arrived and offered to build a great wall around the gods' home — a wall that would protect them from giants and all enemies. His price: the goddess Freya, the sun, and the moon. The gods balked. Then Loki suggested accepting the offer on a condition: the work must be completed in one winter, and the builder must do it alone, with only his stallion Svaðilfari to help.

The gods agreed, certain the task was impossible. They were wrong. The stallion was extraordinary — it did the work of several horses, hauling massive stones in the dark and the cold, and the wall rose faster than anyone had anticipated. Three days before winter's end, the wall was nearly complete. The gods turned on Loki in fury: this was his idea, he had to fix it.

Loki transformed into a mare.

He ran out into the forest and lured Svaðilfari away. The stallion pursued. The builder, without his horse, could not finish the wall in time. When he realised he had been tricked, his true nature emerged — he was a frost giant — and Thor killed him with Mjölnir.

Loki, in mare form, ran with Svaðilfari through the spring. Some time later, he returned to Asgard. He was carrying a foal. The foal was born with eight legs. He was called Sleipnir — the sliding one, the gliding one — and he became the greatest horse in all nine worlds. Sleipnir can run across water, through the air, and between worlds. He is the horse Odin rides, the horse who carries the Allfather on every journey between the living and the dead.

Loki, shapeshifter, gave birth to the horse who carries Odin. This is the kind of mythological complexity that Norse tradition holds without embarrassment or explanation. Loki is a mother. The horse is his son. The horse serves Odin. And the oath of blood-brotherhood between Odin and Loki is honoured in one of the strangest forms imaginable.

Sigyn: The Wife Who Stays

Loki's wife among the Aesir is Sigyn. Her name may mean “victory woman” or “she who follows victory.” She is not a major figure in the surviving mythology — she appears briefly, she is loyal, and she suffers enormously for it.

Sigyn and Loki have two sons: Narfi (also called Nari) and Váli. These are not the same as the other Váli — Odin's son born to avenge Baldr — which shows how compressed and sometimes contradictory the surviving sources can be.

After Baldr's death, when Loki's role became clear and he made it worse by insulting every god at Ægir's feast (the Lokasenna — one of the most extraordinary and darkly comic poems in the Eddic tradition, where Loki goes around the hall systematically cataloguing everyone's worst acts and secrets before the gods finally drag him out), the gods pursued him.

He fled. He turned into a salmon and hid in a waterfall — the same waterfall where he had been sitting in his hall, thinking, when he invented the fishing net to catch fish (and then, realising the gods would use his invention to catch him, threw it in the fire and ran). The gods saw the outline of the net in the ashes, made another, and caught him.

The punishment was precise and terrible. The gods turned his son Váli into a wolf. Váli, in wolf form, tore Narfi apart. Narfi's entrails were used to bind Loki to three great rocks — and then the entrails transformed into iron chains. A serpent was fixed above him, dripping venom onto his face.

Sigyn stayed. She stands over him with a bowl, catching the venom before it reaches him. When the bowl is full, she has to turn away to empty it. In the moment her attention is elsewhere, the drops fall on Loki's face. His writhing shakes the earth. When you feel the ground tremble, the Norse understood, that is Loki in his cave, responding to the pain his wife's brief absence allows.

There is no heroism in Sigyn's position. She did nothing to deserve this. Her husband caused the death of Baldr, insulted every god in the hall, and brought catastrophe down on their family. She stays anyway, holding the bowl. The sources do not moralize about this. They simply describe it. The image of a woman standing in a cave with a bowl, faithful past any reasonable limit, is one of the quieter and more human images in all of Norse mythology.

The Death of Baldr: The Act That Cannot Be Undone

Baldr, son of Odin, was beloved of every being in the nine worlds. He dreamed of his own death. His mother Frigg, in her grief and fear, extracted oaths from every thing in existence not to harm him — fire, water, iron, stone, disease, every creature — all swore they would not hurt Baldr. The gods made a game of it, throwing things at him and laughing as everything bounced off.

Loki went to Frigg in the form of an old woman and asked whether she had really gotten oaths from everything. Frigg mentioned, almost carelessly, one thing she had left out: the mistletoe. It was too young, too small, it seemed harmless.

Loki fetched a sprig of mistletoe and fashioned it into a dart. The blind god Höðr was standing at the edge of the games, unable to participate. Loki guided his hand. Höðr threw the mistletoe. Baldr fell dead.

Every source is clear that Loki engineered this. He did not throw the dart himself. He put the weapon in the hand of the person least able to understand what he was doing. The indirection is characteristic — Loki rarely acts in a straight line. And then, when the gods tried to meet Hel's condition for releasing Baldr, Loki appeared in the form of the old giantess Þökk and refused to weep. Everything wept. She did not. Baldr stayed dead.

Why Loki wanted Baldr dead is a question the sources do not answer cleanly. Some scholars see in it a structural necessity — Baldr's death must happen because Ragnarök must happen, and Loki is the agent of what cannot be delayed. Others see it as a response to the gods' mounting hostility toward him — the Lokasenna suggests Loki knows they hate him, and that knowledge has curdled into something that no longer wants to hold back. Others still see it as simply the action of a being who has always been a force of disruption and has finally found a disruption from which there is no recovery.

Ragnarök: The Family Reunites

At Ragnarök, Loki breaks free from his chains. The earthquake that announces the end of the world is the earthquake of his breaking loose.

He steers Naglfar, the great ship of the dead, made from the uncut fingernails and toenails of the dead — which is why it was considered important in Norse tradition to trim the nails of the dead before burial. Every unpared nail contributed material to the ship that would carry the forces of chaos to the final battle. Loki at the helm, his children among the army, the world ending in the way it was always going to end.

At Ragnarök, Loki fights Heimdall, the watchman of the gods who first sounded the alarm when the world began to break. They kill each other. Loki's death is as bound up in relationship as his life — even his ending is entangled with a god whose fate is tied to his.

What the Family Means

Loki's family is not a collection of random monsters. It is a set of forces — the unbindable wolf, the world-encircling serpent, the ruler of the dead, the horse that carries the gods — that together form a complete picture of what lies at the edges and beneath the surface of the ordered Norse world. Chaos, depth, death, and the means of moving between worlds: all of these belong to Loki's bloodline.

The Norse did not make Loki a simple villain for this. He is bound to Odin by oath. He makes Asgard's walls possible and then makes them impossible. He gives the gods some of their greatest treasures — Odin's spear Gungnir, the ship Skjáldblaðnir, Thor's hammer Mjölnir, Sif's golden hair, the ring Draupnir — through schemes that always involve him getting into trouble and then getting out of it. He is indispensable and he is dangerous and eventually he is unbearable and eventually he is bound.

Whether the binding made Ragnarök more or less likely is a question the myths leave open. Perhaps containing him was necessary. Perhaps it sealed the outcome. The Norse cosmos is not one where the gods make clean choices that lead to clean results. They make the choices they make, and the world they build contains its own ending, and the ending also contains a beginning.

Sigyn is still holding the bowl. Or she was. Until the chains broke.