Oh man, your knowledge of Old Norse literature and culture is really spotty, anon.
Aside from Snorra Edda, the only text that has Loki being explicitly “cast out” is the Lokasenna. The thing about the Lokasenna is that it operates within the constraints of a particular poetic genre; just like there are a certain set of constraints and expectations for sonnets, haikus, Greek tragedies, and the like, so too are there expectations and constraints for the senna.
In Performing Definitions: Two Genres of Insult in Old Norse Literature, Karen Swenson argues that a senna is a genre that pits insider against outsider, with the “outsider” usually representing the feminine, queer, or “monstrous” Other who comes in contact with and challenges the heroic group. The point of the senna is that this challenger forces the masculine “inside group” to recognize the Otherness among them or in them and redefine themselves against it, clearing themselves of the accusations and expelling Otherness in one way or another.
When discussing the Lokasenna in particular, Swenson writes:
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Lokasenna…presents the sexually ambivalent Loki as representing the ‘sacré’ and threatening the community’s sense of self. Loki, the strange god who both is and is not a member of the community, who as double monstrueux is both necessary to and excluded from the community, serves well to embody the forces of and to voice the position of marginality” (72).
She goes on to explain that when Þórr forcefully expels Loki from the hall, brandishing Mjöllnir and yelling over and over again that he is a “queer being” (rög vættr), the Gods are literally creating a wall between the feminine and the masculine, the Self and the Other, and all of the other dichotomies that Loki undermined. Just as the senna genre demands, they are reestablishing boundaries by silencing a marginal figure.
It is important to note that Loki is not punished for killing Baldr in this text, and that the storyline leading up to Loki’s binding in Snorra Edda only draws this conclusion based on stanzas 33-35 of Völuspá: a narrative reading of these stanzas as related that has since been questioned many times. The truth of the matter is, with the appended nature of Lokasenna’s epilogue and the holes in Snorri’s reading of the Völuspá stanzas, we don’t know exactly WHY Loki is bound. What we do know, however, is that he is expelled from the hall at the end of Lokasenna for questioning the other Gods and likening them to himself. If we accept Swenson’s reading of senna (which I do), we realize that Loki is expelled from the hall because he is too close to “Otherness” for the other Gods to accept, and rather than recognizing the flexible nature of these categories they, in this poem at least, choose to force him out completely instead.
It is for this reason that many “outsiders” in modern Heathenry, particularly queer “outsiders” (as the vast majority of the insults against Loki in Lokasenna deal with his queerness) have gravitated to him as a God. He occupies a marginal space, and suffers for it. Personally, I do not find it the least bit insulting to be connected with a God who has endured insults and hardship because he does not comply to sexual and gender expectations. Even if Lokasenna were more than just a formulaic genre poem, it is undeniable that Loki is “outlawed,” as you say (though this verdict is never pronounced) because he is different. If that weren’t the case, why would he have been chased from the hall with charges of ragr behavior being forced upon him?
I am fairly confident that the anon has not read any Icelandic sagas wherein feuding is a major theme or an outlaw is a main character, and if they have it seems not to have increased their understanding of these things at all. The anonymous message is more characteristic of the dogmatized personal fantasies of early modern American heathens than anything that comes from actual Icelandic literature. This is why reading sagas is important for heathens. It is my experience that too many people scan them hunting for remnants of paganism to cherry-pick but it’s absolutely necessary to read the stories on their own terms, whether or not there is even a trace of explicitly pagan belief, if there is any chance of understanding the mindset that produced them (which, by the way, is still highly limited because we know very little about the history of transmission of these stories prior to them being written down, long after the events on which they are based).
It is my interpretation that Loki was not outlawed at all. If he was, the Æsir would not be able to implicate his (otherwise barely mentioned) children in their vengeance. The story very closely follows patterns of feuding in sagas like Njáls saga. The “negative reciprocity” that permeates Icelandic feuding is extremely present in the ragnarök story; Loki’s binding is symbolically equivalent to his disruption of the feast in Lokasenna, and the Æsir are only able to get vengeance on Loki through Narfi and Váli because of Loki’s role in the death of Baldr (in both cases the actor does not kill directly but rather causes to be killed indirectly), but if Loki were actually outlawed and therefore removed from the system of reciprocity, the death of his son would have been plain old cold-blooded murder instead of a measured counterpoint, and whichever Áss was responsible would themselves be subject to outlawry. Sigyn also would not be allowed to help him. To me, the story only makes sense if Loki was NOT outlawed.
This is actually one of the problems with the “innangarðs/útangarðs” dichotomy. There are families of jötnar who are no less a part of the society in which the Æsir participate than the Æsir themselves, but with different sets of alliances and responsibilities, and the family ties must be recompiled for each individual rather than, say, accepting Óðinn as the head of the family and deriving the social roles of the rest of the Æsir by comparison to him. To take the Æsir and their closest allies as a cohesive and self-enclosed “society” does not work — the complex and nuanced social network has a tight cluster around Óðinn’s immediate family and we identify this cluster as the Æsir but the social topography looks very different from the perspective of Óðinn and, say, Skaði. That this was true of human society is painfully obvious in the sagas where people sometimes seriously have trouble figuring out who they’re supposed to side with (not to mention Skarphéðinn Njálsson killing Höskuldr Þráinsson, his foster-brother…).
It also goes (or rather, should go) without saying that this only applies to Snorri and the prose epilogue of Lokasenna, which some scholars believe post-dates Snorri’s Edda anyway. As Lokavinr said, the actual poetic sources on ragnarök are extremely fragmented. We cannot take it for granted that Snorri had any more than the same fragments that we have, or if he did that it did not develop in post-Christianization Iceland.
By the way, Saxo’s version of the story of the death of Baldr, wherein Loki is not even mentioned, seems to have entered the general pool of common knowledge, but I’m not sure if this has: the story that Saxo tells was already attested before him, in Chronicon Lethrense (‘The Lejre Chronicle’), which was probably written before Snorri was born. I don’t know whether Saxo used this as a source or whether they are two separate witnesses to a tradition. Saxo usually has to be treated with caution because he clearly innovated a lot, but having another, earlier example of the Baldr and Hǫðr story goes a long way.
There is something which is EXTREMELY important to keep in mind when reading Snorri’s version of the story. His task was to take fragments of an eroding mythology and fashion them into a cohesive narrative. I am of the opinion that he doesn’t seem to have intentionally invented much, but he really obviously unintentionally invented a lot.
I cannot recommend highly enough Torfi Tulinius’ The Matter of the North on the likelihood that, first of all, Snorri wrote Egils saga, and second, that it was heavily shaped by autobiographical themes. The Edda would then have to be read keeping the same thing in mind. Snorri literally went to war against his own family. Considering what he had to work with — Vǫluspá, Baldrs draumur, maybe the poetic parts of Lokasenna, bits and pieces of other poems like Vafþrúðnismál… it’s really only natural that he would understand these things in terms of a struggle between two parts of a single extended family, and also that he would portray one side of this conflict in a much better light than the other.
This is to say nothing of the possibility of Christian influence on the binding of Loki and the damn-near indisputable Christian influence on Vǫluspá.
Further reading:
- Anatoly Liberman – “Some Controversial Aspects of the Myth of Baldr“ (free PDF)
- John McKinnell – “Völuspá and the Feast of Easter” (free PDF)
- Torfi Tulinius – The Matter of the North: The Rise of Literary Fiction in Thirteenth-Century Iceland (Google books entry)
- William Ian Miller – Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Google books entry – no free PDF unfortunately. This is THE book on feud).
- William Ian Miller – ”Justifying Skarphéðinn: of Pretext and Politics in the Icelandic Bloodfeud“ (JSTOR link, can be read online by logging in with a free account).
great post, I’d add that we also without evening thinking interpret everything within human constructs of steady linear time. Even if Loki were ‘cast out’ was, is, will, he be? Maybe it’s the counterpoint to change that occurs in the split second before the change.
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