The Binding of Loki

At a Glance

• Central figures: Loki, the trickster god of Asgard; Sigyn, his loyal wife; Vali and Narfi, his sons; and the assembled Aesir led by Odin, Thor, and Tyr.
• Setting: Asgard and a deep cavern at the edges of the nine worlds, following the death of Baldr.
• The turn: After Loki is caught hiding as a salmon in a mountain river, the gods bind him with chains woven from the entrails of his own son Narfi, and suspend a venom-dripping serpent above his face.
• The outcome: Loki remains bound in the cavern until Ragnarok, with Sigyn holding a bowl above him to catch the poison; each time she empties it, the venom burns him and his convulsions shake the earth.
• The legacy: The earthquakes that shake the world are said to be Loki twisting against his chains - and at Ragnarok, those chains will break.

Loki had done many things that required forgiveness. He had handed Idunn to the giants and stolen her back. He had cut off Sif’s golden hair and replaced it with finer gold. He had schemed and meddled and wriggled out of consequences that should have killed him. But the death of Baldr was different. Baldr was Odin’s son, the best-loved of the Aesir, and Loki had put the mistletoe dart in blind Hodr’s hand. When Baldr fell, there was no talking his way clear of it. Loki ran.

He shifted shape across the nine worlds - hid in rivers, buried himself in mountain rock, moved as wind and water - but Odin’s sight follows everything, and the gods’ patience was not yet spent.

The Salmon in the Mountain River

At the edge of Midgard, Loki took the form of a salmon and dropped into the cold current of a mountain river. It was as good a hiding place as any. Fish have no faces and leave no tracks.

The gods found him anyway. With Kvasir’s counsel to guide them, they wove a fishing net and dragged it across the river, blocking every lane of water. Loki felt the net coming and did the only thing left - he leaped, arcing up over the mesh and out toward open water.

Thor stood at the bank. He caught Loki mid-leap, gripping him by the tail with both hands. Loki thrashed. It did him no good. From that moment, it is said, all salmon carry slender, tapered tails - marked by the grip of Thor’s fist.

They bound him and dragged him back to Asgard. His judgment was waiting.

The Fate of Vali and Narfi

The gods were not content to punish only Loki. Punishment, when the Aesir meant it, reached into everything around the condemned.

Odin turned his eye on Loki’s sons. Vali, one of them, was transformed into a wolf on the spot - his mind gone, replaced by blind animal fury. He turned on his own brother. He tore Narfi apart.

The gods gathered what remained of Narfi and took his entrails. They worked them into chains - not iron, not rope, but kin-flesh, which binds harder than either. With these they would hold Loki. There was a logic to it that the Aesir did not bother to explain. Loki had used his blood to cause death. His blood would now hold him.

Sigyn, Loki’s wife, did not leave. She stood apart and watched them bind her husband. She said nothing that the sources record. She stayed.

The Cavern and the Serpent

They took Loki deep underground, to a cavern cut off from light and wind. Three great stones had been set there. They stretched him across them and fixed Narfi’s chains around him - one across his shoulders, one across his hips, one across his legs. He lay against the cold rock, pinned.

Then came the serpent. The gods fixed it to the ceiling above his face, head down, fangs bare, so that the venom dripped in a steady fall. Not a killing venom. Something that burned and went on burning.

Sigyn took her place beside him. She held a bowl up to catch the drops. As long as she held it, he was spared. She held it for a long time.

But the bowl filled. When it did, she had to step away and empty it, and in that gap - seconds, not long - the venom hit his skin. Those were the moments when Loki screamed. Those screams traveled up through the rock and into the earth above, and the earth moved. Whole mountains felt it. The ground cracked in places far from any cavern, for no reason anyone above ground could see.

That is where the earthquakes come from.

Ragnarok

Loki lay in the dark and waited. He was not calm about it - the convulsions, the screaming, Sigyn’s bowl, the endless cycle. But somewhere beneath the pain was something else. He knew, as the gods knew, what was coming.

Ragnarok would arrive. The signs were already settled: Fimbulwinter, the wolf Fenrir swallowing the sun, Jormungandr rising from the deep sea. When the earth cracked open at last - not from Loki’s screaming but from the sheer weight of ending - his chains would break with it.

He would walk out of the cavern into a cold sky. He would take the dead from Hel’s halls and sail with them on Naglfar, the ship built from the fingernails and toenails of corpses, and he would steer it toward the final shore. The fire-jotnar of Muspelheim would come from the south. Fenrir would run. Jormungandr would crawl out of the ocean.

At the end of it, Loki would meet Heimdall - the watchman who had never slept, who had seen and heard everything from his post on Bifrost. They would kill each other. Both of them, dead on the field, the trickster and the watcher, settling whatever account was between them.

The chains still hold. Sigyn still holds the bowl. The earth still shakes when she empties it.