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never leave the past behind by ~Kaiser-chanI love kid!Loki from the recent Journey Into Mystery comics so much and this is an awesome, evocative fanwork. So damn excited and nervous about the upcoming Everything Burns arc.
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Loge is diabolically satanic with Joker-ish overtones in this adaptation from the LA Opera.
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Adaptations of Loki:1852- presentI don't even know all these yet!
[ reblogged from skadisdottir ] [ tumblr entry ]
http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/norse-mythology
350+ books on Norse mythology listed here, mostly novels! I've read but a handful. Mama mia, I've got a lot of tracking down and reading to do. :)
EDIT: The list lied - there's considerably less here - but by no means comprehensive. A list for another post. From what I can see, there's a strong focus on fiction, which is what I'm after - reimaginings of and borrowings from, Norse mythology, often in a modern urban context, and if they feature the gods at all, they usually feature Loki as he's pretty damn good for adding colour or plot to a tale...
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D'Aulaires' book of Norse Myths - From the preface by Michael Chabon:
Ally and enemy, genius and failure; delightful and despicable, ridiculous and deadly, beautiful and hideous, hilarious and bitter, clever and foolish, Loki is the God of Nothing in Particular yet unmistakably of the ambiguous World Itself. It was in reading this book that I first felt the power of that ambiguity. Loki never turned up among the lists of Great Literary Heroes (or Villains) of Childhood, and yet he was my favorite character in the book that was for many years my favorite, a book whose subtitle might have been How Loki Ruined the World and Made it Worth Talking About. Loki was the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them. And as he cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it, he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.
I grew up in a time of mortal gods who knew, like Odin, that the world of marvels they had created was on the verge, through their own faithlessness and might, of Ragnarokk, a time when the best impulses of men and the worst were laid bare in Mississippi and Vietnam, when the suburban Midgard where I grew up was threatened - or so we were told - by frost-giants and fire-giants sworn to destroy it. And I guess I saw all of that reflected in this book. But if those parallels were there, then so was Loki, and not merely in his treachery and his urge to scheme and spoil. Loki was funny - he made the other gods laugh. In his fickleness and his fertile imagination he even brought pleasure to Odin, who with all his well-sipping and auto-asphyxiation knew too much ever to be otherwise amused. This was, in fact the reason why Odin had taken the great, foredoomed step of making Loki his blood brother - for the pleasure, pure and simple, of his company. Loki was the god of the irresistible gag, the gratuitous punchline, the improvised, half-baked solution - the God of the Eight-Year-Old Boy - and like all great jokers and improvisers, as often the butt and the perpetrator of his greatest stunts.
In the end, it was not the familiar darkness of the universe and of my human heart that bound me forever to this book and the nine worlds it contained. It was the bright thread of silliness, of mockery and self-mockery, of gods forced (repeatedly) to dress as women, and submit to the amorous attentions of stallions, and wrestle old ladies.
So many Norse mythology & Loki feels ♥ ♥ ♥
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Loki's Monstrous Brood, from D'Aulaires' book of Norse Myths, 1967.
Loki, the God of the Jotun Race
When Odin was still young - before he had hanged himself on Yggdrasil and drunk from the Well of Wisdom - his eyes had fallen on a jotun named Loki. He was graceful and handsome, not uncouth and misshapen like most of his race. Many jotuns could change themselves in wolves or eagles, but Loki could take on any shape he wished, even female ones. Nimble-witted and bright, full of clever ideas, Loki was like a flickering, shining flame, and Odin was so taken with him that he asked him to be his blood brother. Loki gladly accepted the offer. So each cut a small vein in his arm and, letting their blood flow together, they solemnly swore to be as true brothers from then on. They would stand by each other, defend each other, and never accept a favor unless it was also offered to the other.
Thus Loki, the jotun, became one of the Aesir and moved up to Asgard, where the great and holy ones welcomed him. Thor especially liked to have cunning Loki at his side, for Thor was not quite as quick-thinking as he was fast-acting. Loki helped him out of many a scrape, but he also got him into some.
Odin gave Loki one of the goddesses, Sigunn, for his wife. She was loving and kind and very patient with her fickle husband. But in Jotunheim, Loki had another wife, the dreadful ogress Angerboda. She was a better match for him, for, as the Aesir soon found out, Loki was really vicious and spiteful. He loved to play mean tricks, and it didn't matter to him whom he tricked. Neither Aesir nor jotuns could trust him, and he was always causing trouble.
But Loki was so quick-witted and honey-tongued that the Aesir always forgave him his misdeeds. Besides, Odin's blood flowed in his veins and no one dared to harm him.
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