The Loki Variations (eBook)

Introduction

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll never see a Marvel movie where Tom Hiddleston transforms into a mare to procreate with the horse of a giant stonemason, before giving birth to an eight-legged steed and gifting it to his father. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) version of Loki is just not the Norse god I grew up with. Neither is Luke, the isolated fire-starter from Diana Wynne Jones’s children’s novel Eight Days of Luke, nor the expositional plot-device personified by The Trickster/Archangel Gabriel from long-running TV series Supernatural, and certainly not the bratty sidekick Atreus in the God of War videogames. Contemporary popular culture is awash with countless adaptations, interpretations, re-imaginings, versions – variations, if you will – of the character of Loki from Norse mythology.

These variations on the Loki from legend (which is itself open to interpretation) tend to focus, variously, on some key aspects that are assumed to be core to who the god is; mischief, lies, evil, shapeshifting, gender fluidity, magic, hidden agendas, emotional outbursts, rebellion, humour, and psychopathy. In our shared consciousness Loki is simultaneously a hero, anti-hero, villain, and neutral observer. Norse gods Odin and Thor are usually connected in some way, too, although the sibling- and/or parent-child dynamics change depending on which Loki we are presented with. As is often the case with characters in the public domain (like Sherlock Holmes) and some who have been through several iterations over generations (like Doctor Who), every Loki variation is Someone’s Loki – every Loki variation is thus equally valid. Every Loki variation has a purpose, a function, a reason why they have been presented the way they have and a motive behind the story they’re a part of. Obviously, the main motives are to appeal to particular audiences and make money, but beyond that there are opportunities to talk about the environment (as in the Netflix series Ragnarok), gender and sexuality (as is increasingly, tentatively seen in Marvel’s comics, TV and movie output), and the power of faith (or lack thereof, as in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods).

Loki is often an unreliable narrator, but these variations can help us uncover many truths about our society, history, and culture. They can function as a tool to help explore the power of myth, queer theory, fandom, ritual, popular culture itself, and more.

I’m still conflicted, though. The Loki I grew up with was folklore, while the one that lives in my head now is a license for Disney to print money. I discovered my Loki in the mythology books in my school library; a mercurial godling who played the fool but didn’t suffer them. While not the most powerful Norse god, the Loki I was introduced to certainly wielded more influence and intelligence than most and rebelled against the constraints of convention. My Loki was felt in the background of the Viking-inspired Up Helly Aa fire festival in the Shetland parish I grew up in, with the ceremonial shield depicting Loki’s horse-child Sleipnir. Over the years though, I’ve lost a clear sense of my Loki from the library and their voice – it’s been gradually replaced by the omnipresence of the Marvel variations of Loki. I feel I need that time back, to rediscover the core of the cunning red-haired trickster I first met. Luckily, we have the time here, and as Loki says in Snorri Sturluson’s The Poetic Edda, ‘I intend to live for a good time yet…’1

How to unpack the Loki variations, then? We need to go back to the beginning, or, more accurately, a version of the retelling of the beginning, with what we know about Loki from Norse mythology. From the core Eddas Loki of the 13th century, who provides the earliest and most fully-formed variation we can reliably interrogate, we’ll move onto those that have appeared in pop culture in living memory, seeking out commonalities as well as distinct outliers. I’m interested in exploring what Loki, in any and all variations, can tell us from sociocultural perspectives – how can Loki help to contextualise and evidence how we understand contemporary society and our lived reality? How does Loki, specifically, and mythology and pop culture more broadly, connect how we understand ourselves with how we engage with others? Selfishly, my secondary hope is that in researching and writing this I can better understand the nature of the Norse influence in my own identity and reconcile how ingrained or invented the significance of Loki is to that.

I’m from Shetland, a group of islands in the North Sea, sitting to the far north of Scotland and west of Norway. Norse – or perhaps more accurately, Viking – imagery is everywhere in Shetland, in our schools and museums, our music and literature, and in our local businesses and tourism. Although UK citizens, Shetlanders can make genuine claims to ancient Nordic heritage, evidenced in the Old Norse retained in Shetland dialect and placenames,2 local traditions and folklore,3 and art and design.4

Like other Shetland children, I have grown up thinking that it was normal for homes to have decorative shields and axes on the wall. The way we internalise our distant Norse heritage is built around a caricature, in many respects, and so any deeper understanding and emotional investment relies on individual interest and study in the mythology, culture and history of the time. I do wonder whether we should be making more of a concerted effort to do this, as all too often the complex messages and questions behind Norse mythology are ignored in favour of simplified notions of heroes, villains, and monsters.

Popular culture is not just all the geeky stuff that many of us enjoy. In truth it encompasses a seemingly endless array of cultural objects, texts, practices, and beliefs; its forms are those that are dominant, common or far-reaching in everyday society and so are recognised and shared among us. By understanding pop culture as a contemporary folklore that we imbue with personal and shared meaning, we lay the groundwork for why Loki is particularly skilled in shape-shifting and resurrecting themselves across different genres and platforms. Pop culture is distinctly not high culture (which we might think of as forms that are exclusive and elitist, appreciated for their aesthetic and/or intellectual value), nor is it strictly class-based although it’s not typically associated with upper class cultural tastes. Pop culture takes many forms; television, cinema, music, fiction, comics, games, sports, news, fashion, technology, and in the activities and communication built around them – including slang and memes.5 Mass produced and commodified in most cases, many social and cultural thinkers of the 20th century – such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – were dismissive of popular/mass culture as a by-product of the commercialisation and lack of authenticity increasingly found in the consumerism enabled by the Western industrial revolution.6

What they missed (and others thankfully recognised), however, was that the production of pop culture doesn’t solely create profit – it creates connections between people in everyday life and cements relationships, establishes universal forms of language and shared purposes, and helps explain and maintain our identities. To truly understand the history and politics of society, one must understand popular culture. The ubiquity of pop culture means that it is in the escapism of a comic, or the characters in a TV show, or the lyrics of a song, that we encode the everyday human experience. Questions of power, ideology, family, and so much more, can be explored in the accessible cultural canons that we love, with impact and reach that the Tate galleries can only dream of.7 Cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote about how the encoding and decoding of pop culture materials is a process of meaningful communication, via forms such as TV news coverage, by which we create shared knowledge and perspectives as a kind of social project. Hall cites an example from essayist Roland Barthes, of the symbolism associated with a sweater. The sweater, as a mass-produced object, is simply a warm garment but also indicates the action of staying warm, and so further suggests cold weather or even the Winter season.8

Barthes’ approach is important in helping us unpack the Loki variations. In his book Mythologies, Barthes looks at how contemporary Western society has created its own modern myths in a series of essays on forms of popular culture ranging from wrestling to astrology, via washing powder and striptease.9 The more traditional purpose of mythology has been in guiding cultural interpretations of right/wrong and good/evil, offering cautionary tales and explaining everyday phenomena in ways that avoid complication. Over time the historical contexts in which myths have formed, and the representative ways that they have established, have increasingly taken on ideological powers in everyday discourse and found themselves reshaped to fit contemporary social and political narratives. Myths, historical or contemporary, are often a means by which a more conservative status quo can maintain dominance in our collective consciousness, and so it is in the telling and retelling of myths that our lived social reality is founded on values rather than facts.10

Here we find ourselves at the end of the beginning, appropriately...