Loki

“Then Loki took flight, and his feathered cloak thundered as he entered the land of the giants.” In the Marvel universe—a billion-dollar machine that has evolved from comics into blockbusters—the character of Loki is Thor’s half-brother, first his enemy and then his ally. His abilities as the ‘god of mischief’ have even earned him his very own TV series. Having lost our myths, we must seek them out in their form of capitalist entertainment, simulacra transformed into Lego figures. Beyond reflecting Disney’s commercial ambitions, Loki’s success can be interpreted as evidence that this figure from Norse folklore and mythology remains culturally vibrant centuries later, suggesting that humanity still seeks ambiguous figures, celestial anti-heroes, and tricksters capable – as Georges Dumézil writes – of being ‘ingenious confidants or fearsome pranksters’. Loki mocks the other gods. Loki is a god without a cult. Not even Dumézil found any traces of him during his stays in Scandinavia or in his lifelong research. Loki is sometimes a minor figure, and at other times the protagonist of founding myths in which he takes on ‘enormous, almost cosmic’ proportions. The ‘little mischievous god of the Scandinavians’ has a unique characteristic: he almost never acts for a specific reason, but for his own amusement; ‘he is the gods’ most precious friend and helper, and at the same time their worst enemy’. For some peoples he is ‘the civilising hero’; for others, ‘the trickster’. And why not both at the same time, asks the historian in this text, which has been revised over decades: Loki, now published in the Il ramo d’oro series by Adelphi – an analysis challenging the “arbitrary simplifications” surrounding this “rich and multifaceted” figure, drawing on “obscure and fragmentary” poems, and distancing itself from interpretative readings that seek to attribute Eastern and Christian influences. Loki, ‘father of the world-serpent’, is a being on the fringes of a superior intelligence.

Dumézil’s book, through its comparisons and interpretations of those who, before him, attempted to contextualise and explain Loki, becomes a perfect tool for understanding his method of analysing myths, illustrating the struggles between ‘the scepticism of philologists’ and ‘the imperialism of folklorists’. Accused by Carlo Ginzburg of “a barely concealed ideological sympathy for Nazi culture”, Dumézil – who was certainly close to a certain strand of the French right – nevertheless shows us just how free myths can be from ideological and political reinterpretations, and from those who always seek a material and historicist motive behind mythological figures. ‘Mythical thought’, writes the French scholar, ‘lies halfway between dreamlike and verbal thought, between the dream—with which it shares an illustrative, dramatic and generally symbolic character—and discourse, of which it possesses the lucid, articulate and, generally speaking, coherent nature’.

Georges Dumézil
, Loki
, Adelphi, 234 pp., 26 euros