Loki

In the Old Norse corpus Loki is described as the son of the jötunn Fárbauti and the female figure Laufey (sources vary in how Laufey is characterized), making him kin to jötnar by birth while he lives among and participates in the society of the Æsir in Asgard. By the jötunn Angrboða he fathers Hel, Fenrir, and Jörmungandr; these offspring are tied to the cosmos and the prophecies of Ragnarök. The texts present Loki as liminal: born of giant stock, resident among gods, and a father of monstrous beings whose destinies intersect with the end‑time events.

Loki is repeatedly described as a shape‑changer rather than possessing a single fixed form. Attested transformations in the mythic sources include a salmon, a mare (in which form he is impregnated and later gives birth to the eight‑legged horse Sleipnir), a fly, and possibly an elderly woman named Þökk in one narrative context. As a result, surviving narratives do not fix a single stable physical appearance but emphasize mutability and disguise.

Primary abilities attested in the Poetic and Prose Edda materials are shapeshifting and persuasive, insulting speech (as in the flyting of Lokasenna). Loki repeatedly uses cunning and deceit: he alternately helps the gods (taking part in their affairs at feasts and in halls) and undermines them, most consequentially engineering the death of Baldr. He fathers monstrous offspring and, after Baldr's death, is bound by the gods (Váli binds him with the entrails of one of his sons) while a serpent's venom is placed above him; his wife Sigyn collects the venom in a bowl, and when she must empty it his writhing is given as a mythic explanation for earthquakes. The scholarship summarized in the sources also discusses etymological proposals linking his name to Germanic roots related to loops/knots (*luk-), a linguistic hypothesis that some commentators connect interpretively to motifs of entanglement in his narratives (presented as scholarly interpretation rather than a narrated mystical power).