The Binding of Loki · Norse Mythology Sleep Story · 3 Hours

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight we tell the story of the trickster who finally went too far.

Of a feast in a hall lit by gold, where the gods of the north gathered to drink the ale of the sea-giant Ægir.

Of one uninvited guest who walked in alone, and would not leave until he had said every cruel and true thing he had ever been holding back.

Of the words spoken at that table — which the gods could not, afterward, pretend they had not heard.

Of a mountain hall with four doors, where one being sat alone, watching every direction at once, knowing it was only a matter of time. Of a salmon in a waterfall.

Of the first fishing net ever made — and of how it was burned, and how the gods rebuilt it from the ash. Of a hand that closed around a slippery tail in the dark water.

Of the cave the gods carried him to. Of three stones.

Of a wife named Sigyn, who held a bowl above her husband's face for the rest of time, because what else was there for her to do.

Of the earthquakes that mortals would feel for the next thousand years, and would not know were one being's pain. We are telling this story tonight from three places.

From Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, especially the fiftieth chapter of Gylfaginning, which immediately follows the chapter we told you last time — the chapter of Baldr's death.

The two stories belong together. Snorri knew it. The poets before him knew it. Tonight we are telling you what comes next.

We are telling it also from Lokasenna — Loki's flyting — one of the oldest and strangest poems of the Poetic Edda. A poem made almost entirely of insults.

A poem in which the gods of the north sit at a table together, and one being walks among them, and speaks out loud the things that none of them, in all the centuries before or since, had ever spoken.

And we are telling it from the Vǫluspá, the seeress's prophecy — which knows already, from the beginning of the world, that Loki will be bound, and that Sigyn will sit beside him, and that he will not stay bound forever.

The Vǫluspá knows where this ends. It ends with a ship.

Where the surviving sources go quiet — and there are several places where they do — we will tell you we are imagining. We will not pretend otherwise.

The truth is that almost no one knows what Sigyn was thinking. The truth is that we do not know what the cave looked like.

The truth is that we do not know what Loki's face did when the venom dripped. But we know what happened. We know what the bowl was for.

And we know that one of the gods who fixed the serpent above his face was Skaði — the mountain-bride whose father, Þjazi, the gods had killed long before, in the story we told you of Iðunn's apples.

Skaði had not forgotten. None of them had. This is the story of the night the trickster ran out of room. Settle in. Let your shoulders drop.

We begin at the threshold of a hall by the sea, where the gods are arriving for a feast.

Chapter One. The Hall by the Sea. The hall of Ægir stood at the edge of the world. Ægir was a jǫtunn — but not the kind of jǫtunn the gods feared. He was a sea-giant.

A keeper of the deep places.

His hall stood on an island where the western edge of Miðgarðr fell away into the ocean, and the surf came in slow against the dark rock, and the stars at night were so close to the water that they seemed to be floating on it.

Ægir had a wife named Rán, who walked the waves and gathered drowned men in a net. Ægir had nine daughters who were the waves themselves.

Ægir, in his way, was kin to the gods. He had been a friend of theirs as long as anyone could remember. And Ægir brewed ale. He brewed the best ale in the nine worlds.

He brewed it in a cauldron so vast that Þórr himself had once had to go to the giant Hymir to fetch a bigger one for the brewing.

The cauldron Þórr brought back, by force, from Hymir's hall, was the cauldron Ægir used.

And the ale that came from it was the ale the gods drank when they wished to drink the finest ale that had ever been made.

So when Ægir invited the gods to his hall for a great feast, every god who could come, came. Óðinn came.

Þórr did not come — he was away in the east that night, killing trolls, as he often was. But almost everyone else came.

Bragi came, with his wife Iðunn — the goddess of the apples we told you about, the goddess of the gods' youth.

Týr came, the one-handed god, who had given his right hand to the wolf so long ago.

Njǫrðr came, the sea-god of the Vanir, and his son Freyr, and his daughter Freyja — Freyja with her golden necklace, who knew how to weep.

Heimdallr came, the bright watcher of the bridge. Skaði came — the mountain bride who had taken a husband from among the gods, long ago, for the killing of her father.

Sif came, Þórr's wife, with her hair of gold. And the lesser gods came too — Gefjun, the goddess of unmarried girls. The servants Byggvir and Beyla, who attended Freyr.

And Vidar, who said almost nothing. They came from every direction.

They came across Bifrǫst, and they came across the water, and a few of them came by paths that the sources do not name.

They came in their finest cloaks, and they came carrying nothing but themselves, because at Ægir's table no weapons would be allowed. That was the rule of the feast.

The hall, when they entered, was not lit by fire. It was lit by gold.

Ægir had set out gold around the walls of the hall — the way another host might have set out torches.

Gold that glowed of its own accord, the way that some gold in the old stories did. The gold lit the long tables. The gold lit the carved beams of the ceiling.

The gold lit the faces of the gods as they entered and took their seats. There was no smoke. There was no flame.

There was only a soft warm light, everywhere, that fell on everyone equally and did not move. It was beautiful. And there was a rule.

The rule of Ægir's feast was the rule that all old halls had. At Ægir's table there would be peace. No weapon would be drawn inside the hall.

No old quarrel would be raised inside the hall. No insult would be given.

The hall was a place out of the world, a place where the gods and their friends would simply drink, and eat, and tell stories, and let the long winter night pass without trouble.

That was the rule. Everyone knew it. Everyone honored it. The gods had honored it for as long as anyone could remember. And the ale was being poured by two servants.

They were called Fimafengr and Eldir. They were not gods. They were servants Ægir kept in his hall.

Fimafengr was the one who moved through the hall with the pitcher, refilling the cups, smiling, never spilling, never spoken to but appreciated.

Eldir was the one at the door. Eldir stood at the threshold and met each new arrival and took their cloak and welcomed them in. The gods sat. The ale flowed.

The hall warmed with conversation. Bragi told a story. Iðunn laughed at something Freyja said. Týr — the one-handed — drank slowly with his left hand and listened.

Njǫrðr nodded over his cup.

Skaði, who did not love feasts, was nonetheless smiling, because Ægir's hall was beautiful, and the ale was good, and the long night was at last warm.

Outside, the sea was very dark. Outside, the stars were very close. And outside, on the path that led up to Ægir's hall from the shore, someone was walking.

Someone who had not been invited. Someone who, in the long memory of the gods, did not need to be invited. Eldir, at the door, looked up. He saw who was coming.

He set his hand on the doorframe, the way a servant does when something has begun to go wrong, and a servant cannot yet say what.

Chapter Two. The Seat He Claimed. Loki came up the path alone. He was dressed plainly. He did not look like someone who had come a long way.

He did not look angry, or hurried, or grand.

He looked the way Loki always looked when something was about to happen — slightly amused, as if he had a small private joke that he might choose to share with you, or might not.

His auburn hair was longer than it had been when we last told you of him. His face was thinner.

He had been moving in the world a long time, since the day Baldr fell in the courtyard, and the gods had begun, slowly, to suspect. He had been moving carefully.

He had not, yet, been caught. And tonight he had come to Ægir's hall. Eldir, at the door, did not let him in. Eldir was a servant. He had no authority.

But he was also a being who had been told, by his master, that this feast was for the gods of Asgard, and that the night was to be a peaceful one, and that the doors of the hall were to be opened to those who came in friendship.

Eldir, looking at Loki, did not see friendship. Eldir saw a being walking toward him whose eyes already knew what they were going to do.

"You are not invited tonight," Eldir said, gently. "Stand aside, friend. Walk on." Loki considered him.

Loki said many things to Eldir that night — short things, sharp things, things that the poem Lokasenna preserves for us — about what was being said inside, and about how he had a right to be there, and about how Eldir had better step aside before something he did not want to happen, happened.

Eldir replied to him in kind.

The two of them stood at the doorway, talking, the gold from inside falling out onto the path between them, and inside the hall the gods went on drinking, not yet knowing.

And then Fimafengr — the smiling one, with the pitcher — came out to the threshold to see what was keeping Eldir. Loki killed him there. The poem does not say with what.

The poem does not say how. The poem says only that Loki killed Fimafengr at the door of the feast, on the threshold of the hall, with the gold falling over them both.

And inside the hall, the gods heard it. They heard what they did not yet understand they had heard — a small sound, a wet sound, a falling. They came to the door.

They came pouring out, Óðinn in front, and they saw Loki standing over the servant's body, and the gods drove Loki out of the hall, out into the dark, out down the path toward the sea.

They drove him out without ceremony. They did not even speak to him. They simply turned him out, because there was nothing to say. He had broken the rule of the feast.

He had broken it in the worst way it could be broken. There was no question of his continuing inside. The gods went back in. They closed the door behind them.

And they tried to begin the feast again — to set down their cups and pretend that what had happened at the threshold had not, in some small way, ended the night.

They could not quite. The light from the gold was the same. The ale in the cups was the same. But something at the heart of the hall had gone slightly cold.

They knew it had. They went on anyway. What else could they do. Outside, on the dark path, Loki turned around. He came back. He came back not as a stranger.

He came back as a god — as he had every right to do.

Because Loki, in the long ago, before any of this, before Baldr, before the dart, before the chase that had not yet begun — Loki had sworn a blood-oath with Óðinn himself.

The two of them had mixed their blood. They had become brothers.

And the rule of the old north was the rule that no man, and no god, would ever drink at a feast unless his blood-brother could drink beside him too.

It was a rule older than the hall. It was a rule older than Ægir. It was a rule Óðinn could not refuse. Loki walked back up the path. Loki opened the door.

And Loki, standing in the doorway with the dark sea behind him, said to the assembled gods of Asgard, quietly: I am the blood-brother of Óðinn.

I will drink at this table tonight. Or Óðinn will drink at no table tonight, ever again. The hall was silent. The gold was still warm.

Óðinn — old Óðinn, who had stood at the well of Mímir and had given an eye for wisdom, who had hanged himself from Yggdrasill for nine nights, who had known this day was coming since before any of them — Óðinn looked at his son Vidar.

And Óðinn said: rise. Give Loki your seat. Pour him a cup. The blood-oath is the blood-oath. He will drink with us tonight. Vidar rose. He poured Loki a cup.

He set the cup before the seat he had been sitting in. And he stepped aside, silent, the way Vidar always was, and let Loki take the place where Vidar had been.

Loki sat down. He took up the cup. He drank from it slowly, looking at every god at the table one by one.

And then he set the cup down, and he opened his mouth, and he began.

Chapter Three. What He Said to Bragi and Iðunn. The first one he turned to was Bragi. Bragi was the god of poetry. He was Iðunn's husband.

He had a long silver-gold beard and gentle hands and he had spent his entire life among the bright halls of the gods, drinking their ale and singing their stories and making them feel that the songs the world told about them were songs the world remembered.

Bragi was the god whose voice carried across the long mead-benches. Bragi had never lifted a weapon. Bragi had never had to.

Loki looked at Bragi and said: Hail to all the gods, except to you. Bragi was silent for a moment. Bragi did not know what to say to this.

He had not expected to be the first one Loki spoke to.

He had been preparing — every god at that table, in the breath after Loki had taken his seat, had been preparing — for Loki to look across the hall and find them.

To find their face.

To find the worst thing they had ever done and to say it out loud at this table where the gold was still warm and the ale was still good and the rule of peace had been broken once already tonight.

Bragi had not thought it would be him. Bragi tried to be generous.

Bragi offered Loki a horse from his stable, and a sword from his hall, and a ring from his arm — gifts, the way a host would give gifts, to settle the quarrel before it began.

Loki rejected the gifts. Loki said that Bragi was no warrior. Loki said that Bragi was a bench-decorator. A man who sat down. A man who hid behind other men's swords.

The poets of the old north would have said it harder than I can — there is a particular phrase in Lokasenna here that translates roughly to that Bragi was a coward, and that any time anyone needed something done, Bragi was the last one to volunteer.

Bragi heard this. Bragi stood up. Bragi said that if they had been outside the hall, he would have answered Loki for this. He said that they were not outside the hall.

He said that the rule of the feast held him from doing what he would have done if they had been on any field anywhere else in the nine worlds. Loki smiled.

And then Iðunn — Iðunn whose apples the gods had nearly lost, whom we told you about three episodes ago — Iðunn put her hand on her husband's arm. She said: please.

Bragi. Sit down. He is not worth this. Please. Loki turned to her. He looked at Iðunn.

He looked at the small soft face of the goddess of youth and renewal, the goddess who held the apples that kept the gods of the world from aging into death.

He looked at her and he said — and what he said was unsayable. What he said was that Iðunn had embraced the man who had killed her own brother.

That she had wrapped her arms around her brother's killer. That she of all the gods at this table was the one whose own kin had been spilled, and who had then forgotten.

The hall — the hall did not move. Iðunn did not answer. Iðunn had no answer. Whether what Loki said was true is a question that the surviving sources do not answer.

The Eddas do not tell us who Iðunn's brother was, or what happened to him, or whose arms killed him. The Eddas have lost that part of the story.

The Lokasenna preserves Loki's accusation and Iðunn's silence — and nothing else. We can read it as a wound the old north knew but the modern world has lost.

We can read it as a wound Loki invented in that moment and that no one knew how to deny. Iðunn lowered her hand from her husband's arm. Bragi sat back down.

He did not look at his wife. And the gods around the table understood, finally, that this was what the rest of the night was going to be.

That Loki was not going to throw stones at glass. That Loki was going to throw stones at the soft tender private heart of each one of them in turn.

That the rule of the feast — the rule that said no old quarrel — was being broken, not from outside, but from one of their own.

That the gods of Asgard were, tonight, going to be made to listen to their own buried things, said out loud, at a table where they could not stand and walk away.

Some of them had wondered, in the silence after Iðunn dropped her hand, whether they should rise and leave. None of them did.

You do not, when a thing like this begins, rise and leave. You sit. You listen. You wait to see whose turn is next.

You hope, in a small ungenerous corner of yourself, that yours will not be the worst. Loki turned, slowly, to the next god.

Chapter Four. The Old Wounds. He turned to Gefjun. Gefjun was the goddess of unmarried girls.

She was, in the old north, the patron of women who had not yet given themselves to anyone. She was a quiet goddess. The sources tell us little about her.

We know she had once ploughed an island free from the body of Sweden, using four giant sons in the shape of oxen, and we know that she walked among virgins and watched over them.

We know that she was kind. We know that in the brightness of the Asgard halls, she had a small and gentle place.

Loki looked at her, across the table, and said: I know about the youth. Gefjun's face did not change. She did not look up. Loki said: I know about the necklace.

I know what you gave for it. I know which youth gave it to you, and what you gave him in return, that he might give the necklace to you.

I know what your hand did under your cloak that night, Gefjun, when the bright lamp was burning low. I know. There is no other source for this specific accusation.

The Lokasenna preserves it; no other Eddic text confirms a youth and a necklace ever traded hands at Gefjun's bedside.

What the old sources do say of Gefjun is that pattern we mentioned a moment ago — the ploughing of the island, the night with King Gylfi.

The bargain of the body for the land. So the shape of the accusation is not foreign to her.

The shape of the accusation is something the old north could have believed of Gefjun.

But the specifics — the youth, the necklace, the lamp burning low — those are Loki's alone.

Whether they were a real wound the old north remembered, or a real wound Loki invented in the moment, or a slight twisting of the Gylfi story to make a familiar shape feel like a private hurt — that we cannot tell you.

Gefjun did not deny it.

The gods of the table, looking at the small quiet goddess of unmarried women, suddenly were not sure what they had been told before, and what they had not. Óðinn spoke.

Old Óðinn, the All-father, the one who had given an eye, the one who had hung himself from the great tree for nine nights, the one who had brewed war and wisdom — Óðinn said: Loki, stop.

He said it gently. He did not raise his voice. He simply said: stop. You are doing a thing that does not need to be done tonight. Loki turned to Óðinn.

And Loki said: you have given victory in battle to the worse warrior, all-father. Do not pretend otherwise.

I have stood beside you when you gave your favor to the man who did not deserve it, and you took your favor from the man who did.

I have seen which judgments of yours were just, and which were not. I have stood at the back of every battle you have judged, and I have known. So have you.

Do not lecture me about what does and does not need to be done tonight. Óðinn looked at him.

Óðinn — and this is the part of Lokasenna that the modern reader, when they meet it, cannot quite forget — Óðinn did not answer about the battles.

What Óðinn said instead was: Loki, you were eight winters underground as a milkmaid. You bore children there. You took the form of a woman.

Do not lecture ME about what is and is not shameful for a god to have done. The hall, for a moment, did not breathe.

What Óðinn was saying was that Loki, in the long ago, had taken on the shape of a woman. Had lived as a woman. Had borne children, the way women bear children.

The sources — Snorri elsewhere, the Eddas in fragments — confirm at least part of this.

Loki had, at one point, transformed himself into a mare and borne the eight-legged horse Sleipnir to a stallion.

Loki had crossed the line that the old north had between male and female, and had borne, from his own body, a child of that crossing.

Sleipnir was the horse Óðinn rode now. Óðinn rode Sleipnir to every battle. Óðinn rode Sleipnir to every council of the worlds.

Sleipnir had eight legs because of what Loki had done. What Óðinn was saying, in that hall, was that Loki had been a mother.

And Loki, who in any other quarrel would have laughed at this — Loki who had laughed at this, in lesser quarrels, before — Loki this time did not laugh.

Loki said to Óðinn: and you, all-father. You who have practiced seiðr — the magic the old north called woman's magic. The magic of foresight and influence.

The magic that no man among the gods practices because it is shameful for a man to practice it. You have practiced it. I have seen you.

You have whispered into the runes the way only women whisper. You have danced the dance that only women dance. You have done with magic what only women do.

Óðinn lowered his cup. Óðinn said: I have. The hall heard the all-father admit it.

The hall heard Óðinn, the highest of the gods, the one who held the spear Gungnir and rode the eight-legged horse — heard him say, at his own table, that yes, he had practiced the woman's magic.

He had whispered into the runes. He had crossed the same line Loki had crossed.

And then Frigg — Frigg, who had walked the worlds asking every living thing not to harm her son — Frigg spoke. Frigg said: husband. Do not give him this.

Do not give him your old secrets here. He is not worth them. Loki turned to Frigg.

He looked at the goddess whose son had died, only a season before, on a courtyard in Asgard, with a small mistletoe dart in his chest.

He looked at the goddess who had walked the entire world asking each rock and each plant to spare her son. He looked at her and he said: Frigg.

When Óðinn was banished, long ago, and his throne stood empty, you took his brothers Vili and Vé into your bed. Both of them. You did not wait.

You did not wait for your husband.

You took his brothers into the place that was his place, and you held them there, and you let them have what they wanted, the way a wife does. I know this.

The whole hall knows this. The whole world knows this. Frigg sat very still. Frigg did not answer. The sources are silent about whether Loki's accusation was true.

There is a fragment in one source — only one — that suggests Óðinn was once exiled by his brothers, and that Frigg did, in his absence, share his throne with the brothers who had taken it.

The fragment is unclear. The fragment may be a misremembering. The fragment may be Loki's invention. But Frigg, in the Lokasenna, does not deny it.

Frigg, in the Lokasenna, looks at Loki and looks away. And then Frigg spoke. Not loudly. Not in anger. The way a mother speaks when she has nothing left to lose.

Frigg said: Loki.

If my son Baldr were sitting at this table tonight — if my son Baldr were at this feast with the rest of us — you would not be allowed to leave this hall alive.

You would not be allowed to finish your cup. You would not be allowed another breath at the gods' table.

My son Baldr is the only god in all of Asgard who would have stopped what you are doing tonight by standing up and saying no. The hall, for a moment, almost relaxed.

Almost.

It almost felt, for a breath, like a normal thing — a mother speaking the name of her dead son to remind the room that loss had been suffered here, that even Loki should have the grace to be quiet in the face of it.

Then Loki spoke. Loki said: Frigg. Do you want to know why your son Baldr is not sitting at this table? Frigg looked at him.

Loki said: do you want to know why Baldr did not ride into the hall this evening? Why he is not laughing at his father's side?

Why his mother walks the worlds with red around her eyes? Frigg did not answer. Loki said: it was my doing, Frigg. It was me.

I was the one who learned that you had missed a plant in your walking. I was the one who found the mistletoe west of Valhǫll and shaped it into a dart.

I was the one who put the dart into the hand of the brother who could not see. I was the one who guided Hǫðr's arm.

I am the reason you no longer see your son ride into this hall. I am the reason. Me. The hall was silent.

The hall — and this is the moment the whole Lokasenna has been building toward — the hall heard Loki, at the gods' own table, in front of every god who had ever loved Baldr, say plainly that he had killed him.

The thing the gods had suspected. The thing they had said quietly to each other since the funeral on the great ship Hringhorni.

The thing no one had dared accuse him of in public. Loki had just said it himself. The Lokasenna preserves this moment as stanza twenty-eight. The poem is unambiguous.

Loki does not hedge. Loki does not soften. Loki tells Frigg that he is the reason her son is dead, and he tells her at the table where she cannot rise.

The gods around the table understood, then, that something had passed that could not be unpassed. Not even by being silent. Not even by waiting it out.

They were going to remember this confession. They were going to act on it. Not tonight. Not in this hall. The peace-rule still held.

But tomorrow, when the doors of Ægir's hall opened and the gods walked back out into the world, they were going to hunt the being who had just told the mother of Baldr, at her own table, that he had been the one who killed her son.

Frigg did not weep. Frigg, in the poem, does not speak again after this moment. Frigg, in the long surviving Norse tradition, almost does not speak again at all.

The story keeps going around her. Frigg, for the rest of the night, sat very still, and looked at the place at the table where her son was not.

The hall was beginning, very slowly, to feel cold. The gold around the walls was still glowing. The ale in the cups was still warm.

But something at the heart of the room had gone wrong. Each god who had been spoken to so far had not been spoken to about a thing they had done in public.

They had been spoken to about a thing they had done in private.

The private things were the things they had not, in the long history of their being gods together, ever expected to hear said out loud at a table.

The private things were the things they had carried alone. Loki was taking them out, one by one, and putting them on the table beside the ale.

And no one — no one — was going to be spared.

Chapter Five. The Vanir's Shame. He turned next to Freyja. Freyja was the goddess of love. Of beauty. Of seiðr, which Óðinn himself had just admitted to practicing.

Freyja was the one who had once wept tears of gold for the husband who had gone wandering and not returned.

Freyja was the one who wore the golden necklace called Brísingamen, which she had bought, the old stories said, from four dwarves in a cave, by sleeping one night with each of them in turn.

Freyja was beautiful, and Freyja was complicated, and Freyja knew, of all the goddesses at the table, exactly what Loki was about to say.

Loki said: Freyja, every god at this table has been your lover. Every elf at this table has been your lover. Every dwarf in the caves below has been your lover.

Even your own brother has been your lover. I have seen it. Do not deny it. I have stood at the doors of your hall on the nights you brought your brother through them.

I know what the two of you do. I know what your father once caught the two of you doing. The world knows. Do not pretend otherwise.

This accusation, unlike the others, has a small thread of source-evidence behind it.

The Ynglinga Saga preserves a faint tradition that among the Vanir — the older family of gods to which Freyja and her brother Freyr both belonged — sibling marriage had once been the custom.

The Vanir, the saga says, had practiced incestuous marriage in the long ago, before they joined with the Æsir.

When they came to live among Óðinn's people, that custom was set aside. But it had existed. The accusation was not pure invention.

The accusation was the dragging-out, into the bright light of the gold-lit hall, of a Vanir custom the Æsir had agreed to forget. Freyja did not answer.

Freyja, in Lokasenna, only said: Loki, your tongue is a thing that will be silenced.

There will come a day when the gods bind you, and when your mouth is closed for what comes after. I will live to see that day. Loki laughed.

He laughed a small laugh, not loud, as if she had said something gently amusing. He turned to her father.

Njǫrðr was the god of the sea, the patron of sailors, the father of Freyja and Freyr.

He was an older god — he had come into Asgard from the Vanir, in the long-ago hostage exchange that had ended the war between the two families of gods.

Njǫrðr had been a hostage. Njǫrðr had been sent to Asgard to live as a sign of peace, the way kings of small countries used to send their sons.

Njǫrðr was not, by birth, of the Æsir. Njǫrðr was, by treaty, among them. Loki looked at Njǫrðr and said: you were a hostage. Do not forget what you were.

And what is more — the daughters of the giant Hymir, when they passed by you on the eastern road, urinated into your mouth, the way they would into a chamber pot.

They mistook you for one. They did not even know who you were.

They saw a man of the sea standing by the road, and they thought him a vessel, and they relieved themselves into him. I have heard the story.

The whole north has heard the story. Do not pretend the story is not yours. Njǫrðr — and this is one of the strangest things in Lokasenna — Njǫrðr did not deny it.

Njǫrðr said: yes. But what does that matter. I have a son. I have a son who is the joy of every god at this table. Freyr is loved by every house in Asgard.

Freyr is the one we look to when we wish to remember why we joined our two families. My shame, if I had any, would not outweigh the gift of my son. Be silent, Loki.

Loki looked at Njǫrðr's son. Loki turned to Freyr. And the room, gently, knew what was coming next.

Chapter Six. Týr's Hand and Freyr's Sword. But before Loki could speak to Freyr, Týr did. Týr was the one-handed god. We told you of him three episodes ago.

He was the god who had laid his right hand in the mouth of the wolf, knowing the wolf would close, because someone had to.

Someone had to be the one whose hand the wolf took. Týr had been that one.

Týr had walked through the rest of his life with one hand, with the long shame of an absence at the end of his arm, and Týr had never complained, because the binding of Fenrir had to happen, and someone had to pay.

Týr was a good god. The old north loved him. Týr said to Loki: leave the boy alone. Leave Freyr alone. He has done nothing to you.

You will not speak to him the way you have spoken to the others. Move on. Loki turned to Týr. Loki said: ah. The one-handed. Tell me, Týr — where is your hand.

Tell me what happened to it. Tell me the story of the wolf you fed. Týr did not flinch. Týr said: my hand is gone because I gave it. I gave it because I had to.

I would give the other if I had to. Be silent, Loki. Loki said: and tell me, Týr, who is the father of your son.

Tell me how it is that I, of all the gods at this table, am the one your wife came to.

Tell me how you have not noticed, all these years, that the boy who calls you father has my eyes.

Tell me how you sleep in the same bed as a woman who has, more than once, opened her door to me in the dark. Tell me, Týr, what your hand truly cost you.

Týr, for the first time, lowered his head. The hall did not know what to say. What Loki had just said is not preserved elsewhere.

There is no source other than Lokasenna that says Loki and Týr's wife had ever met.

There is no son of Týr's whose paternity has ever been doubted, in any of the other Eddas. The accusation may be true. The accusation may be Loki's invention.

The accusation may be a poetic exaggeration the poet of Lokasenna had heard somewhere and chose to include. We do not know.

What we know is that Týr, in Lokasenna, did not deny it. Týr lowered his head. Týr let the accusation stand. Loki turned then to Freyr.

He looked at the boy whose father had just been silenced.

He looked at the bright golden god of summer and harvest, of fields and ships, of the gentle warmth that came back to the world each spring. He looked at Freyr.

Loki said: Freyr. Tell me about your sword. Freyr's hand went, by old habit, to his belt — and found nothing there. Loki smiled. Loki said: you gave up your sword.

You gave it up for the love of a giant's daughter. You sent your servant Skírnir to ride into Jǫtunheimr to win her for you, and the price of that wooing was your sword.

The sword that would, in the last days, have defended you. The sword you will need at Ragnarǫk.

The sword you will not have, when the day comes that Surtr rides up from Múspell with a flame in his hand, and the worlds burn.

You will stand on the field of the last battle, Freyr, with nothing in your hand at all. Because of a woman. Freyr did not answer.

This accusation has full source-evidence behind it.

The poem Skírnismál — which we will tell you the story of in another episode — preserves the entire story of how Freyr fell in love with Gerðr, the daughter of the jǫtunn Gymir; how he sent his servant Skírnir to woo her on his behalf; and how Skírnir's price for going was Freyr's sword, the sword that would fight on its own, the sword that had been Freyr's most prized possession.

Skírnir succeeded. Gerðr came to Freyr. And the sword was gone, and would not come back, and Freyr will indeed, in the prophecy of Ragnarǫk, fall on the field without it.

It is one of the saddest small details of the end of the world. And Loki, at the table, had said it out loud. Freyr did not lift his head.

His servant Byggvir — a small loud nervous voice — started to speak in defense of his master, the way a servant who loves his lord cannot keep himself from doing.

Byggvir said: if I were as great as Freyr, Loki, I would crush you. I would grind your bones the way the mill grinds corn. I would — Loki turned.

Loki said: what is this little chattering thing. What is this small thing. Tell me, Byggvir, where you were when the gods of Asgard fought.

Tell me what corner you hid in. Tell me what bench you crept under. Tell me which crumbs of bread you swept up at the feet of your master while real beings died.

You are not a god. You are not a man. You are a little thing that lives at Freyr's heel. Go back there. Be silent. I have not yet finished. Byggvir sat down.

Byggvir did not speak again.

The hall, by this point — the hall that had been bright and gold and warm at the beginning of the evening — the hall had become a place where the gods of the north were sitting, very still, looking into their cups, listening to the rain begin against the high windows of Ægir's hall.

None of them were drinking. None of them were eating.

None of them were speaking, except when Loki addressed them — and then only as long as it took to be told what they had done, and to lower their heads, and to let the next god be addressed.

Loki had not yet finished. There were still others at the table.

Chapter Seven. Heimdallr and Skaði. Loki turned next to Heimdallr. Heimdallr was the watchman.

The watcher at Bifrǫst, the rainbow bridge that linked Asgard to the world of men.

Heimdallr was the god who slept very little, the god whose hearing could pick up the sound of grass growing on the earth, the god whose eyes could see for a hundred days' ride in every direction.

He was the one who would, at the end of all things, blow the Gjallarhorn — the great horn whose sounding meant Ragnarǫk had begun.

He was, of all the gods at this table, the one who watched the longest. And the one who slept the least. Heimdallr looked at Loki and said, calmly: Loki. You are drunk.

You are out of your mind. You should be quiet now. A drunk man who keeps talking only buries himself deeper. Loki turned slowly. Loki said: Heimdallr. Quiet yourself.

You are the god who has stood at the gate of Bifrǫst since the dawn of time, with the wet wind blowing on your back, watching for the riders who will come at the end of the world.

You have never sat in a hall and warmed yourself. You have never slept in a bed for longer than a single night.

You have a wet back, Heimdallr — that is what they say of you, in the deep wells where the stories are kept. The gods gave you a bad fate. A fate of always watching.

A fate of never resting. A fate of being the one who waits. Heimdallr did not answer. Heimdallr knew this was true.

Heimdallr had stood at Bifrǫst since the worlds were young, and would stand at Bifrǫst until the day the worlds ended and the horn was blown.

The wet back was not a metaphor.

The wet back was the actual condition of Heimdallr at the edge of the bridge, where the rain off Niflheim never stopped, and the cold of Jǫtunheimr blew across him at his unsleeping post.

Heimdallr did not deny what Loki said. The hall heard the watcher of the worlds receive what was, in some quiet old way, a true description of his condition.

And then — and this is the moment, in Lokasenna, where the next voice rises — Skaði spoke. Skaði had not, until now, spoken at the feast. Skaði was the mountain-bride.

The daughter of Þjazi, the jǫtunn the gods had killed.

We told you that story two episodes ago — the long winter when Iðunn had been stolen, and how the gods had killed her father in retribution, and how Skaði had walked down out of the mountains in armor, demanding payment in marriage, and how Njǫrðr had married her in restitution, and how the marriage had not held because Skaði loved the mountains and Njǫrðr loved the sea.

She had returned to her father's hall. She had become a god of winter. Of skis and snow and the high places. She was not a daughter of the Æsir.

She had been brought in by treaty, after the killing of her father, and the treaty had not been kind to her. She looked at Loki across the table.

And she said: you laugh tonight, Loki. You will not laugh long. There is a rock waiting for you. A rock with sharp edges.

They will lay you on that rock, and they will bind you, and they will bind you with the entrails of one of your own children. Not your daughter. Not your wife.

One of your children, Loki. The cold one. The son whose body will be turned into a cord to hold you down. They will lay you on that rock and they will leave you there.

You will not laugh on that rock, Loki. You will scream on it. And you will scream on it for a very long time. The hall went very still.

The Lokasenna gives this stanza to Skaði. Skaði, alone among the gods at the feast, speaks not of Loki's past but of his future. She names the rock. She names the cord.

She names the child whose body will be unmade to make the cord. She does this calmly, as a winter-goddess does. As if she has seen it already.

As if she is reporting from the future. The other gods stop drinking when Skaði speaks. The other gods understand, then, that the rock is not a threat.

The rock is a thing that is going to happen. Loki met her eye. Loki said: Skaði. If they bind me on a rock. If my own son's body is what they use to do it.

Let it be remembered that I was first and foremost when we killed your father. I was the one who lured Þjazi into the trap.

I was the one who guided the gods to the place where they could burn his wings as he flew. Your father died because of me. Not because of Óðinn. Not because of Þórr.

Because of me. So when you sit in your halls of winter and miss your father, Skaði — remember whose hand placed the spark. Skaði did not flinch. Skaði had known this.

The gods had known this. The killing of Þjazi was the thing that had brought Skaði down from the mountains.

Skaði had walked into Asgard with that knowledge in her chest, and had taken Njǫrðr in restitution. The marriage had failed, but the wound had not.

And Loki had, by speaking it tonight, made the wound public again. Made it stand up in the hall and breathe. Skaði said: yes. Loki. You were the one.

So all the kindness I have shown you since then — every council you sat in at my mountain halls, every hospitality I gave you in winter — was given to the man who had killed my father.

I gave you my temple. I gave you my house. I gave you bread at my own hearth. And you, in return, gave nothing.

The hall watched the winter-goddess and the trickster look at each other across the gold. Loki said one more thing.

Loki said — and this is the line, from stanza fifty-two, that the modern reader of Lokasenna finds the cruelest of all the night — Loki said: lighter words, Skaði, were the words you spoke when you wanted me in your bed.

I remember those words. Do you? The hall heard it. Skaði had — at some point, in some way the surviving sources do not preserve — said warm things to Loki.

The sources do not tell us whether she had ever invited him to her bed. The sources do not tell us whether Loki was lying. The sources tell us only that Loki said this.

And that the hall heard it. And that Skaði did not answer. And the hall, again, watched a woman be made small. The rule of the feast still held.

No one rose to strike Loki. But the gods were beginning, very quietly, to count the seats between them and the door.

Chapter Eight. Sif and the Coming of Þórr. Loki turned to the next goddess.

But this time — the surviving poem tells us — this time the next goddess rose, before Loki could speak. Sif rose. Sif was the wife of Þórr.

She was a goddess of the harvest, a goddess of the fields, a goddess whose hair — golden, long, famous in the old north — was said to be the wheat itself.

The standing grain of late summer. She was, by the time of this feast, one of the calmest gods at the table. She had not, until now, spoken to Loki. Sif rose now.

Sif took a horn from the table. A crystal horn.

The Lokasenna names it, and tells us it was old, that the mead inside it was old, that it was the kind of cup the gods kept for ceremonies that did not happen often.

She filled it. She walked it to Loki. She set it down in front of him with both hands. And Sif said: Loki. Drink this. And be welcome.

And consider, when you drink it, that there is at least one woman of the Æsir who has done nothing against you.

There is at least one woman in this hall who has nothing to confess. Drink. And let that be the truth that ends this conversation.

The hall — quietly — almost broke into relief. The hall almost — for the small space of Sif's gesture — believed the night might still be salvaged.

Sif was offering Loki a way out. She was offering him the chance to stop.

She was telling him, with the cup in front of him, that some of the things at this table were still good. That the rule of the feast might be honored.

That she, the wife of the absent Þórr, was inviting him to be small enough to step back. Loki picked up the cup. He looked at the gold mead inside it. He drank.

He set it down. And he said: yes, Sif. Yes. There is one woman at this table who has done nothing wrong — if you do not count the night that you and I lay together.

The night when Þórr was away. The night when you came to me, Sif, in the hall where your husband sleeps. You and I lay together. You and I knew what we were doing.

Þórr did not know. Þórr still does not know. But I will tell him, Sif. I will tell him when he comes home. I will tell him what his wife did when he was away.

Sif lowered the cup. Sif sat down. Sif did not, in the surviving poem, answer. The sources do not, anywhere else, tell us that Loki and Sif had been together.

The story of Loki and Sif is, in the wider sources, the story of Loki cutting her hair.

A famous old prank, where Loki sneaks into Sif's chamber while she sleeps and shaves her head, and the gods make him put it right by procuring the wig of gold from the dwarves.

That story is known. The story of Loki and Sif as lovers, however, is preserved only in this stanza of the Lokasenna.

The sources do not say whether Loki was telling the truth, or telling a cruel improvisation, or telling a half-truth twisted into a wound. Sif did not deny it.

Sif sat back down. The hall heard Loki say it. And the hall did not know what to believe. And then. And then the hall heard something else. The hall heard footsteps.

The hall heard the heavy footfall of a god approaching from outside.

Beyla, who had been silent all evening — Beyla, the small servant-goddess, the wife of Byggvir — Beyla looked up at the door, and she said: the mountains are shaking.

Þórr is coming. The hall heard it then. The cups on the table rattled. The walls of Ægir's hall trembled. The gold around the walls swayed, very slightly.

Þórr had been in the east. Þórr had been killing trolls. Þórr had not been at the feast.

But somewhere, in some way that even the surviving Eddas do not fully explain, Þórr had heard. Some messenger. Some bird. Some shimmer in the air. Þórr knew.

And Þórr was coming. The hall held its breath. The door of Ægir's hall opened. Þórr stood in the doorway. He was wet from the rain. He was muddy from the road.

He had Mjǫllnir in his hand. His beard, in the light of the gold-glowing walls, was the color of wet oak. His eyes were not angry, exactly. His eyes were patient.

The eyes of a god who had ridden a long way to do something that he had been ready to do for a very long time. Þórr stepped into the hall. Loki turned to him.

Þórr said: Loki. Stop talking. It was not an order. It was not a threat. It was a request, almost. The way a tired god speaks when he has heard enough. Loki said: Þórr.

Son of the Earth. Why are you angry? You will not be so brave when the wolf opens his jaws and swallows your father whole. You will not be so brave at Ragnarǫk, Þórr.

Your hammer will not save him. Your hammer will not save you. You will fight the World Serpent. You will kill him. You will take nine steps. And then you will fall.

I have seen this. The Vǫluspá has seen this. You and I both know what is going to happen, Þórr.

So do not stand in this doorway with your hammer and pretend you are not afraid. Þórr lifted Mjǫllnir. Þórr said: I will send you to the gates of Hel, Loki.

I will end this feast with one blow. Loki said: you remember, Þórr, the night you crawled into the giant's glove.

The night you and your companions huddled in the dark thumb of Skrýmir's glove and shook with fear at his snoring. You were the great Þórr that night, too.

And you were the small one in the giant's glove. I was there. I remember. You can swing your hammer at me now, Þórr. But I remember when you hid.

Þórr's hand tightened on Mjǫllnir. The rule of the feast still held. No weapon would be drawn inside Ægir's hall. Not even by Þórr. Not even tonight.

Þórr stood in the doorway with the hammer in his hand and his eyes on Loki, and Loki stood at the table with the cup in his hand and his eyes on Þórr, and the hall held its breath, and the rule held.

Loki set down his cup. Loki said: I have said what I came to say. I have addressed every god at this table. I have placed every secret on the wood beside the ale.

I am done. I will leave now. And I will leave because of you, Þórr. Because I know that even the peace-rule will not stop you if I stay another breath. So I leave.

And Loki walked out of the hall. He passed Þórr at the door. Þórr did not strike him. Þórr — the law of the feast still binding him — let him pass.

And as Loki stepped over the threshold, he turned, one last time, to Ægir behind him. And he said: Ægir. Your hall will burn. Your gold will go cold.

No peaceful feast will gather here again.

The world remembers the gods who hosted this night, and the world will remember Ægir's hall as the place where the peace of the gods broke.

The world will not forgive you for what you let happen tonight. Then Loki was gone. The door closed behind him. The rain, somewhere outside, was still falling.

And the gods of the north — all of them, every one of them, sitting at the tables of Ægir's hall — looked at one another in silence, and understood, finally, that this had been the last feast.

Chapter Nine. The Mountain Hall. The story leaves the hall of Ægir behind. The story walks, with Loki, up into the mountains.

The Lokasenna ends with Loki stepping over the threshold. The Lokasenna does not tell us where he went, or how long he ran, or what he did with the time.

For that part of the story we go to Snorri Sturluson.

To the fiftieth chapter of his Gylfaginning, which preserves, in his calm thirteenth-century prose, the part of the myth that the older poems leave dark. Loki ran.

He did not, the source tells us, run home. He did not return to Sigyn, his wife, who waited for him in his own hall in Asgard with their two boys.

He did not return to his old places.

He understood, the way a hunted thing understands, that the moment the gods finished their feast at Ægir's hall, they would come for him. So he ran. He ran east.

He ran into the mountains that stand at the edge of the world. He ran into the cold high country where the gods do not often go.

Where the streams are clear and bright, and the rocks are sharp, and the wind moves between the peaks in a constant low hush.

He ran until he could not see Asgard behind him. And then he ran further. And then he stopped. He stopped at a high mountain.

The mountain — Snorri tells us — was crowned by a flat stone shelf, broad enough to build a small hall on.

Below the shelf, the mountain fell away in cliffs on every side.

And in the cliffs below the shelf, the streams that came down off the mountain gathered into a single waterfall. The waterfall of Fránangr, the source calls it.

Which fell in a long white ribbon into a dark pool at the bottom of the cliffs. Loki stopped at the shelf. He built a hall there. He did not build it like a god's hall.

He did not build it for warmth, or for company, or for feasting. He built it for one purpose only. He built it so that he could see who was coming.

He gave the hall four doors, one in each wall, facing the four directions of the world.

From the eastern door he could see the rising sun and the path that came up out of the valley below.

From the western door he could see the setting sun and the place where the wind came down from the high peaks. From the northern door he could see the cold country.

And from the southern door he could see the way that ran back toward Asgard. He sat inside the hall. And he watched. He watched all four doors at once.

He turned, and turned, and turned. He did not, in this part of the story, sleep — or if he slept, the source does not tell us so. He kept the four doors in his eye.

He watched for the gods. And then. When watching exhausted him. He went down to the waterfall. This is the part of the story the old north remembered most clearly.

Loki, who could take many shapes — who had been a mare, and a fly, and an old woman, and a hawk — Loki took the shape of a salmon. The salmon was a careful shape.

A salmon is a thing that lives in a current. A salmon is a thing that knows where to lie in the water so that the moving current itself becomes a hiding place.

So that the very water that should reveal you becomes the shadow that hides you.

A salmon, lying in the dark pool below the waterfall, can be invisible even to a watcher standing two paces away. The light bends. The shadow moves.

The eye loses the fish. Loki, in this part of the story, became that fish. He slipped into the cold water of the pool below Fránangr. He felt the current take him.

He felt his body — his god's body, his trickster's body — become long and silver and dark-backed. He felt his breath change to the slow gill-breath of a fish.

He felt the cold press against his sides. He felt the rhythm of the current. He lay in the deepest shadow of the pool with the waterfall pounding white above him.

And he waited. He did this every day. He climbed up to the hall in the morning. He sat in the hall and watched the four doors.

When the watching tired him, he went down to the waterfall, and he became the salmon, and he hid in the dark pool until evening. Then he climbed back up.

And he sat in the hall. And he watched again. This was the rhythm of his life now. A god in exile. A god who had said what he could not unsay.

A god who had no friend, no shelter, no hall to return to. He had Sigyn, his wife. She had not left him. But he had nothing else.

And in the evenings, when the watching had not tired him yet, and the salmon-shape had not yet pulled at him — Loki did one other thing.

He sat by the small fire in the four-doored hall. He took linen thread. And he began to make a net.

This is the part of the story that the modern reader of Snorri finds the strangest.

Loki — the hunted one, the one who knew the gods were coming for him — Loki, with his own hands, in the high mountain hall, invented the first fishing net.

The Eddas are clear about this. Before Loki sat down at his fire and began to twist the linen into knots, there had been no fishing net in the world.

The fishermen of the old north had caught fish with spears, with hooks, with weirs of stone — but they had not caught them with nets.

Loki was the one who thought of the net. Loki was the one who first looked at the pattern that catches a fish. Snorri does not tell us why he was making it.

Snorri tells us only that he made it. We might imagine, in the small space where the source is silent, that he was making it to think with.

That he was making it because that was what his hands wanted to do. That he was making it the way a worried man whittles.

Because the small careful work of the fingers steadies the mind. That he was making it without knowing why.

He sat by the fire, in the high mountain hall, with the four doors open to the four winds, and he wove the first net. He held it up in the firelight. He saw the knots.

He saw the spacing. He saw the way the linen would catch a body sliding through water.

How the gaps in the weave would let the water pass but would catch any living thing wider than a finger. He saw it.

He understood, in the small clear way that craftsmen understand, what he had made.

And in that moment — and this is the moment Snorri preserves with great care — Loki heard something on the wind. The wind was coming from the south.

The wind was bringing the smell of horses. Of riders. Of many feet moving up the mountain at once. The gods were coming. Loki dropped the net into the fire.

He did not have time to hide it. He did not have time to throw it out the door.

He did not have time to do anything but the one small careful thing that, on his very best day, he might have thought of in time. He kicked it into the flames.

The net curled. The net blackened. The net was eaten by the fire. Loki ran for the western door. He ran down the cliff path.

He plunged into the cold pool at the bottom of Fránangr. He took the salmon-shape.

And the gods, who had been climbing the mountain for many days, now stood at the threshold of the four-doored hall. And the gods walked inside.

And the gods looked around at the empty hall and at the cold seat by the fire and at the four open doors. And the gods, looking down at the small dying fire, saw.

Saw something in the ashes. Something woven. Something with a knot pattern. Something the gods had never seen before in their lives.

Chapter Ten. The Net of Ash. The first god to step into the four-doored hall was Kvasir. Kvasir was, in this part of the story, the wisest of the gods.

He had been born from the spittle of the Æsir and Vanir mixed together, in the peace-pact that ended their war.

A sign that wisdom comes from the joining of different waters. He was, in some old accounts, the wisest being who had ever lived.

He could look at anything that had been made and understand, simply by looking, what it was for.

He could pick up a piece of carved wood and tell you whose hand had carved it, and why, and to what end. Kvasir walked to the dying fire. He knelt down.

He looked at the ashes. The other gods filled the hall behind him. Þórr came in first, mud on his boots, Mjǫllnir at his hip. Then Óðinn, in his blue cloak.

Then Týr, with his one hand. Then Vidar, silent. Then Heimdallr, whose ears had been the first to hear the salmon-shape leap, somewhere far below the cliff. Then Bragi.

Then Freyr. Then the others. They filled the small four-doored hall. They stood around Kvasir. Kvasir did not speak for a long time.

Kvasir reached his fingers into the cold ash at the edge of the fire. He drew up a small charred fragment. A curl of black thread with knots in it.

He held it up to the light. He studied it. He turned it over. He looked at the way the knots had been tied. He saw the spacing of the gaps.

He saw the consistent pattern of loops and crossings. And Kvasir said, quietly: he was making something to catch a fish. The gods, behind him, did not understand.

Kvasir said: this is a net. He made a net. The pattern is the pattern of a thing that goes into water, and catches a thing in water, and pulls it out.

He has never made one before. We have never made one before. But this is what it is. He has invented it here, in this hall, while he was waiting for us.

And he was using it — or planning to use it — for himself. Because he is in the water below. He is the thing he was going to catch. The gods understood.

The gods understood, at the same moment, that Loki was in the pool below the waterfall, and that he was in the shape of a fish, and that the tool he had just invented to escape them was the very tool they could use to catch him.

Kvasir said: we will rebuild the net. The gods sat down in the hall. They worked through the rest of the day.

They gathered the burned thread from the fire — what they could rescue.

Where the linen was too charred to use, they replaced it with new linen, copying the knot pattern exactly. They worked by Kvasir's hand and by Kvasir's eye.

Þórr held the cord. Týr, with his one hand, tied. Bragi sat against the wall and watched. Óðinn watched everything. By evening, the net was rebuilt.

It was wider than the burned one. It was stronger. The knots were tighter.

The gods, copying the work of the trickster, had made an improvement on the trickster's own invention. The net was, by now, a god's net.

They carried it down the cliff path. They came to the bank of Fránangr.

The waterfall hammered down above them in the half-light, and the pool below it lay deep and dark and shadowed under the cliffs. Loki was in there. The gods knew it.

Loki, in his salmon-shape, was lying in some dark stone-shadow at the bottom of the pool, holding very still, hoping the gods would not know how to find a thing that did not want to be found.

The gods stretched the net between two of them. They began at one bank. They walked it across the pool. They walked it slowly. They walked it together.

They walked it the way fishermen would walk a net for ten thousand winters after this, in every cold river of the north — because Loki had invented the net here, in this story, and the gods had reconstructed it here, on this evening, and from this evening forward the children of men would know how to take a fish from a river.

The pattern was leaving the world of the gods and entering the world of work. It would not be lost again. The net came across the pool.

Loki, on the bottom, felt the water change. He felt the small currents of the linen passing above him. He felt the shadow of the weave move across the stones.

He felt the gap between knots — a gap small enough to catch a god's body in the shape of a fish, but big enough to let the river itself pass through.

Loki — clever in salmon-shape as in god-shape — slipped between two stones. He flattened himself. The net passed over him.

The gods, walking it across the pool, felt the net pass cleanly. They drew it up on the far bank. They looked at the empty mesh.

The salmon they had been hunting was not in the net. Kvasir said: he hid between the stones. We need to weight it. They tied stones along the bottom of the net.

They walked it back across the pool.

This time with the weighted bottom dragging along the stone-bed of the river, so that nothing could slip between the bottom of the net and the bottom of the pool.

They walked it slowly. They walked it firmly. Loki, on the bottom, felt this too. He understood, in his salmon-shape, what the gods had done.

The space between stones was no longer a hiding place. The weighted hem of the net was scraping the stones now, and the river-floor itself had become hostile country.

There was only one direction left. Loki gathered himself. He pushed off from the stone-bed with his tail.

He shot upward through the water — through the deep dark green of the pool, through the rising columns of bubbles where the waterfall met the surface, through the white foam at the top — and he leapt clear of the water.

He leapt over the net.

He flew through the cold mountain air, his silver body twisting, the spray of the waterfall catching the late light around him, the shadow of his arc falling on the far bank where the gods watched in silence.

And for one moment, in that leap, Loki was the most beautiful thing in the world. And then Þórr stepped forward. Þórr had been waiting for this.

Þórr — who had not joined the netting, who had stood on the far bank with the water around his ankles, who had been ready since the gods first stretched the net — Þórr put out his hand.

He caught the salmon in mid-air. The fish was slippery. The fish was twisting with all the strength a god could put into a fish-body.

The fish was, for one moment, almost out of his grasp.

But Þórr — and this is the detail Snorri preserves with great care, the detail that became, in the long memory of the north, the explanation for a thing every fisherman knew — Þórr closed his hand around the salmon's tail.

Tightly. Very tightly. He held the salmon by its tail in his fist. And the salmon — Loki, in his shape — could not slip free. Þórr's grip was too strong.

The tail of the salmon, where Þórr's hand crushed it, narrowed to the shape of a god's grip. The flesh thinned. The bones flattened.

The wide flat tail of the salmon, in that moment, was permanently changed.

And from that moment on — Snorri tells us — salmon in every cold river of the world have had narrow tails.

Where Þórr's hand once closed around the trickster who had become a fish to escape him.

Every fisherman who has lifted a salmon and seen the narrow tail of it has been holding, in a small way, the memory of the night the gods caught Loki below Fránangr.

The shape of the fish carries the shape of the catching. The shape of the catching carries the shape of the god's hand. Loki, in Þórr's grip, twisted.

Loki tried to take his god-shape back. Loki tried to become the trickster again. But Þórr did not let go.

And the gods — Kvasir, Óðinn, Týr, Vidar, all the rest — gathered on the bank around them. And the gods looked at Loki, who was still half-fish in their hands.

And the gods understood that the long story of Loki at the gods' tables, of Loki at the gods' feasts, of Loki in the gods' company — that story was over.

What came next was a different story. What came next was a cave.

Chapter Eleven. The Three Stones. The gods led Loki down the mountain. They led him on foot. They did not put him on a horse. They did not let him walk free.

Þórr held him by the back of the neck. Týr held his arm with the one hand he had. Óðinn walked behind. Vidar walked beside.

The rest of the gods followed in a long quiet line. They led him to a cave. The cave was somewhere in the high country between Asgard and Jǫtunheimr.

A place that does not appear on any of the maps the surviving sources preserve. It was a deep cave, with a low mouth and a wide chamber inside. The gods knew it.

The gods had chosen it. The gods had decided, before they left the river, where they were taking him. They walked him into the cave. The cave was cold.

Three stones stood in the cave. Three large stones, set up in the cave by the gods themselves, before the gods had gone east to look for Loki. The gods had prepared this.

The gods had known, when they left Asgard, what they would do with him when they caught him. The three stones were not random stones.

They were the stones the gods had measured and placed. One stone was set so that it would be under his shoulders. One stone was set so that it would be under his loins.

One stone was set so that it would be under his knees. Loki saw the stones. He understood what they were. He did not, in the surviving sources, speak.

The sources do not preserve any further words of Loki from this moment forward. The Lokasenna had given him his last words at the feast. The capture had been silent.

The binding was silent. Loki — who had talked the gods of the table into rage, who had said every cruel and true thing he had ever held back — had no words for this.

He was, finally, mute. The gods led him to the stones. They laid him down on the three stones. His shoulders on the first stone. His loins on the second.

His knees on the third. He lay across them as if across three altars. Then the gods sent for his sons. His sons were two boys. Their names were Narfi and Váli.

They were the sons of Loki and Sigyn. Sigyn, his wife, who had been waiting for him in Asgard while he sat in the high mountain hall and watched the four doors.

Sigyn had borne them. Sigyn had raised them. They were the only two children Loki had who were also Sigyn's children.

Loki had other children, by other mothers, who were the wolf Fenrir and the World Serpent and the dark goddess Hel. But Narfi and Váli were the boys of his marriage.

They were the boys Sigyn had named. The gods brought them to the cave. This is the part of the story the modern reader of Snorri finds most difficult.

The gods, in the cave, transformed Váli. They turned him into a wolf. How they did this, the source does not tell us.

Whether it was Óðinn's magic, or some older charm, or the work of some god whose name has not been preserved — Snorri does not say. He says only that Váli was turned.

That he was a boy when he entered the cave, and a wolf when he came out of the next breath. That he no longer recognized his father, who lay across the three stones.

That he no longer recognized his brother, who stood beside him. And the wolf-Váli — driven by whatever fury the gods had put into him — tore his brother Narfi apart.

The cave became, for a moment, a place no story in the surviving sources matches for darkness. Narfi was killed. The gods watched. Loki, on the stones, did not look.

Or — the sources do not say. We do not know if Loki watched, or if Loki closed his eyes, or if Loki had any choice about whether to watch or not.

We know only that his son was killed. That his son was killed by his other son. That the gods did this to him, and made the killing happen, and did not stop it.

Narfi was dead. The wolf-Váli ran out of the cave and disappeared into the world. The gods turned to the body of Narfi. They opened the body.

They drew out Narfi's entrails. And as the entrails left the body, in some old magical way that the source preserves but does not explain, the entrails changed.

They hardened. They became — Snorri tells us — like iron. They were no longer flesh. They were a cord. They were the cord that the gods had needed.

The cord that nothing in the world could break.

The boy Narfi, when he died at his brother's mouth, had become — without consent, without warning, in some terrible alchemy of the old gods — the chain.

The gods took the cord. They tied Loki down with it. They bound him to the three stones. They bound his shoulders to the first. They bound his loins to the second.

They bound his knees to the third. They tied the iron cord around him in many turns. They tied it tight.

They tied it the way you tie a thing you do not want to come loose. When they were finished, Loki could not move. He could lift his head, a little.

He could open and close his eyes. He could turn his face. But his body was held to the three stones by the entrails of his own son.

And he could not — by any strength a god could summon — break free. The gods stepped back. They looked at him. He looked back at them.

His face — the trickster's face, the face that had been at every feast and council of the gods for a thousand years — was, for the first time, blank. Not angry.

Not afraid. Empty. The gods turned. And then Skaði stepped forward.

Skaði — whom Loki had taunted at the feast, whom Loki had reminded that he had killed her father, whom Loki had publicly humiliated by speaking of a private invitation she had once given him — Skaði carried something in her arms.

She carried a snake. It was a large snake. It was a venom-snake. The kind that lives in the high cold rocks of Jǫtunheimr.

The kind whose fangs leak a slow burning venom that does not kill but does not stop. Skaði carried it carefully.

She had brought it down from the mountains while the gods were binding Loki. She had been gone, briefly, while the iron cord was being tied.

The gods had not asked her where she was going. Skaði had known. She came to where Loki lay. She fixed the snake above him.

She tied it to the roof of the cave so that its body hung directly over Loki's face. With its mouth open above his eyes. She left it there.

She made sure it could not slip free.

She tied it in such a way that the venom that dripped from its fangs would fall, drop by drop, onto the upturned face of the bound god below. She stepped back.

She did not speak. The Lokasenna had ended with Skaði's prophecy of the rock and the cord. The story, in the cave, had brought Skaði's prophecy to pass.

Skaði had named the binding before it happened. And now Skaði was the one who finished it. She had — Snorri tells us — closed the circle of her father's death.

The gods turned. The gods walked out of the cave.

They left Loki bound to the three stones with the entrails of his son, with the venom-snake above him, with the first drop of venom already beginning to gather at the tip of the snake's lower fang.

The gods walked out into the cold mountain air. They did not, the source tells us, look back. Loki was alone in the cave. The first drop fell. It hit him on the forehead.

It burned. Snorri does not tell us in words, but the source preserves the truth of it in what happens next. The venom burned. The pain went all through his body.

He could not move because of the cord. He could not turn his face away because the cord held him too tightly.

He could only feel the venom, and feel the next drop gathering, and feel the wait. He cried out.

He cried out not in words but in the way a god cries out when his face is being burned by venom that he cannot stop. He bucked against the iron cord. He thrashed.

The three stones beneath him held. The cord held. The cave shook around him.

And the earth — far below the cave, in the deep places where the roots of the world drink at the well of Urðr — the earth itself felt his thrashing.

The mountains trembled. The valleys trembled.

The cold rivers of the north, the rivers that come down from the ridges where the gods had walked, felt the shaking of the bound god in the cave and answered with their own shaking.

The first earthquake the world had ever known passed through Midgard.

The first time men in their winter halls had felt the ground itself shudder under them — that first time was Loki, in the cave, thrashing under the venom-drop.

And then — and this is the moment the story slows, the moment the cruelty of it bends, just a little, the moment a small soft thing enters the cave — Sigyn arrived.

Sigyn was Loki's wife. Sigyn had not, in the story so far, said one word. The Eddas do not give her speeches. The Eddas do not record her grief.

The Eddas tell us only what Sigyn did. And what Sigyn did, in this hour, was the smallest and the most enormous thing. Sigyn walked into the cave. She carried a bowl.

The bowl was — Snorri does not specify, but the picture is clear in the long Norse tradition that grew around this scene — a small wooden bowl.

The kind a woman uses to wash her hands at the hearth. The kind that has been smoothed by many years of use. Sigyn carried it in both hands.

She walked past the iron cord. She walked past the three stones.

She came to where her husband lay bound, with the venom-snake above his face and the burning on his forehead and the cries still in his throat. She knelt beside him.

She raised the bowl. She held it under the snake's open mouth. The next drop of venom fell. It fell into the bowl. It did not fall on Loki.

He turned his face slightly to look at her. He did not — the sources are silent on this — speak. The poem does not give them a conversation.

The poem gives us only the image. Sigyn kneeling beside him. Sigyn holding the bowl above his face. Sigyn catching the venom that the gods had meant to fall on him.

And Sigyn — in the small old picture the Eddas preserve — stayed. She stayed there. She is still there. The Norse cosmology kept Sigyn in that posture.

Sigyn — wife of Loki, mother of the slain Narfi and the wolf-Váli, witness of the binding — stays in the cave with her bowl until the end of the world.

The Eddas do not move her. The Eddas leave her there. She stands beside her bound husband, holding the bowl above his face, catching what she can catch.

And when the bowl fills — because the bowl is small, and the snake is large, and the venom is endless — Sigyn must turn and pour the bowl out.

She must walk to the wall of the cave and tip the venom onto the stone. She must walk back.

And in the small space of those steps — when the bowl is no longer over Loki's face — the venom falls on him again. And he thrashes again.

And the earth, far below, shakes again. That is what the Eddas preserve.

That is the picture the old north carried in its head when it lay in winter halls and felt the ground tremble. That is what the old north said an earthquake was.

That is the cosmology the cold north of the long memory gave to the shaking of the earth. Loki, in the cave. The venom on his face. Sigyn turning to empty the bowl.

The world feeling the moment when his face is bare. The gods walked away from the cave. The gods returned to Asgard.

The gods, in the old stories, did not look in on Loki again. The world kept turning. The hall of Ægir grew quiet, and grew empty, and grew dark.

The gods met at other halls. The gold around the walls of other halls glowed. The cups of other halls were filled.

Spring came, and summer came, and autumn came, and winter came. The wheel of the world turned. The gods went on with the work of being gods. And Loki stayed in the cave.

And Sigyn stayed beside him. And the bowl was raised. And the bowl filled. And the bowl was tipped. And the bowl was raised again.

The slow rhythm of a wife's hands in the dark. The slow rhythm of love that has nowhere left to go but service.

The Vǫluspá — the great prophetic poem we have been carrying with us all season — the Vǫluspá tells us, in stanza fifty-one, what will end the binding.

The Vǫluspá tells us that there will come a day when Loki tears himself free. The Vǫluspá tells us that day will be the beginning of Ragnarǫk.

The Vǫluspá tells us that when Loki rises from the cave, he will go to the gathering place of the giants, and he will join the wolf his son and the serpent his son, and he will steer the great ship Naglfar — the nail-ship, the ship made of the fingernails of dead men — across the sea to fight the gods at the end of all things.

That is what Loki's binding is. A waiting. A holding-in-place. A wife with a bowl. A husband on three stones. A snake with venom. A world that will, in time, break.

Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Wolf at the Edge of Time. The story we told you tonight is one of the longest stories in the surviving Norse sources.

It is the story the Lokasenna and the fiftieth chapter of Gylfaginning preserve together.

The story of how a god of the Æsir, a god who had sat at every council of the gods, a god who had walked beside Óðinn at the dawn of the worlds, became the prisoner at the bottom of the cosmos.

The story of how the table broke. The story of how the binding came. The story of how Sigyn became the one who holds the bowl.

It is also — and this is the part the modern reader of the Eddas sometimes misses — the story of the last evening before the world began to count down.

Because the binding of Loki is, in the old Norse cosmology, the beginning of the end. The Norse universe, you remember, has a shape.

The shape is a great tree, and at the foot of the tree there is a well, and beside the well there sit three sisters who weave the fates of every living thing.

The three sisters are Urðr, who is what has been; Verðandi, who is what is becoming; and Skuld, who is what shall be.

The three sisters have been weaving the cloth of the world since the first morning. And the cloth, like all woven things, has an end. The end of the cloth is Ragnarǫk.

We have been telling you, since the first night of this almanac, that the cloth was woven toward Ragnarǫk.

We have shown you the wolf Fenrir, in episode four, being lured onto an island and bound with a silken cord, and biting down on Týr's hand as the gods betrayed him.

We have shown you Skírnir, in another story, riding to Jǫtunheimr to bring back the giant-bride for Freyr — and Freyr giving away the sword that he will need at the last battle.

We have shown you Óðinn, the all-father, riding the eight-legged Sleipnir down to the gate of Hel to interrogate a dead woman about a dream his son had had.

We have shown you Baldr, the most beautiful of the gods, dying on a courtyard in Asgard with a small mistletoe dart in his chest.

We have shown you Hermóðr, riding nine nights into Hel to bring him back, and failing, and returning empty-handed.

We have shown you the gods burning Baldr's body on the great ship Hringhorni. And now, tonight, we have shown you the binding.

Each of these stories — the wolf, the sword, the dream, the death, the burning, the binding — is a single step the world has taken toward Ragnarǫk.

The Norse believed the world was not, in this slow late age, in equilibrium. The Norse believed the world was tilting.

The Norse believed that every wrong that was added now to the long sum of the cosmos brought the cosmos closer to the day when the sum would be settled.

The binding of Loki is the deepest of these steps. Because Loki — bound now in the cave with the venom dripping on his face — will not stay bound forever.

The Vǫluspá tells us, in its fifty-first stanza, that the day will come when Loki rises.

The day will come when the cord made from his son's entrails will break, and the three stones beneath him will crack, and Loki will walk out of the cave.

The day will come when Loki goes to the eastern shore.

The day will come when Loki finds, waiting for him on the beach, the great ship Naglfar — the ship made from the nails of dead men, the ship the Norse believed was being built quietly through the centuries by the unkempt dead, the ship that would be ready when Ragnarǫk came.

The day will come when Loki, beside his old son the World Serpent and his old son the wolf Fenrir, will sail Naglfar across the sea to meet the gods on the field where the world will be decided.

That is the day Ragnarǫk begins. And the binding tonight — the binding in the cave, the binding to the three stones — is what is keeping that day from happening yet.

Sigyn's bowl is the world's bowl. Every drop of venom Sigyn catches is a day the world has not ended.

Every drop she empties is a moment when Loki thrashes, and the earth shakes, and the world remembers that the binding cannot hold forever.

This is what the old Norse meant by an earthquake. This is what the old Norse meant by the slow turning toward Ragnarǫk.

This is what the old Norse meant when they said the world was running out of time. You and I, dear listener, are living in that running-out-of-time.

The Norse cosmos imagined every age as a slow countdown. The gods locked in their last late years. The world thinning. The long evening before the dark.

The almanac you are listening to tonight is the almanac of those last years. Each episode is a day on the slow calendar. Each story is one more drop in Sigyn's bowl.

We will keep telling you the stories. We will tell you, next time, of Þórr and his great fishing trip with the giant Hymir.

When Þórr and Hymir went out into the open sea and Þórr cast his hook and pulled up, on the end of his line, the World Serpent itself. The great Jǫrmungandr.

His old enemy. The one he is fated to fight at Ragnarǫk. We will tell you of the moment when Þórr raised his hammer to strike the Serpent dead.

And of the moment when Hymir, in fear, cut the line. We will tell you of the Serpent dropping back into the dark sea. We will tell you of the long failed shot.

We will tell you of the way that story, too, is a step closer to the end. That is the story you and I will tell together on Wednesday. But for now.

For now, the cave is dark, and the snake is dripping, and Sigyn is kneeling, and Loki is silent.

The gods have walked away, and the world has turned, and the wind in the cold north is moving over the cave-mouth, and Sigyn — patient, faithful, with no other place to go — is holding the bowl.

Goodnight, dear listener. Wherever you are tonight. Whatever bed you are in. Whatever quiet room. Whatever soft pillow you have laid your head on.

Let the picture of Sigyn beside her husband be the last picture you carry into sleep. Not the cruelty of the cave. Not the venom. Not the binding. The bowl.

The hand of a wife above the face of her husband. The slow rhythm of love that has nowhere left to go but service. Let that be what you take with you down into the dark.

Let the wolf at the edge of time wait. Let the great ship Naglfar wait in the cold east. Let Ragnarǫk wait. Tonight there is only the cave, and Sigyn, and the bowl.

And tonight there is only your bed, and your breath, and the room around you growing dark. Sleep.

The Sleeping Almanac will be here on Wednesday with another story from the old north. New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday at eight o'clock in the evening.

If the story carried you down into sleep — if Sigyn's bowl was the last picture in your mind before the dark came — leave a quiet small note in the comments.

We read every one. We tell each other, in the morning, who slept. Sleep deeply. Sleep without dreams. And wake into a quieter world. Goodnight, dear listener.

From the long old north. From the cave where the bowl is held. From the almanac that is keeping the slow count. Goodnight.

[Music to sleep by]