This is part of the That Læ-ing Loki project. This article was up temporarily for select people to read the rough draft. That temporary time is over. Thanks for playing.

But don’t worry, depending on what happens it will either reappear here complete and polished or in a journal somewhere. Or on Amazon. I have no idea at this point and make no promises.

In this paper I adopt an animistic-skaldik point of view to examine Loki’s name and what it tells us about his Jotun nature. This took me by the hand, and I was given a tour of Loki’s house where he keeps his favorite shoes by the front door (if you can figure out which one it is), and out back where the river runs so he could show me how to turn into a salmon. He reminisced with me about his early days in Asgard. I could barely get a word in edgewise, he talked so much, so I got a good idea why Oðin said he was foolishly mad and should shut the fuck up that one time.

What I’m saying here is that I basically did a complete character analysis of one of America’s favorite tricksters, and I was surprised at what I found. By the time I got to Lokasenna, I was no longer able to view him the way people say I should view him. He had become very human to me, and his motives were very understandable. He just needed to learn to keep his mouth shut.

That rambled, here are the things I covered:

• His name
• His other real name
• How the one name is not the other name, and why one ties him to his nature element (not fire)
• The debate and history that is partly responsible for why people think he’s a fire god
• Thor
• Things he does and tools he uses that backs up his actual element
• Fish
• Illusions
• His job description
• Shapeshifting
• Wyrms. And more fish.
• Sleipnir
• Feathers. On cloaks.
• His shoes. – which I fleshed out into another paper I entitled Air Jotuns.
• Earthquakes
• Smelting
• His House
• Odin.
• His limit.

If you read it, don’t forget the footnotes! Pratchett is a muse.