This has been hanging around in the back of my mind for about a year now. I took a crack at a draft earlier this year, to get some of my thoughts down; that draft has been sent to join its ancestors.

I was thinking over the Lokasenna, and the myth about Loki’s binding, and the various players in that myth, and I realized that another way of looking at it is about civilization’s attitude towards nature.

The Aesir are commonly seen as gods of civilization, whereas Loki is not only a Jotun, from the part of the pantheon where deities are aligned with primal natural forces and phenomena, He is (among other things) a god of change, which is one of the most fundamental natural forces there is. While there are other Jotnar who are accepted among the Aesir, Loki never seems to be as fully accepted among this…