Episode 16 - Loki and the Question of Gender

All Norse gods and goddesses are subject to some level of mischaracterization in popular media, but Loki's frequent shapeshifting into female form have made him a particularly attractive target for embellishment of the story. In this episode I won't be telling you what you should think about Loki, but I will be compiling every little detail we have that could possibly relate to his gender and sexuality, and examining them through the lens of the ancient Scandinavian mindset. Spoiler alert: ancient people didn't conceptualize gender and sexuality the way we do today, but there's no reason why you should be forced to view Loki the way ancient people did a thousand years later. The myths are what you make of them.

Sources:

• “Coming to terms with Navajo Nádleehi: a critique of berdache,’gay’, ‘alternative gender’, and ‘two-spirit’” by Carolyn Epple, 1998
• “Lokasenna: The Norse Poem of Loki’s Locker Talk” by Jackson Crawford on YouTube, 2017
• “Loki” by Jens Peter Schjødt in “Pre-Christian Religions of the North” Volume III, 2020
• “Níð, Ergi and Old Norse Moral Attitudes” by Folke Ström, 1974
• “The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society” by Preben M. Sørenson, translation by Joan Turville-Petre, 1983
• “The Poetic Edda”, original translations in this episode by me
• “The Prose Edda”, original translations in this episode by me

Contact:

• Write in: waelhraefn (at) gmail (dot) com
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Music:

Celebration by Alexander Nakarada (www.serpentsoundstudios.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/