Matt Damon has died as Loki and then come back to make a joke about it.
In Kevin Smith’s Dogma, released in 1999, Damon plays Loki, a fallen angel who once served as the Angel of Death. By the end of the film, he’s dead. Twenty years later, Damon turned up for a short cameo as Loki in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. Asked what happened to him after Dogma, Loki says he ended up floating in the Mediterranean Sea.
Anyone who’s seen The Bourne Identity gets it immediately. That film opens with an Italian fishing crew hauling an unconscious man out of the Mediterranean, two bullets in his back and no memory of who he is. Damon played Jason Bourne, too, so the joke stitches his two most famous characters together in one line.
It’s a throwaway gag, and it’s the perfect introduction to Loki.
He’s a character who keeps dying and keeps coming back, in a new form, in somebody else’s story, wearing somebody else’s face. He’s been doing it for about a thousand years.
The Loki most people know now is Tom Hiddleston in a Marvel costume. Before him there was a fire god in a Wagner opera, a green rubber mask in a Jim Carrey comedy and a hundred years of comic books. Before all of them there were a handful of Icelandic manuscripts, a few carved stones, and a trickster nobody has ever been able to pin down.
Who is Loki in Norse mythology?
Nearly everything we know about the original Loki comes from two sources written in Iceland in the 1200s. One is the Poetic Edda, a collection of older poems preserved in a manuscript called the Codex Regius. The other is the Prose Edda, written around 1220 by the Icelandic poet and politician Snorri Sturluson as a handbook for poets.
In those books, Loki is the son of a giant named Fárbauti and a woman named Laufey. He lives among the gods of Asgard anyway, and he’s sworn blood-brotherhood with Odin himself. He’s handsome, clever and a shape-shifter. He’s also, as Snorri describes him, the source of most of the gods’ troubles.
His family is a catalogue of disasters. With his wife Sigyn, he has sons. With the giantess Angrboda, he fathers three monsters: the wolf Fenrir, the world serpent Jörmungandr and Hel, who rules the dead. In one story, he turns himself into a mare to lure away a builder’s stallion and later gives birth to Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse.
That last detail tells you how far the old storytellers were willing to go with him.
Was Loki a villain or a hero in the myths?
Both, and for most of the stories, neither.
The early Loki is a problem-solver who causes the problem first. He cuts off all the golden hair of Thor’s wife Sif as a prank. Thor threatens to break every bone in his body, so Loki goes to the dwarves and talks them into making replacement hair of real gold, along with a magic ship and a spear for Odin. Then he bets his own head that a pair of dwarf brothers can’t do better.
They make a golden boar, a ring that multiplies itself and a hammer. Loki turns into a fly and bites one of the smiths to ruin the work, so the hammer comes out with a short handle. It’s still the best treasure of the lot. That hammer is Mjölnir. Thor’s signature weapon exists because Loki started a fight and then tried to cheat his way out of it.
He loses the bet. When the dwarves come to collect his head, he argues they’re entitled to the head but not the neck, so they can’t cut. The dwarf settles it by sewing Loki’s lips shut.
In another poem, a giant steals Thor’s hammer and demands the goddess Freyja as his bride. Loki’s solution is to dress Thor up as the bride, veil and all, and go along disguised as the bridesmaid. At the feast, the bride eats an entire ox and eight salmon, and Loki explains that she hadn’t eaten for eight nights because she was so eager to be married. Thor gets his hammer back and kills everybody in the hall. It’s the closest thing to slapstick in Norse poetry, and Loki makes it work.
Loki has survived a thousand years of retellings because every storyteller needs the one character who refuses to follow the rules. – Richard LoweShare on X
Then the stories turn dark.
Baldr, the most beloved of the gods, dreams of his own death. His mother, Frigg, makes everything in the world swear never to harm him, everything except the mistletoe. It seemed too young to matter. The gods turn it into a game, throwing weapons at Baldr and watching them bounce off. Loki finds out about the mistletoe, makes a dart of it and puts it in the hand of Baldr’s blind brother, Höðr.
He guides the throw. Baldr dies.
The goddess of the dead agrees to release Baldr if every single thing in the world weeps for him. Everything does, except one giantess in a cave, named Þökk, who refuses. The storytellers believed she was Loki in disguise.
In the poem Lokasenna, he walks into a feast of the gods and insults every one of them in turn, dragging out their secrets and their shames. The gods finally run out of patience.
What happens to Loki at Ragnarök?
The punishment is one of the grimmest scenes in mythology. The gods catch Loki, who has turned himself into a salmon, and bind him to three rocks in a cave using the entrails of his own son. The giantess Skaði hangs a venomous serpent over his face. His wife Sigyn stands beside him holding a bowl to catch the poison. When the bowl fills and she turns to empty it, the venom hits his face, and his thrashing is what people feel as earthquakes.
He stays there until Ragnarök, the end of the world. Then he breaks free and sails against the gods with an army of the dead. His children are there too. Fenrir kills Odin, and Jörmungandr and Thor kill each other. Loki and Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, fight and kill each other.
So the character who started as Odin’s sworn brother and the gods’ fixer ends as their destroyer. That’s the arc in the original sources: helper, troublemaker, murderer, prisoner, apocalypse.
Did the Vikings worship Loki?
As far as anyone can tell, no.
Gods like Thor, Odin and Freyr left their names on places all over Scandinavia, on farms, hills and lakes where they were honored. Loki left none that scholars agree on. There’s no clear evidence of temples, offerings or a cult. He seems to have lived only in stories.
Remember who wrote those stories down, too. Snorri was a Christian, writing about two centuries after Iceland formally converted around the year 1000. Some scholars think the darkest version of Loki, the devil-like figure chained until the end of time, owes something to Christian ideas about Satan. Others think the binding story is much older. The sources don’t settle it.
The stones suggest at least part of it is old. The Snaptun stone, a hearthstone found in Denmark and dated to around the year 1000, shows a face with stitched lips. It looks a lot like the dwarves’ revenge. The Gosforth Cross in Cumbria, England, carved in the tenth century, shows a bound figure with a woman beside him holding what looks like a bowl. A carved stone from Kirkby Stephen, also in Cumbria, shows a bound figure that some identify as Loki.
So the Loki of the myths was already a story being retold by the time anyone wrote him down. That makes everything that came after him one more retelling.
How did Loki change in later books and movies?
Richard Wagner borrowed him first, at least for the big stage. In Das Rheingold, the opening opera of the Ring cycle, Loki becomes Loge, a demigod of fire. He’s clever, cynical and the only one in Valhalla who sees the gods’ doom coming. He’s also the one who flatters the dwarf Alberich into turning himself into a toad so the gods can grab him. Wagner blended Loki with Logi, a separate fire figure from the old stories, and the name confusion has followed Loki ever since.
Marvel took him in 1962. Journey into Mystery #85, by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby, introduced Loki as Thor’s villainous adopted brother. That one change rewired the whole character. In the myths, Laufey is Loki’s mother. In Marvel’s version, Laufey is the king of the Frost Giants, and Odin takes the giant’s abandoned son home and raises him as a prince.
That turned a trickster into a family drama. Kenneth Branagh’s Thor in 2011 built the whole film around it, and Tom Hiddleston played Loki as a son who’d spent his life second to his brother and just found out why. He became the villain of The Avengers, an uneasy ally in Thor: Ragnarok, and died at the start of Avengers: Infinity War.
He came back, of course. The Loki series gave a variant of him a story of his own, with Owen Wilson as Mobius, the agent who spends the first season trying to figure him out, and by the end of season two he sits alone at the end of time, holding the branching timelines together in the shape of the World Tree. The comics had already gone there. Al Ewing’s Loki: Agent of Asgard ended with Loki becoming the god of stories.
The god of mischief became the keeper of every story. It’s a fitting promotion for a character who only ever existed in stories.
What does Loki have to do with The Mask and Dogma?
Hollywood has also used Loki as a name to hang a new idea on.
In The Mask, released in 1994, Jim Carrey’s timid bank clerk, Stanley Ipkiss, finds a carved wooden mask that turns him into a green-faced cartoon with no rules at all and no fear of anyone. A psychiatrist in the film identifies it as a mask of Loki, the Norse god of mischief. The sequel, Son of the Mask, put Loki himself on screen in 2005, played by Alan Cumming, hunting for the mask he’d lost.
The mask is pure Loki. Whoever wears it stops following anyone’s rules.
Kevin Smith’s Dogma uses the name with almost none of the mythology. His Loki is an angel, the former Angel of Death, banished to Wisconsin with his friend Bartleby after a drunken decision to quit. The two of them find what they think is a loophole that would let them back into heaven, and the plot spins out of that. Bartleby turns into a monster. Loki ends up with a conscience, and Bartleby kills him for it.
It’s the myth turned inside out. The angel named after the great betrayer ends up being betrayed.
And then Damon brings him back for a cameo, and gives him a death that never happened in a film he wasn’t in, and drops him into the Mediterranean to become somebody else. That’s about as Loki as a joke can get.
Novelists keep reaching for him too. Joanne Harris’s The Gospel of Loki, published in 2014, retells the Norse myths in Loki’s own voice, as a charming, unreliable narrator who insists he’s been misjudged. Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase books cast him as the scheming villain for a younger audience. Each one keeps the core of the character and moves the camera.
What can writers learn from Loki?
Every story needs someone who won’t follow the rules. What would the Norse myths be without him?
Look at what Loki does in the myths. Almost every story about him starts because he breaks something, and the plot is the fallout. Without him, Sif keeps her hair and Thor never gets his hammer. A story where everyone behaves has nowhere to go. The trickster is the character who makes things happen. Every culture has one.
He’s also proof that a character can change sides and stay the same person. In the myths, he moves from helper to enemy without ever becoming somebody else. He’s always clever, always restless, always resentful of the gods who keep him around and never quite trust him.
The Marvel version kept that and gave it a reason: a son raised in a family that would always prefer his brother. If you’re struggling with villain motivations that fall apart, Loki is a good place to look. His grievance never changes, only what he does about it.
And he shows how much an old character can carry. Wagner, Marvel, Kevin Smith and Joanne Harris all took the same name and wrote completely different stories. None of them needed to explain him. The name alone tells the reader to expect trouble, and that’s a lot of work for one word to do.
The god who keeps coming back
The myths chain Loki in a cave until the end of the world. Storytellers have never left him there. He keeps breaking loose, in an opera house, a comic book, a green rubber mask and a Wisconsin bus station, and every time he comes back, somebody gets a new story out of him.
A great character outlives the story that made him. If you want to build one of your own, the Writing Hub covers characters readers remember, and my book coaching can help you find your own trickster. Just don’t be surprised if he turns up later, floating in the Mediterranean, with no memory of how he got there.
