The book
The Gospel of Loki is the stories from Norse Mythology told through the
eyes of Loki, the Trickster god. It’s basically a run through of all the myths,
but told from a different perspective. Loki comes to live with the Aesir,
causes trouble and sits around to watch the delightful results.
Thoughts
Since I’m Norwegian I have read and heard Norse myths in school and I
knew the stories and myths in this book. Almost surprisingly well. I always
liked Loki because I always thought he seemed like fun, and he was ambiguous,
so I was excited to read a story told from his perspective, because well, Loki
is badass. So I was excited about this.
Sadly this didn’t really impress me very much. Firstly the author changes
Loki’s origin. In the original myths Loki is a Jotun/God and lives with the
Gods because he is sort of related to them, and he seems to find them
fascinating. In this book Loki is not a Jotun, he is a part of Chaos, a sort of
non-corporeal entity. He is made corporeal by Odin. I don’t understand why this
was done. It didn’t really make Loki’s story any better necessarily. And it
wasn’t done for any magical purposes. The “real” Loki can shift form, so making
him Chaos didn’t make him any more powerful. It seemed sort of pointless. And
the original story is good. Because he sort of straddles the world of good and
bad and doesn’t know exactly where he belongs, and how he should interact with
the Gods.
It also didn’t change very much. The Norse mythology is basically built
up of different stories, and a lot of it isn’t really like a continuous
narrative. And this was the same. The individual stories were put in order so
it seems like a continuous story. And Loki seems to have different
justifications and reasons for doing what he does than what was said in the original
stories. It wasn’t done well enough for it to feel like one continuous story.
It felt like the book said: and then this happened, and then this happened, and
then this happened. I don’t know if there is a way to write the Norse
mythologies into a long story, but this wasn’t the way to do it.
I also found Loki sort of annoying. He knows what he’s doing, he knows
why he’s doing the things he does. He knows why he kills Balder, he knows what
he’s done to cause Ragnarok, but he acts like he hasn’t done it on purpose, and
by the way, it wasn’t his fault anyway. It’s incredibly annoying. Like, take
some responsibility Loki, you did this because you enjoy chaos, and because you
feel slighted. You know it’s your fault, and you know why you did it. Don’t be a
whiny asshole.
Finally
Even though there were things that annoyed me it was fun enough. It’s
always fun to read the Norse mythologies, and I liked that it used modern
language. It made the gods seem like petty teenagers, which is fun. But still.
Meh.
