Loki

 

 

Here’s a thing about gods. You might think all gods are nice – you know, maybe the god of wine gets drunk sometimes, or the god of maths is a bit boring, but they’re not really bad or anything. It’s just, you know, if you’re the god of maths, then you have to talk about long division all the time. But you need all the different gods, even gods of fractions, or rain, or underwear or whatever, because otherwise there’d be no one to ask for help when you got stuck in maths. Or ran out of underwear.

Anyway. That’s what you might think, but it’s not true. Because there are some gods who are just evil. There’s Loki, for instance, who’s this Viking god who went around doing awful things for no reason at all, like killing other gods just for fun and then refusing to cry so they never got reborn. He was so evil that the other gods tied him up in a cave underground and stuck a poisonous snake over his head, so that now the snake drips poison on him all day and all night and his wife has to stand over him with a bowl, catching it. And when the bowl is full, she pours it away and then the poison from the snake drips on Loki and he shakes so much that the whole Earth shakes too, and that’s where earthquakes come from.

Or so the Vikings thought.

And that proves that not all gods are nice. Some gods will kill other gods and make sure they never get reborn. Just for fun.