Loki, as we have seen all along, whatever his origin may have been, had come to mean evil by the time these myths were formed,—the destructive principle, the originator of all corruption—as, father of devouring Hel, of Fenrir, the wolf annihilator, and of Jörmungand, the universal wolf. There is a curious story in one of the Eddas about a feast which the King of the Sea gave to the gods. By the way, one song says of Ægir, "Sat the Rock-dweller, glad as a child:" which is the introduction to another feast he gave the gods. If he began by being glad on this latter occasion, expecting a happy entertainment, he must have had a grievous disappointment, for Loki, bent on mischief, would insist upon feasting with the Æsir. Things rarely went well where Loki was, which the gods knew and begged him not to come. But Loki would come, and directly he was seated at the table he began his mischief-making, doing his best to make the gods quarrel with one another, insulting them by turns, reminding each of some fault or misfortune least pleasant to remember. Altogether it must have been a most uncomfortable dinner-party. At last Thor, who had been on a journey, came back; and, after a good deal of abuse had passed between him and Loki, the latter appeared to take alarm and slank away from his enraged companions. One account says that it was immediately after this the gods caught Loki and bound him, but another does not mention his capture in connection with Ægir's feast. Simrock says that Loki, in his character of accuser at this banquet, represents the guilty conscience of the gods. From this he becomes the guilty conscience itself, a personification of the consciousness of sin. His attempts at concealment, the four doors of his house placed every way that he might be alert in descrying danger, his making the net by which he was caught (for the Æsir were said to copy the net which they found in Loki's house), his being bound with the entrails of his own children—results of evil deeds—all carry out this idea. He is, says Simrock, the Bad itself as well as the consciousness of it. He is sin chained as Fenrir is destruction chained. The gods are moral power, they are his chains, for it is said that when he shudders they tremble. And yet, how real he has become in this myth, so much a person that we can scarcely help wishing him to escape by means of his ingenious disguises, and are certainly glad that at last some one is left to pity him—the faithful wife, standing by, who wards off from him so much of his punishment.
We now come to Ragnarök; and "first," as Har said, "there will come a winter." But that is not exactly how we tell the story.
CHAPTER IX.
RAGNARÖK, OR THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS.
Since the day that Baldur died no one had walked in the bright halls of Broadblink—no one had even stepped through the expanded gates. Instead of undimmed brightness, a soft, luminous mist now hung over the palace of the dead Asa, and the Asyniur whispered to one another that it was haunted by wild dreams.
"I have seen them," Freyja used to say; "I have seen them float in at sunset through the palace windows and the open doors; every evening I can trace their slight forms through the rosy mist; and I know that those dreams are wild and strange from the shuddering that I feel when I look at them, or if ever they glance at me."
So the Asyniur never went into Broadblink, and though the Æsir did not think much about the dreams, they never went there either.