![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Previous scholarship, I suggest, has overlooked a Christian background to the Norse gods’ final fishing expedition, which leads to the binding of Loki and his captivity until Ragnarǫk, when Loki is caught in a net of his own invention: a widespread biblical topos concerning the devil and other “evil-doers.” Snorri’s treatment of the “The Matter of Loki” is hence relevant more broadly to long-standing debates concerning the intellectual debt of Snorri’s conception of Norse myth as “mythic history” to the formative influence of Christian eschatology. My central claim is that two pervasive figures, the bird and the fish-prototypically represented as captured in Ecclesiastes 9:12 and elsewhere in the Christian literary tradition-merit consideration not as “sources” of certain myths of Loki but of Snorri’s representation of them. I offer an argument for a relationship between the construction of Snorri’s mythography in the Edda and two figurative traditions stemming from the Old Testament, most notably codified in the 9th chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and their subsequent reception in the medieval commentary tradition in Latin and Icelandic, the Old Norse liturgy, vernacular saints’ lives, and lives of the Icelandic bishops. This article re-examines the much-debated question of the indebtedness of the medieval Icelandic scholar-poet-politician Snorri Sturluson to the Christian-Latin tradition. ![]()
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