Nobody in this poem lands a hit. Thirteen gods and goddesses take a turn at answering Loki and every single reply either concedes the point, changes the subject, or threatens him. The poem is a wisdom-literature exercise conducted through obscenity, and its conclusion is that the divine order cannot defend itself with words — only with a hammer.
Before anyone sits down
Ægir was brewing for the gods in his hall under the sea, in the enormous cauldron that had been fetched out of giant country for exactly this purpose. The ale served itself; gold laid on the floor lit the room; peace was in force inside the doors, which in Norse terms is a legal condition, not a mood.
Ægir had two servants, Fimafeng and Eldir. The guests remarked on how well Fimafeng did his job, and Loki, who could not tolerate hearing anyone praised, killed him on the spot. The gods shook their shields at him and shouted him out into the forest, then went back and sat down.
He came back. Outside the door he met Eldir and asked what the gods were talking about in there. Their weapons, said Eldir, and their standing in war — and nobody in the hall has a good word for you.
Loki went in anyway, and his opening move is the sharpest thing in the poem. He does not force entry. He points out that he is thirsty, that he has come a long way, and that in the old days he and Odin mixed their blood and Odin swore never to taste ale unless it was poured for them both.
Odin, held by his own oath in front of witnesses, told Víðarr to make room.
Going round the hall
What follows is a senna — the formal insult-exchange that Germanic literature treats as a recognised genre, with rules, turn-taking and a scoring system, the same form that produces Unferth's challenge in Beowulf and Odin's own abuse of Thor in Hárbarðsljóð. The convention is that both parties speak; the innovation here is that only one of them has anything to say.
He starts on Bragi, the poet, who offers him a horse, a sword and a ring to keep the peace, and is told that a man who buys his way out of a quarrel is exactly the sort who sits furthest from the fighting. Iðunn tries to calm her husband and is told she once put her arms round the man who killed her brother.
Gefjon speaks up and is accused of taking a jewel from a fair-haired boy and paying for it in the obvious way. Odin defends her, and Loki turns on him: that he has handed victory to the worse man again and again, to armies that did not deserve it. Odin's counterattack is the one everybody remembers — that Loki spent eight winters below the earth as a woman, milking cows, and bore children there, which is the conduct of an argr man.
Loki's reply is that Odin worked seiðr on Sámsey, beat a drum like a wise-woman, and went among human beings in a witch's shape, and that this looked to him like the conduct of an argr man too.
This is not banter. In Icelandic law, calling a man argr, or saying he had borne a child, was among the small set of insults for which a man could be outlawed or killed with impunity. The two most powerful beings in the room have just accused each other of the one thing that cannot be said, and neither denies it, because in both cases the corpus elsewhere says it happened.
Frigg intervenes and is told she took Odin's two brothers into her bed while he was away — which the Ynglinga saga independently confirms, so the audience knew it was true. She says that if Baldr were sitting here Loki would not walk out. Loki says that if she wants more of this, he can go on: he is the reason her son never came back.
Freyja is told that every god and elf on the benches has been her lover, and then something considerably ruder involving her brother that has embarrassed translators for two centuries. Njörðr is reminded that he was a hostage in the east and that giants' daughters treated him as a latrine; when he replies that at least he has a fine son, Loki tells the hall who that son's mother was.
Týr speaks for Freyr and is asked how the missing hand is. Freyr is asked what he plans to fight with when Muspell's sons come riding, having handed his sword away as a bride-price. Heimdall is told that his lot in life is a wet back, standing sentry for other people's sleep. Skaði threatens him and is told he was at the front of the party that killed her father. Sif comes forward with a cup of mead and a request for peace, and is told she has taken one lover besides her husband, and that it was the man she is talking to.
Then Beyla says she can hear the mountains shaking.
Thor in the doorway
The final movement is four exchanges and it works like a drum.
Thor arrives, and tells Loki to be quiet or he will take his head off. Loki asks why the son of earth is shouting, and points out that on the day the wolf gets loose he will not be so brave.
Thor threatens again, and Loki replies that he intends to live a long time yet, and asks what happened to Thor's courage inside a certain glove, when he was crouching in a finger and hardly daring to sneeze.
Thor threatens a third time. Loki brings up the provision bag that could not be untied, and a hungry god sitting beside it with no supper.
Thor threatens a fourth time, and Loki gets up and leaves — and the line he leaves on is a concession, which is the only one he makes all evening. He has said what he came to say. He is going out for Thor alone, because Thor is the one who actually strikes. And on the way through the door he tells Ægir that his fine hall will burn, with everything in it, and fire will play over his back.
What happens to him afterwards
The prose passage that follows the poem in the manuscript is the earliest full account of the binding of Loki, and it is one of the nastiest paragraphs in medieval European literature.
He hid in the mountains, built a house with four doors so he could watch every direction, and spent his days as a salmon in a waterfall. The gods worked out where he was; the salmon leapt the net and Thor caught it in mid-air by the tail, which is offered as the reason salmon taper towards the back.
Then they took his two sons. One was turned into a wolf and tore the other apart, and the gods used the dead son's entrails to tie the father to three upright stones. Skaði fixed a serpent above his face to drip venom on him. Sigyn sits beside him holding a basin, and when she turns away to empty it the venom falls on his face and he convulses, and that is what earthquakes are.
Nothing in that is presented as excessive. The gods have been publicly stripped in their own hall by someone they let in on a technicality, and the response is proportionate to Norse understandings of dishonour rather than to the killings.
The text, and the argument about it
Lokasenna has come down in a single medieval book, the thirteenth-century Icelandic codex that carries most of the Eddic poems. Snorri Sturluson makes no use of it anywhere, although the binding at the end of it was clearly known to him.
Whether it is a heathen poem or a Christian one is a live and old dispute, and it is more interesting than a simple date question.
The case for lateness and irony: the poem's effect is to make the gods look ridiculous, adulterous, cowardly and dishonest, one after another, in a single sitting. That is exactly what a Christian satirist of the eleventh or twelfth century would want. The tidy structure — round the hall, one god per pair of stanzas — reads as literary design rather than performance.
The case for it being genuine tradition: the senna is a real Norse social form with real legal weight, not a literary conceit; the accusations track other texts too accurately to be invention; and the ergi charges are a legal live wire that a satirist writing about dead gods would have had little reason to handle so precisely. The poem also assumes an audience that already knows every story alluded to, which is a strong sign of a living tradition rather than an antiquarian one.
A third reading, which does not depend on the date, is that the poem is doing moral work inside the mythology: it assembles the gods' guilt in one place, immediately before the end of the world, and lets you see that when Ragnarök comes the gods will not be innocent parties.
Are the accusations true?
Mostly, and the pattern is worth setting out, because "every insult is true" is repeated as a slogan and is not quite right.
Corroborated elsewhere in the corpus: Odin's seiðr and cross-dressing magic; Loki's own childbearing as a mare in the building of the wall; Frigg and Odin's brothers; Týr's hand and Fenrir; Freyr giving away his sword to win a giant's daughter; Skaði's father's killing; Loki's part in Baldr's death; Thor in the glove at Útgarða-Loki's hall; Njörðr's hostage-taking; Odin awarding battles capriciously.
Attested only here: Sif's affair with Loki; Gefjon and the jewel; Iðunn and her brother's killer; the specific obscenity about Freyja. These are unverifiable, and it is possible that some are invented on the spot, which would be entirely in character and entirely within the rules of the genre.
Never denied by anyone: all of them. Not one god in the hall says "that did not happen."
Questions this poem raises
Why does Odin let him in at all? Because the blood-brotherhood oath is real and public, and Odin is the god who binds himself with oaths and lives inside the consequences. Refusing would cost him more than the evening does.
Why is Thor the only one who works? Because the senna's rules stop applying to him. Everyone else answers Loki within the form — insult for insult — and loses, because he is better at it. Thor declines the form entirely. The poem's argument is that speech is not the medium in which this problem can be resolved.
Is Loki drunk? The poem never says so, and the precision of his material argues against it. He is doing something more deliberate: he arrives with a prepared case against every guest, in order, and works through it.
Was a real senna like this? In outline, yes. Insult-exchange with a formal structure is attested in law codes as a punishable offence, in sagas as a social event, and in poetry as a genre. What is fictional is the guest list.
Does anyone come out of it well? Sif and Bragi try civility and are humiliated for it. Frigg lands the only accurate prediction — that Baldr would have stopped this — and it is a statement about a dead son. The nearest thing to a win is Thor's, and it consists of making a threat credible enough that the other party leaves the room.
Read on at Loki, the hall's host at Ægir, the cauldron's journey in Thor's fishing trip, the killing behind Frigg's line at the death of Baldr, and the whole arrangement at the Norse hub.