The Norse sources name three children born to Loki and the giantess Angrboda—Fenrir, Jormungandr, and Hel—and tie each one to the long arc of Ragnarok. Their stories live on the edges: between the living and the dead, land and sea, oath and fear. The gods responded to that danger the way anxious rulers often do: they tried to place each threat where it could be watched or limited. Odin threw the serpent into the ocean, sent Hel down to rule the dead, and allowed the wolf to stay in Asgard until dread forced a binding that scarred the pantheon. Read closely, the poems and Snorri’s prose are not just set pieces about monsters. They are about decisions, consequences, and how attempts to avoid a fate can end up building the road toward it.
What the sources actually say (and how they fit together)
The backbone is the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. Völuspá sets the frame of making, breaking, and ending. Lokasenna shows Loki tearing at social bonds in a crowded hall. Hymiskviða gives the famous fishing match between Thor and the World Serpent. Baldrs draumar and Snorri Sturluson’s Gylfaginning add the descent to Hel and the gods’ efforts to undo disaster. For Loki’s children, Gylfaginning is explicit: Odin throws Jormungandr into the great ocean around Midgard; Hel is sent below to rule over those who die of sickness and old age; Fenrir is kept in Asgard because he is too dangerous to abandon—an act that becomes its own risk. The poems and the prose do not match on every detail, but they agree on the line of the story: the Aesir recognized danger early, tried to assign it to places and roles, and could not make prophecy vanish.
That mismatch in tone between poem and prose matters. The poems speak in warnings and images; Snorri, writing later, strings the images into a neat narrative. When we read them together we should let both styles talk: the poetry keeps the uncanny; the prose lays out the chain of decisions. Taken together, they show a myth-world in which power is real, limits are real, and even gods run into both.
Angrboda and the Ironwood
Angrboda—“she who brings sorrow”—belongs to the shadowed ranks of giant women whose influence looks like foresight. Völuspá hints at a brood of wolves in the Ironwood (Járnviðr) and a watcher among them; Snorri makes the connection and names Angrboda as mother to the three who trouble the gods. Her place is Jotunheim, not Asgard; her work is not hearth and law but the kind of bearing that sets events moving. Where Asgard stands for fences, oaths, and assembly, Angrboda marks the outer border where wild rules apply. Even the children’s destinations feel like a reply to their mother’s nature: one to the sea’s rim, one to the underworld, one inside the very halls that fear him.
Hel: a realm with rules
Snorri’s line that Odin sent Hel “to those who die of sickness or old age” is not throwaway. It defines her power. Hel is not only a figure; she is the head of a jurisdiction—the realm that receives the ordinary dead, neither chosen by Odin’s valkyries for Valhalla nor by Freyja for Fólkvangr. Descriptions are brief but pointed: a hall named Éljúðnir, a threshold called Fallandaforað (“fall-to-peril”), a platter called Hunger and a knife called Famine. Art later gives her the half-alive, half-dead appearance. What matters more than the cold imagery is the ability to rule. Hel sets terms, keeps them, and does not yield to pleading.
Baldr’s death makes that plain. When the beloved god dies, Hermod rides Sleipnir down to Hel’s hall and begs for release. Hel agrees only if every being and thing in the world will weep for Baldr. One figure—Thökk—refuses (the tradition points to Loki), and the bargain fails. The point is not cruelty for its own sake. It is legitimacy. Hel’s “no” proves the realm has weight. The world cannot be put back the way it was because a ruler with authority has said the condition was not met. A world with rules has griefs that cannot be smoothed out by rank or charm.
Jormungandr: measuring the world
At first glance Odin throws the serpent away; in practice he defines the world with the act. Jormungandr grows until he bites his own tail, the ring that marks Midgard’s edge. In Norse thinking, to encircle is to control; to hold your own tail is to keep the boundary tight. This is why the serpent’s first move at Ragnarok—opening his mouth and letting the tail slip free—reads like a world-event. The ring is broken and the boundary fails.
The serpent is also the best counterpart to Thor because he opposes Thor’s role in shape and symbol. Thor is the straightener: the one who drives things back into line. The serpent is the curve that holds the sea in place. Their meetings are border tests. In Hymiskviða, Thor goes fishing with the giant Hymir, baits the hook with an ox head, and hauls the World Serpent up until the boat groans. The poem is tense and ambiguous: the line strains; the sea heaves; does Hymir cut, or does Thor strike first? Snorri’s prose preserves versions where the line is cut and the world gets a reprieve. The lesson is the same either way: to lift the sea’s curve even for a moment takes Thor, a giant’s strength, and an ox head. At the end, prophecy is clear: Thor kills the serpent, staggers nine steps, and falls from venom. They undo each other and lie together on the field. That is not spectacle for its own sake. It is symmetry. The world’s straightener and its encircler cancel out; a balance is paid.
Fenrir: fear, oath, and the cost of peace
Fenrir grows up in Asgard because the gods want him where they can watch him. That looks prudent and becomes the problem. He grows huge and shrewd; only Tyr will feed him by hand when others lose their nerve. The gods test his strength with chains; he breaks them. Finally they commission Gleipnir, the ribbon forged by dwarfs from impossible ingredients—cat’s footfall, woman’s beard, mountain’s roots, fish’s breath, bird’s spittle, bear’s sinews. The trap requires an oath as bait: someone must put a hand in the wolf’s mouth while the “test” is underway. Tyr steps forward. Gleipnir holds; the wolf thrashes; Tyr loses his hand.
This is not a children’s fable about promises. It is a story about the price of order. The gods call a trick an oath to make it palatable. The tale does not punish Tyr for honesty; it marks him as the one god who paid in flesh for a common safety the others wanted at no cost to themselves. From then on, the wolf’s howling is a barometer of Asgard’s uneasy peace. A sword is jammed in his jaws; the chain bites; fate waits. At Ragnarok he breaks free and swallows Odin. Odin’s son Vidar kills the wolf by tearing his jaw apart with a reinforced shoe. The bookkeeping is deliberate: a deception followed by a king’s death, followed by a son’s revenge. Fenrir is not mere horror. He is owed violence coming due.
Sleipnir: the other child most people forget
Most readers remember the monstrous three and forget that Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse, is also Loki’s child—born when Loki turned into a mare to distract a builder’s stallion and save Asgard from a bad bargain. It reads like comic relief until you think about function. The gods create problems of distance and access; Loki produces a mount that crosses every border. When a god must reach Hel’s gate or outrun disaster, the horse that can carry him there matters as much as any weapon. Look at the set as an ecology, not a neat list: the serpent draws a border; the horse crosses borders; the wolf punishes false security; Hel administers the people beyond the border.
Why the gods acted as they did
Odin’s choices make sense if you read them as risk management in a world that believes in prophecy and payback. Keeping Jormungandr in Asgard would have been madness; the ocean was the only container big enough. Leaving Hel idle would have made her a roaming threat; giving her authority turned a danger into an office with rules. Fenrir was too dangerous to cast away; keeping him close felt safer until closeness bred fear and fear broke oaths. Each move is understandable on its own. Each also tightens the cords it was meant to loosen. You can relocate danger; you cannot remove it from the story.
The sources are crisp about some predictions and vague about others. We are told who kills whom at the end; we are not told whether different choices could have delayed or softened the outcome. Snorri writes like a man who wants the logic to line up; the poets sing like people who think character is destiny. Either way, the lesson is steady: you can assign risk, bind it, ship it, crown it, feed it—yet the bill still arrives.
Hel elsewhere in the cycle
Hel’s realm is not just where Baldr goes; it is also where Odin rides in Baldrs draumar to question a dead seeress about the future. That ride on Sleipnir ties together several traits: Odin’s habit of seeking knowledge he is warned not to touch; Hel’s independence (she will not release Baldr because a visitor pleads); and the hard truth that information carries a price. The dead speak in riddles and partial answers. The living must decide what to do with news they cannot change. If Hel had simply obeyed the wish of the gods, Norse myth would feel like a fairy tale with easy exits. Because she sets terms and holds them, the world feels like a place with institutions and limits.
The serpent and the fisherman
Writers often point out how the serpent’s image is all curve and the god who fights him is all line. Jormungandr encircles; ship prows rise to meet waves; Thor’s fishing line pulls straight; the hook is a small curve that makes straightness bite. When the line holds, order pushes back; when the giant cuts it, the sea falls into its old shape and the day is saved by retreat. Artists love to draw Thor’s feet breaking the boat because it shows both truths at once: power so great that wood gives way, and resolve so firm that the sea itself looks like it might blink. The coil and the line are rival disciplines. One contains; one strikes. The world needs both, and the end comes when both spend themselves.
The ethics inside Fenrir’s tale
Modern readers often see only violence in the binding of the wolf. The sources show a code at work. Tyr keeps his word in the moment even while the others plan a trick. Odin makes settlements on the largest scale possible—moving beings to sea and underworld to keep a fragile order. Vidar, who speaks rarely, acts without speech when it is time. Together they sketch what “good” looks like in a damaged cosmos: acting when required, paying costs without theatrics, holding back until holding back would be wrong. Fenrir’s story hits hard because the harms feel earned rather than random. Everyone behaves exactly as their role demands, and yet the debt still comes due.
Loki as catalyst rather than cartoon
Loki is not a single-note villain. He is the spark that tests the system. With Angrboda he fathers a brood that lives on borders; as a mare he births the horse that crosses them. In Lokasenna he forces himself into the hall and says the things no one wants said—some true, some foul, all damaging. If the Aesir stand for form and fence, Loki stands for stress-testing both. He does not allow a wall to sit unchallenged. That is infuriating in peace and sometimes necessary in danger, because it exposes the weak places before the enemy does. He brings trouble; he also brings tools. Both parts are in the tradition, and both matter for understanding why the myths look the way they do.
How Ragnarok ties it together
When the seeress in Völuspá chants the end, she does not describe random collapse. She assigns parts. Fenrir breaks his bonds and takes Odin. Jormungandr floods the world, poisons the sky, and dies with Thor. Hel does not ride out with a sword; she remains what she has always been—the one authority that never fails, receiving what the battle sends her. The end is staged like a set of balances being settled. The children of Loki are central to that staging: a wolf who meets sovereignty head on, a serpent who marks and then breaks the world’s boundary, and a queen who gathers the dead. They are not add-on monsters. They are structural pieces in a mythic system that thinks in terms of limits, offices, and the cost of breaking both.
How artists have pictured them
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century illustrators—Johannes Gehrts, Lorenz Frølich, John Bauer, Willy Pogany, and others—fixed images that still shape how we imagine these figures. Gehrts’ Hel is upright and sovereign rather than ghoul. Frølich’s serpent coils through sea and sky with grand sweep, and his Thor is all purpose and strain. Bauer’s Fenrir is a massive, watchful mind at the instant before betrayal. Pogany groups the three children together so that readers, young and old, see how each relates to the others. These are not archaeological reconstructions; they are visual arguments. They work because they stay close to scenes and lines in the sources while giving them a clear, memorable form.
The spread of these images into schoolbooks, posters, and popular retellings means most of us “see” the myths through their eyes first. That is not a weakness if we keep the texts in view. The art helps us remember the shape of the story: a queen ruling the quiet dead; a serpent defining and then breaking the world’s edge; a wolf whose binding buys time and whose freedom ends it. When we go back to the poems, the images guide the attention but do not replace the words. Good art and careful reading reinforce each other.
What the triad tells us about Norse myth
Taken together, the stories of Hel, Jormungandr, and Fenrir explain what Norse myth values and fears. The first lesson is that power is limited by office. Hel’s refusal to release Baldr unless every being weeps is not malice; it is procedure. The world is tied together by terms, and even great sorrow does not cancel them. The second lesson is that boundaries are part of creation, not an afterthought. The serpent defines the world as surely as Odin’s act of ordering it. When that ring opens, the world’s shape fails. The third lesson is that peace bought with cleverness alone will not hold. The binding of the wolf postpones the reckoning and raises the price. Tyr’s missing hand keeps the cost visible until the day the account closes on the field.
A final lesson sits behind them all: placing a danger is not the same thing as ending it. Odin’s choices—sea for the serpent, office for the queen of the dead, watchful custody for the wolf—are reasonable acts by a ruler under threat. They also make the map of how the story must end. Myth is not arguing that planning is useless. It is saying that planning has a shape, and the shape itself can guide an ending. That is why these figures keep their hold on readers. They are not generic monsters. They are the lines and knots that keep the world together until the day they break it.
