Loki vs Raven

A complex figure, blood brother to Odin but frequently causing trouble for the gods. A shape-shifter and trickster who fathers monstrous children including Fenrir, Jormungandr, and Hel.

Loki is not one of the Aesir by birth but a giant, the son of the giant Farbauti and the giantess Laufey (or Nal). Despite his giant heritage, he was accepted among the Aesir after becoming blood brothers with Odin in ancient times. The details of this pact are lost, but it bound Odin to never drink unless Loki was also offered a cup. Loki married the goddess Sigyn, who bore him sons Narfi and Vali. With the giantess Angrboda, he fathered three monstrous children: Fenrir the wolf, Jormungandr the World Serpent, and Hel, ruler of the dead.

Loki is a shape-shifter and the catalyst for most Norse myths. Sometimes a helpful ally, often a malicious nuisance, his actions drive the plot of the gods' lives.

The central figure of Tlingit and Haida oral tradition, who steals daylight from a wealthy old man's nested boxes at the head of the Nass River and, in a Haida telling, coaxes the first people from a clamshell on the beach at Haida Gwaii.

As the poet and translator Robert Bringhurst wrote of the Haida telling, Raven "never actually creates anything; he made the world by stealing, exchanging, redistributing, and generally moving things around." Both Tlingit and Haida traditions cast Raven this way: greedy, funny, and self-interested, yet the figure through whom the world's useful and beautiful things (daylight, salmon, the first people) come to be. Raven's stories are told today by Tlingit and Haida people as living oral tradition, and Sealaska Heritage Institute, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian nations' own cultural institution, publishes Raven stories for public audiences.