Skadi

Skadi is a famous frost-giantesses and a Jotun. She gained a place among the Aesir through marriage (twice). She had her own cult in ancient times and was revered as the goddess of winter and hunting, she was known to help her worshippers with their hunt, back in those days the people had to hunt in winter to survive. She is also a goddess of the cold, snowy regions, a huntress with bow and arrows. Her sled is pulled by a pair of white wolves. Many feel she is the inspiration for the Frost Maiden of old russian stories, and also the Snow Queen of Hans Christian Andersen's stories. She was revered in ancient times by hunters who would ask her aid in feeding their families. Her good will (and the success of the hunt) often meant the difference between survival and starvation.

Skadi was the daughter of the Jotun Thjassi, the frost-giant who captured Idunna of the Aesir and was subsequently killed during Loki's rescue of Idunna. Thjassi, the son of Olvalde, also somehow owned land in Asgard, due to complicated circumstances. Thjassi had married an Aesir woman for a brief time but he never went to Asgard; she apparently came to live with him in his cliff-fortress in the north of Jotunheim, and died had soon after of the cold. Thjassi had technically inherited her Asgard estate, he never visited it because of the Aesir-Jotnar animosity (which is funny when you think of all the Jotun women who married Aesir and that Loki was himself a Jotun). When he was killed, his daughter Skadi claimed his estate, and also claimed weregild from the Aesir for her father's death.

She marched to the gates of Asgard in full panoply and fully armed, and demanded that she be given not only weregild and her father's inheritance, but she also demanded she be given an Aesir husband of her choosing. She hoped to marry Baldur, most beautiful of the gods, but Odin blindfolded her and made her choose between the unmarried men in Asgard by only their feet. She chose the one with the finest feet, thinking it must be Balder, however it was Njord, the Vanir sea-king who had stayed in Asgard after the Aesir Vanir war as part of the peace treaty between the main two clans of the gods. Njord was good-looking and kind enough, so they married, but found after a while that they could not live together. Both Skadi's homeland - Thrymheim in Jotunheim - and her inherited package in Asgard were in the mountains, where she preferred to be, but Njord, could not bring himself to live that far from the sea. His home in Asgard, Noatun, and his home in Vanheim, both by the ocean, annoyed Skadi. She complained about the noise of the sea-birds and the constant roar of the waves. He could not get used to the howling of her wolves. The two separated amicably after a time, and by then Skadi had gained a place in the council of Asgard.

It seems that shortly after this, she had an ill-fated affair with Loki. Some sources claim that Odin sent Loki to her in order to cement her bonds with Asgard; others merely suggest that the opportunistic Loki saw a chance to take advantage of the depressed Skadi, some thought them well suited as they were both Jotun. One time she was feeling depressed and Loki tried to cheer her up by making a spectacle of himself. He tied his testicles to a goat, and let the goat pull him around screaming and staggering, much to the amusement of the onlookers. At some point the rope snapped, and he fell headlong into Skadi's lap, and she laughed, finally. This rite is echoed in legends of sacrificial rites to the cold, implacable death goddess, where a man is castrated and flung bleeding into her lap, with the idea that only blood, not semen, can fertilize a death goddess. It may be that Loki was deliberately mimicking this rite as a way of offering himself to Skadi.

At any rate, she seems to have taken him more seriously than he took her, for they had an affair that did not last, and it filled her with a rage against him so bitter that when he was caught and bound after Baldur's death, Skadi placed a poisonous serpent over his head, to drip venom onto his head for eternity or until he was released. A lesson even Loki may have learned to not piss off a Jotun goddess. If Loki's courtship actions were an allusion to a traditional consort's sacrifice to a Goddess, and Skadi took that offering seriously, then Loki's casual discarding of her when he had had enough was more than callousness; it was outright sacrilege and the dishonoring of a ritual marriage. This may be why she felt that she had every right to make him suffer for centuries. Indeed, one could say that Loki's mistake with Skadi was the worst that he ever made.

(based on an article by Raven Kaldera)