Solas and Loki: A Comparison
From the first time I read about Fen’Harel, I associated him with Loki, but it was after I’d played Trespasser that Solas as a Loki figure truly captivated me. Pre-Trespasser there really wasn’t much which could be said to point to Loki specifically, as Fen’Harel shares much with many trickster gods. The reason Loki in particular was the one I thought of is because of my own background – In Denmark we still grow up with stories from Norse Mythology – though it didn’t hurt that he’s a wolf with a name reminiscent of Fenrir, Loki’s monstrous wolf son.
Fen’Harel in Dalish Religion and the Vilification of Loki
Let’s take a look at the first codex entry we get on Fen’Harel. It won’t tell us much of Solas, but it will tell us a lot of how he’s viewed in Dalish religion.
Fen'Harel kept to himself and plotted the betrayal of all the gods.
Now, Loki could hardly be said to keep to himself, but he did betray the gods. There’s more to it than that, as there is with Fen’Harel, but that insight is largely lost today, as the truth of Solas’ actions is it in Thedas. More on that later on.
In ancient times, only Fen'Harel could walk without fear among both our gods and the Forgotten Ones, for although he is kin to the gods of the People, the Forgotten Ones knew of his cunning ways, and saw him as one of their own.
Loki had connections to both the Norse gods and jötnar, just as Fen’Harel had it to both the Elven gods and the Forgotten Ones. It seems to be shifted around though - Fen’Harel is kin of the gods, but considered one of the Forgotten Ones, while Loki was a jötunn who was, through his blood brotherhood with Odin, considered one of the Aesier.
Now a big difference here is that it’s implied Fen’Harel is equally a part and yet not a part of both groups, which isn’t entirely true of Loki. He was relatively loyal to the gods until near the end, despite his penchant for causing trouble.
There is still a sense of Loki having a foot in both camps though. He was married to a goddess, Sigyn, and had humanoid children with her, while he also had a relationship with a jötunn woman, Angrboda, with whom he had monstrous children, like Fenrir. Jötunn were creatures of chaos, the gods creatures of order, and thus Loki was a chaos god.
And that is how Fen'Harel tricked them. Our gods saw him as a brother, and they trusted him when he said that they must keep to the heavens while he arranged a truce. And the Forgotten Ones trusted him also when he said he would arrange for the defeat of our gods, if only the Forgotten Ones would return to the abyss for a time. They trusted Fen'Harel, and they were all of them betrayed. And Fen'Harel sealed them away so they could never again walk among the People.
Here we see Fen’Harel condemned as a loyaltiless villain at fault for robbing the Dalish of their gods. We, of course, know this to be very far from the truth of the situation, but this is the legacy Solas is left with.
Now what’s interesting is that just as Solas was turned into a villain in Dalish religion, Loki has historically been vilified as well. The arrival of Christianity saw Baldr turned into a Jesus figure and Loki turned into a satanic one. In Marvel and many other modern versions of the character, this tradition is continued. Furthermore, many pagans today refuse to participate in and even outright condemn worship of Loki for various reasons, even though it’s unlikely such attitudes were prominent pre-Christianity.
These sentences from the wiki really capture a similarity between Fen’Harel worship and (at least contemporary, since we have no sources on ancient) Loki worship:
In the past, however, it is said that the Dread Wolf was called upon by elves for aid and advice in various matters, but always with a price. In spite of this, offerings of thanks were often given for Fen'Harel’s help as he did follow through on promises of aid, if in an unorthodox manner. (x)
The Fen’Harel of Felassan’s Stories
The one depiction of Fen’Harel that bears the most similarity to Loki is the stories Felassan tell in The Masked Empire. In two of them we hear of Fen’Harel’s special, very trickster-like way of helping those who sought his aid, but it’s the third, Fen’Harel and the Tree, in particular that really drives home his similarity to Loki for me:
In the story, Fen'Harel was captured by the hunting goddess, Andruil. He had angered her by hunting the halla without her blessing, and she tied him to a tree and declared that he would have to serve in her bed for a year and a day to pay her back. But as she made camp that night, the dark god Anaris found them, and Anaris swore that he would kill Fen'Harel for crimes against the Forgotten Ones. Andruil and Anaris decided that they would duel for the right to claim Fen'Harel.
He called out to Anaris during the fight and told him of a flaw in Andruil’s armor just above the hip, and Anaris stabbed Andruil in the side, and she fell. Then Fen'Harel told Anaris that he owed the Dread Wolf for the victory and ought to get his freedom. Anaris was so affronted by Fen'Harel’s audacity that he turned and shouted insults at the prisoner, and so he did not see Andruil, injured but alive, rise behind him and attack with her great bow. Anaris fell with a golden arrow in his back, badly injured, and while both gods slumbered to heal their wounds, Fen'Harel chewed through his ropes and escaped.
Loki was frequently a target of anger from both gods and jötnar, as when he gets threatened by a jötun into kidnapping Idun, only to be threatened by the gods into rescuing her (x). Fen’Harel is similarly the target of anger from both Andruil and Anaris, and he resolves the situation by using trickery, just as Loki so often does, one example being when he (infamously) turns into a mare to distract a horse, thus making sure the builder, whom the horse belongs to, can’t live up to his side of a bargain Loki struck with him on the god’s behalf, so the gods don’t have to either. (x) Other examples can be found in Loki’s Wager With The Dwarves and Þrymskviða.
Things really start to get interesting with the knowledge of the truth behind the Dalish legends. As it turns out, the Dalish gods were not truly gods; they were very powerful mages, who used their power to enslave other elves and fight wars against each other.
Solas saw this for the corruption that it was and he set out to liberate slaves and oppose the Evanuris, where, as far as we know, no-one else did. To Solas, their corruption culminated in the murder of Mythal, which was the last straw that made him act drastically.
It’s for his involvement in Baldr’s death that Loki is hated by the rest of the gods, not for anything as noble as freeing slaves, and yet there are similarities to be found. The Norse gods were deeply flawed, as gods in polytheistic religions tend to be, and one of their great flaws was arrogance, which Loki was unable to stomach.
Baldr is a good example of such arrogance. His mother Frigg had made him unkillable, or so everyone thought, by making everything in existence promise to never harm him. As he was supposedly invincible, the gods would throw whatever at him to amuse themselves (they had never heard of “tempting fate”, it seems). Frigg had never asked mistletoe though, and when Loki found out about that, he fashioned a weapon of it and gave it to Hödr to strike at Baldr with, which he then did in the belief that it wouldn’t harm him. From Loki’s point of view, Baldr was killed because of the gods’ arrogance in assuming Baldr was truly unkillable.
The entirety of Lokasenna can be seen as Loki knocking the gods down a notch or two, keeping with this interpretation. He may not have been nearly as noble about it, but ultimately Loki’s goal was to point out what he perceived as corruption among the gods, just as Solas opposed the Evanuris for their corruption.
Another possibility lies in a theory about Gullveig. Gullveig was a witch whom the Aesir killed, which prompted the “first war in the world,” widely believed to be referring to the Aesir-Vanir war. They killed her three times, as she came back each time they killed her, and by the end of it she took the name Heiðr, which could be thought of as similar to how Mythal ends up known as Flemeth. There are many theories about this event, as it’s sparsely attested but seems important, but the one relevant to this meta concerns Loki.
In Hyndluljóð from the Poetic Edda, Loki eats the heart of an “evil woman” and becomes pregnant:
Loki found the heart by a linden fire
partly roasted by the flame
Lopt became pregnant by the evil woman
That is where all wicked beings descend from
It’s speculated that this is Gullveig’s heart, and that Gullveig and Loki were close. In a retelling of the myths, The Children of Odin, Loki’s reaction to the murder of Gullveig is described thusly:
Now, when he came back and heard the whispers of what had been done, a rage flamed up within him. For Loki was one of those whose minds were being changed by the presence and the whispers of the witch Gulveig. His mind was being changed to hatred of the Gods. Now he went to the place of Gulveig’s burning. All her body was in ashes, but her heart had not been devoured by the flames. And Loki in his rage took the heart of the witch and ate it. Oh, black and direful was it in Asgard, the day that Loki ate the heart that the flames would not devour!
Here clear similarities can be drawn to Solas’ relationship to Mythal and his reaction to the Evanuris’ murder of her. According to this theory, Loki turning on the gods was caused by their murder of Gullveig, just as the final push for Solas was the murder of Mythal.
The Veil and the Cosmological Necessity of Ragnarok
In Dalish legends, Fen'Harel seals away the other deities out of love of trickery. If we understood more ancient elven, we might find earlier versions of the Dread Wolf’s story give him a more nuanced motivation beyond spite. (x)
As I’ve just explained, though Loki is often thought to kill Baldr for the lolz/evulz, his true motivation is much more nuanced. What’s important to understand here is that the Norse gods represent order and human society, where jötunn represent chaos and nature. If the gods are too arrogant, they are as humans who think they can rule over nature with no regard for it - which is par for the cause today, but not respecting nature could probably get you killed quite quickly in the Viking Age.
Just as more lies behind Loki’s contribution to Baldr’s murder, Ragnarok is not a temper tantrum he throws once he gets free of his bindings. Loki and the jötnar engaging in a war with the gods is nature’s revenge (unrelated, but if most of humanity gets wiped out in a natural crisis caused by global warming, this was exactly the kind of thing Norse Mythology was warning us against, just saying) and it’s a necessary change being made forcefully after an attempt to stop it from happening at all. The fact that there are survivors of this war on both sides shows that Ragnarok is more the rebirth of the universe than the end it’s often framed as. Most old religions are cyclic in nature, and this is true of Norse Mythology as well.
Now in my eyes, Solas putting up the Veil was his first (unintentional) Ragnarok, what he’s working on now is his (deliberate) attempt at a second. While putting up the Veil didn’t have anything to do with balance between society and nature, it was nevertheless as necessary. Just as Ragnarok was a rebirth of the world, so is the Veil. The reasons behind and the execution of it have little in common with Ragnarok, but the narrative function and the results are similar enough that a comparison seems appropriate. Provoking great change when necessary is one of the core functions of a trickster, and this is truly where Solas shines as such. Whether bringing down the Veil is necessary or not is up for debate, but Solas is convinced of its necessity, just as he was when he put up the Veil in the first place. if he succeeds in bringing down the Veil again, he’s merely doing what he’s supposed to from a cosmological standpoint.
Conflicts about magic are tearing the world apart; where the Veil once seemed a solution, now it’s a problem responsible for a great deal of the conflict in Thedas. Order was breaking down as Ragnarok came nearer, chaos was taking back territory, and if one views the sides of the Veil as worlds of order and chaos respectively, a clear comparison can be made.
Solas and Mythal = Loki and Odin?
Odin is the leader of the Norse pantheon, and he bears similarities with several figures from Dragon Age, most prominently Mythal, Flemeth, Elgar’nan and, like Loki, Solas.
Odin has few similarities with Mythal as she appears in the Dalish legends; in those he seems more similar to the vengeful Elgar’nan. As soon as Flemeth gets involved though, the similarities are clear. Odin was prone to disguising himself as a mere wanderer when in Midgard and testing the wits of humans in this disguise. Flemeth’s general behaviour, and indeed the whole idea of hiding as harmless old woman who just happens to know a bit of magic, is very similar to how Odin would conduct himself when on Midgard. Here some of his similarities with Solas become clear as well; the rest are derived from the fact that Odin and Loki are both trickster figures and indeed surprisingly similar. There are similarities to be found between Flemythal and how Solas used to behave according to Felassan as well.
Some time long before Odin became the leader of Asgard, Loki became his blood brother. In Norse society, being someone’s blood brother was as good as being their biological brother, and it was through this connection to Odin that Loki was owed respect: it was the source of his godhood and the reason he was tolerated. I do have to wonder if Solas was “brought up” by a connection to Mythal, as Loki was with his to Odin. It bears mention that Odin also had two wolves, Geri and Freki, who served him.
Solas and Mythal are as intrinsically related, it would seem. Aside from their partnership in current day Thedas, and Solas’ actions after the murder of Mythal, there are the underground statues that depict him next to Mythal. Furthermore, Felassan has vallaslin “probably of Mythal,” making it likely that Solas once had those too, or at least that he had access to Mythal’s servants.
Another possibility struck me after reading this bit from tv tropes (“Fenris” her refers to Fenrir of Norse Mythology):
“Fenris was actually briefly kept as a guard dog by Odin before being chained by Gleipnir. He took exception to that and it became apparent as he grew that keeping him as a glorified pet might not have been the best idea.”
It’s possible that Solas’ initial connection with Mythal was of a similar nature. My theory (partly supported by this codex entry) is that Solas was a shapeshifter who found himself in the service of Mythal, as Fenrir once was in service of Odin, only to break a bond of servitude and instead forge one of partnership, similar to Loki’s bond of brotherhood with Odin.
Now that I’ve laid out the similarities, the differences can better shine. Loki and Solas started in a similar place and have been through similar things, and yet their fates differ a lot.
I’ve previously used these two pictures to point out the similarity between them, but the differences are as interesting:
Where Fenrir is bound by gleipner and guarded by a man (possibly Tyr, who bound him, although the figure seemingly having both hands makes that unlikely, or Odin, whom Fenrir kills during Ragnarok), Solas/Fen’Harel is not bound, not in any of his forms.
Loki doesn’t live to perform a second Ragnarok - although surely another trickster will take his place - but Solas survived the lifting of the veil and is now able to fulfill his trickster role a second time by bringing it down.
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