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Loki conjures daggers freely all the time, yet something seems special about the blade Kid Loki hands over in the episode’s climax.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Loki Episode 5, “Journey Into Mystery,” streaming now on Disney+.
A gathering of Lokis greater than ever before occurred in the latest episode of Loki, as the title character teamed up with his variants to survive the apocalyptic environment of the Void. Each Loki brought to bear their own unique set of skills and leading up to the climax of the episode, that meant that Kid Loki handed off a valuable artifact: a sword.
The moment does not receive much explanation, and while the magic sword looks cool, this may have left audiences scratching their heads about what exactly makes it so special. But that’s not just any sword: that’s Laevateinn, and it’s possibly Loki’s most powerful weapon.
As already shown in Loki, many Loki Variants have many different skills. Whereas the main Loki is primarily a spellcaster, his counterpart Sylvie primarily fights with the assistance of a sword. No slouch in the fighting department himself, Loki summons daggers to wield in battle seemingly from thin air, and it’s precisely this trick that may undercut the drama of Kid Loki summoning a blade to hand him before the God of Mischief faces down Alioth. But there’s more to that blade than meets the eye.
While the hum drum nature of the Time Variance Authority and the Marvel Cinematic Universe putting its own spin on such stories may make the gods of Asgard seem like any other civilization, it’s easy to forget that they are actually based on real world Norse mythology. In those legends, Loki did indeed wield a weapon known as Lævateinn, and although it periodically appears as a sword, it has also been referred to as a dart or a wand. It’s quite like Loki’s nature for the weapon itself to have a mercurial quality, and the comics have their own version of Laevateinn that hints at the powers the MCU’s version may have.
Appearing as early as Journey Into Mystery #115, the comic offers insight into what the blade can do when Loki wields it in battle against Thor and his hammer, Mjolnir. The blade proves capable of cutting through almost anything save Mjolnir itself, and Loki can also phase it onto a different dimension so that Thor cannot shatter its metal. He even uses the blade as a spellcasting focus, casting his magic through it in a callback to its possible interpretation as a wand. This use is especially fitting for a spellcaster such as Loki.
The blade appears later in Loki: Agent of Asgard, when the God of Mischief summons it out of thin air in a manner now familiar to fans of the MCU, saying that he always keeps the ancestral blade on him. Though Norse legend tells of the blade’s role in slaying the monstrous rooster Víðópnir, the comics do not seem to refer to this story. Nevertheless, the blade’s power should be considerable. Of the Loki variants, Kid Loki is held in high regard because he is the only one known to have slain Thor. That very well could be the achievement that makes the weapon worth handing to Loki at such a critical moment.
Thus far in Loki, all the blade is shown to do is light aflame and fail to distract Alioth as Loki waves it around. Like a Chekhov’s Gun that demands importance to the story, however, there is little reason to introduce the blade with such import. Unlike many of the episode’s cameos and Easter eggs, this is one small moment that will doubtless come back to have critical importance.
Loki stars Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Sophia Di Martino, Richard E. Grant, Sasha Lane, and Eugene Cordero. New episodes air Wednesdays on Disney+.
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