I don’t think that anyone until their soul leaves their body, is past the point of no return – Tom Hiddleston
The deeds of Loki’s life are woven throughout history, and while the God of Mischief was content, for the most part, to direct his pranks and tricks towards his “brother” Thor (he even turned him into a frog and left him to fend for himself in New York, which led to an epic battle between the rats and frogs of the city in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Or It’s Not Easy Being Green, a storyline that culminated in Thor #365), as he’s grown older, Loki has cast his narcissistic gaze further afield, as his desire to be worshipped as the “rightful ruler” of Asgard has overwhelmed his wayward and misguided sense of fun.
Loki’s life, his astounding belief in his self-forged Machiavellian schemes, and overwhelming optimism that he’s destined to reign over humanity and his fellow gods prove that he’s never paid much attention to Einstein’s definition of insanity or given much thought to the adage that inextricably ties age and wisdom together.
While we can understand why he’d choose to ignore Albert as mankind’s understanding of physics pales in comparison to that of Asgard, we’d have thought that having been around the block as many times as Loki has, that he would have acquired the foresight and acumen to understand that just because you want something, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get it or that the universe is going to hand itself to you on a plate.
We are, however, judging Loki’s inability to learn from his past mistakes through very human eyes and forgetting one crucial, and all-important detail. He isn’t human.
Loki doesn’t think the same way that we do and because time works very differently on Asgard, age becomes immaterial. After all, what is a century to a god?
It’s nothing more than the blink of any eye or minor diversion in the everyday humdrum mundanity of eternity.
That idea that the way Asgardians and humans view time and feel its passage is exponentially disparate, made us think that maybe we’d misjudged Loki and that we should reconsider his behavior in relation to it, and try to see him, and his actions the way he does That led us to ask and try to find an answer to the question that lies at the heart of conundrum that governs Loki’s nature and why he hasn’t apparently learned anything from his past mistakes.
It’s a common misconception that Asgardians are immortal and that they’ll live forever. They feel the weight of the years on their shoulders the same way that every other creature in the universe does, it’s just that the weight they carry isn’t as heavy for them as it is for the rest of us.
We know that Asgardians can, and do die of old age, we saw Odin pass into the Halls of Valhalla in Thor: Ragnarok at the end of his long and just life.
So what does an Asgardian consider to have been a long and fruitful existence, and what is the average lifespan of a god?
After digging through and getting distracted by back issues of Thor, we discovered that the average lifespan of an Asgardian was roughly five thousand or so years.
As Odin appeared to be somewhere in his mid-eighties when he succumbed to the ravages of time, we were then able to do some rough and ready math, and according to our calculations, for every year that passes on Asgard, sixty of them pass on Earth.
So How Old Is Loki?
Having done the math, it’s simple and straightforward to work out how old Loki is by following the timeline established in Thor.
The final battle in the war against the Frost Giants happened in 965 AD, and having beaten them, Odin stripped them of their power to wage war again when he took the giant’s casket from Laufey.
And when he took the casket, he also took Laufey’s baby son and claimed him as his own. And Laufey’s son was, as we’re sure you’re more than aware, Loki.
That means that Loki was born in or just before the same year in which that battle happened, which means that he breathed his first lungful of Jotunheim air in 965AD, which would make him, in human terms at least, one thousand and fifty-six years old.
While it seems ancient to us, it’s important to remember the time variable that governs life on Earth and Asgard, and even Loki has been hopping around and wreaking all sorts of devilment and mischief for over a thousand human years, back home on Asgard, he’s barely eighteen.
The fact that he’s still a minor on Asgard, would explain why he continues to behave the way he does, and do the things that he does without any regard for the consequences.
He is who he is, and hasn’t learned from his mistakes because he’s still a teenager and the folly of youth is a rare, addictive, and dangerous thing.
Will Loki ever learn from his mistakes? Undoubtedly, but don’t hold your breath and expect it to happen anytime soon, because we figure it should take him until his mid-thirties or so to become a better god.
That means that we’ll only have to wait for another thousand years for Loki to finally become the deity he was always meant to be.
Wait A Minute… Isn’t Loki A Frost Giant?
You’re right, and technically that would mean that Loki wouldn’t and shouldn’t age the same way that Asgardians do, which would throw our calculations out of the window and means that we’d have to start again.
At least it would if Frost Giants and Asgardians didn’t share similar lifespans, which according to the mythology of the Marvel Universe, they do. So, the next time that Loki has a birthday cake on Asgard, he’ll have to take a deep breath and blow out eighteen candles.
