ᛚᚢᚴᛅᛒᚱᛁᚾᛅ lukabrina

Lokabrenna: Sirius, 'Loki's burning'

An Icelandic name for Sirius, the brightest star of the night, recorded by scholars around 1800. No medieval text uses it.

Lokabrenna is Sirius: Later folk tradition The name refers to Ragnarök's fire: Modern guess

What the sources say

Surtr fares from southward with switch-eating flame; / On his sword shimmers the sun of the war-gods; / The rocks are falling, and fiends are reeling, / Heroes tread Hel-way, heaven is cloven.
Gylfaginning, ch. 51, tr. Brodeur (1916), quoting Völuspá

The names

ᛚᚢᚴᛅᛒᚱᛁᚾᛅLokabrenna: 'Loki's burning' or 'Loki's blaze'
ᛚᚢᚴᛁLoki: the trickster among the gods, bound until Ragnarök
ᛋᚢᚱᛏᚱSurtr: the fire giant who burns the world at Ragnarök

Runes: our letter-by-letter spelling in the Viking-age Younger Futhark; these names come down to us in manuscripts written in the Latin alphabet. How we write runes.

The story and what it means

Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, a flashing blue-white point low in the south on winter evenings in the north, where it often twinkles in all colours. In Icelandic it has been called Lokabrenna, 'Loki's burning'.

The name is not medieval. It is first recorded by Icelandic antiquarians around 1800: Skúli Thorlacius noted it, and Finnur Magnússon's dictionary of Norse mythology (1828) gives Sirius as Loka brenna, 'the burning of Loki', and connects it with the fire at the end of the world. Cleasby and Vigfusson's dictionary (1874) and Jacob Grimm both took the name from these writers. Whether it was everyday Icelandic usage or a learned name is hard to say; no saga, poem or medieval treatise mentions it.

The meaning is also open. Brenna is a burning or a fire; Finnur Magnússon read it as the conflagration Loki brings about at Ragnarök, when he steers the ship of the dead against the gods and Surtr's fire consumes the world. Others have simply seen a star that flickers and changes colour like Loki himself. Both are interpretations, not sources.

How sure are we?

Claim	Grade	Basis
Lokabrenna is Sirius	Later folk tradition	Recorded c. 1800–1828 by Icelandic antiquarians (Skúli Thorlacius, Finnur Magnússon); not in any medieval source.
The name refers to Ragnarök's fire	Modern guess	Finnur Magnússon's reading (1828).

See it tonight

Sirius are best placed in the evening sky around February; from northern latitudes it is a winter star, low in the south.

City	Tonight, Mon 26 Oct (local time)
Reykjavík	not up in darkness tonight
Oslo	Clear of the south-southeast horizon from about 03:00, highest around 04:45 (13° S)
Stockholm	Clear of the south-southeast horizon from about 02:15, highest around 04:15 (14° S)
London	Clear of the southeast horizon from about 01:15, highest around 04:30 (22° S)
New York	Clear of the southeast horizon from about 01:30, highest around 05:15 (33° S)
Sydney	Clear of the east-southeast horizon from about 23:30, highest around 05:15 (73° N)

Sirius is 8.6 light years away, the fifth-nearest star system to the Sun; it looks so bright because it is close and about 25 times as luminous as the Sun. Its colours come from Earth's atmosphere, which bends its light differently for each colour when it is low.

Sources

Texts: Gylfaginning 51 and Völuspá (Ragnarök); Lokasenna (Loki's binding, in the prose ending). Quotations from the public-domain translations of the Poetic Edda by Henry Adams Bellows (1923) and the Prose Edda by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916); Brodeur's chapter numbers. Cleasby-Vigfusson s.v. brenna and the Loka- compounds; Finnur Magnússon, Priscae veterum borealium mythologiae lexicon (1828); J. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, ch. XII.