Over-reliance on the 13th-century view in interpretations of pre-Christian Scandinavian deities — basically Migration-Age figures — is a problem in both heathenry and academia. We’ve got translators messing with verb tenses to fit their preconceived ideas of how the story should go (see above). We’ve got historians dismissing out-of-hand that a figure was considered worthy of worship regardless of the amount of evidence available, while insisting other figures with less evidence absolutely must have had a cult. It’s a mess.
James Parkhouse’s _Loki the Slandered God?_ chapter addresses much of this, then goes on to demonstrate that Snorri deliberately left out positive kennings of Loki, ones that he had to know of based on the sources he provided for other kennings. Sadly paywalled but a must-read. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789048554065-014/pdf
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