Times 24,696 Loki Lessons Needed

Solving time 25 minutes

An interesting puzzle with a mix of an old Italian poet (in the Times, surely not), a French Revolutionary and a nautical manoeuvre using an anchor (sounds like fun). I found the eastern bloc easier than the western, probably because I couldn’t get 1A until I had some checkers and used the wordplay (who was Loki?) and the poet for some reason didn’t come immediately to mind. Some nice deceptions, as at 14D for example where I couldn’t get The Needles out of my mind.

Across
1 TRICKSTER – T(R)ICK-STER(n); all I know about Loki is that he appears in Norse mythology;
6 CORAL – CO(R)AL; “material” is the definition otherwise “reef” is doing double duty;
9 SIGNORI – GI’S reversed – IRON reversed;
10 EVICTOR – E-VICTOR;
11 OUSEL – (car)OUSEL; a blackbird; cue Gordon MacRae and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”;
12 GYMNASIUM – cryptic definition;
14 IDA – sounds like “eider”;
15 DOMICILIARY – DO-M(ICILI)ARY;
17 SEPTEMBRIST – (priest set)* surrounds MB=doctor; one who massacred royalist prisoners in Paris, September 1792;
19 deliberately omitted – easily solved unless you’re a bit below it today;
20 LITTERBUG – LITTER (as in puppies)-BUG (as in germ);
22 EMEND – E(MEN)D; a chauvinistic clue?;
24 EPOCHAL – (chapel + o=old)*;
26 ISOLATE – I-S(O)LATE;
27 TREWS – (s)TREWS; tartan trousers, Jock;
28 GADGETEER – G-AD-GET-EER; yes, there is such a word;
Ā 
Down
1 TASSO – SAT=brooded reversed – SO (the note); your well know poet for today is Torquato Tasso 1544-1595;
2 INGESTA – sounds like “in jest” – A(nalyse);
3 KNOWLEDGE – K(NOW-L)EDGE; to kedge is to move a vessel using a kedge anchor (surely you knew that!);
4 THINGUMABOB – THIN-GUM-A-BOB; shilling=BOB (old slang); old what’s-his-name;
5 RYE – sounds like “wry”;
6 CHINA – CHI-(A-N reversed); more slang (china plate = mate);
7 RETSINA – (trains + e)*; awful Greek wine. No wonder they’re in such a mess when they drink the stuff;
8 LORD,MAYOR – LORD-MAYO-R; goodness!!=LORD!!; County Mayo is in the west of Ireland;
13 MOCKINGBIRD – MO-C-(big drink)*; no literary references – wow!;
14 INSOLVENT – IN SOL(V)ENT; off Hampshire=IN SOLENT; “on the rocks” is slang definition; nothing to do with The Needles;
16 LITHESOME – (homeliest)*;
18 POTHOLE – PO(THO)LE; we still have some that have not been repaired from last winter!;
19 PRELATE – PRE-LATE; geddit?;
21 ETHOS – E-THO(ma)S;
23 DREAR – D(R)EAR;
25 deliberately omitted – you shouldn’t need to dally on it;

49 comments on “Times 24,696 Loki Lessons Needed”

  1. Aother Needles man here.
    Didn’t know the verb to kedge and INGESTA was new to me. If I was simply asked to spell THINGUMABOB it would be thingummybob. Such useful information can only be gleaned from crossword puzzles. Guessed that Loki was a trickster. Straightforward solve although a bit slow off the mark.
  2. 50 minutes on the commute with no time left to go through and check all the answers and wordplay so on reading Jimbo’s blog I discovered three spelling errors in my grid on unchecked squares. I won’t embarrass myself further by detailing them here.

    Good puzzle.

    Jimbo, you’ve a K missing in the explanation at 1ac if I’ve understood the clue correctly.

  3. 40 minutes for this generally straightforward puzzle, finishing with SEPTEMBRIST, where I was working around a word ending in ā€˜-builtā€™ until I got INSOLVENT. Two wrong: ā€˜domicillaryā€™ for DOMICILIARY, and, after much hemming and hawing, ā€˜thingumibobā€™ for THINGUMABOB. (Even though I was aware of the ā€˜aā€™ cannot stand for one = i rule, I ignored it and paid the price).

    I hesitated over KNOWLEDGE (despite parsing it correctly) because, in spite of the dictionary definition, viz. ā€˜facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subjectā€™, these days [theoretical] knowledge is commonly contrasted with ā€˜practical skillā€™.

    Trivia: ā€˜Loki Boundā€™ is the name of a tragedy, of which only a fragment survives, written by a teenage C.S. Lewis, who was much influenced, especially in early life, by Norse mythology.

  4. A bit easier today, 19 mins.
    Thingummybob and thingummyjig need watching: Chambers gives nine possible different spellings for the two of them.
    Loki indeed is from Norse mythology but much of his character really comes from Wagner’s Ring cycle, I think. In myth he is more unpleasant.
    1. Well he got Balder knocked off, but got his in the end after being bound to a rock: possibly a blackish one? Check this.
  5. ‘Rye’ (5 dn) went in as a ‘can’t be anything else’ answer; only understood wordplay after checking archaic use of ‘wry’ in OED. ‘Thingumabob’ wouldn’t have been my spelling either (I suspect, if pushed, it would have been ‘thingummybob’) but wordplay made required spelling clear. All in all, an enjoyable and, for me, achievable challenge with COD to 14dn (once I’d got The Needles out of my head).
  6. 25 minutesish. A reasonable cruise until hitting the rocks in the North West passage. Eventually had to go for assistance for ???NORI (An ancient race? Folks from an Italian area?) Doh! Must admit I have never encountered the word though. The rest then fell into place, including bloody TASSO, who I always wanted it to be, but couldn’t at first justify. And must confess to thingumIbob, having only ever encountered a thingummybob before (“Put a worn sticky coin in the whatzit” if I recall correctly from a previous incarnation. All in all, an enjoyable outing.
  7. 15 minutes, so both easier and less irritating than yesterday’s, but still with some decent vocab challenges.
    3d’s kedge I think I knew from “Riddle of the Sands” where they did a lot of that. LORD=goodness was a bit of wordplay I didn’t get, but there were no alternative entries. 6d caused me pause as I tried to remember the Greek letter with an N in it, but since it wasn’t lapna I eventually kicked myself and the clue into a different shape.
    CoD to PRELATE for cheeky wordplay, close second to INSOLVENT.
  8. Under 40 minutes; so on the easier side, but one that kept proving trickier than I thought it should be (whatever that means). COD to INSOLVENT but I did like LORD MAYOR.
  9. Like others, found RHS easier than left, which only fell into place once I realised it was THINGUMABOB rather than -AJIG – doh! I too had in DOMICILLARY, and was held up thinking about Needles for 14d. Good puzzle, learnt loads of new stuff, and managed to complete it (mostly) without aids. Great to have blog to confirm guesses. J
  10. 34 minutes. Disappointed that I couldnā€™t finish in under the half hour. Always enjoy clues such as 12 across: ā€œvaultā€ offers so many possibilities from banks to public houses and, indeed, gymnasia. In 28, the definition ā€œgismo buffā€ was a clever feint: I tried various meanings of buff before realizing that I had bought a dummy.
  11. 21:27 today. I had a thing about The Needles too, also got fixated that in 11ac a runabout could be removed from roundabout. Penny eventually dropped.
  12. Ditto runabout.
    Another garden path I strolled down which I forgot to mention earlier was “Loki, say”, looking for a word meaning low key.
  13. 27 minutes but foolishly entered Domicillary. Liked this one (though it took some time to get to the required spelling of Thingumabob). Have a weakness for ‘lithesome’, lovely word.
    1. Peter, nobody has yet really explained TRICKSTER=Loki. Presumably your knowledge of Wagner can throw some light on this?
      1. The clearest example is the capture of Alberich by Wotan and Loge in Das Rheingold, first of the Ring operas.

        The key passage is from about 5:30 to 8:30 in this clip – chosen because the cartoon version shows the shape-shifting better than stage performances. Loge is the orange character with the pointy head.

        1. Summary for those without 3 minutes to spare: Loge tricks Alberich into using the Tarnhelm (a magical helmet) to turn himself into a toad. As a toad, he’s small and weak enough to be captured.
  14. 11:27 – found parts of this pretty tough. Also got most of my knowledge of Loki from the Wagner version (Loge) – if we still had Norse Gods, crossword setting would certainly have been on his patch.

    Solved 17 by misremembering the Russian Decembrists, whose name might possibly have been inspired by the earlier revolutionaries.

  15. I suppose I must have been on the setter’s wavelength this morning – 1ac went straight in, and so did nearly everything else. 10:12 in the end.
  16. I put in Ingests for 2 down and so had no clue what 14 across was. Completely clueless on 14 down and made up a variety of names out of the spare letters for 17 across! On the positive side, the rest of the crossword came together very quickly!
  17. Iā€™m another who misspelled DOMICILIARY. No other mistakes but SW was slow going with INSOLVENT, IDA, POTHOLE, SEPTEMBRIST among my last in. TASSO and TRICKSTER from the wordplay.
    1. I got stuck in that area too. I’d entered NUN (sounds like NONE = duck) instead of IDA. Luckily I’m part of the music mafia and connected Loki with Loge, and got out of the hole fairly quickly by deducing INGESTA.
      Dafydd.
  18. 17:18, which must be my fastest genuine time since the relaunch of the Crossword Club site. Everything just clicked today.

    In the Norse mythology, Loki is often referred to as “Loki the Trickster”, rather like “Jove the Thunderer” (now which well-known daily newspaper should we rename, do you think?).

  19. Found this pretty hard going, and had to cheat once or twice in the NW corner to get this finished in my lunchtime. COD 22ac or 14d.
  20. 10:13 – delayed by the NW corner where I found a set of clues that took some figuring out. TASSO first, then OUSEL, KNOWLEDGE, TRICKSTER and INGESTA to finish.

    I did not know Loki, but the wordplay was clear.

  21. The North West was the hardest for me. eventually twigged Trickster having got Knowledge…its all been said i think above. around 40 minutes!
    pleased with that!
  22. An enjoyable 48 minutes. Very straightforward, with nothing to quibble at. I got stuck for a long time assuming that “revolutionary” in 17ac was CHE, and even after seeing the wordplay, took a long time to dig up SEPTEMBRIST from the memory vaults.

    I was tempted to look up Loki (I thought he was from Hindu mythology), but feel good that I didn’t.

    I have happy memories of using a KEDGE anchor on the Norfolk Broads – the only way to make any progress in a flat calm.

  23. About 25 minutes, ending in the tricky NW area with INGESTA, SIGNORI and IDA in that order. IDA caused a groan when I realized which duck was referred to. I also go with INSOLVENT as COD. Not much else to add to what’s been said. Regards.
  24. Sorry for the late post – this site now appears to be permanently blocked at work. I blame Jimbo’s incessant swearing. 14 minutes dead for this so I found it on the easy side of average. Only the 1s held me up really where Loki looked like he was going to be a cricketer until I remembered the poet from a recent puzzle.
  25. Just for the record, 34 mins – straightforward apart from a couple of oddities, easily guessed.
  26. I’m back after a weekend of square dancing in Sweden. I found this puzzle of moderate difficulty, which means I solved it correctly (which I had some difficulty with in the recent past) but it took a bit more than an hour and with some pauses. Finished in the NW corner, once I realized, for 1ac, that BRACKSTER was not a word, PRANKSTER didn’t fit the wordplay and finally hit upon TRICKSTER; I did seem to remember that this was a defining quality of Loki (how fortunate that Norse gods are deceased, or they wouldn’t be allowed in clues). Never heard of TREWS or KEDGE but solved the clues to which they pertained correctly. Last in was OUSEL, after which I kicked myself because it was so obvious.
    1. It is rather indicative of their grasp of reality, that, by making Hagen their national hero, the Nazis managed to miss the whole point of Norse religion, viz. that it told men to serve gods who would certainly be defeated in the end.
      1. I wasn’t aware that they did make Hagen a hero, but if they did, it shows how much they cared about or understood the Wagner operas that get associated with Nazism. (Partly the fault of Wagner himself, of course.) In the only opera in which he appears, Hagen is clearly the baddie, and literally stabs Siegfried (“peace after victory” – the seemingly obvious representative of any “master race”), in the back.
        1. Their switch of allegiance from Siegfried to Hagen, and the irony thereof, is noted by C.S. Lewis in his 1942 article ‘First and second things’ (available online from a Lewis fan, if you’re interested). Lewis was a great lover of Northernness, and indeed of Wagner, in his youth.
          1. Article found – I’ll take a look later. On the face of it, stating such an obvious absurdity seems an awful waste of C S Lewis, but it looks as if he tries to explain it.
  27. My 6:53 felt miserably slow (one minor senior moment after another) so I thought Peter B would be wiping the floor with me today. It’s the sort of puzzle I think I might have solved quite fast in my heyday, which perhaps means that it’s a bit old-fashioned (like me :-).

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