Donar

Also Known As: Old High German; Old Saxon Thunar, manuscript form thunaer; Old Frisian Thuner; Old English Þunor; from Proto-Germanic *Þunraz, “thunder”
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Germanic Mythology, Frankish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the thunder itself, named for the sound, and the oaks and high places of the continent belonged to him.
Role in Mythos: He was the weather god of the inland Germanic peoples, the power a farming population addressed when the sky turned over their fields.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary people on the continent kept his day in their week and his trees in their clearings, and the churchmen sent to convert them treated him as the hardest habit to break. Every surviving document that names him was written by someone trying to make them stop.

The axe went in once. Boniface had cut a single notch into an oak so wide that the crowd standing behind him could not see around its trunk, and the Hessians who had come to watch were cursing him steadily and silently, waiting for the god to do something about it. What happened next, in the account written some forty years afterwards, was a wind out of a clear sky. The oak came down on its own, and it split as it fell into four trunks of equal length, the way no felled tree does. The cursing stopped. The timber was sawn and pegged into an oratory dedicated to Saint Peter, so that the wood smelled of fresh cut oak for a season inside a Christian church, and the man who had brought the axe went on to Thuringia.

The god who owned that tree is not named anywhere in the story. Willibald calls it the Oak of Jupiter, reaching for the Roman name because that was what Latin reached for whenever it met a foreign god who threw lightning. The identification of that Jupiter with Donar is an inference, a sound one, made by later readers rather than by the source. That distinction matters, because a great deal of what circulates about this god is inference of exactly that kind, repeated until it hardens. He is a figure assembled almost entirely out of other people’s paperwork.

His name is not a name in the way that Odin or Balder are names. It is the word for thunder, in the local mouth: Donar in Old High German, Thunar among the Saxons, Thuner on the Frisian coast, Þunor in England, all of them worn down from an older *Þunraz that meant nothing more mysterious than the noise. When a farmer in Hesse heard the first roll come in over the barley and the light went flat and green under the cloud, he was not thinking of a god behind the thunder. He was hearing the god. That identity of sound and person is the oldest thing about him and the only thing every source agrees on. It also survives in the calendar. When the Germanic peoples took over the Roman week they translated the day of Jupiter into the day of thunder, and Germany still calls Thursday Donnerstag.

The clearest attestation is a renunciation. In a ninth-century manuscript out of Mainz, now Vatican Codex palatinus latinus 577, a priest puts three questions to a Saxon convert and the convert answers in his own language. He forsakes the devil, then all sacrifice to the devil, then all the devil’s works and words, and the text names them: thunaer ende uuoden ende saxnote ende allvm them unholdum the hira genotas sint. Thunar and Woden and Saxnot and all the unholy ones who are their companions. Note the order. In the single surviving document where a continental Saxon is made to list his gods aloud, the thunder god comes first, ahead of Woden, which is not the order any later Norse text would give.

Against that there is one object, and it outweighs the whole rest of the record. A gilded bronze brooch turned up at Nordendorf near Augsburg in 1843, out of an Alamannic row-grave cemetery, made somewhere between the middle of the sixth century and the early seventh. Scratched on the back, upside down relative to the other inscription, are three words on three lines: logaþore, wodan, wigiþonar. Thunder with a prefix that means either to hallow or to fight, so either holy thunder or battle thunder, and nobody has settled which. Klaus Düwel called it the most important runic document of the continent, and he was not overselling it, because explicit theonyms are close to unknown in the runic corpus. Whether a believer scratched it to invoke the two gods or a Christian scratched it to call them sorcerers is still argued.

There is no myth of Donar. Not one. No continental text gives him a birth, a father, a wife, an enemy or a single episode, and the hammer, the goats, the belt of strength and the fishing trip after the world serpent all belong to Iceland, to a literature written down after conversion by men working in a different language on a different island. Lifting that material across and calling it Donar’s is the commonest thing done to him and the one thing the evidence forbids. What the continent gives instead is a shape: the oaks, the high ground, the weather, the day of the week, and three names spoken in the right order by a man being asked to give them up.

His powers follow from that shape rather than from any story. He brought the rain that made a harvest and the strike that could end one, and the trees that stood in his clearings were his because lightning finds tall oaks. Where his name is invoked on the brooch it is invoked with hallowing or with fighting attached, which suggests he was asked for protection and for force. Beyond that the record does not go, and padding it out would be inventing him.

His weakness is stranger and more particular than any giant. He survives only in the mouths of people employed to erase him. A hagiographer who will not print his name, a baptismal formula that lists him in order to have him renounced, a brooch whose inscription may be a curse against him rather than a prayer to him. He loses every encounter in the written record because every author of that record was on the other side. Somewhere under the four split trunks at Geismar there was a god with stories attached, and the men who wrote the only documents we have had no reason at all to write them down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Donar?

Donar is the thunder god of the continental Germanic peoples, known in Old High German as Donar and in Old Saxon as Thunar. His name is simply the word for thunder, and he is the same deity the Norse called Thor, attested independently on the continent in eighth and ninth century church documents and on a sixth century Alamannic brooch.

Is Donar the same god as Thor?

They are the same god under cognate names from different Germanic languages, both descending from Proto-Germanic *Þunraz. The difference is the evidence. Thor has a full body of Icelandic literature behind him, with Mjölnir, the goats and the giants, while the continental Donar has no surviving myths at all, so material from the Norse sources cannot be treated as attested for Donar.

What happened at Donar’s Oak?

Around 723 the missionary Boniface cut into a huge oak at Gaesmere, now identified as Geismar in Hesse, in front of a hostile pagan crowd. In Willibald’s account he had made only a first notch when a wind brought the tree down and split it into four equal trunks, after which the onlookers converted and the timber was built into a chapel dedicated to Saint Peter. Willibald never names Donar, calling it the Oak of Jupiter.

Where is Donar actually attested?

In the Old Saxon Baptismal Vow, a ninth century manuscript from Mainz now held as Vatican Codex palatinus latinus 577, where a convert renounces thunaer ende uuoden ende saxnote; on the first Nordendorf brooch, an Alamannic find of the sixth or early seventh century inscribed wigiþonar beside wodan; and in the weekday name, since Latin dies Iovis became the day of thunder and gives modern German Donnerstag.

What did Donar look like?

No continental source describes him. There is no surviving description of his face, his build, his clothing or his weapon anywhere in the Old High German, Old Saxon or Frankish record. The familiar red beard and hammer come from Icelandic texts written centuries later, and applying them to Donar means importing a portrait the continental evidence never gave him.