Thor

The sound arrived before the weather did. Across a Norwegian fjord, before the first rain hit the turf roofs, people heard a grinding roll overhead like iron-rimmed wheels dragged over stone, and they knew whose cart it was. Two goats hauled it, snarling, teeth bared. Somewhere above the cloud a red-bearded god was going about his work, and his work was killing giants.

No other figure in the Norse world left so heavy a physical trace. More than a thousand hammer pendants have come out of the ground across Northern Europe, worn at the throat by farmers, traders and warriors, and for a long time nobody could prove what they were meant to be. Then a tenth-century amulet was lifted out of the soil at Købelev in Denmark with a runic line scratched along it: *hmar x is*. This is a hammer. In the eleventh century Adam of Bremen described a temple at Uppsala where a statue of Thor sat enthroned between Odin and Freyr, and wrote that Thor ruled the sky, governed thunder and lightning, wind and rain and fair weather, and gave the crops. Odin was the god of kings and poets and the hanged. Thor was the god you actually prayed to when the sky went black over the barley.

He was born of Odin and Jörð, the earth herself, which puts sky on one side of him and soil on the other. He married Sif, whose hair was famously golden because Loki cut off the original and the dwarfs replaced it with spun gold. By the giantess Járnsaxa he fathered Magni, “the strong”; by Sif came Móði and the daughter Þrúðr. His hall was Bilskirnir, and the eddic poem that names it counts five hundred and forty rooms, the largest house anyone ever built. The detail is a boast rather than a floor plan, but it tells you the register in which people spoke about him.

His equipment came out of a wager. Loki, having already made trouble over Sif’s hair, bet his own head that two dwarfs could not match the treasures of another pair, and while they worked he turned himself into a fly and bit the one working the bellows on the eyelid. The smith flinched. The hammer came out of the forge perfect except for a handle that was too short, which is why Thor swings a weapon slightly wrong for a man his size. With it he wore Megingjörð, a belt that doubled a strength already past measuring, and Járngreipr, iron gloves needed simply to grip the thing. Mjölnir never missed and always came back to his hand.

The stories about him are mostly journeys east, and they follow a shape. He arrives, something enormous underestimates him, and then it stops existing.

Once, travelling with Loki, he stopped for the night at a poor farm and had nothing to offer his hosts, so he slaughtered both his goats, and they were skinned and boiled and eaten. In the morning he laid the hides out with the bones piled on them, swung the hammer over the heap, and the goats stood up alive. One of them limped. A boy at the table had split a thigh bone for the marrow, and Thor’s face when he saw the limp frightened the family so badly that they handed over both their children, Þjálfi and Röskva, who served him from then on.

The best attested of all his adventures is a fishing trip. Carvings of it survive on stones from the eighth century onward, older than any manuscript that tells it. Thor rowed out with the giant Hymir, further and further past the fishing grounds, having torn the head off one of Hymir’s oxen for bait. What took the hook was Jörmungandr, the serpent that lies round the whole world with its tail in its mouth. Thor braced so hard that his feet went through the hull and struck the sea floor, and he hauled the thing’s head up over the gunwale, venom running, the water going white and the old earth itself buckling. He had the hammer raised. Hymir, in terror, cut the line, and the serpent sank back into the sea.

He is not a subtle god, and the myths are entirely aware of this. When the giant Thrym stole Mjölnir and demanded Freyja as the price of returning it, the gods dressed Thor in a bridal gown and veil instead. At the wedding feast he ate an entire ox, eight salmon and all the delicacies laid out for the women, and drank three casks of mead, while Loki explained that the bride had simply been too excited to eat for eight nights. When Thrym lifted the veil to kiss her he recoiled from eyes that seemed to burn. The hammer was brought out and laid in the bride’s lap to bless the marriage. That was the last decision Thrym ever made.

Against the giant Hrungnir he fought a formal duel on the border of the worlds. Hrungnir threw a whetstone; Thor threw the hammer; the two met in the air and the whetstone shattered. One shard drove into Thor’s forehead and stayed there for the rest of his life, and the rest fell to earth as every flint on the ground. Hrungnir’s skull came apart, but the dead giant’s leg pinned Thor where he lay, and none of the gods could shift it. His son Magni, three years old, lifted it off him one-handed and got the giant’s horse as a reward.

His powers all run in the same direction. Strength without a measured limit, a weapon that returns, weather at his command, and the ability to hallow: to make a thing whole or holy by holding the hammer over it, which is why the hammer appears at weddings and at boundary stones and beside cremation urns. What he cannot do is anything that requires being clever, and the sagas keep testing him on exactly that. In the hall of Útgarða-Loki he failed to empty a drinking horn, failed to lift a grey cat off the floor, and was wrestled to one knee by an old woman, and only learned afterwards that the horn ran to the sea and he had drained it enough to make the tides, that the cat was the world serpent, and that the crone was Elli, old age, who has never lost a bout with anyone. He cannot cross the rainbow bridge with the other gods either, because his heat would set it alight, so he wades the rivers instead.

The last of it is already written down. At Ragnarök he meets Jörmungandr a second time and this time kills it, and then walks nine paces from the corpse and falls, dead of its venom. His sons Magni and Móði survive him and inherit the hammer. In the graves of the conversion period, hammer pendants and small crosses turn up in the same workshops and sometimes on the same chains, made side by side by smiths who saw no reason to choose.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Thor in Norse mythology?

Thor is the Norse god of thunder, the son of Odin and the earth goddess Jörð, and the defender of both Asgard and the human world against the giants. He wields the hammer Mjölnir, drives a cart pulled by two goats, and is portrayed as enormously strong, red-bearded and quick-tempered. He was the most widely worshipped Norse god among ordinary people.

What is Thor’s hammer called and what can it do?

Thor’s hammer is called Mjölnir. It was forged by dwarfs, never misses its target and always returns to his hand, and its handle came out short because Loki, in the form of a fly, stung the smith working the bellows. Beyond fighting, Mjölnir hallows things: it blesses marriages, consecrates boundaries and can restore the dead, as when Thor resurrects his own goats by swinging it over their hides.

Why did Thor dress as a bride?

The giant Thrym stole Mjölnir and refused to return it unless he was given the goddess Freyja as a wife. Rather than surrender her, the gods dressed Thor in a bridal gown and veil and sent him to the wedding with Loki as his maidservant. When the hammer was laid in the bride’s lap as part of the ceremony, Thor took it up and killed Thrym and his household.

How does Thor die?

Thor dies at Ragnarök, killing the world serpent Jörmungandr and then walking nine paces before falling dead from its venom. It is their second meeting: he had already hooked the serpent on a fishing trip with the giant Hymir, only for Hymir to panic and cut the line. His sons Magni and Móði survive Ragnarök and inherit Mjölnir.

Did people really wear Thor’s hammer?

Yes. More than a thousand hammer-shaped pendants have been excavated across Northern Europe, worn by men and women for protection during the Viking Age. A tenth-century example from Købelev in Denmark carries a runic inscription reading “this is a hammer”, which confirmed what the pendants were meant to represent.

Related Entries

Odin, Loki, Jörmungandr, Fenrir, Balder, Tyr, Freyja, Jörð, Æsir, Jötunn, Surtr, Perun, Perkūnas, Taranis, Indra, Zeus