Thunor

Also Known As: Old English Þunor, genitive Þunres; from Proto-Germanic *Þunraz, “thunder”; cognate with Old Saxon Thunar, Old High German Donar and Old Norse Þórr
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Anglo-Saxon Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the thunder itself under its ordinary English name, and the hammer and the hooked cross found in early English graves are the marks most often read as his.
Role in Mythos: He was the weather power of the Saxon and Jutish settlers of southern England, addressed in clearings and open fields rather than in halls.
Relation to Humans: Farmers in Kent, Surrey, Essex, Sussex and Hampshire gave his name to about a dozen groves, fields, ridges and mounds, more places than any god but Woden. Every word written about him in England was written afterwards, by Christians explaining why nobody should have done it.

In the summer of 854 a scribe working through an estate boundary at Hardenhuish in Wiltshire wrote the words *to ðunres felda*, to Thunor’s open field, and moved straight on to the next hedge and the next ford. He was describing property. A god had become a landmark, useful for telling one man’s acres from another’s, and that clause in a land charter is close to the whole of what England kept of him.

His name is not a name the way Beowulf is a name. Þunor is the ordinary Old English word for thunder, the common noun, still in the mouth of anyone who uses the modern one. It is also still in the week. Þunresdæg, Thunor’s day, has come down through eleven centuries as Thursday, spoken by people who have no idea they are naming him, which is a fair summary of how he has fared.

The places are the real evidence. About twelve of them across southern England carry his name, and the distribution is sharp enough to be a finding in itself: they belong to Saxon and Jutish country and stop at the edge of Anglian territory, so whatever cult stood behind them was regional rather than English at large. Thunderfield in Surrey was Þunresfeld in 880. Thundersley in Essex was Þunres lēah, his woodland clearing, and Thunderley sits beside it; Thursley in Surrey is the same name worn thin by use. Thunderlow hundred in Essex takes in a hlæw, a mound. Thurstable in Essex may be Thunor’s pillar, though Margaret Gelling was not convinced and the reading is still open. Charter bounds add the ones that never became villages: þunres lēah at Droxford and at Millbrook in Hampshire, þunorslege at Barnhorne in Sussex, another þunres feld in Surrey in 947.

Read the second elements and a shape comes up out of them. Lēah is a clearing in woodland. Feld is open ground. Hlæw is a burial mound. These are not settlements. They sit out beyond the fields, on boundaries, next to barrows and old earthworks, the kind of ground people walked to on purpose and did not live on. A clearing struck often enough by lightning is a clearing that gets a reputation, and wet ash and split oak have a smell that stays in the air for days afterwards.

Picture a man at the edge of one of them in July, barley behind him, the first roll coming in low over the Weald and the hail arriving before he can get back. He would not have needed a theology for that.

Archaeology offers a little more, held loosely. Miniature hammers turn up in early English burials, including a cremation at Gilton in Kent where a small hammer lay with a small spear, and the pairing is usually read as Thunor and Woden reduced to charms small enough to wear at the throat. The hooked cross, the fylfot, was stamped and cut into cremation urns across East Anglia with real care, and it is the second commonest motif on them after the serpent. It probably means fire or the thunderbolt. It might also mean a potter’s mark, or a family’s, or nothing anyone can now recover. The people who put it there did not write it down.

What did get written down came three centuries too late and was written by an enemy. Ælfric of Eynsham, composing his homily *De falsis diis* around the turn of the eleventh century, set the English gods against the Roman ones so his congregation would understand what their great-grandparents had been at: Woden was Mercury, Tiw was Mars, Frige was Venus, and Þunor was Jupiter, master of thunder and weather and the crop. Then he explained all four away, as dead men whom ignorant people had mistaken for gods, or as devils wearing their names. Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, thought well enough of the argument to rework it and preach it again. That equation with Jupiter is the closest thing to a statement of what Thunor was that any English writer ever made, and the man making it was arguing that he had never existed.

He fared worse in Kent. The Kentish royal legend, in the form it reaches us from the eleventh century, tells how King Ecgberht’s cousins Æthelred and Æthelberht were murdered at Eastry by a royal retainer who wanted them out of the succession, and how the bodies were hidden under the floor of the hall and given away by a column of light standing over the spot. The retainer’s name is Thunor. Later, as a hind runs out the boundary of the land being granted to the boys’ sister in compensation, he complains that too much is being given away, and the ground opens and takes him. A mound was raised over the place and it was called þunores hlæw, Thunor’s mound.

The mound near Manston in Thanet was called that already. Gabriel Turville-Petre’s reading of the episode is the one that has stuck: the story was built backwards to account for a name whose original owner had been forgotten, by people for whom Thunor was no longer a god and had to be somebody. That is what became of him in England. He was written into a saint’s life as a minor villain and swallowed by the earth to explain a hill.

The silences are worth stating plainly, because they are large. No English source gives him a father or a mother, a wife, a son, an enemy, a birth or a death. He appears in no royal genealogy, while Woden stands at the head of almost every one of them and the kings of Essex traced themselves to Seaxnet instead. Thunor founded nothing. He has no myth.

The hammer that kills giants, the two goats, the belt of strength, the night spent fishing for the world serpent: all of that is Icelandic, set down in a different language on a different island by men working generations after their own conversion. Moving it across and calling it Thunor’s is the easiest thing in the world to do and the evidence does not hold it.

What the English record actually gives him is narrow and consistent. He had the weather, which in a subsistence economy meant the harvest and therefore the year. He had the groves and the open fields on the edges of things, and the mounds. He had a hammer small enough to be buried with, and a day of the week. Those were enough to make him the most-named god in the south and not enough to keep him. Woden survived the conversion by turning into an ancestor, which is a job a king can still use. Thunor had no dynasty to be useful to, no story anyone could retell, and nothing to hold on with once the clearings were felled and the churches were up. He went out as a word for weather, and he is still doing that work every Thursday.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Thunor?

Thunor was the thunder god of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, worshipped mainly in the Saxon and Jutish kingdoms of southern England before the conversion. His name is the ordinary Old English word for thunder, and he is known almost entirely from place-names, a handful of later Christian texts, and small hammer amulets found in early English graves.

Is Thunor the same god as Thor?

Thunor and Thor are the English and Norse forms of one inherited Germanic god, along with the continental Donar and Thunar, all of them from Proto-Germanic *Þunraz, “thunder”. The names are cognate, but the material is not interchangeable: Mjölnir, the goats, the belt of strength and the fishing of the world serpent are all Icelandic, and no English source attaches any of them to Thunor.

What evidence is there that the Anglo-Saxons worshipped Thunor?

The strongest evidence is place-names. Around twelve places in southern England carry his name, including Thunderfield and Thursley in Surrey, Thundersley and Thunderley in Essex, and charter sites such as þunres lēah in Hampshire and þunorslege in Sussex. Miniature hammer amulets, one found with a spear in a cremation at Gilton in Kent, and the hooked cross stamped on East Anglian cremation urns are usually read as his marks, though that reading is an inference rather than a certainty.

Why does Thunor appear as a murderer in the Kentish Royal Legend?

In the eleventh-century Kentish royal legend a royal retainer named Thunor has King Ecgberht’s cousins Æthelred and Æthelberht killed at Eastry, and is later swallowed by the earth at a mound called þunores hlæw. The mound in Thanet already bore that name from the god, and the accepted reading is that the story was invented afterwards to explain a place-name whose original meaning had been lost.

Is Thursday named after Thunor?

Yes. Modern English Thursday comes from Old English þunresdæg, “Thunor’s day”, the English translation of the Roman day of Jupiter. Ælfric of Eynsham made the same equation between Thunor and Jupiter directly in his homily *De falsis diis*.