Thor

Thor

God of thunder, who guards gods and men with his hammer

The god of thunder and the strongest of the Norse gods: a red-bearded giant-killer who rides in a chariot drawn by two goats and fights with the hammer Mjöllnir. Son of Odin and Jörd, the Earth, he guards Asgard and the world of men against the giants, and most of his stories are journeys east into their lands, from which he comes home with a cauldron, a stolen hammer won back or a giant's skull broken. In the late Viking Age he was the most widely worshipped god in Scandinavia: people wore his hammer as an amulet and named their children after him. At Ragnarök he will kill the Midgard Serpent and fall dead of its venom nine steps away.

Family

Parents

Odin Snorri, Gylfaginning 9

his first son, Snorri says
Jörd Snorri, Gylfaginning 9; Völuspá 56

the Earth; the poems also call her Fjörgyn and Hlódyn

Wife

Sif Snorri, Skáldskaparmál

Loki cut off her hair; the dwarfs made her new hair of gold

Lovers

Járnsaxa Snorri, Skáldskaparmál

a giantess, mother of Magni

Children

Thrúd Snorri, Skáldskaparmál

of Sif; the poets call Thor “Thrúd's father”
Magni Snorri, Skáldskaparmál

of Járnsaxa; at three years old he lifted the dead Hrungnir's leg off his father
Módi Vafthrúdnismál 51

with Magni, will have Mjöllnir after Ragnarök

Stepson

Ullr Snorri, Gylfaginning 31

Sif's son, an archer and skier

Servants

Thjálfi and Röskva Snorri, Gylfaginning 44

a farmer's children, taken in payment when Thjálfi cracked a goat's bone

Companion

Loki Thrymskvida; Snorri, Gylfaginning 44

his companion on the road east, and the target of his threats in Lokasenna

Enemies

The Midgard Serpent Hymiskvida; Völuspá 56; Snorri, Gylfaginning 48, 51

Loki's son; they meet three times, and the third time both die
Hrungnir Snorri, Skáldskaparmál; Haustlöng

the stone-hearted giant; a piece of his whetstone stayed in Thor's head
Thrym Thrymskvida

stole the hammer and asked for Freyja in exchange

His stories

The theft of the hammer

Thor woke to find Mjöllnir gone. The giant Thrym had buried it eight leagues under the earth and would give it back only for Freyja as his bride; she refused so furiously that her necklace burst. So Thor went to the wedding himself, veiled as the bride, with Loki as his maid, and when the hammer was laid in the bride's lap to bless the marriage he seized it and killed Thrym and all his kin.

Thrymskvida, known only from the Codex Regius; at the feast the bride eats an ox and eight salmon

At Útgarda-Loki's

In the giants' stronghold Thor and his companions lost every contest: Loki was outeaten, Thjálfi outrun, and Thor could not drain a horn, lift a cat or wrestle down an old woman. Next morning the giant king told the truth: the eater was wildfire, the runner thought, the horn's end lay in the sea, the cat was the Midgard Serpent and the old woman old age.

Snorri, Gylfaginning 44–47; Thor's drinking, the giant said, had made the tides

Fishing for the Serpent

Thor rowed out to sea with the giant Hymir and baited his line with the head of an ox. The Midgard Serpent took it; Thor pulled so hard that his feet went through the bottom of the boat, and he was raising his hammer when the terrified Hymir cut the line.

Snorri, Gylfaginning 48; Hymiskvida; carved on the Altuna runestone in Uppland and the Gosforth fishing stone in Cumbria

The duel with Hrungnir

The giant Hrungnir, drunk in Asgard, boasted that he would carry off Freyja and Sif. Thor met him in single combat: the hammer shattered the giant's whetstone in the air and then his skull, but a splinter of the stone lodged in Thor's head, and the dead giant's leg fell across his neck. Only his three-year-old son Magni could lift it.

Snorri, Skáldskaparmál; the splinter is still there, which is why no one should throw a whetstone across a floor

The thunderer

A name, a chariot and a hammer

Thor's name is simply the word for thunder, the same as Old English Thunor and German Donner, and when the Germanic peoples took over the Roman week, the day of Jupiter became his: Thursday, Donnerstag, torsdag. He is the storm seen as a person: huge, red-bearded, quick to anger and quick to be appeased, crossing the sky in a chariot drawn by two goats.

His weapon is the hammer Mjöllnir, forged by the dwarfs Brokk and Eitri. Snorri says it never misses and always comes back to his hand, and that its handle came out short because Loki, as a fly, stung Brokk at the bellows while Eitri worked. To wield it Thor wears iron gloves, and a belt of strength that swells his power. The hammer kills giants, but it also blesses: Thor hallows Baldr's pyre with it, raises his goats with it after he has eaten them, and in Thrymskvida the giants lay it in the bride's lap to consecrate a marriage.

Against the giants

Journeys east, and one enemy

Thor's work is to keep the giants out. When the gods find one in their hall they call his name and he is there at once; when he is missing he has, as Snorri puts it, gone east to hit trolls. His stories are the Norse myths closest to comedy. In Thrymskvida he goes to a wedding dressed as the bride and eats an ox; at Útgarda-Loki's he loses every contest to illusions; in Hárbardsljód a ferryman who is Odin in disguise mocks him across a sound he cannot cross.

Behind the comedy is a serious enemy. The Midgard Serpent, a son of Loki, lies in the ocean that circles the world, and Thor meets it three times: as a cat at Útgarda-Loki's, on the end of his line in Hymir's boat, and at Ragnarök, where he kills it, walks nine steps and falls dead of its venom. His sons Módi and Magni will inherit the hammer in the world that rises afterwards.

The most worshipped god

Temples, amulets and names

Odin was the god of poets, but Thor was the god of almost everyone else. In the great temple at Uppsala, Adam of Bremen was told, his image sat in the middle, between Wodan and Fricco, and he was the one to sacrifice to in plague and famine:

Thor, they say, rules in the air; he governs thunder and lightning, winds and rains, fair weather and crops.

— Adam of Bremen, *Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum* IV, 26

In Iceland, Eyrbyggja saga tells how the settler Thórólf Mostrarskegg threw overboard the pillars of his high seat, one of them carved with Thor's image, and built his farm where they came ashore. Names made with Thor's, Thórólf, Thorstein, Thórdís, fill Landnámabók, the book of the settlements. In the tenth century, as Christianity pressed north, small silver hammers were worn on the chest as the cross was, and Danish runestones such as the one at Glavendrup ask Thor to hallow the runes. When missionaries reached Iceland, a poet named Steinunn told one of them that Thor had challenged Christ to a duel and wrecked his ship.