Thor

Origins & Family

Thor is the son of Odin, the Allfather, and Jord — a name that simply means "earth", making the thunder god the child of sky-wisdom and soil. Snorri also calls his mother Fjorgyn, and both names point at the same personified land ^2,4. He is married to Sif, whose hair of spun gold becomes the hinge of one of the great treasure-myths, and their household includes the daughter Thrud and the stepson Ullr, a god of the bow and the ski. Thor's own sons, Modi and Magni — "Courage" and "Strength" — are among the handful of gods prophesied to walk out of the world's end, and they inherit Mjolnir when their father can no longer carry it ^1,4.

For all that Odin presides over the pantheon in the surviving literature, Thor was the god most of the Norse actually lived alongside. Personal names built on his (Thorstein, Thorgrim, Thorbjorn), farm and place names across Scandinavia and Iceland, and the thousand-odd hammer amulets pulled out of Viking Age graves all point the same way: the aristocratic, poetic cult of Odin sat on top of a much broader popular devotion to Thor ^4,5,6. The medieval German chronicler Adam of Bremen, describing the temple at Uppsala, placed Thor in the central seat of the three great idols ⁶.

The Hammer and the Chariot

Thor's already prodigious strength runs through three possessions. The belt Megingjord doubles his might when he buckles it on; the iron gloves Jarngreipr let him grip a weapon that would burn any other hand; and Mjolnir itself, dwarf-forged and short in the handle, strikes like a thunderbolt and returns unerringly to the hand that throws it ^2,3.

He travels by chariot, drawn by two goats — Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjostr, "teeth-barer" and "teeth-grinder" — whose wheels are the thunder itself. The goats can be slaughtered and eaten at night, then restored in the morning when Thor hallows their hides and bones with the hammer, a detail that quietly establishes Mjolnir as an instrument of consecration and not only of destruction ². On one such night a farm boy splits a thigh-bone for the marrow; the goat rises lame, and the family pays with two children, Thjalfi and Roskva, who become Thor's servants and travelling companions ².

Myths & Feats

The stories cast Thor almost invariably as the tireless defender of gods and men against the jotnar, the giants who press at the edges of the ordered world. In Thrymskvida — one of the most comic poems in the whole Norse corpus — the giant Thrym steals Mjolnir and demands Freyja as the price of its return; Thor is instead dressed in the bride's veil, with Loki as his maidservant, and recovers the hammer at the wedding feast by laying hands on it and slaughtering the entire hall ^1,7.

Hymiskvida and Snorri both tell of the fishing trip: Thor rows out past the giant Hymir's usual grounds, baits his line with the head of an ox, and hooks Jormungandr, the serpent that circles the world. He braces so hard his feet go through the boat's bottom, and hauls the monster up to the gunwale — before Hymir, in terror, cuts the line ^1,2. The scene was popular enough to be carved in stone: the Altuna picture stone in Sweden and the Gosforth fishing stone in Cumbria both show it ^4,6.

Two further encounters define him. In Snorri's account of the journey to Utgard, Thor is humiliated by a giant king's illusions — he cannot drain a drinking horn whose far end is the sea, cannot lift a cat that is really the World Serpent, and cannot throw an old woman who is Old Age herself — a defeat that is, on inspection, a catalogue of cosmic forces he very nearly overcame ². In Skaldskaparmal he duels the stone-headed giant Hrungnir and wins, though a fragment of the giant's whetstone lodges permanently in his skull ³.

Thunder, Oaths, and Everyday Faith

Beyond the narratives, Thor's function was practical. His hammer hallowed weddings, funerals and boundaries; his name secured oaths; his weather governed harvests and sea crossings. Scholars have long noted that the Thor of skaldic verse and cult is closer to a guarantor of order and fertility than the brawler of the mythological anecdotes, and that the two aspects are the same idea seen from different angles — the giant-killer keeps chaos outside the fence, and inside the fence the rain falls on time ^5,6.

His name descends from the Proto-Germanic Thunraz, "thunder", the same root that gives English thunder and Old English Thunresdaeg — Thursday ⁵. Roman writers, mapping foreign gods onto their own, identified him with Jupiter, which is why the day that was dies Iovis in Latin is Thor's in the north ^5,6.

Role in Ragnarok

At Ragnarok Thor and Jormungandr meet a final time, and neither survives it. Voluspa gives the scene in a few unhurried lines: he kills the serpent, steps back nine paces, and falls, dead of its venom ¹. The nine steps are the point — the strongest of the gods gets exactly far enough to prove he won, and no further.

What follows is not quite an ending. Modi and Magni cross the reborn earth carrying Mjolnir, which means that in the world after the world, the first thing to be recovered is the hammer ^1,2,4.