Who Is Thor in Norse Mythology?

Thor was the son of Odin, the chief of the Norse gods, and he lived in a hall called Bilskirnir. Where Odin was clever and secretive, Thor was direct. If a giant threatened the world, Thor went and dealt with it personally.

In Norse mythology Thor was especially popular with farmers and sailors rather than kings. Thunder meant Thor was riding across the sky in a chariot pulled by two goats. He was seen as a defender, which is why so many small hammer pendants have been found in Viking age graves.

Thor's hammer Mjolnir is the most famous object in Norse mythology. It was made by dwarves, it never missed its target, and it returned to his hand after being thrown. Its handle was famously short, because the making of it was interrupted.

Mjolnir was not only a weapon. It was used to bless marriages and to hallow important events, which tells us Thor was linked to protection and fertility as well as fighting. That double role is easy to miss if you only know the modern Thor.

Norse mythology gives Thor some of its best and strangest tales:

• •He fished for the world serpent Jormungandr using an ox head as bait
• •He dressed as a bride to recover his stolen hammer from a giant
• •He tried to drink an entire ocean without knowing it
• •He failed to lift a cat that was really the world serpent in disguise

In Norse mythology Thor's story ends at Ragnarok, the final battle. He kills the world serpent, then walks nine steps and dies of its venom. That ending is typical of Norse myth, where even the greatest heroes do not escape fate.

This is one of the things that makes Norse mythology distinctive. The gods know roughly how the end will come, and they go anyway. Thor is the clearest example of that stubborn courage.

Thor left marks on the calendar. Thursday is Thor's day, matching a wider pattern in which Wednesday belongs to Odin, Tuesday to the god Tyr and Friday to Frigg or Freyja. Those names survived the conversion to Christianity because weekday names are used too often to be worth replacing.

Place names across England, Scandinavia and Iceland still carry his name, marking sites where he was worshipped. Thousands of small hammer pendants have been recovered from Viking age sites, and their distribution increased during the conversion period, which some archaeologists read as a deliberate statement of identity.

Most of the detailed myths about Thor survive in two Icelandic works written down in the thirteenth century: the collection of poems known as the Poetic Edda, and the Prose Edda, a handbook for poets usually attributed to Snorri Sturluson. Both were recorded by Christians, generations after Scandinavia had converted. Historians therefore treat them carefully. They preserve older traditions, but the writers also arranged, explained and sometimes perhaps adjusted the stories for their own readers.

Older evidence helps fill the gap. Poems by Viking age court poets, called skaldic verse, mention Thor's fight with the world serpent, and some carved stones show a figure fishing with an ox head. The German chronicler Adam of Bremen, writing in the eleventh century, described a temple at Uppsala in Sweden with a statue of Thor alongside other gods. Personal names such as Thorstein and Thorgerd were also common, showing how deeply the god was woven into everyday life.

Modern films present Loki as Thor's adopted brother, but that is not how the old stories describe them. In the Prose Edda, Loki is the son of a giant and is counted among the gods through a bond with Odin. He is Thor's frequent travelling companion and troublemaker rather than his sibling. One story shows the relationship well. Loki, as a prank, cut off all the golden hair of Thor's wife Sif. Thor was furious and threatened to break every bone in his body unless he put things right.

Loki went to skilled dwarves, who made new hair of real gold that would grow like natural hair, along with a ship and a spear for other gods. Loki then bet his own head that another pair of dwarf brothers could not make better treasures. They produced a golden boar, a gold ring that multiplied itself, and Mjolnir. The gods judged the hammer the finest gift of all, so Loki lost the wager. He escaped losing his head by arguing that the dwarves had no right to his neck, and they sewed his lips shut instead.

The goats that pull Thor's chariot have names, Tanngnjostr and Tanngrisnir, and they feature in one of the stranger episodes in the Prose Edda. Travelling with Loki, Thor stopped for the night at a poor farmer's house. He slaughtered both goats, cooked them and shared the meat with the family, telling everyone to throw the bones onto the goatskins. The farmer's son, Thjalfi, split a thigh bone with his knife to get at the marrow. In the morning Thor raised Mjolnir over the skins and the goats stood up alive again, but one was lame in a hind leg.

Thor's fury terrified the family, and the farmer offered everything he owned to make amends. Thor calmed down and accepted the two children, Thjalfi and his sister Roskva, as his servants, and they travelled with him on later adventures. The ending echoes how disputes were often settled in Norse society, through compensation agreed between the parties rather than endless revenge. It also shows the hammer's hallowing power restoring life rather than ending it. Tales of animals brought back to life from carefully kept bones appear in folklore elsewhere in Europe and Asia too, which suggests the motif is older than this version.

The Prose Edda tells of Thor's fight with Hrungnir, the strongest of the giants, whose head and heart were made of stone. Hrungnir had boasted in Asgard while drunk, and a duel was arranged. The giants built a huge clay warrior to stand beside him, but it was so frightened that it wet itself when Thor arrived. Thor's servant Thjalfi tricked Hrungnir into standing on his shield, claiming Thor would attack from below. Thor then hurled Mjolnir, while Hrungnir threw his weapon, a great whetstone. The two met in mid-air and the whetstone shattered.

One fragment lodged in Thor's head, and the falling giant's leg pinned him to the ground. None of the gods could lift it, until Thor's son Magni, said to be only three nights old, pushed it off. Later a seeress named Groa chanted spells to loosen the stone. To reward her, Thor told her that her husband Aurvandil would soon come home, and that he had carried him out of the north in a basket and thrown a frozen toe into the sky as a star. Groa was so delighted that she forgot her spell, and the stone stayed in Thor's head.

Thor in Norse mythology is the thunder god, hammer bearer and protector of humans, and the old stories give him far more humour and complexity than his modern reputation suggests.