THOR — THE GOD WHO TOOK EVERYONE ELSE
Odin took the kings. Thor took everyone else.
It is one of the oldest lines in Norse poetry, and it explains why the red-bearded god with the hammer was the most beloved of all the gods. Odin was for rulers, poets and the doomed. Thor was for the farmer in his field, the sailor in the storm, and the family that needed the roof to hold.
THE GOD OF EVERYONE ELSE
In the poem Hárbarðsljóð, Thor meets a ferryman who is secretly Odin, and the two trade insults across the water. The ferryman boasts that he has the nobles who fall in battle. Thor answers, in effect, that Odin may have them, but he has the common people. The line has the ring of something the commoners themselves said.
It matches what we see in the sources. Thor is invoked for fair weather, for good harvest, for the blessing of a marriage and the hallowing of a boundary stone. The Vikings who sailed in the ninth and tenth centuries wore his hammer at their throats. His name is still in our week: Thursday is Thor’s day, the day of Þórr, preserved in English and in every Germanic language.
THE SON OF EARTH
He was the son of Odin and of Jörð, whose name simply means Earth. A god born from the sky’s king and the ground itself is a good picture of what he stood for: the thunder that makes the soil fruitful. He is shown with red hair and a red beard, enormous and short-tempered, a god who eats an entire ox at a sitting and drinks like the sea.
He rode a chariot drawn by two goats, Tanngnjóstr and Tanngrisnir, which he could kill and eat at night and revive in the morning with a touch of his hammer, so long as every bone was kept whole. He wore the belt Megingjörð, which doubled his strength, and iron gloves to hold the hammer’s handle. His wife was Sif, of the golden hair. His sons were Magni, “strength,” and Móði, “wrath.”
THE HAMMER
Mjölnir was made by dwarves, in a wager. The brothers Sindri and Brokkr forged it, and Loki, who had bet against them, turned himself into a fly to spoil the work. He bit the smith on the eyelid at the last moment, and the handle came out short. The hammer was still the finest thing the gods possessed.
It never missed. It returned to Thor’s hand after being thrown. It could shrink small enough to carry under his tunic. And it could do something no weapon could do: bless. A hammer raised over a bride and groom made a marriage valid. Over the dead, it made a funeral holy. In Thor’s hand it was thunder and it was a blessing, and the poems never separate the two.
Men wore its likeness. Silver and iron pendants shaped like Mjölnir have been found across Scandinavia and the Viking-age settlements in the British Isles, and a stone mould found in Denmark could cast either a hammer or a cross. In the century when Scandinavia was turning Christian, the hammer at the throat was a way to say whose side you were on. The Mjölnir pendant in our collection is that object, made again.
THE GOD IN A WEDDING DRESS
The comic masterpiece of Norse myth is the Þrymskviða. Thor wakes one morning and his hammer is gone. Loki goes to find it and learns that the giant Þrymr has buried it eight miles under the earth. He will give it back on one condition: that he marry Freyja.
Freyja refuses with such fury that her necklace snaps. So the gods dress Thor as the bride, in a veil, in jewels, in the necklace Brísingamen, with Loki as his maid. At the feast Thor devours an ox and eight salmon and drinks three barrels of mead, and the giants stare. Loki explains that the bride has not eaten for eight days, so great was her longing for the wedding. Þrymr lifts the veil, sees the eyes burning behind it, and is told they are red from sleeplessness. When the hammer is laid in the bride’s lap, as the custom was, Thor takes it and kills them all.
THE FISHING TRIP
Thor wanted to fish for the Midgard Serpent. He went to the giant Hymir, took an ox head for bait, and rowed far out beyond the sight of land. The serpent Jörmungandr took the bait, and Thor hauled him up until the boat’s planks cracked under his feet, and the two stared at each other over the gunwale. Thor raised the hammer. The giant Hymir, terrified, cut the line, and the serpent sank back into the sea.
It is the first meeting of two enemies who would meet again. We told the end of the story in Ragnarök.
THE TRICKS OF ÚTGARÐA-LOKI
Snorri Sturluson, writing in thirteenth-century Iceland, tells a story in which Thor, for once, loses. Travelling in the land of the giants, Thor and Loki are invited by a giant king to compete in feats. Thor is told to drink from a horn, and he drinks and drinks and barely lowers it. He is told to lift the king’s cat, and he can lift only one paw. He is challenged to wrestle an old woman, and she brings him to one knee.
The king explains afterward that none of it was what it seemed. The horn was joined to the sea, and Thor had lowered the tide. The cat was the Midgard Serpent, and Thor had lifted it nearly to the sky. The old woman was Old Age, whom no one overcomes. Thor’s strength had been enormous, so enormous that the giants were afraid. It is one of the sharpest stories in the tradition: even the strongest god meets three things he cannot beat, and what he does is remarkable anyway.
THE ROAD TO RAGNARÖK
The prophecy gives Thor the last great fight. At the end of the world, Thor meets Jörmungandr on the field, as he always knew he would. He kills the serpent. Then he takes nine steps, and falls dead from its venom.
Nine steps is a precise number, and the old poets chose it carefully. Thor does not die in the fight. He wins it, walks away from it, and dies of the cost. It is a very honest picture of what protecting something actually looks like.
WHAT THE DESIGN CARRIES
The back print is not the thunder-god of the comics. It is the one in the poems. A broad-shouldered warrior in white and grey ink, his head bowed, a scar down his forehead, his beard dark red. A studded strap crosses his shoulder, and the hammer rests against it, handle wrapped in gold. Behind him a torn field of old gold, like a banner that has been through a war. He is not mid-swing. He is resting between two fights.
The front is the stone. A single standing stone in cream-white ink, cracked down its face, with one dark-red rune cut into it, the shape of the thorn rune, ᚦ, whose name means giant and which later runic tradition ties to Thor. The Norse raised stones to mark what mattered. The chest carries one.
WHAT THOR ACTUALLY MEANS
Odin wanted knowledge, and paid for it with an eye. Thor wanted nothing but to hold the line, and he held it with a hammer and with his body. He is the god who stands between the ordinary world and the things that would end it, and he does it without being asked, without being wise, and without any promise that it will end well.
That is why he outlasted the others. People do not need to understand a god like that. They need to know that when the storm comes, someone big and angry and on their side is out in it.
THE NEOLITHIC CONNECTION
Thor stands at the centre of our Norse Saga collection. Ragnarok Warrior carries the end of the world he is waiting for, Fenrir — The Unchained Wolf carries another of the monsters of the last day, and The Unblown Horn carries the silence that comes before it. Mjölnir — The Hammer of Thor is the hammer itself, worn the way Vikings wore it.
The stories are here too: Ragnarök, Loki, Fenrir, Odin’s ravens, Gjallarhorn and Yggdrasil.
— Neolithic Store