Magni and Móði are the sons of the thunder god Thor, and their great moment comes after the end of the world: according to the Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál, stanza 51, they take up the hammer Mjölnir once Ragnarök is over. Snorri Sturluson adds one unforgettable scene – the three-night-old Magni heaving the dead giant Hrungnir off his father's neck. Beyond that, the sources are thin. Which is exactly why it pays to look closely: what is attested, what is interpretation, and what did games and the internet make up?
Picture this. You are the strongest god alive. You have just won the hardest duel of your life, and now you are lying flat on your back with a dead stone giant sprawled across you, his foot pinning your throat. Your servant cannot shift it. Every god in Asgard comes running, and none of them can shift it either. Then a baby, three nights old, toddles up – well, presumably – flicks the leg aside, and remarks that it is a shame he got there so late, because he would have punched the giant to death himself. That is how Snorri Sturluson introduces Magni. It is the biggest entrance Thor's sons ever get in the whole tradition, and one of very few.
Magni and Móði (usually anglicised as Modi) are among the figures of Norse mythology about whom the internet says the most and the medieval sources say the least. In this article we go through it all, stanza by stanza and kenning by kenning, and we tell you plainly where the record ends and imagination begins.
Before the stories, a sober list. Everything we know about Thor's children comes from a handful of passages, nearly all of them written down in thirteenth-century Iceland – two or three centuries after the end of the Viking Age and well after the conversion to Christianity.
That is essentially it. There is no cult, no place name, no runestone and no archaeological find that can be securely tied to Magni or Móði. Not a single myth has Móði doing anything at all. When you read long character sketches online – gentle Magni, hot-headed Modi, the brothers as rivals – you are reading modern embellishment. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It just helps to know.
The two names are practically labels. Magni belongs to the Old Norse word megin, "might, power". The same word sits inside Thor's belt of strength, megingjörð ("power-girdle"), and inside ásmegin, the "god-strength" Thor summons in Snorri's tales when things get serious. Magni is simply "the Mighty One" – a cousin of English "main" in the old sense of "with might and main".
Móði comes from móðr, which in Old Norse means "wrath, agitation, battle-fury". English "mood" and German "Mut" (courage) are the same word, both of which have mellowed considerably. In Old Norse the anger that drives a warrior still rings through, and Thor himself is regularly described as furious in Eddic verse. Whether you translate Móði as "the Brave" or "the Wrathful" is therefore not a matter of faith: each catches part of the word.
Then there is the daughter: Þrúðr (roughly "Throod"), whose name means "strength, power" – as in Thor's home Þrúðvangr ("Field of Strength") or the epithet þrúðvaldr goða, "strength-wielder of the gods", which Thor uses of himself in Hárbarðsljóð. Thor's three children thus carry names that read like their father's profile: might, wrath, strength. That is why the scholar of religion Rudolf Simek suggested reading them as embodiments of Thor's qualities. More on that below.
The oldest and most important passage sits in a poem that is a small drama in itself. In Vafþrúðnismál, Odin travels in disguise under the name Gagnráðr to the wise giant Vafþrúðnir and challenges him to a contest of knowledge, with heads at stake. Question follows question, from the origin of the world to its end. Near the close, Odin asks who will hold the gods' inheritance once Surtr's fire has died down.
Vafþrúðnir answers in stanza 51. The first half names Víðarr and Váli, the sons of Odin, who will dwell in the gods' sanctuary. The second half belongs to Thor's sons. Henry Adams Bellows' 1923 translation, now in the public domain, renders it:
"Mothi and Magni shall Mjollnir have / When Vingnir falls in fight."Vafþrúðnismál 51, second half, translated by Henry Adams Bellows
A slightly closer rendering of the Old Norse would be "Móði and Magni shall have Mjölnir at the end of Vingnir's fighting" (our own translation). Vingnir is a name for Thor himself – Snorri knows a Vingnir as Thor's foster-father, and Þrymskviða once calls the god Vingþórr. The meaning is clear enough: when Thor's last battle is over. And that battle ends in death. In Völuspá, Thor slays the Midgard Serpent, walks nine steps and falls, struck by its venom – see our article on Ragnarök.
A small correction while we are at it: an earlier version of this page attributed a German line "when Vingnir falls in battle" to Karl Simrock's 1851 translation. Simrock actually has the brothers swinging Mjölnir and fighting the war to its end. The "falls in fight" wording belongs to Bellows. We have fixed it.
Why does this stanza matter so much? Because it fills a gap. The famous Völuspá, the Seeress's Prophecy, describes the green world after Ragnarök in loving detail: Baldr returns, the gods find golden gaming pieces in the grass, Hœnir chooses the lots. But Magni and Móði never appear in Völuspá. So if you read that "according to Völuspá, Thor's sons inherit the hammer", that is wrong. It is Vafþrúðnismál – and Snorri, who stitches both poems into one picture.
Snorri Sturluson, Icelandic chieftain and scholar, wrote his Edda around 1220 as a handbook for young poets. In Gylfaginning chapter 53 he paints the time after the end. In our own paraphrase of the Old Norse: Víðarr and Váli are alive, unharmed by sea or Surtr's flame, and they dwell on Iðavöllr, where Asgard once stood. There too come the sons of Thor, Móði and Magni, and they have Mjölnir with them. Then Baldr and Höðr return from Hel. They sit together, talk over their secrets, and recall the Midgard Serpent and the wolf Fenrir.
It is a lovely scene. The new generation of gods sits in the grass where the citadel of the Æsir once stood, looking back on a past that has become pure memory. To see how the sources imagine the world afterwards, read What Comes After Ragnarök? and the story of the two humans who survive, Lif and Lifthrasir.
What Snorri does not say matters too. He never tells us what Magni and Móði do with the hammer. They do not fight, they are not explicitly said to rule; they simply "have" it. In this picture the hammer is an heirloom and a sign: the protective power Thor stood for does not go down with him. For what the hammer meant in myth and in the ground, see our article on Thor's hammer Mjölnir.
Now for the one real story. It is in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, chapter 17, and it is one of the most entertaining tales in the entire Edda. You will find the full version of the duel in Thor versus Hrungnir; here is the short version with the spotlight on Magni.
The giant Hrungnir, strongest of his kind, with a heart of stone and a skull of stone, has ended up in Asgard after racing Odin's Sleipnir. He gets drunk and threatens to carry Valhalla off to Jötunheim and kill every god except Freyja and Sif. The gods call for Thor. A duel is arranged at the border, at Grjóttúnagarðar. Thor hurls Mjölnir; Hrungnir hurls his whetstone. The weapons meet in mid-air, the whetstone shatters, and a splinter lodges in Thor's head. But the hammer smashes Hrungnir's skull.
Then comes the punchline. Hrungnir topples forward across Thor, and his foot lands on Thor's neck. Thor's servant Þjálfi tries to lift it and fails. All the gods come when they hear Thor has fallen. They cannot lift it either. Then Magni steps up – son of Thor and Járnsaxa, three nights old according to Snorri – and throws the foot off. In Arthur G. Brodeur's public-domain translation of 1916, he says:
"See how ill it is, father, that I came so late: I had struck this giant dead with my fist, methinks, if I had met with him."Skáldskaparmál 17, translated by Arthur G. Brodeur
This motif – the impossibly precocious divine child – appears once more in Norse myth, and we will meet it again with Váli in a moment. It is a classic heroic marker: whoever does something monstrous in the cradle is marked by fate.
The story does not end with the leg. Thor gets up, greets his son and says he will surely grow into someone great. Then he makes him a gift: Gullfaxi, "Gold-Mane", the dead Hrungnir's horse. This is the very horse that started the whole affair – Hrungnir had boasted that Gullfaxi was faster than Odin's eight-legged steed.
And Odin? He is put out. Snorri has him say that Thor did wrong to give the good horse to the son of a giantess rather than to his own father. It is a revealing line. Even among gods there are family squabbles over heirlooms. And it shows how Snorri labels Magni – not as a son of the Æsir, but as "the son of a giantess".
Whether Odin's remark is ironic, an old saying, or Snorri's own seasoning, we cannot know. Thor, at any rate, does not take the horse back. After that, Magni rides in no other story. The gift is all we hear of the two together.
Magni's mother Járnsaxa is a giantess. Her name can be read as "she of the iron sax" – a sax being the single-edged short sword or knife that Viking-Age people wore at the belt. A tough name for a tough family.
Járnsaxa turns up in two more places. She is listed among the troll-women in the giantess name-lists of Snorri's Edda. And in the Eddic poem Hyndluljóð, a Járnsaxa appears among the nine giantesses who gave birth to Heimdall – see The Nine Mothers of Heimdall. Whether this is the same figure as Magni's mother is an open question; names repeat in these lists.
There is also a small barb. In a section of Skáldskaparmál that some editors regard as a later addition, Sif, Thor's wife, may be called "Járnsaxa's rival" (elja Járnsöxu). It sounds like jealousy among goddesses, but it is only a poetic periphrasis; no story behind it survives. For Thor's wife herself, see our article on Sif.
That Thor fathers a child with a giantess is no slip, by the way. The border between gods and giants is far more porous than the eternal war suggests. Odin fathers Víðarr on the giantess Gríðr, Freyr marries the giantess Gerðr, Njörðr marries Skaði. Thor, the giant-killer par excellence, has a son with giant blood – and it is precisely that son who rescues him from a giant.
About Móði there is startlingly little to say. He is there when the inheritance is handed out, he turns up in a kenning, and that is all. No mother, no scene, not a single line of speech. This is not a failing of modern scholarship; it has been the state of the sources for eight hundred years.
Which is exactly why he makes such a good blank canvas. In fantasy novels and games he often becomes the hot-tempered, jealous younger brother, sometimes Magni's rival. That is an obvious reading of his name – but a reading all the same. For the Viking Age itself we do not even know for certain whether Móði was imagined as a character with stories of his own, or whether he lived mainly in the language of poets.
A kenning is a poetic circumlocution of the kind the skalds adored: instead of "ship" you say "steed of the sea", and instead of "Thor" you say "Magni's father". Skáldskaparmál, Snorri's handbook of poetic diction, explains in chapter 4 how Thor may be referred to: son of Odin and Jörð, father of Magni, Móði and Þrúðr, husband of Sif, stepfather of Ullr, owner of Mjölnir, Megingjörð and Bilskírnir, enemy of giants.
The sons serve here as identifying marks of the father. That fits their overall profile: they are part of Thor's description rather than independent actors. And sure enough, we find the kennings in the poems:
The interesting part: these kennings assume the audience knew the sons. A poet does not describe someone through a figure nobody recognises. So Magni and Móði must at least have been familiar names when these poems took shape. When that was, though, is disputed – scholarly dating of the Eddic poems ranges from the Viking Age to the twelfth or thirteenth century. To get to know the Edda itself, start with The Edda – Where We Know the Myths From.
Thor's daughter Þrúðr is hardly mentioned more often than her brothers, but the traces she leaves are intriguing. According to Snorri, her mother is Sif. In the poem Grímnismál, stanza 36, a Þrúðr appears among the valkyries who bring ale to the einherjar in Valhalla – whether she is the same figure, nobody knows.
More mysterious still: the early skald Bragi Boddason calls Hrungnir "thief of Þrúðr" (Þrúðar þjófr) in a kenning. So there must once have been a story in which the stone giant carried off Thor's daughter. It is lost. Some have wondered whether the Hrungnir duel was originally a fight over Þrúðr – in which case it would be no accident that Thor's son ends up clearing away her abductor's leg. But that remains speculation.
Something similar applies to the poem Alvíssmál, in which the dwarf Alvíss wants to marry Thor's daughter and Thor stalls him with questions until sunrise turns the dwarf to stone. The daughter is never named. Many readers fill in Þrúðr; it is a natural guess, but not attested.
Back to stanza 51. It sets two pairs of brothers side by side: Odin's sons Víðarr and Váli, Thor's sons Magni and Móði. That is no accident but a deliberate image. The fathers fall at Ragnarök; the sons carry on. Our article Víðarr and Váli – the Silent Avengers tells the stories of Odin's sons in full; here are the striking parallels:
The American Scandinavianist John Lindow, in his handbook of Norse mythology, pointed out precisely this parallel between Magni and Váli. You can read a pattern into it: the gods of the new world are children of unions between gods and giants, marked by early strength – a generation that carries both worlds within it. How far the old poets really thought in those terms is interpretation, not established fact.
Scholarship essentially asks two questions of Magni and Móði. First: were they ever more than poetic figures? Second: how old are they?
On the first question, Rudolf Simek, in his Dictionary of Northern Mythology, reads Thor's children as embodiments of their father's qualities – strength (Magni, Þrúðr) and wrath (Móði). The view is widely shared because it explains the thin record so neatly. If you are essentially an attribute, you do not need a biography. Thor "has" strength and wrath just as he has Mjölnir and his belt of power; that his strength survives his death is expressed by the myth in letting it, in the form of his sons, inherit the hammer.
No cult of Magni or Móði is attested. There are no place names as there are for Thor, no sacrificial sites, no Viking-Age personal names clearly referring to them. That sets them sharply apart from their father, whose worship is documented by hundreds of place names, runestones and amulets – see our portrait Thor – Thunder over Midgard.
On the second question there is no firm answer. If Hymiskviða, Hárbarðsljóð and Vafþrúðnismál preserve old traditions, Thor's sons were already known in the pagan North. If those poems are younger, the idea may only have taken shape in the high Middle Ages. One observation is worth noting: the notion of a "next generation" inhabiting a cleansed world after the end has reminded some scholars of Christian apocalyptic imagery. Others consider the renewal motif native. Both positions are seriously argued.
The pair's biggest boost in fame came not from scholarship but from the living room. In the video game God of War (2018), Magni and Modi appear as Thor's sons and stand in the way of the heroes Kratos and Atreus – a loud-mouthed pair of brothers who come to a bad end. That has little to do with the Edda, where they are precisely the ones who survive the end of the world. For what the game does with Norse myth more broadly, see our God of War fact-check. In the Marvel films, incidentally, neither of them plays any part – Thor's family is built quite differently there, as our Marvel Thor fact-check shows.
In everyday life at least one name lives on: Magni is still a common given name in Iceland. Móði is much rarer.
And in our workshop? For families with two sons, the brothers make a lovely motif – precisely because the Edda gives them the role of heirs. Not war, not revenge, but this: what the father built goes on. A hammer, two names in runes, the line from Vafþrúðnismál on slate – that says more than any invented character sketch. With pieces like these we stick to what is attested, and we tell you honestly when a motif is modern.
Who are Magni and Modi in Norse mythology? Magni ("the Mighty") and Móði ("the Wrathful, the Brave") are the sons of Thor. According to Vafþrúðnismál 51 and Snorri's Gylfaginning, they take up the hammer Mjölnir after Ragnarök.
Who is Magni's mother? According to Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, the giantess Járnsaxa. No source names a mother for Móði; the idea that Sif is mother of both is a modern assumption.
How old was Magni when he lifted Hrungnir's leg? Three nights old, according to Snorri – not three years, as is often claimed. Thor rewarded him with Hrungnir's horse Gullfaxi.
Do Magni and Modi survive Ragnarök? Yes. In Vafþrúðnismál and in Snorri they are among the gods of the new world, along with Víðarr, Váli, Baldr and Höðr. Völuspá, however, does not mention them.
Does Thor have a daughter? Yes, Þrúðr ("Strength"), according to Snorri the daughter of Thor and Sif. Almost nothing is told of her; one kenning calls Hrungnir her thief.
Are there any stories about Modi? No. Móði is named only in Vafþrúðnismál, in Snorri and in the Thor-kenning "Móði's father" in Hymiskviða. No tale of his own survives.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
Thor · Mjöllnir · Ragnarök · What comes after.
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