No god was so beloved by ordinary people as Thor. With hammer, strength-belt and thunder-chariot he holds the powers of chaos in check – red-bearded, quick-tempered, and with an appetite that frightens even giants.
Thor (Old Norse Þórr, continental Donar) is the god of thunder and the foremost protector of gods and humans. Son of Odin and the earth-goddess Jörð, he embodies strength, reliability and the tireless war against the giants, the powers of chaos. Where Odin works by cunning and sorcery, Thor works with the hammer.
His chief weapon is the hammer Mjölnir, which never misses and returns to the hand like a boomerang. It was forged by dwarves – its handle turned out too short only because Loki, in the shape of a fly, stung the bellows-dwarf on the eyelid. Thor also wears the strength-belt Megingjörð, which doubles his power, and the iron gloves Járngreipr. His chariot is drawn by the goats Tanngnjóstr and Tanngrisnir, whose hooves thunder across the sky – Thor can slaughter and eat them in the evening and revive them with the hammer in the morning, so long as no bone is broken. And the hammer does not only kill: it also hallows – weddings, births and funeral pyres.
Half of Thor’s life is one long campaign against the giants. He shatters the stone-headed Hrungnir in single combat – a splinter of the giant’s whetstone stays lodged in Thor’s skull forever. He journeys to the stronghold of Utgard, where illusions push him to his limits, meets the vast giant Skrymir on the road, and hammers three valleys into a mountain. And in the Þrymskviða his hammer is stolen; to win it back, the bearded thunder god must disguise himself as the bride Freyja – one of the funniest scenes in all the Edda.
His greatest foe, though, is Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent that coils around the whole world. Once he nearly hauled it from the sea: on a fishing trip with the giant Hymir, Thor baited the serpent with an ox-head and drew it up to the gunwale – until the terrified Hymir cut the line. Postponed, not cancelled: at Ragnarök the two meet a last time. Thor slays the serpent, staggers back nine steps, and then falls himself, killed by its venom.
“Hither there comes the son of Hlothyn, / the bright snake gapes to heaven above; / … the world’s protector in wrath shall smite; / nine paces fares the son of Fjörgyn, / and, slain by the serpent, fearless he sinks.”— Völuspá 56, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
While Odin was the god of chieftains and poets, Thor stood close to ordinary farmers and seafarers. Archaeology shows it strikingly: more than a thousand Thor’s-hammer amulets have been found – no other divine symbol is so richly attested. Some casting moulds could even pour a cross and a hammer at once: the smith served both faiths. In the age of conversion the hammer became the defiant counter-sign to the cross.
On the continent he was Donar (Proto-Germanic Þunraz, „thunder"), and his tree was the oak. In 723 the missionary Boniface felled the Donar oak at Geismar in Hesse – when the expected lightning-bolt failed to fall, it was taken as proof of the new faith, and he built a chapel from the wood. To this day Thursday („Thor’s day", German Donnerstag) bears the god’s name.
You will find the hammer and other genuine Norse motifs laser-engraved in our shop – and the post on real and invented symbols explains which signs are truly of the Viking Age.
Mjölnir – Thor’s hammer · The Midgard Serpent · Thor & Skrymir · Jötunheim · Ragnarök · The Norse pantheon.
Völuspá, Þrymskviða, Hymiskviða, Hárbarðsljóð (Poetic Edda), English public domain: Henry Adams Bellows (1923). Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii (c. 760). Scholarship: Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (2001).