How Thor Lost His Thunder

The Changing Faces of an Old Norse God

Declan Taggart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367889029
• eBook ISBN: 9781351674218
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How Thor Lost his Thunder is the first major English-language study of early medieval evidence for the Old Norse god, Thor. In this book, the most common modern representations of Thor are examined, such as images of him wreathed in lightning, and battling against monsters and giants. The origins of these images within Iron Age and early medieval evidence are then uncovered and investigated. In doing so, the common cultural history of Thor's cult and mythology is explored and some of his lesser known traits are revealed, including a possible connection to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Iceland.

This geographically and chronologically far-reaching study considers the earliest sources in which Thor appears, including in evidence from the Viking colonies of the British Isles and in Scandinavian folklore. Through tracing the changes and variety that has occurred in Old Norse mythology over time, this book provokes a questioning of the fundamental popular and scholarly beliefs about Thor for the first time since the Victorian era, including whether he really was a thunder god and whether worshippers truly believed they would encounter him in the afterlife.

Considering evidence from across northern Europe, How Thor Lost his Thunder challenges modern scholarship's understanding of the god and of the northern pantheon as a whole and is ideal for scholars and students of mythology, and the history and religion of medieval Scandinavia.

1
Introduction

In my first draft of this introduction, I tried to imagine a modern-day reunion of the Old Norse gods. I pictured them sitting in awkward silence in a circle, limp tea sandwiches hanging from their hands, paint peeling from the wall of their conference room, and names like Lýtir and Bil markered in black onto stickers on some of their chests. In the end, I gave up. The image never really worked, not even in a fictionalised modernity in which Þórr (MnE Thor) and the other pre-Christian gods of Scandinavia walk the earth and enjoy conference coffee. Today, while the dísir (sing. dís) are largely unknowns and the álfar (sing. álfr) have been eclipsed by the elves of twentieth-century science-fiction and fantasy – while even Óðinn and Loki are relatively obscure – Þórr is profiting from a cultural renaissance for medieval Scandinavian culture, judging from his frequent appearances in popular literature, music, cinema and video games (on modern appropriations of Old Norse myths, see O’Donoghue 2007, pp. 163–199). It is safe to assume he would not get invited to a divine twenty-first-century þing.

Yet Þórr has changed and changed again over the centuries. Thanks to some extent to the influence of the Marvel cinematic universe, the arch-thunder god in the twenty-first-century West is blond, clean-shaven and blue-eyed, the perfect vision of what, to some of the world, is the stereotypical Scandinavian (cf. O’Donoghue 2007, pp. 130, 146, 197–198). Other modern versions differ. One of Þórr’s original Marvel artists had already portrayed the character, for a different comics company, as a ginger, bearded villain – though he was really a mobster in disguise (Kirby and Simon 1942). The authors of the Danish Valhalla comics also elected for a red-bearded Thor (e.g. Madsen et al. 1979), cleaving closer to those sagas which identify the god by the redness of his facial hair (e.g. Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, ch. 8; Eiríks saga rauða, ch. 8). The mythological poems that remain do not speak at all of the colour of Þórr’s hair, though he is bearded in Þrymskviða (st. 1:5).¹

The prevailing vision of Þórr in popular culture differs from that of the Viking Age, and the way an Icelandic fisherman from that period conceived of the god might not have matched the account of a counterpart on a Danish island like Læsø. For scholars, this is crucial. If a major part of an argument is based on an assumption – such as the idea that Þórr was uniformly thought of as a thunder god across the whole of the North – that turns out to be incorrect, then it undermines the conclusions that are drawn and may reinforce those erroneous assumptions for future scholars.

The main purpose of this monograph, therefore, is to undertake a rigorous philological dissection of medieval representations of the Old Norse deity Þórr, investigating variety in these representations and focusing in particular on thunder, the god’s most popular association in modern scholarship and culture. My hope is that from my contribution can come a more realistic and reliable model of historical conceptions of the god, giving scholars and other interested parties a sounder basis to work from.

1.1 Justifications and the limits of the study

Modern representations of Þórr revolve around two basic and arguably complementary characteristics: strength and control over thunder. The many comics and novels centred on the god take titles like The Mighty Thor, Thor: Man of War, Thunderstrike, The Adventures of Thor the Thunder God, Thor the Viking God of Thunder, God of Thunder, Thor: God of Thunder (no relation), Thor: Ages of Thunder, Thor: Blood and Thunder, The Mighty Thor, Thor: The Mighty Avenger and, of course, Thor the Thunder Cat. The (non-feline) comic-book protagonist is routinely depicted mid-hammer blow, his weapon and background bathed in silver or gold by crooked jags of lightning. Recently, a newly discovered species of shrew native to the Democratic Republic of Congo was designated the Thor’s hero shrew (Scutisorex thori) after the deity, from a correspondence between the unusual power of the shrew’s verte-brae and Þórr’s reputation for strength (Johnston 2013; Stanley et al. 2013).²

The popular conceptualisation is echoed in many academic studies of the Old Norse deity and in influential handbooks. In his Dictionary of Northern Mythology, for example, Rudolf Simek epitomises Þórr as ‘[t]he Germanic god of thunder, the strongest of the æsir and the giant-killer among them’ (1993, s.v. ‘Thor’). Hilda Ellis Davidson introduces Þórr as ‘the northern thunder-god’ and refers to him later as ‘thunder-god and deity of the sky’ as well as ‘protector of homes and the community’ (1988, pp. 1, 135), while Jan de Vries’s still-prominent Altgermanisches Religionsgeschichte denotes Þórr repeatedly as a Donnergott ‘thunder-god’ (1970, § 413, 415, 416). Mads D. Jessen’s examination of Þórr’s cognitive appeal works from the assumption that Þórr was a god of ‘war and weather (especially thunder)’, citing associations like his goats and linking the god’s hammer Mjǫllnir with the production of thunder and lightning (2013, pp. 325–327). And Martin Arnold’s recent survey of the evolution of Þórr begins with the observation that the figure’s single ever-present characteristic is ‘his devotion to protecting humanity from ill’ and goes on to label him ‘[m]aster of both thunder and lightning’ (2011, pp. xi, 11. See also e.g. Turville-Petre 1964, p. 81; Raudvere 2008, p. 237; Schjødt 2008; and further instances could be adduced).

In the past, Lotte Motz (1996, pp. 40–41, 48, 55–57) and Ellis Davidson (1965, pp. 3, 5) have both questioned the validity, at least in Iceland, of characterising Þórr as a thunder god. Motz is particularly vehement and argues that the few connections she can find, chief among them the etymology of the name Þórr (see Section 3.1), are ‘not matched by descriptions in the texts’ (1996, p. 55). The most circumspect textbooks limit themselves to an overview of the sources, rather than naming Þórr as particular kind of god: in John Lindow’s Handbook of Norse Mythology, for example, the entry on Þórr focuses on his giant-slaying on that basis, without any mention of thunder or lightning (2001, s.v. ‘Thor’), while another, discussing a major poem about the god, refers to Þórr’s thunder-god label as an ‘assumption’ (2001, s.v. ‘Thrymskvida (The poem of Thrym)’). Elsewhere in the same book, though, Lindow does tag Þórr as ‘the thunderer’ (2001, s.v. ‘Inter-pretatio germanica’); the characterisation is apparently somewhat ingrained even in scholars wary of it.

The scholarly mantra about standing on the shoulders of giants remains true. Yet, every so often, researchers should peek over those shoulders to check the working out being done by the giants, and that is doubly important in cases like this, when the characterisation of Þórr as a powerful thunder god has achieved such ubiquity and is so fundamental to modern conceptions of the Old Norse god. At the same time, it is impossible, even in the time and space allotted to this book, to make a comprehensive study of the entirety of medieval and pre-medieval evidence related to Þórr. As a consequence, I am indebted to previous works of scholarship in this field, from Helge Ljungberg’s monumental though never finished Tor (1947), which collates information from many sources and a comparative perspective, through a wide spectrum of articles to Martin Arnold’s Thor: Myth to Marvel (2011), the most recent long-form discussion in English dedicated to the god. Arnold’s monograph follows representations of Þórr from their earliest extant forms to incarnations in twentieth-century popular culture and, while it is useful for its restatements of sensible positions taken by other scholars on early conceptions of the god, its real contribution concerns the post-medieval reception of the god and medieval Scandinavian culture more broadly.

The commentaries of most value to this book are Arboe Sonne’s Thor-kult i vikingetiden (2013) and Maths Bertell’s Tor och den nordiska åskan (2003), though they adopt very different analytical stances. Both successful in their own way, Thor-kult i vikingetiden is stridently revisionist – cynical even – in its approach to previous scholarship and to the merits of many of the sources that must be utilised to build any understanding of pre-Christian worship of Þórr. Even if Arboe Sonne overstates the case, his thesis nonetheless points to the merit of re-examining the depictions of Þórr found in pre-medieval and medieval source material to wipe away any residue left on them by centuries of academic and popular inquiry. A study of the cultural exchange behind certain mythological motifs in the literature of Þórr, Bertell’s work is more hopeful and constructive than Arboe Sonne’s. Though this book challenges the primary tenet of Tor och den nordiska åskan that Þórr was a thunder god, many of Bertell’s findings, regarding Þórr’s characterisation as a protector, for example, are complementary to my research, while the cross-cultural scope of Bertell’s work makes it a fascinating storehouse of materials that could not find room here. The views of Bertell, Arboe Sonne and many other scholars will necessarily be cited, challenged and modulated throughout this book.

Despite the limits of time and space placed on this study, it should be plain from the wide range of sources that are used whether the key motifs of thunder, lightning and strength were consistently important and, moreover, possible to evaluate variation in representations of Þórr in their textual and extra-textual contexts. Regarding these key motifs, explicit statements of a connection with Þórr will be sought. In the first instance, this is to avoid circular reasoning – attributing thunder as an underlying concept when rumbling occurs in a text, for example, because thunder is expected to be there. Secondly, if thunder was an essential Þórr attribute for the Viking Age and medieval societies that produced and transmitted stories about him, then it is natural to expect that this would be unambiguous in their texts and that an investigation would not need to be exhaustive to find it.

1.2 Vikings, religion and other controversies

The validity of terminology that will be used throughout this investigation, in particular Viking and Viking Age, has been questioned in the past (see further Ambrosiani and Clarke 1998; Richards 2005, pp. 2–6). As is the case with any attempt to assign discrete boundaries to the ceaseless processes of history, the Viking Age is a constructed aid to comprehension, though one that has achieved currency through ongoing usefulness. The convention offers a facilitative schema for research and pedagogy, if its conditionality is acknowledged and made open to ongoing re-evaluation (cf. Brink 2008, p. 5). In this spirit, the practice of marking the beginning of the Viking Age at the raid on Lindisfarne monastery in Northumberland in AD 793 and its end with the battle of Stamford Bridge in AD 1066 will be followed here, though these dates can be quibbled with according to the criteria – geographical, archaeological, linguistic, art historical, religious – used to derive them (e.g. Ambrosiani and Clarke 1998, p. 33). Viking is itself a term with uncertain origins. It can be related to the Old Norse nouns víking ‘expedition’ and víkingr ‘someone on an expedition’, and seems in these cases to have had a special connection with military voyages (for a broader introduction to the possible senses and etymologies, see Brink 2008, pp. 5–7). I will use Viking here in its common, extended modern English sense, in which a Viking could be any member of the Nordic peoples in this period (though, admittedly, the word can have a stress on their violent activities, which is of lesser relevance here...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sources
• 3 Naming thunder
• 4 Eddic thunder
• 5 Non-eddic voices
• 6 Mythological objects
• 7 Mundane objects
• 8 Conclusions
• Index