Thor

Thor is the storm made flesh: red-bearded, colossally strong, quick to anger and quick to laugh. He is the great defender of gods and humans against the jötnar, riding a chariot drawn by the goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr whose wheels roll out thunder across the sky. His hammer Mjölnir — forged by the dwarves Brokkr and Sindri — never misses and always returns to his hand; with the belt Megingjörð his strength doubles.

The myths delight in throwing Thor into undignified situations: dressed as a bride to recover his stolen hammer in Þrymskviða, humiliated by the illusions of Útgarða-Loki, fishing up the Midgard Serpent with an ox-head for bait. But the affection is real — archaeology shows Mjölnir amulets were the most popular pendant of the Viking Age, and Thursday ("Thor's day") carries his name across the Germanic languages.

The people's god

Son of Odin and the earth herself — the giantess-goddess Jörð — Thor is half sky and half soil, and it shows in his worshippers. Where Odin gathered kings and poets, Thor belonged to farmers, sailors, and settlers: the god you called on to hallow a wedding, a ship, a grave, a new-claimed valley. Icelandic settlers threw their high-seat pillars overboard and built where Thor washed them ashore; more Icelanders in Landnámabók bear Thor-names (Þórólfr, Þorsteinn, Þorgerðr) than names honouring any other god. He dwells in Þrúðheimr, "Power-home," in the hall Bilskírnir, which Grímnismál counts at five hundred and forty rooms — the largest hall ever built.

His household is its own small mythology: his wife Sif of the golden hair; their sons Magni and Móði, Strength and Courage, who will carry the hammer past the world's end; his daughter Þrúðr; and his human servants Þjálfi and Röskva, taken in payment when Þjálfi split the leg-bone of one of Thor's goats. Those goats are the perfect emblem of the god: he slaughters and eats them at evening, hallows the bones with Mjölnir, and they stand up whole in the morning — appetite and renewal in a single miracle.

How did Thor get Mjölnir?

Through Loki, of course, and through spite. Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda tells how Loki sheared Sif bald as a prank, and, facing Thor's wrath, commissioned the Sons of Ivaldi to forge living golden hair — plus the spear Gungnir and the ship Skíðblaðnir. Unable to stop while ahead, Loki bet his own head that the dwarf brothers Brokkr and Sindri could not forge three finer treasures. They made the ring Draupnir, the boar Gullinbursti — and Mjölnir. A fly (Loki in disguise) bit Brokkr at the bellows, which is why the hammer's handle came out short; the gods judged it the best of all treasures anyway, "the greatest defence against the frost-giants," and Loki kept his head on a technicality. Alongside the hammer Thor owns the iron gloves Járngreipr, needed to grip Mjölnir's haft, and the strength-doubling belt Megingjörð.

The bride of Þrymr

The funniest poem in the Poetic Edda begins with catastrophe: Thor wakes and the hammer is gone. The giant Þrymr has buried it eight leagues deep and will trade it for one thing only — Freyja as his bride. Freyja's refusal shakes Asgard and snaps the necklace Brísingamen from her throat. It is Heimdallr who proposes the unthinkable solution: dress Thor in the bridal linen, hang keys at his waist, set the necklace on him, and send him to Jötunheimr as Freyja.

What follows in the theft of Mjölnir is pure comic escalation. The "bride" eats an entire ox, eight salmon, and three casks of mead; Loki, along as a sharp-tongued maid, explains that Freyja has fasted eight nights in her longing. Þrymr lifts the veil for a kiss and reels back from the burning eyes; she has not slept for longing either, says the maid. When the hammer is finally brought out to hallow the bride, Thor's fingers close on the haft, and the poem ends in a massacre described with the same cheerful economy as the wedding feast.

Thor and the Midgard Serpent

Thor's true opposite is not any giant but Jörmungandr, the serpent that circles Midgard biting its own tail — another of Loki's monstrous children. Their enmity runs through three great episodes.

In the journey to Útgarðr, told in Gylfaginning, Thor is systematically humiliated by illusions: he cannot drain a horn whose far end sits in the ocean, cannot lift a grey cat that is the serpent in disguise, and is wrestled to one knee by Elli, old age herself. Only afterward does Útgarða-Loki confess the trick — Thor's drinking created the tides, and the cat's one lifted paw terrified every watching giant.

The rematch is Thor's fishing trip. Rowing far out to sea with the giant Hymir — told in Hymiskviða and by Snorri — Thor baits a colossal hook with an ox-head and hauls the World Serpent itself to the gunwale. God and monster stare at each other, venom and thunder; Thor raises the hammer, and Hymir, in terror, cuts the line. Snorri leaves it open whether the hammer struck home. The third meeting is at Ragnarök, and no one cuts the line there.

Among his other giant-fights, the duel with Hrungnir stands out: the strongest of the jötnar, armed with a whetstone, met Mjölnir mid-air. The hammer shattered stone and skull, but a shard of whetstone lodged in Thor's head forever, and the dead giant's leg pinned him until his three-year-old son Magni heaved it off.

Is Thor stronger than Odin?

In raw strength, yes — Snorri calls Thor the strongest of gods and men, and no myth contradicts it. But Norse religion did not rank its gods on one ladder. Odin holds sovereignty, magic, and the choosing of victory; Thor holds might and the defence of the world's order. The Eddas even stage the rivalry: in Hárbarðsljóð, Odin, disguised as a ferryman, mocks Thor across the water — "Odin gets the jarls who fall in battle, and Thor gets the race of thralls" — and Thor can only fume. The insult preserves a real social truth: the aristocracy leaned toward Odin, the broad world of farmers toward Thor, and late heathen Iceland seems to have loved Thor best of all.

At Ragnarök

When the last battle comes to the plain of Vígríðr, Thor finally finishes the fight begun on Hymir's boat. He and Jörmungandr meet, and neither survives: Thor crushes the serpent's head, walks nine steps through its spreading venom, and falls dead. Völuspá gives the scene its grave epitaph, and Vafþrúðnismál adds the sequel — Magni and Móði inherit Mjölnir in the renewed world. Thunder is not abolished by the world's ending; it is inherited.

In the primary sources

Thor drives the plots of Þrymskviða and Hymiskviða, trades insults in Lokasenna (where his arrival finally silences Loki) and Hárbarðsljóð, and confronts a cheeky dwarf in Alvíssmál, holding him in riddles until sunlight turns him to stone. Gylfaginning in the Prose Edda carries the Útgarða-Loki adventure, the fishing trip, and his fate at Ragnarök; Skáldskaparmál adds the duel with Hrungnir and the journey to the giant Geirröðr, made without the hammer and survived thanks to the giantess Gríðr's borrowed gear. Beyond the Eddas, Adam of Bremen describes Thor enthroned at the centre of the Uppsala temple, and the archaeological record — hammer amulets, runestone invocations like "May Thor hallow these runes" — attests his cult more richly than any other god's.

Legacy

Thursday preserves his name across the Germanic world — Old Norse Þórsdagr, English Thursday, German Donnerstag ("thunder's day"). Place-names thick with him stretch from Thorsberg to Torshavn, and settlers carried the name to Iceland in dozens of personal names still in use. The oak was his tree in continental tradition — Boniface felled "Thor's oak" at Fritzlar in the eighth century — and the chemical element thorium and countless modern retellings keep the thunderer within everyday reach.