Tonight, a story with thunder in it — but do not worry: it is friendly thunder, the kind that grumbles far away over the hills while you are warm inside, and tonight you will learn what it actually is. It is a chariot. It is two goats and a copper-bearded god with a hammer, patrolling the fences of the world while everyone he protects is asleep. His name is Thor, and of all the gods in all the old stories he is the easiest to love, because his job, if you look at it squarely, was simply this: to stand between everything fragile and everything that wanted to break it. This is his whole life, from his strange birth to his nine last steps. Pull the blanket up. The patrol is out tonight, and the story is long and good.
He was born of a marriage grander than most: his father was Odin, the Allfather, the sky's one-eyed wisdom — and his mother was the Earth herself. Not a goddess of the earth, you understand; the actual ground, the old giantess Jord, the green hills walking as a woman. Think what that means, and half of Thor explains itself. The other gods live above the world and look down at it. Thor is half made of it. The soil that grows your bread is his mother's cheek; when he defends Midgard he is, quite literally, defending his mother from his father's enemies. He grew fast and enormous — full-grown gods found him alarming at three winters old — and everything about him ran hot: hair and beard the colour of embers, an appetite that emptied larders, eyes that could hold a giant still across a hall, a temper like August weather, quick up and quick down and clean afterward. And strength. Strength beyond every measure in the nine worlds, strength that had to learn — this is the tender part of his boyhood, and every parent of a big-hearted large child knows it — to be careful: with cups, with doors, with friends. The boy who would carry the thunder spent his whole childhood learning where to put it down.
You know already how he got the hammer — how Loki, having shorn Sif's golden hair for the joy of ruining something lovely, bought his bones back with dwarf-forged marvels; how the wager doubled, and the fly bit, and out of Sindri's forge came Mjolnir with its handle one fly-bite short. But stop a moment on the day the gods first passed the hammer into Thor's hands, because the poems all agree on a strange detail: the moment it was his, it fit. The weapon that could crush mountains shrank politely when he wished to hide it inside his shirt; it never missed what he threw it at; and however far it flew, it came home to his grip like a falcon, like a good dog, like a thought returning. He wore iron gloves to hold it and a belt that doubled his strength to swing it, and from that day the arrangement of the world was settled: the gods had many treasures, but they slept soundly because of one. 'Best defence against the frost-giants,' the judges ruled. The frost-giants, in the east, felt something change in the weather, and were not wrong.
For the giants were always coming. That is the standing fact of Thor's whole life, its tide and its calendar. Not because giants are wicked, exactly — you have met kind ones in other stories, and Thor's own grandmother was one — but because the giants are the old wild powers of frost and stone and flood, everything unfenced and unfarmed, and the world of gods and people is a garden cut out of their wilderness, and the wilderness wants it back. Someone has to walk the fence line, forever. Thor was the someone. His workdays were spent 'in the east, smashing trolls,' the poems say, as casually as a farmer says he was mending walls — and his commute home was the weather itself: the chariot with iron wheels, drawn by two goats whose names mean Teeth-Barer and Teeth-Grinder, rolling over the cloud-tops with a noise you have heard through your own window. Next time it comes, count with me: that far-off grumble is the wheels; the sharp crack overhead is the hammer meeting something that had it coming; and the rain after is the good part, the part his mother sends up the wheat for. Thunder is not the sky being angry, little one. It is the sky being guarded.
And the goats — I must tell you about the goats, because nothing shows you the household of Thor better. They pulled his chariot by day, and at night, if the larder was thin, Thor would slaughter and roast them for supper — and in the morning touch the bones and hides with the hammer, and up they sprang, bleating, whole and indignant, ready for the road. Endless goats; the traveling god's perfect provisioning. But one night, guesting at a poor farmer's house and sharing the goats out generously to the family, Thor woke to find one goat limping: the farmer's boy, Thjalfi, had cracked a leg-bone in the night to suck the marrow. Now watch the temper, up and down, because this is Thor exactly: his knuckles whitened on the hammer-shaft, the family fell to their knees expecting the roof to come off — and then the big shoulders came down, and the storm passed inward, and he took no lives at all. He took the boy. Thjalfi and his sister Roskva entered the thunder-god's service that morning, and Thjalfi became his runner, his squire, and — as you are about to hear — his fellow victim in the strangest adventure any god ever had.
For it was with Thjalfi and Loki beside him that Thor went east to Utgard, the outer stronghold of the giants, on the journey where nothing was what it was. You may remember pieces: the night they slept in a vast strange hall that dawn revealed to be the thumb of a giant's glove; the giant himself, Skrymir, so big that his snoring was a small earthquake, who tied their food-bag with wire no god could undo, and who received three of Thor's very best hammer-blows in his sleep — blows that would have levelled hills — and woke murmuring about falling leaves and drifting acorns. Thor, for the first time in his life, felt small, and did not care for it at all. And then the castle: Utgard, so tall you had to bend your neck back to see the battlements, where the giant-king lounged on his bench and said, smiling, that no one might stay who could not beat someone at something.
So they were beaten, one by one, and listen how. Loki, the hungriest creature alive, lost an eating race to a lean red thing called Logi — the trencher of meat eaten clean, but the other side ate meat, bones, and the wooden trough itself. Thjalfi, the fastest boy in Midgard, ran three heats against a slip of a lad called Hugi and lost ground in every one. And Thor? Thor was offered the king's own drinking horn — 'good drinkers empty it in one pull' — and he drank as gods drink, three colossal pulls that would have drained lakes, and the level barely bowed. He was invited to lift the king's grey cat off the floor — a party trick for children — and heaving with the strength that out-wrestles mountains he raised one single paw. And at last, humiliated, roaring for a real opponent, he was given an old, old woman: Elli, the king's nurse. And the old woman took hold of the thunder-god, and the harder he gripped the steadier she stood, and slowly, gently, horribly, she forced him down onto one knee. The king called the match there, kindly, the way you stop watching something that has become unfair. And they went to bed that night, the three of them, beaten flat — the god of strength out-wrestled by a grandmother — and I want you to remember how that felt to him, because the morning is coming.
In the morning the giant-king walked them to the gates himself, courteous as a bishop, and once they were safely outside his walls he told them the truth. There were never any contests. Everything had been sjonhverfing — sight-bending, the deceiving of eyes. Logi, who out-ate Loki, was wildfire: no appetite born can race the forest fire. Hugi, who outran Thjalfi, was Thought: no feet catch it. The horn's far end, Thor — the horn's far end stood in the ocean, and the world watched you drink: when you reach the shore you will see how the sea has shrunk back from the land, and men will call it the tide, and it will remember you forever, twice a day. The grey cat was the Midgard Serpent itself, the world-snake that rings all lands, and every giant behind my benches went white when you got its paw off the floor. And the old woman — the old woman was Old Age, who has thrown every wrestler since the beginning, and no one, god or man, has ever before gone down to her on one knee only. 'You were never losing, son of Odin. I was cheating because I was afraid.' And Thor, understanding at last — three days of shame dissolving into three impossible compliments — did the most Thor thing in all the poems: he raised the hammer. And the king was gone, and the castle was gone, and there was nothing on the whole green plain but wind. The one enemy he could never smash: a trick of the light, an idea. He drove home in silence. He was not stupid, whatever the clever gods said. He was strength itself learning, slowly and honestly, the shape of the things strength cannot fix — and unlike cleverer gods, he never once pretended the lesson had not hurt.
But do not think the east always made a fool of him. Ask Hrungnir. That one began, as trouble usually began, with Odin — riding Sleipnir into giant-country and wagering his head that no horse there could match him — and it ended with the strongest giant alive galloping his golden-maned Gullfaxi right through Asgard's gates on the Allfather's heels. The gods, cornered by hospitality, poured ale for the guest, and the guest drank all of it and grew loud: he would carry Valhalla home under one arm, he announced; he would sink Asgard in the sea; he would slay every god in the hall except Freyja and Sif, whom he would keep. It is at exactly this point in an evening that someone says the name Thor — and Thor arrived indoors like weather, hammer up, and only the laws of sanctuary held him: the giant was an unarmed guest. So Hrungnir, drunk and enormous, did the one brave stupid thing left: he challenged the thunder-god to the world's first formal duel, at the border stones, three days hence, weapons allowed. He went home to arm — and giant-country, suddenly sober, realised what it had done: their strongest was about to face the hammer, and if he fell, who stood behind him? So they built a second, a helper: a man of clay, nine leagues tall and three leagues broad across the chest, and they could find no heart big enough to run him but a mare's, and that is what they put in him. He is the ancestor, some say, of every scarecrow since. On the day, Hrungnir stood at the stones with his shield of stone and his whetstone for a weapon, and the clay giant stood beside him, and Thor came — but not the way anyone looked for him. Thjalfi ran ahead and called out, friendly as a neighbour: 'You've been fooled, giant — Thor comes at you from below, underground!' And Hrungnir, crediting the boy, stood on his shield. On his shield. And Thor came, of course, the only way Thor ever came: straight down the sky, in fire and thunder, hammer already loosed. Hrungnir hurled the whetstone; stone met hammer in mid-air and burst; the hammer continued to its appointment and the strongest head in Jotunheim went the way of the whetstone. Beside them the clay colossus saw the flash and — the mare's heart hammering — wet himself, the poems say plainly, and was chopped down by Thjalfi to little glory. But a shard of the burst whetstone had lodged deep in Thor's brow, and there it stayed. A wise-woman named Groa nearly sang it loose — the stone was actually lifting from his skull — when Thor, feeling the joy of it, blurted his thanks too soon by telling her glad news of her long-lost husband; and Groa, overcome, lost every stitch of her spell, and the stone settled back for eternity. So the thunder-god carries flint in his skull to this day, and it aches when the weather turns; and that is why, the old ones said, you must never fling a whetstone across a floor — for the shard in Thor's head stirs when its brothers move, and it is unkind to make a guardian wince.
There were other roads east — there were always other roads east. There was the visit to Geirrod, where Loki, caught snooping in falcon-feathers and starved in a box for three months, bought his freedom with a promise to deliver Thor unarmed — no hammer, no belt, no iron gloves — into a killer's hall. Thor went, trusting his friend, because trusting was in him the way scheming was in Loki; and only a friendly giantess on the road, old Grid, saved the world's protector, whispering the truth by her fire and lending him her own belt and gloves and her unbreakable staff. So armed, he crossed the river that Geirrod's daughter swelled against him — and dammed it at the source, as he put it, with a well-flung boulder, a line his goats presumably heard forty more times on the way home — and when his chair rose beneath him in the guest-hall to crush him against the roof-beams, he braced Grid's staff against the rafters and pushed, and something beneath the chair crunched hugely: the two daughters, lifting. And when at last Geirrod himself, shouting welcome, seized a glowing iron ingot from the fire with tongs and hurled it, Thor caught the molten metal out of the air in Grid's iron gloves — caught it — and returned the throw with interest, through the iron pillar Geirrod hid behind, through Geirrod, through the wall, and some way into the landscape beyond. Hospitality, in the old world, was sacred; and its abusers answered, sooner or later, to a copper-bearded ombudsman with excellent aim.
And there was the wedding. You heard it in full on another night — the stolen hammer, Freyja's magnificent refusal, the bridal veil, the ox and eight salmon, the burning eyes explained away by the best bridesmaid in mythology. I will add only the detail that belongs in his biography: of every trial in Thor's long life, the dress was the one he argued against hardest. He would face the Serpent without blinking; the veil nearly broke him. 'The gods will call me unmanly,' he pleaded, and Loki answered with the truth that governed Thor's every day and made him what he was: 'Would you rather explain the dress, or watch the giants live in Asgard?' Duty over dignity — always, every time, whatever it cost, and it cost him his dignity regularly and his life eventually. He put on the veil. And when the hammer touched his lap, and his heart, as the poem says, laughed in his breast — the laugh, you understand, was not only vengeance. It was a man getting his hands back on the one tool his whole meaning ran through, and knowing which parts of himself no dress had touched.
But over all these adventures, through the whole length of his life, one enemy waited, and it was never a giant. When Odin flung Loki's monstrous children out of Asgard, he hurled the serpent-child into the world-ocean — and in the deep it grew, and grew, until it wrapped the whole earth round and gripped its own tail in the dark below the waves: Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent, the World-Snake, the living noose around everything Thor was sworn to keep. They were made for each other in the exact and terrible sense: the guardian of the circle, and the thing the circle is made of. Three times they touched, across the ages. Once in Utgard, unknowing — the grey cat whose single lifted paw turned every giant pale. And once from a fishing boat, on the day the old poems could not stop retelling and the old carvers could not stop carving: Thor, guesting with the giant Hymir, rowing them far out past every safe mark while the giant whitened; the ox-head bait sinking through the twilight fathoms; and then the sea itself heaving, and the head that rose against the gunwale — venom-blue, dripping, wide as a headland — and the god and the World-Serpent looking into one another's eyes at last, no cat this time, no tricks, the hammer rising, the whole future of everything balanced on one boat-plank — and Hymir, mad with terror, cutting the line. Down went the head into the dark; down, some say, went Hymir shortly after, over the side and no great loss; and home rowed Thor in a silence with weather in it, wading the last miles with the boat on his back. He had had the end of the world on a hook, and lost it to a frightened man's knife. The third meeting, both of them already knew, would keep.
It kept until Ragnarok. When the last winter came, three winters deep with no summer between, and the wolves ate the sun and moon, and the horn of Heimdall went ringing through every world, the sea rose all around the lands at once — because the Serpent was letting go. Coil by coil it came off the drowned coasts and ashore, ploughing venom in front of it like tide-wrack, and the poisoned surf carried the ship of the dead. On Vigrid plain the last lines met, and each of the old pairs found each other in the smoke, as if the whole history of the worlds had been a very long betrothal: Odin to the wolf, Freyr to the fire, Heimdall to Loki. And Thor — Thor came at last, without trick or veil or borrowed staff, to the third meeting. His father was fighting the wolf beside him and he could not help; the poems make a point of it; each had his own appointment now. It was the fight the fishing-line had postponed and nothing could postpone again, hammer and coil, thunder and undertow, the two oldest neighbours in creation settling the fence line forever — and Thor won it. Let that be said plainly, because he earned it: the Midgard Serpent, the girdle of the world, the fear of every sea-road since the first keel — Mjolnir found its skull, and the World-Snake died on the last morning, and the circle came off the world like a shackle. And then Thor stepped back from the wreck of it, and walked nine steps — the venom already in him, the sky already failing — nine steps, one for each of the nine worlds he had spent his whole enormous life defending, and after the ninth he fell, and the thunder stopped.
But his story does not end in the venom, and you deserve to hear where it truly ends. When the fire had passed over, and the sea gave the green earth back, and the young gods came out into the light of the new sun to found the quieter world — among them walked two brothers carrying something between them, taking turns at its weight. Magni and Modi, Thor's sons: their names mean Strength and Courage. And the thing they carried was Mjolnir. The hammer outlived the storm that swung it, and Strength and Courage inherit it together — neither, the old ones would want you to notice, can lift the whole meaning of it alone. Whether the new green world ever needed it swung, no poem says; perhaps it hangs on a wall in the morning light, the most honourably retired tool in creation. And the thunder you will hear some warm night this summer, far off and gentle over the hills? The old folk had an answer for a listening child, and it has been handed down, parent to parent, all the way to this room: the patrol goes on. Strength and Courage take turns at the wheel-reins. The fences of the world are walked, the wild is kept politely to its own side, the rain comes after to feed the wheat, and nothing — nothing, little one — is going to trouble the middle yard tonight. So close your eyes. The grumble over the hills is a friend of the family. He was half made of his mother the Earth, and so, when you think about it, are you — so sleep the way the earth sleeps under summer thunder: guarded, watered, and entirely unafraid. Goodnight.