Thor in Norse Mythology: The God of Thunder of Iceland's Eddas

His name reaches far beyond the manuscripts. Thursday still means Thor's day, and Þórsmörk, a valley in the southern highlands, carries his name onto the map. Meet Thor in Norse mythology on his own terms and you'll find a red-bearded, quick-tempered giant-fighter the poems treat with equal parts humor and awe.

Thor is the son of Odin and the earth goddess Jörð. From his home in Asgard, he guards both the gods and Midgard, the human world, against the jötnar, the giants who threaten cosmic order. What set him apart was who worshipped him. Odin drew the kings and the poets, the noble and the learned. Thor belonged to everyone else: the farmers and households who called on him for good weather, a strong harvest, and safety when danger loomed.

The essential facts, from his name to his fate:

Snorri Sturluson compiled the Prose Edda around 1220, in Christian Iceland, partly as a handbook to teach poets the myths their verse drew on. By then, the country had been Christian for generations. We meet Thor through writers determined to preserve the stories, not through a living faith, and Snorri's telling in particular is vivid, funny, and shaped by a single author's hand.

Thor means thunder. In earlier Germanic languages, the god's name and the word for it were the same. The Old Norse Þórr (Þór in modern Icelandic, Thor in English) comes from the same ancient root as the English word thunder. Say that word aloud and you're speaking a cousin of his name. 

The Þ throws people off. It looks like a P, but it's pronounced like the th in thin, so Þór is just Thor. The name outlasted the worship and never left, surfacing in the calendar and in place names. Most alive of all, though, are the people who carry it: Icelanders still call their children Þorsteinn, Thor's stone, and Þórdís, Thor's goddess.

Mjölnir is Thor's hammer, one of the most famous objects in Norse mythology. Two dwarf brothers, Brokkr and Eitri, forged it to win a bet with Loki, who had wagered his own head that they would fail. Loki set out to wreck the work. As Brokkr pumped the bellows to keep the fire hot, a fly stung him again and again. The last bite drew blood and broke his rhythm, so the hammer came out with one flaw: a handle a touch too short.

Alongside it, Thor carried two more treasures: the iron gloves Járngreipr, to grip Mjölnir, and the belt Megingjörð, to double his strength. His chariot was drawn by two goats, Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr (teeth-barer and teeth-grinder), whose passage overhead was the thunder. The hammer never missed, and once hurled, it struck like lightning and flew back to his hand.

Mjölnir was also a tool of blessing, laid over people and things to make them holy. The same power carried into daily life: ordinary men and women wore small silver hammer pendants as charms, found in Scandinavia and as far away as Iceland. As Christianity took hold, some were cast in the same molds as crosses, and a few were shaped to be read as either one.

Thor married Sif, a goddess famous for her golden hair, and together they had a daughter, Þrúðr. His sons are a different story: Magni, born to the giantess Járnsaxa, and Móði, whose mother the sources leave unnamed. Sif brought a son of her own to the marriage, Ullr, which made him Thor's stepson.

Thor's family tree holds seven names:

One name you might expect on that tree, but won't find, is Loki. In the myths, he's no relation to Thor at all. He is Odin's blood brother, the two having mingled their blood in the earliest days, according to the Poetic Edda.

The best-known Thor stories pit him against his two greatest enemies: the giants and the World Serpent. In the three that follow, he wears a bridal veil to take on a giant king, gets outfoxed by illusions in another giant's hall, and nearly kills the serpent on a fishing trip.

Thor woke one morning to find Mjölnir gone. Loki, borrowing Freyja's feather cloak, flew to Jötunheim and found the culprit: a giant named Þrymr, who had buried the hammer deep underground and would give it back on one condition. He wanted the goddess Freyja as his bride. She refused outright, so the gods held a council and found another way. Heimdall proposed that Thor himself attend the wedding dressed as Freyja, with Loki serving as his handmaid.

The disguise nearly held. At the wedding feast, Thor ate entire animals, then washed it down with three casks of mead. When Þrymr marveled at his bride's appetite, Loki explained that Freyja hadn't eaten for eight nights, so fierce was her longing for Jötunheim. Þrymr lifted the veil for a kiss and leaped back from the fire in her eyes. Loki was ready again: the same longing had kept her from sleeping. Then Þrymr called for Mjölnir, to lay it in the bride's lap and bless the marriage. The moment the hammer touched Thor's knees, the disguise was over. He seized it and killed Þrymr and every giant in the hall.

On another journey into Jötunheim, Thor reached the hall of a giant king called Útgarða-Loki, who arranged a string of contests for him. Thor tried to empty a drinking horn in three enormous gulps and barely lowered the level. Lifting the king's gray cat went no better, since it wouldn't shift past a single raised paw however hard he heaved. Then an elderly woman named Elli wrestled Thor down onto one knee. By every appearance, the strongest of the gods had lost at everything.

The truth came out as Thor left. The horn's far end had been dipped in the sea, and his three gulps had pulled the ocean down into the tides that rise and fall to this day. The cat was no cat but the Midgard Serpent, Jörmungandr, and lifting a single paw had hauled the world-circling snake almost to the sky. Elli was old age itself, which no one has ever wrestled to the ground. Thor had come closer to the impossible than any giant wanted to admit. When he grabbed for his hammer in fury, Útgarða-Loki and his hall vanished into empty ground.

Thor and the serpent met again on the water. Fishing far out with the giant Hymir, Thor baited his line with an ox head, and Jörmungandr took it. He hauled the serpent up until the two glared at each other over the gunwale, then reached for Mjölnir to finish it. Hymir, terrified, cut the line, and the serpent slid back into the deep, saved for the end of the world.

Thor dies at Ragnarök, and he takes the Midgard Serpent down with him. He kills it with Mjölnir, then falls dead of its venom after nine paces. The Ragnarök prophecy in Völuspá foretold the duel from the start.

Iceland took Thor personally. When Norse settlers crossed to the island in the 800s, some brought their devotion with them. Landnámabók and Eyrbyggja saga tell of Þórólfr Mostrarskegg. Nearing land, he threw overboard his high-seat pillars, carved with Thor's image, and settled where they drifted ashore. He named the spot Þórsnes, Thor's headland, and raised a temple to the god.

Þórsnes was not the only place to take his name. The best known is Þórsmörk, a valley ringed by three glaciers in the southern highlands. Its name means Thor's woodland, from mörk, "forest," a fitting label for one of the few corners of Iceland where birch still grows. In English, it's usually called the Valley of Thor.

One of the best-known objects to survive from that world is small enough to hold in your palm. The Eyrarland statue is a bronze figure just 6.7 cm (2.6 in) tall, cast around the year AD 1000. It was dug up at a farm of the same name near Akureyri in the north. The statue shows a seated man gripping a hammer to his chest, and most read it as Thor with Mjölnir. The short cross-like head matches the shape of Icelandic hammer pendants. Some tie the pose to Þrymskviða, the moment the seated Thor grasps his recovered hammer at the wedding. Others doubt it's Thor at all and take it for a gaming piece. The original is on display in the National Museum of Iceland's permanent exhibition, Making of a Nation. To stand in front of it yourself, plan an hour or two at the National Museum in Reykjavík.

Thor even guarded the written word. Viking Age carvers added the formula Þórr vígi, "may Thor hallow," to their runes, asking the god to keep the stone and its message safe. He is the only god invoked this way on any Viking Age runestone, on monuments like the Glavendrup stone in Denmark and Velanda in Sweden.

The Thor most people know, blond and caped, is Marvel's, not the Eddas'. The Norse god Thor came first, and the films kept the hammer and the giant-fighting but changed almost everything else.

Marvel even shot some of that reinvention on Thor's home ground. Parts of Thor: The Dark World were filmed in Iceland, at Skógafoss and around Reykjavík.

Strip away the cape and the box office, and Thor in Norse mythology is the original, rougher figure. He once put on a bridal veil to win his hammer back, and he's fated to die when the gods themselves fall. The closest you can get to him today is to walk the valley that bears his name.

No, Thor is a Norse god, not a Greek one. The mix-up usually comes from Zeus, the Greek god of thunder, and from Marvel's superhero take on him. He wasn't a Viking, either. Thor was the god that Viking Age Scandinavians and Icelandic settlers prayed to, and his stories reach us through the medieval Icelandic Eddas.

Yes, Thor is the son of Odin, though his mother matters just as much. She's Jörð, whose name is the Old Norse word for earth. That makes Thor the child of the ruler of the gods and the Earth herself. Many credit his enormous strength to his mother's giant side rather than his father's.

Thursday is literally Thor's day, from the Old Norse Þórsdagr. The name replaced the Roman "day of Jupiter." Jupiter was Rome's thunder and sky god, so the Germanic peoples matched him to their own. Thor isn't the only deity in your week, either: Tuesday belongs to Týr, Wednesday to Odin, and Friday to Frigg.

Raw physical strength is Thor's core power, and he ranks as one of the strongest gods. On top of that, he controls thunder and storms and carries gear that boosts him further. What's telling is what he lacks: sorcery. Odin and Loki work through spells and shapeshifting, while Thor tackles almost every problem with force.

In the myths, Loki isn't Thor's brother at all. He's the son of the giant Fárbauti and Laufey, with brothers named Býleistr and Helblindi. He and Thor travel together in several tales, which is likely where the confusion starts.

Two goats, Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, pull Thor's chariot. Their real trick isn't the pulling, though. Thor can butcher and eat them at night, then revive them the next morning by blessing their bones with his hammer. The catch is that the skin and bones have to stay whole for it to work.

Yes, especially among ordinary people. When Iceland accepted Christianity at the Alþingi around the year 1000, public worship had to end. But the compromise let people keep sacrificing to the old gods in private for a while. By then, Thor had been the settlers' favorite for generations.