The Marvel Cinematic Universe only scratches the surface when it comes to Mjolnir and Stormbreaker.
From their legendary origins to their modern-day enchantments, here’s the truth behind Thor’s
magical weapons.
You might already know this, but the god of thunder goes back way further than their Marvel
Comics debut in 1962, and so does his thunderous hammer.
Mjolnir got its origin story in the 13th-century Prose Edda, and like most
Norse mythology, it involves Loki causing trouble.
In this case, he made a wager with a pair of dwarves named Brokkr and Sindri you may
know them from the 2018 game God of War betting that they couldn't craft three magical items
that were the equal of Asgard's three greatest treasures.
To rise to the challenge, the blacksmithing dwarves set about working their forge and,
despite Loki's interference, they crafted a trio of treasures of their own.
The most well-known, of course, was Mjolnir, which turned out to be a pretty good hammer.
As powerful as it was, Mjolnir wasn't Thor's only piece of equipment in the myths.
To heft the incredibly heavy hammer, a problem that he had to face long before Marvel Comics
came along, he had to use another pair of magic items.
The first was the Jarngreipr, a pair of gauntlets known as the "Iron Grippers," and the second
was the Megingjord, a belt that doubled his already considerable strength.
"We just gotta load Tony's old Hulkbuster armor, the prototype for Cap's new shield
and the Megin..
The megin…
Thor's magic belt."
Over the years, Marvel has added or adapted most of the mythological stories behind the
Norse gods, so it's not surprising that both of those items exist in the comics.
However, the Megingjord shows up rarely on the page, and to explain why Thor doesn't
just wear it all the time to double his strength, Marvel's version, according to Thor #363,
takes a pretty serious toll on the god of thunder.
Marvel's version of Mjolnir first appeared in Journey into Mystery #83, loaded up with
a few interesting spells to make for more exciting superhero comic stories.
The first, of course, was the familiar enchantment by Odin that meant only the "worthy" could
lift it.
"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor."
For the other, though, it seems like the Marvel masterminds may have been taking some inspiration
from a lightning-powered hero who was a little more recent than the Prose Edda.
In the Golden Age of Comics, young Billy Batson discovered a wizard in a cave and said the
magic word "SHAZAM!" to transform with a thunderous blast into Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest
Mortal.
He even shared his power with his sidekick, Captain Marvel Jr., whose secret identity
was Freddy Freeman, a young man whose injured leg led him to walk with a crutch.
Captain Marvel stopped being published in the '50s, though he would eventually come
back as DC's Shazam, renamed for various legal reasons.
Fans might've found an interesting alternative in 1962, though.
Marvel's version of Thor was secretly Don Blake, a doctor whose injured leg led him
to walk with a cane.
He discovered a stout stick in a cave, and when he smacked it against the ground,it turned
into Mjolnir and transformed him with a thunderous blast into Thor, the World's Mightiest Immortal.
Blake was then blessed with the strength and power of Thor.
Whether the Marvel bullpen was actually trying to recapture the magic of Captain Marvel Adventures
by giving it some of that hot Viking flavor is certainly up for debate.
Marvel's most enduring addition to the Mjolnir mythos was the enchantment that granted the
power of Thor to those who were worthy of it.
Anyone who was worthy of it.
Over the years, that's a list that has included a surprising number of names, but the more
notable examples include Steve Rogers, who first hefted the hammer when he was operating
as "The Captain," and later lifted it in his more familiar identity of Captain America.
"...assemble."
Squirrel Girl also got her hands on the hammer and used it to stop a misguided duplicate
of herself who couldn't lift the hammer from beating up the Marvel Universe.
The most eye-catching for crossover fans, however, came at the climax of JLA/Avengers,
when Superman charged into battle wielding both Captain America's shield and Thor's hammer
to save the day.
Once the battle was over, however, Superman found himself unable to lift it, leading Thor
to explain that Odin occasionally sees fit to suspend the enchantment for special occasions.
In 1983, Walt Simonson took over as the writer and artist of Thor with #337, and he certainly
brought in plenty of new ideas.
The first big shift?
Ditching the Thunder God's human identity and making the new Thor a space horse.
Okay, it's slightly more complicated than that.
While investigating something in space, Thor encounters an alien warrior named Beta Ray
Bill.
In the fight, Thor loses his hammer, and thanks to yet another enchantment that required him
to keep in contact with it to maintain his godly form, it turns back into Blake's walking
stick.
A very frustrated Bill grabs the stick and smacks it against the wall, and readers suddenly
learned that this strange new alien who definitely seemed like a bad guy is every bit as worthy
as the guy with his name on the cover.
Bill transformed into a new, sci-fi Thor, and was promptly whisked off to Asgard because
Odin's summoning spell was looking for "Thor," not his son.
Over the next few issues, Bill has to battle to the death against Thor to determine who
would be the true god of thunder — which, if we're being honest here, is some pretty
rough parenting from Odin the All-Father.
In the end, though, Bill ended up saving Thor's life and proving himself to be a good and
noble soul who just happened to look like a giant skeletal horse.
Bill swore his loyalty to Thor as his "oath-brother," and to reward his nobility, Odin had Eitri
the dwarf craft a new hammer to be Mjolnir's equal: Stormbreaker.
It was every bit as strong, had the same enchantment about worthiness, and the only big difference
came in the aesthetics.
Stormbreaker, while made of the same Uru metal as Mjolnir, appeared golden and had one flat
hammer-head and an ax-like blade on the other side.
Beta Ray Bill isn't the only strange transformation that Thor underwent during Walt Simonson's
five-year run.
At one point in the comics, Thor found himself turned into a frog thanks to — let's say
it all together now — Loki.
While he was a frog, he got caught in a Secret of NIMH style war between New York City's
frogs and the ravenous sewer rat population that was being controlled by a bad guy with
low aspirations called the Piper.
The whole issue was built around a struggle for Thor to recover his hammer, and when he
did, he struck it against the ground and was thunderously transformed into … a six-foot
six-inch frog dressed like Thor.
That's not the end of the frog's story, though.
While he was briefly amphibious, Thor spent some time hanging out with a frog named Puddlegulp,
who it turned out was also a human transformed into a frog, because that's the kind of thing
that happens when you're living in a universe full of wizards.
At one point, however, Puddlegulp found a shard of Mjolnir that was chipped off by one
of Thor's chariot-pulling goats.
Puddlegulp lifted the shard, struck it against the ground, and became Throg, the frog of
thunder.
Unlike Thor's time as the thunder frog, Throg's was still frog-sized, with a tiny Mjolnir
to match.
This hammer had all the abilities of the regular version, and was thus given the extremely
on-the-nose name of "Frogjolnir."
In 2014, Thor came to the conclusion that he was no longer worthy to wield Mjolnir,
and that lack of confidence became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
While Thor was being glum about this turn of events — and getting his left arm chopped
off by Malekith the Dark Elf in a pretty disastrous attempt at hammerless crime-fighting — Jane
Foster, believing that there must always be a thunder god to stand against evil, hefted
the hammer herself and became the Mighty Thor.
For the next three years, Jane was Thor, but her tenure as the goddess of thunder came
to crashing end when Mjolnir itself was destroyed.
It happened during a battle with the Mangog, a creature that had come into being in a past
era when Odin destroyed an entire planet, and the pure hatred of its population coalesced
into a nearly unstoppable monster.
The key word there, however, is "nearly."
Jane did end up stopping the Mangog by chaining him to Mjolnir and hurling it into the heart
of the sun.
As you may know from science, the core of the sun is roughly 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit
and contains a constant nuclear reaction.
That turns out to be about the level of force that you need in order to destroy a presumably
"unbreakable" magic hammer.
Mjolnir was vaporized, Jane retired from Thor-ing, and the Odinson once again took up his heroic
exploits, using a series of substitute hammers crafted by a dwarf named Screwbeard.
Sadly, due to a shortage of the mystical Uru metal from which the original Mjolnir had
been crafted, none of the replacements were as good as the genuine article.
Mjolnir may have been destroyed forever, but this is comics.
It's only a matter of time before everyone comes back from the dead, including hammers.
In this case, it happened during 2019's War of the Realms, a crossover event that, shockingly,
was not Loki's fault.
Instead, it's Malekith again, leading an invasion of Midgard, or as we call it, Earth, from
the united forces of the other realms.
At the climax of the story, Thor conjures up the God Tempest, a storm so powerful that
it affects the sun itself, reforging Mjolnir and sending it crashing back to Earth.
The reborn Mjolnir was pretty recognizable as the original, with the exception of the
handle.
This incarnation had a handle made of braided, natural-looking wood, presumably to bring
it more into line visually with the version of Stormbreaker that moviegoing audiences
would've seen in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.
It also retained the worthiness enchantment, but Thor now saw worthiness as a struggle
that we all face to be better, declaring himself, along with his new hammer, to be the god of
the unworthy.
While they're easily the most notable ones, Mjolnir and Stormbreaker are far from the
only Asgardian weapons to show up on the page.
Most of the weapons that originated in mythological sources are present in the world of the comics,
like Odin's spear, Gungnir, and Heimdall's magic sword, Hofund.
Plus, there's Gram, the sword of the dragon-slayer Sigmund, and Laevateinn, Loki's sword whose
name has the amazing translation of "Damage Twig."
Others, however, are unique to the comics.
Before he proved himself worthy of Mjolnir, Thor used a fearsome ax named Jarnbjorn, or
"Iron Bear."
"Is that a Dragonfang?"
"It is."
"My god.
It's the famed sword of the Valkyrie.”
Dragonfang, which appeared on the screen in Thor: Ragnarok, is the sword carried by Brunhilde
the Valkyrie, so named because it was literally carved from a dragon's tooth.
Before he got his hands on a couple of assault rifles, Skurge the Executioner was fond of
using the Bloodaxe to behead his enemies, and its violent name is pretty self-explanatory.
There are other hammers, too.
Loki once crafted a Mjolnir-like bludgeon named Stormcaster that he gave to the X-Men's
resident weather-controlling goddess, Storm.
Eric Masterson briefly took on the identity of Thor while the actual god was banished,
and when the Odinson returned, Eric became a hero named Thunderstrike, wielding a magical
mace of the same name.
Most recently, Jane Foster took up a mystical Asgardian artifact named Undrjarn the All-Weapon,
which can transform into any weapon that Jane required in her new job as a Valkyrie.
Oh, and the Asgardian name?
Fittingly enough, for a weapon unique to the comics page, it translates loosely to "Marvelous
Weapon."
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