When most of us picture the man known as Thor, it’s likely the image we pull up is that
of pretty-boy Chris Hemsworth.
His depiction is not far off the real deal, and if you look for old images of the Norse
God online you’ll find most are of a handsome, muscular man with rather beautiful long blond
hair.
And yep, the old school Thor was also quite fond of a certain hammer.
We have the movie version of this man, and we have the comic version, too.
But what about the real Thor?
Did such a man really exist?
We can trace Thor back to Germanic mythology, and the character was pretty much like the
one we see today in the Marvel movies.
Thor has always been the God of thunder, and he always carried the most fearsome weapon
known to man.
That is the hammer called “Mjölnir.”
As with most stories belonging to what we call mythology, there are many spins on the
tales.
The Norse people were spread out over Scandinavia and beyond and so the tales tended to be varied.
Thor himself is said to have had about 15 names.
One thing that doesn’t change is that he is the God of thunder and has tremendous strength.
His father is Odin and his mother is Jörð, although you might find she has different
names, too.
But the question we all want to know is was Thor real?
Some of you might scoff at this question, but let’s remember there are a lot of people
in this world that believe in Gods, and some of those people believe in miracles which
to some extent are superpowers.
Look around you, there are places of worship everywhere.
We swear on the bible in courts, we sing songs about heaven, we watch people being healed
on cable TV when we can’t sleep at 4 in the morning.
And in the past some of those Norse pagans also took their Gods seriously.
They did not just marvel at the heroics contained in the stories, they actually believed that
Thor and his family were real.
In the spirit of open-mindedness we might say it’s sounds a little unfair if someone
claims that their God is real but the other person’s is just plain silly, and so today
we are taking our superhero seriously.
During our research we found a media story with this title, “Swedish archaeologists
find Thor's Hammer.”
The engineer who found it said, “I at first thought it was piping sticking out of the
ground.”
So wow, isn’t that amazing.
Well, not quite so, because the article was written on April 1st and there is no corroborating
evidence.
You can actually find quite a lot of articles that tell the reader Thor’s hammer has been
discovered.
But these stories seem only to appear in the British tabloid media, and some of those newspapers
could be said to have juggled with the truth on occasions.
In the USA, Fox News reported in 2018 that the hammer had been discovered in Iceland,
but what was found was really only a tiny amulet.
There must have been lots of these around in the past.
Thor’s hammer was a special pagan symbol, and there were images of it everywhere in
those days around Scandinavia and beyond.
One of the UK’s more creative media companies called the Daily Mail also said the hammer
had been found, but this time in 2014 and the site was in Denmark.
The Mail writes, “Archaeologists have unearthed a 10th century torshammere in Købelev, on
the Danish island of Lolland, that could finally end the debate on how Thor’s legend influenced
Viking jewelry.”
The paper does say, though, that thousands of such things resembling a little hammer
amulet have been found all over the place.
Imagine if in 1000 years someone digs up a Christian cross and says, “Hey dudes, this
is the cross on which that guy Jesus died…it shrunk over time of course.”
So, with that mind, we can say that finding hammer symbols doesn’t mean Thor existed,
but it does show how many people believed in him.
In fact, the Christian cross is often compared to Thor’s hammer in that the hammer was
also a small symbol you’d find in many people’s pockets and in their houses.
That’s because the powerful symbol represented not only thunder and storms and lightning,
but also the protection of mankind, healing and fertility.
Oh and Oak trees, we shouldn’t forget them.
Belief in such Gods goes a long way back, and you can find ancient Roman manuscripts
that talk about the Gods of the Germanic peoples.
Thor and his hammer have been compared to Hercules and his club.
Of course some people might have found this superstitious, but many others were happy
to roll with powerful men who wielded magic weapons.
In the 8th century there is evidence that the Saxon people believed in Thor, with some
guy and a hammer turning up in poetry.
This is called a possible version of Thor, because there are many stories and many languages
and dialects.
The Christians of course were having none of it, telling those pagan fools that no such
Gods existed.
“Balderdash”, they might have said, there is only one true God and it’s ours.
In the 11th century if you told a Viking what he could do with his hammer you might have
got your eyes removed.
In fact, there is evidence that in 1030 an English preacher told some Vikings his version
of Thor and for that they lynched him from a tree.
Those Vikings we believe were not what you might call an “inclusive” horde, yet in
the end nearly all converted to Christianity- so maybe one god was more real than the other
in the end.
While there are stories of such Gods going back to ancient times, it seems we got many
more stories in the 10 and 11th and 12th centuries.
This is called the Viking Age and post-Viking Age.
Word spread of course because the Vikings liked to move around a lot.
They successfully plundered parts of England back then, and at first burned down churches
and laughed at the English people’s pitiful God, a God with a skinny son that wasn’t
interested in martial arts and rather large house tools.
Still, Christianity won many converts and that became the go-to religion for many people
in Europe.
Heathens were pretty much outlawed.
Those hammer symbols were taken off the living room wall and replaced with crosses.
The symbolic expression of power was replaced with a symbol of sacrifice.
Who knows, it could have gone the other way and instead of sitting in front of a giant
cross holding up a bloodied JC on Sunday, we could have been staring up at a muscular
blond guy wielding a massive hammer.
Early Thor-based poems have been uncovered and then translated to English.
Many of these poems involve a beast getting his behind kicked.
This is part of one of those poems: “Against the serpent goes Othin's son.
In anger smites the warder of earth.”
Thor of course hands that serpent a good old-fashioned whupping.
We could go on and on, because there are lots of stories, or what we might call sagas, just
as every religion has it’s stories.
Did Thor beat up that serpent in real life, you might ask?
Well, you could also ask if Saint George slayed a dragon, if Moses parted the Red sea or if
there was a Forbidden Tree in the Garden of Eden and on that tree were some pretty irresistible
looking apples.
What we are trying to say of course, is that Thor existed for some people and he might
still exist now for some people.
All we have to go on are stories, because all history is a story.
We cannot possibly tell you the immutable truth because we weren’t there.
We can only speculate, or have faith.
On that rationale, you could say Thor is as real as Jesus Christ, Allah, Shiva, Abraham,
or that Dragon which Saint George put in its place.
If this insults you, we only want to point out that some of those Norse people took their
Gods seriously just as you do now.
The tales were just overtaken over a long period of time.
The Pagans and their rituals were replaced with churches and new books of high truths.
These days many devout people don’t actually take everything in those books literally.
Some do, but others will tell you the tales serve merely as metaphors.
Some of those pagans might not have believed in the man and God called Thor, but they had
faith in what he represented.
That was protection, and importantly, fertility, because everyone needed crops to grow to survive.
Finally, there is no evidence that Thor existed, but as you have seen, there is a lot of evidence
that shows us many, many people all over Europe believed he did exist.