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.
