Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

an ox, eight salmon, and three cups of mead, and he ate two out of the three oxen provided for a repast by the giant Hymir when he went on his famous fishing expedition. In the hall of Utgard-Loki he took part in an epic drinking contest, striving to empty a great horn whose tip went down into the sea, and though he was bemused by the cunning of the giant, he lowered the level of the ocean perceptibly by his efforts. His visit to Hymir was ostensibly to obtain a mighty cauldron in which mead could be prepared for the gods, and there is mention of certain huge goblets kept in Asgard for Thor’s use. According to another story, Thor’s own goats were slaughtered and devoured with relish by the god and his travelling companions before their bones and skin were called back to life by the power of his hammer. There is not much doubt that tales like that of the god disguised as a bride or of Thor’s humiliations in the hall of Utgard-Loki were primarily for entertainment, acceptable at a time when the worship of Thor was no longer of serious concern among men. Nevertheless the very characteristics of the god seized upon to provide mirth must be in themselves significant, and much may be learned from them.

Thor’s delight in eating and drinking was in accordance with his great vitality and physical strength. His progress through the realms of gods and giants was marked by the continual overthrowing of adversaries and overcoming of obstacles. His usual method of killing his enemies was simple and direct: without recourse to the tortuous wiles of Odin or Loki, he simply struck at them with his hammer or hurled it through the air to shatter their skulls. In this way he slew Hrungnir in a duel, disposed of Thrym and his relatives, and struck at the Midgard Serpent. The shattering of rocks and stones is mentioned frequently in legends of Thor. Once he killed his enemy Geirrod by hurling a red-hot bolt through a pillar, while another time he used a drinking vessel as a missile, to pass through a pillar and shatter itself against Hymir’s head. He slew giantesses with boulders, or broke their backs by forcing a weight down upon them. The argument for trust in Thor given in one of the Olaf Tryggvason sagas is that:

Thor had done many great works, and had split rocks and shattered cliffs, while Odin gave men victory.

Olafs Saga Tryggvasonax, Fornmanna Sgur, 101

In such stories we are seeing Thor the Thunder God at work, felling trees and destroying men with his deadly bolts. Thor’s realm is very different from that of Odin. His cult was not an aristocratic one, and indeed a taunt made against him in one of the Edda poems was that while Odin received kings who fell in battle, Thor got the thralls. But we shall see that his power extended far, and that he was the god supreme not only over the stormy sky, but also over the life of the community in all its aspects. If part of the mantle of the old sky god, Tiwaz, fell upon Odin, a great part of it undoubtedly covered the broad shoulders of Thor.

2. The Temples of Thor

The figure of the god with his hammer is said to have stood in many temples at the close of the heathen period. We hear more of the images of Thor than of those of the other gods, and when he shared a temple with other deities, he is usually said to have occupied the place of honour. Rich robes are mentioned, and sacrifices of meat and bread are said to have been made to him in his temples in Norway. His worshippers would look for guidance from the image of Thor when the time came to make some difficult decision. Adam of Bremen corroborates the evidence of the sagas when he tells us in the eleventh century that Thor’s image stood in the heathen temple at Uppsala, and that the god held a sceptre (his hammer ?) in his hand. In an eleventh-century Irish poem we find a Christian saint demanding of the king of Dublin that he should take ‘the golden castle from the hands of the Black Devil’. Marstrander¹ interprets this as a reference to a black image of Thor in his rich shrine in the Viking stronghold in Dublin. It is known that King Maelseachlainn did in fact take the ring of Thor and ‘many other treasures’ from this shrine in 994.

Accounts in Heimskringla and Flateyjarbok of the destruction of such statues of Thor by the Christian kings of Norway imply that they were man-size or even larger. A description of an image of Thor at Thrandheim refers to a chariot drawn by goats, in which Thor sat:

Thor sat in the middle. He was the most highly honoured. He was huge, and all adorned with gold and silver. Thor was arranged to sit in a chariot; he was very splendid. There were goats, two of them, harnessed in front of him, very well wrought. Both car and goats ran on wheels. The rope round the horns of the goats was of twisted silver, and the whole was worked with extremely fine craftsmanship.

Flateyjarbok, 1, 268

Skeggi, the man who took Olaf Tryggvason to the temple to see Thor, persuaded him to pull the cord round the horns of the goats, and when he did so, ‘the goats moved easily along’. Thereupon Skeggi declared that the king had done service to the god, and Olaf not surprisingly became angry, and called on his men to destroy the idols, while he himself knocked Thor from his chariot. The implication here is that the pulling along of a well-greased chariot formed part of a ritual in Thor’s honour.

The noise of the chariot of Thor rattling along was said to cause thunder. Snorri derives the god’s name, ku-?orr, from the verb aka, to drive, and interprets it as Thor the Driver or Charioteer. This is in accordance with the picture of a chariot driven by the god across the sky, which in many religions forms part of the conception of the sun god. Such a picture of the thunder god may well be an ancient one in the north. Lappish loan-words for thunder: atsa-raite, rai??e, and others, appear to have been derived from an earlier form of Old Norse rei?, which has the double meaning of a wheeled vehicle and thunder. Descriptions of Thor’s arrival in ninth-century skaldic verse emphasize the clatter and roar of a storm, and show that this aspect of the god was by no means forgotten in Iceland. We find for example in a ninth-century poem, Haustlng:

The Son of Earth drove to the iron game, and the way of the moon resounded before him. … The holy places of the powers burned before the kinsman of Ull. Earth, ground of the deep, was beaten with hail as the goats drew the wagon-god for his meeting with Hrungnir. … The rocks shook and the boulders were shattered; high heaven burned.

It was not merely Thor’s power over the thunder which was symbolized within the temple. We hear also in many passages in the sagas of a great gold or silver ring on which oaths were sworn, and which was kept in temples where Thor was worshipped. There is independent evidence that this ring was sacred to Thor, for in Irish sources the ‘ring of Thor’ is one of the treasures taken from his temple in 994. Earlier than this, in 876, the heathen Danish leaders in England made a truce with King Alfred, and they are said in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to have sworn oaths to him on their sacred ring.

Descriptions of this ring suggest that it was an arm-ring and not a finger-ring. Indeed in Eyrbyggja Saga Snorri the priest is said to have worn it on his arm, where it protected him from a blow from a sword. In Hauksbok, in a passage repeated in several of the sagas, it is said to have weighed two ounces in silver, which would make it not much larger than a wedding ring; the statement in Eyrbyggja Saga, settling the weight at twenty ounces, seems more likely to be reliable.¹ The oath formula given in the sagas mentions Freyr and Njord and ‘the Almighty God’, usually assumed to be Thor, because of his association with the oath-ring. It may also be noted that the General Assembly of Iceland opened on Thor’s Day, while Adam of Bremen alludes to the breaking up of Thor’s image which stood in the place of the Assembly at Uppsala about A.D.1030. It would seem that Thor had taken over some of the powers of Tiwaz, and in particular that which hallowed oaths taken between men.

One of Thor’s most enthusiastic worshippers described in the sagas was Thorolf Mostrarskegg, ‘bearded man of Most’, whose arrival in Iceland is recorded in Landnamabok, and told in the early chapters of Eyrbyggja Saga at some length. He came from the little island of Most on the west coast of Norway, and when life grew difficult on account of the tyranny of Harald Fairhair, he consulted Thor as to whether he should leave for Iceland. The reply was evidently favourable, for he took down Thor’s shrine, packed its high-seat pillars and most of the timber from it on his ship, and also ‘the earth from under the pedestal where Thor had sat’. When he reached Iceland, he flung the high-seat pillars overboard and landed at the point where they were washed ashore. There he marked out the plot of land where he would live, and where he meant to rebuild Thor’s temple. He went round the borders of the new estate with fire, and then began building his own house and a mighty sanctuary for his divine friend. The temple is