If Odin is the god of cunning, prophecy, and grim wisdom, Thor is the god of clear skies, honest strength, and thunder rolling across the mountains. He is the strongest of the Aesir, the protector of Midgard (the world of humans), the bane of giants, and the friend of farmers, sailors, and free men. Where Odin is ambiguous and terrible, Thor is direct, hot-tempered, brave, and unmistakably powerful. He is the defender of the gods’ order, the wall against chaos — and he will die at Ragnarök as a consequence of his courage.
The thunder god was the most popular of the Norse deities in the Viking Age. Place-names in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic are full of his name, runestones were raised to him, and the day we call Thursday is named for him. To a Viking farmer in Norway or Iceland, Thor was the one whose favor most mattered: he kept the giants from freezing the crops, the trolls from eating the livestock, and the sea from swallowing the longships.
Origin and Family
Thor is the son of Odin and the earth-goddess Jörð (Old Norse for “Earth”). His mother, named in the Prose Edda, is a personification of the soil itself, and this is one of the reasons Thor is so closely identified with the farmer and the field: he is, in a sense, the son of the earth.
His primary wife is Sif, the golden-haired goddess associated with grain and the harvest. With Sif he has a daughter, Þrúðr (Thrud), one of the valkyries, named in the Hárbarðsljóð as a promised bride to the giant builder of Asgard’s wall. After Sif, Thor has a relationship with a giantess, and from that union he fathers Magne (“the strong”), who survives Ragnarök.
But Thor’s most famous son is Móði (“the brave”), whose mother is generally identified as the giantess Járnsaxa. Magni and Móði are said to survive the end of the world, along with Víðarr and Váli, and to inherit their father’s hammer in the new earth.
Appearance
Thor’s appearance, as described in the Eddas and the skaldic verses, is striking. He has a great red beard, hair of the same color, and eyes that flash with lightning. He is the largest and strongest of the gods — his body is described as swollen with strength, and he cannot sit comfortably on the high seats of the gods at feasts without breaking them under his weight. His face is grim and weathered, his voice is the rumble of thunder, and his presence is that of a man more comfortable in the field than in the hall.
The Prose Edda describes him as short-tempered, generous, and slow to be suspicious. He is the sort of god that farmers and sailors would trust — a defender, not a deceiver.
The Chariot and the Goats
Thor drives a chariot across the sky, and the rolling of its wheels is the thunder we hear in storms. The chariot is pulled by two goats: Tanngrisnir (“teeth-barer”) and Tanngnjóstr (“teeth-grinder”). These goats are remarkable: they can be slaughtered and eaten at Thor’s hall in Þrúðheimr, and as long as their bones are kept intact and not broken with a knife, they will be resurrected the next morning, ready to be slaughtered again.
This is the central setting of the famous Gylfaginning story in which Thor and Loki travel together. Thialfi, the swift-footed human boy, breaks one of the goat’s leg-bones to suck the marrow, and the next morning the goat is lame. Thor, in a fury, breaks both of Thialfi’s legs — and then heals him, taking the boy and his sister Röskva into his service. The story is a piece of folk-etiquette: do not break the bones of the sacrifice.
Mjölnir, Megingjörð, and Járngreipr
Thor’s most famous weapon is the hammer Mjölnir, forged by the dwarves Sindri and Brokkr during a wager with Loki. It is short-handled (because Loki, in fly-form, distracted the dwarves during forging by biting Brokkr’s eyelid), but it is the most powerful weapon in the Nine Worlds. It never misses what it is thrown at, it can be returned to the hand by thought, and it can level mountains.
The hammer is so heavy, however, that Thor cannot wield it without help. He wears the belt Megingjörð (“power-belt”), which doubles his already vast strength, and the iron gloves Járngreipr, which allow him to grip the short handle. Without the belt and the gloves, Mjölnir is unusable.
Mjölnir is more than a weapon. It is also a consecration tool — used to bless marriages, to hallow the funeral pyre of the dead, to seal bargains, and to mark the boundaries of a community. Many Viking burials have been found with small Mjölnir amulets among the grave-goods, suggesting that the hammer played a role in the religious imagination of ordinary Norse people.
Fishing for the World Serpent
One of the most famous Thor myths is the fishing trip from the Hymiskviða. Thor travels with the giant Hymir in his boat, and they row far out into the sea. Thor, baiting his hook with the head of an ox, attempts to catch the World Serpent Jörmungandr — the great sea-monster that encircles the world.
The serpent takes the bait. Thor hauls him up, and the two face each other across the gunwale. The giant Hymir, terrified, cuts the line, and the serpent sinks back into the deep. Thor is furious. In some versions he strikes the giant with his hammer; in others, he simply hurls the giant into the sea. The world is not yet ready for the final confrontation — that is reserved for Ragnarök, where the two will fight and kill each other.
Journey to Útgarða-Loki
The longest and most elaborate Thor myth is the Útgarða-Loki episode from the Gylfaginning. Thor and Loki, with Thialfi and Röskva, set out on a journey into the north, and they come to the hall of the giant Útgarða-Loki (“Loki of the Outyards”). There, the giant tests the Aesir in three contests of seemingly impossible strength.
- Eating: Thor is given a horn from which the giant says no one can drink the bottom in three swallows. Thor drinks so hard that the horn drops, and where the liquid lands it carves a great channel in the floor. (In some versions, the channel is so deep that it cuts a deep fissure in the rock — and a later tradition, preserved by the medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, claims that this horn is the source of the great sea-fjord Roskilde.)
- Lifting: Thor attempts to lift a cat in Útgarða-Loki’s hall, but the cat arches its back and refuses to be lifted. In truth, the cat is the World Serpent Jörmungandr in disguise, and Thor is bending the back of the world.
- Wrestling: Thor wrestles an old woman, who resists him and eventually brings him to one knee. The old woman is Old Age ( Elli), and no one in the world can defeat her.
In the morning, Útgarða-Loki reveals the true nature of the contests, and Thor raises his hammer to kill the giant — but the giant and his hall vanish into the mountainside. It is a brilliant Norse meditation on the difference between raw power and true cosmic force, and it ends with Thor’s recognition that the universe is larger than he thought.
Death at Ragnarök
At Ragnarök, Thor takes his place with the gods on the plain of Vígríðr. The World Serpent Jörmungandr rises from the sea, and Thor at last gets to face him. He kills the monster, but as he steps back after the battle, nine paces, he falls dead from the venom of the serpent, which the monster has spat into his face.
Thor’s death is one of the great tragic moments of the Eddas. The protector of the worlds, the bane of giants, the friend of farmers and sailors, dies because he has done what he always did: he has faced the biggest enemy. His sons Magni and Móði survive him and inherit Mjölnir in the new earth that rises from the sea.
Cultural Influence
Thor has been one of the most influential figures in the modern reception of Norse myth. Richard Wagner wrote about him in his early work. J.R.R. Tolkien drew on him in his depictions of the warrior-aragorn, and the dwarven race has some affinities with his world. In the Marvel Comics universe, beginning with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s 1962 Journey into Mystery #83, Thor has become one of the most recognizable figures in pop culture — though the comic-book version, a blond, noble, Shakespearean warrior, is significantly softer than the red-bearded, hot-tempered, occasionally fallible god of the Eddas. The 2011 film Thor and its sequels, set in the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe, made the Allfather Odin and the trickster Loki into household names.
In the modern revival of Heathenry (Ásatrú), Thor is one of the most venerated gods, particularly among those who see the tradition as a religion of folk and family. His hammer is still used in modern blóts and weddings, and the day Thursday (Þórsdagr in Old Norse, Thursday in English) is observed as his day.
The Thunder God and the World
Thor’s myths are, in many ways, the simplest and the most human of the Norse gods. He is the one who faces the threat. He does not rely on cunning or prophecy; he relies on a hammer and a strong arm. He loses fights — he cannot lift the cat that is the world, he cannot drink the bottom of the horn — and yet he fights. He dies at the end of the world, falling from the venom of the serpent he has just killed. In Norse terms, this is not defeat. This is the wyrd of the gods: the one who fights will be killed, and yet the fight was the point. The world is preserved, briefly, by the courage of those who face the threat, and the new earth rises at the end. Thor is the defender of Midgard, and his thunder is still heard in the mountains. He never wins everything, and he never asks to. He asks only to face whatever is on the other side of the door, hammer in hand. There is no Norse virtue more enduring than that.
Last reviewed: June 2026.