Dan Snow's History Hit - Thor: The God behind the Superhero

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Few early medieval gods are as well-known and as popular as Thor. He’s currently thrilling moviegoers worldwide with his new outing for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: Love and Thunder. But behind the countless films and works of fiction, what’s the real origin story for Thor? How was he worshipped? And how has he secured such an enduring place in popular culture?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr Cat Jarman speaks to Professor Carolyne Larrington, an expert in Norse literature and mythology, to find out more about the god behind the superhero. The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi History Hit listeners. Now for all you medievalists out there, I understand there are some. Me, I'm an early modernist. Personally, I like the whiff of gunpowder. I like the uneven groping shuffle towards human rights, towards the Industrial Revolution, towards equality. But I understand. If you want your medieval stuff, we've got a podcast for you. Gone Medieval with Dr. Kat Jarman and Matt Lewis. It's a dream team. They go from the fall of Rome to the fall of Rome. One in the 5th century and the other in the 16th century. It's a big chunk of time. That's the medieval period, folks. They've got a broad canvas. They get out on location. They do explainers. They know medieval history off

the back of their hands. You've got to listen to Gone Medieval with Dr. Kat Jarman and Matt Lewis wherever you get your pods. Hello and welcome to today's episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm your host for today, Dr Kat Jarman. Few early medieval gods are as well known and as popular as Thor. Thor is known to most people as the God of Thunder, wielding his infamous hammer in fits of rage. So popular is Thor, in fact, he's been given a starring role

in endless works of fiction and film, not least the Marvel comic series, and more recently, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And right now, there's a brand new blockbuster out, part of the whole series of Thor films called Thor Love and Thunder. But what do we actually know about the real god Thor? What do the medieval sources say about him and how was he worshipped a millennium ago and why are we still so fascinated by this particular god? As my guest today I have the absolutely perfect person to

discuss this. Caroline Larrington is a professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford and one of her key research interests is Old Norse literature and especially mythology. But not only that she also researches and writes about the use and reception of the medieval world today and especially in popular culture. She's written a number of books. The most recent one was called All Men Must Die, Power and Passion in Game of Thrones, exploring exactly how those medieval myths and legends are used

in popular films and series like Game of Thrones. And right now, Caroline is working on a new book, On Norse Myth myths in the present. Caroline, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me on the podcast today. It's a great pleasure to be here. So let's start talking about our god of choice today. But before we get to Thor, I was hoping that you could just give us a very sort of simple primer of these gods, of that universe that he was part of, and what Thor's particular role within that was. Well, we have a pantheon of Old Norse gods, and in the main source about them, we hear that there are 12 gods and 12 goddesses more or less, but this is pretty well

a kind of systematising in a nice round number by the author of the treatise on the gods, Norris Dutterson. But the most important gods are Odin, the All-Father, the King of the Gods, and Thor is his son, not by his wife, the goddess Frigg, but by Jörð, whose name means earth, and who is a giantess. And so Thor is probably the second most significant god after Odin in our sources, and probably in real life, if we can call it that, even more significant than Odin himself, as far as ordinary people were concerned. I should also say, I guess, that Thor has a wife called Siv, and two sons called Modi and Magni, and also a daughter who is called Thrúðr. And all of the children's names mean something like strength. So it's obviously quite an inheritable characteristic. So the physicality of him is actually a really key part, not just of him,

but his entire family, I suppose. Yes. And in fact, there is one story where Thor has been fighting a giant and the giant has been laid low. He's out for the count. But Thor has also fallen over and the giant's leg has fallen across his throat. And he can't shift it. But along comes Magni, I think, who just lifts the giant's leg, pops it on the side and says, you can get up now, Dad. And so clearly, the next generation of gods will be even stronger, even tougher than Thor. Fantastic. I love the sound of that. But one thing, and you sort of touched upon a little bit, that the sources that we have. So can you explain a little bit,

how do we know about Thor and these gods? What sources is it that we have to describe them to us? Well, we have two different sets of sources. And we should also add, of course, that since the pre-Christian Scandinavians did have a writing system they had runes but nevertheless they didn't write these tales down in any form that we can see today. Anything that's written has been written down by Christian scribes and therefore there may be a degree of interference and certainly in our main prose text about the gods, it was written by a Christian in the 13th century, a man called Snorri Sturluson, an Icelander. And in his Prose Edda,

he gives an account of how Old Norse poetics work. And in order to do that, he has to explain quite a lot about the mythology because the mythology feeds into poetic metaphors and paraphrases, kennings as we call them, so that a warrior can be described as the Odin of the spear and if you're going to make sense of that you need to know who Odin is and so Snorri sets out in the first part of his poetic treatise an overview of the gods couched in a kind of dialogue between a king of Sweden called Gylfi and three of the Aesir,

who are, in Snorri's view, not really gods at all, but in fact refugees from Troy, who with their clever technology have turned up in Scandinavia and kind of tricked the inhabitants into worshipping them. But there's a kind of double framework going on here. They're talking about their ancestors rather than their own feats and their own attributes. So we have this rather systematised prose account of the gods, which makes a lot of sense of things, but in some ways is not as authentic perhaps as the oral poems that have been preserved about the gods. And we have in another manuscript a collection of poems known as the Poetic Edda, and this has 11 mythological poems in it, and these give a number of adventures of Thor, some of which also turn up in Snorri's prose Edda. And besides that, we have one quite long poem in a different kind of verse measure,

in Scaldic verse called Thor's Draupa, which is clearly pre-Christian and tells the story of Thor having an adventure among the giants. And we also have a little fragment, and I think this is quite interesting, of what is sometimes described as a hymn to Thor, which praises Thor for destroying various giants who are all listed. And there we get a sense of Thor as a defender of humanity against the depredation of the giants or troll women, this kind of other who are the enemies of the gods. And the word giant may or may not be the right way of describing them. In Old Norse, the term is jötunn, which can mean a very big figure indeed, but doesn't always have to be. Giant women, for example, can be the same size as the gods. So it's quite a variable term, but it refers to the group that is the other,

as far as the gods are concerned. So we have quite a lot of sources, but as you've already said, these come from a Christian setting and after the Viking Age. Now, we tend to quite confidently think that these are Viking Age gods and the Viking belief. We tend to quite confidently think that these are Viking Age gods and the Viking belief. What do we have to sort of tie all of this to the Viking Age, especially? I mean, you've already said that it's not really written down as such in any runic settings. But how can we tie it to the Vikings? Or can we do that at all? We can tie it to some extent, I think.

We can certainly point to a picture stone from Gotland, I think it is, which depicts one of Thor's adventures where he goes out fishing in a boat with a giant. And he fishes up the Midgard serpent, the world serpent. It's a very dangerous moment for everybody. And this is iconographically so distinctive that we know this must be Thor, it's not some other kind of adventure. And so that places his worship in an 8th century context at least. But in addition to that we have a number of Thor's hammers, amulets which people would hang around their neck to invoke Thor as their protection and these are found in graves that are dated all the way through the Viking Age. And also important here, I think, is the evidence from personal names and place names that people named their farms or named hillsides or groves after Thor, particularly in western

Norway. And then when they got to Iceland, Thor would also turn up as an element in names attached to parts of this new country. And people had the Thor element in their names as well. They had names like Thorbjörn or Thorndís or Steinthor. And although these names kind of run in families, to some extent, we suspect that this points to a particular veneration for that god, that you chose to have his name as part of your child's name, instead perhaps of a name like Freyr, who also turns up, but not anything like us frequently in the Icelandic context. In the literature and in the stories, what do we know about his hammer,

and where does it come from, and what does it do? Well, the hammer is one of a number of extraordinary treasures which were made for the gods by the dwarves, the dwarves of the great craftsmen in Old Norse mythological thinking and the god Loki who is of course very familiar to us now from his Disney incarnation who is a kind of trickster. At some stage, we imagine quite early in mythological time, goes to the dwarves and asks them to make a set of treasures. And they make all kinds of useful things. They make a head of golden hair for Sif, Thor's wife, because Loki has cut off all her hair under slightly mysterious

circumstances. They make a ship that you can fold up and put in your pocket. They make Odin's great spear Gungnir. But in order to kind of double the haul, as it were, Loki goes to the dwarf craftsman's brother and bets him that he can't make an equally good set of treasures and he wages his head that the other craftsman can't outsmart his brother. And the other craftsman is set to work and starts making Gutlimbrsti, the famous golden battle pig that the god Freyr rides. And he also makes the hammer Mjötnir, the mighty hammer that is going to be a gift for Thor. And as this is being made, Loki begins to think that he's going to lose this bet because this set of treasures is even better than the ones being made by the other brother.

So he turns himself into a fly and stings the craftsman on the hand. And so he has to just divert his attention a moment from forging the handle of Mjölnir to swap the fly away. And for that reason, the handle comes out a little bit short. So it has this tiny built-in defect. And when the gods come to judge between the two sets of treasure, nevertheless, they say that although the first set of treasures look great, the second set, particularly Mjölnir, with this marvellous capacity for violence built into it, is going to be super useful in their fight against the giants.

And so they award the prize to Brokkr, the second craftsman. And he's very pleased because he can now cut off Loki's head but Loki gets out of it by saying well you could take my head sure but you can't take any part of my neck at which part Brokkr gives up shrugs and goes okay you win you can have the treasures but he sews Loki's mouth up to stop him from uttering any more lies of this kind of misleading kind of vets. So Thor goes off with Mjölnir and it becomes his sort of iconic weapon that he uses when he's out in the east patrolling against depredations from the giants. And there is a story when the hammer goes missing. He wakes up one morning and finds the hammer has vanished. And it's been stolen

by a rather opportunistic giant called Thrimr. We don't know quite how Thrimr got into Thor's home to steal the hammer. But nevertheless, Loki finds out that Thrimr has the hammer and he will only return it if he can marry the goddess Freyja. So Loki and Thor go to Freyja and ask her to get ready because she's going off to giant land to marry Thrymr and Freyja says over my dead body this is just not going to happen and therefore the gods meet in council and decide the only thing for it is to dress Thor up as Freyja and send him off to Giantland, which they duly do with Loki as his serving maid to do the talking for him. And Threema is very pleased. His bride has come at last. Thore, it has to be said, is heavily veiled. But Thore almost gives the game away because

his eyes are very red with rage at the situation he's in. And when Threema peeks under the veil to have a look at his bride, he leaps backwards down the hall and says, why are her eyes so red? And Loki says, because she was so excited to come to see you in Giant Lands that she hasn't slept for nights. And then Thor eats a massive amount of food at the wedding feast. And again, Threema thinks this is a little suspicious. But look, he says, well, she hasn't eaten for eight days and nights. She was so excited about coming to giant land. And when the hammer is finally brought out to hallow the marriage and placed on the bride's lap, it's a matter of seconds before Thor has it back in his grasp, smashes Threema and all the giant

guests at the wedding to pieces and makes his way home again to his own territories. So the possession of Mjolnir is absolutely essential for Thor. He can't have it out of his grasp because of the danger it represents that the god's power will fail in some way. And this is a bit of a theme and it becomes a bit of a theme. We'll talk later on about some of these popular depictions but this sort of having the hammer, loosing the hammer, and the fact that his strength is tied up in it. That becomes quite an important theme, doesn't it, I suppose, throughout? Yes, there's another occasion. In fact, in the Scaldic poem I mentioned before, Thor's Draupur, where Loki has been captured by the giant Geirröðr and in order to effect his escape, Loki has to promise to lure Thor to Geirröðr's house without the hammer and without his belt of

power and he's to leave this at home as well. And so Thor and Loki set out to go to Geirröðr's house and on the way Thor begins to think that maybe this wasn't such a great idea so he stops at the home of a friendly giantess called Gríðr and she lends him a pair of magic gloves and they make their way with some difficulty to Geyrðr's house. Geyrðr's daughters try to stop Thor by pissing in the river which he is trying to cross and almost drowning him. When they get to the house and are invited in, Thor sits on a chair and is almost crushed against the ceiling because the giant's daughters are lurking underneath and they rise up and try and squash him.

But he presses down, he calls up his divine power and breaks their backs. And then the giant throws a red hot ball of iron at Thor in order to destroy him. But thanks to the magic gloves, Thor was able to catch it and hurl it back with such force that it kills the giant immediately. And then he and Loki kind of dust off their hands, probably return the magic gloves to Gríðr and go back home again. So he does have the power when he wants to call upon it, but it's kind of externalised in the hammer and it becomes an important symbol for Thor, which is why people like to have metal copies of it to wear around their necks

as something that will keep away the powers of evil in the same way that Thor uses Mjolnir to dispel evil in the mythological universe. Now one thing that you've mentioned a few times so you mentioned earlier that he was married in the literature and obviously that the new film which just for full disclosure here we're recording this before the new Thor film is out so neither of us has seen it yet we've seen the trailer but obviously it's called love and thunder and in the trailer you can see that he meets up with his ex-girlfriend and i wanted to just talk about relationships and the fact that he was married thor also has this very sort of violent and very hyper masculine image but how does he actually treat the women in

his life and his wife because of, in a lot of the stories about the gods, they have quite open views on relationships and they have affairs and all sorts of things. But what about Thor? What's he like as a husband and as a man? Well, it's rather interesting, I think, that in the stories we have about Thor, in distinction to his father Odin, let's say, who is always having affairs both with human women and with giantesses. Thor seems to be quite a faithful husband. And in some ways, I think we can imagine that he can't have affairs with the goddesses, because they are other people's wives. This would lead to all kinds of friction in the divine community. But he's not about to have an affair with the

giantess either, because he spends all of his working life killing giants and giantesses. And so he's hardly going to be a very welcome sexual partner there. And although his mother is a giantess, there doesn't seem to be any sense in which he goes to visit his maternal kindred, or has a kind of exception for his mother's family, not that we know anything about them. But there is one poem where Thor is journeying home and he meets his father on the other side of a field. And his father is disguised as an old man called Greybeard. And Thor asks him to bring the ferry across so that he can travel across the field and speed his journey home and his father begins to riddle with him

and to taunt him and says I think your wife has a lover at home and also your mother is dead and Thor is pretty disturbed by both of these propositions whether either of them are true is not at all clear it's hard to see how Earth can be dead, given that she is the kind of deity of the planet. But there does seem to be a suggestion that Thor's wife may have had something with Loki while Thor is out on his endless patrols along the eastern frontier, crushing the giants. on his endless patrols along the eastern frontier, crushing the giants. And so while himself, he's quite a good family man, I think. He's actually maybe not around as much as he could be,

and therefore things happen while he's absent from Ausgader. So he doesn't really have a sort of negative reputation then, I suppose. He's got quite a good reputation, does he? Yeah, well, I think what's interesting about the myths that survive about Thor, and of course we've only got what survived, we can't really speculate about what's been lost, but in most of the myths he's either smashing giants to pieces and keeping the world of the gods and the world of men safe for those tribes to live in, but also he's depicted, partly in Snorri's prose Edda,

as not as smart as all that. He seems to be a kind of violent, smash people first, ask questions later kind of figure. And that's someone you definitely want on your side in a quite militaristic society,rolling your borders making sure there are no incursions but at the same time I think it has quite affected the way that he's been perceived in popular culture that he's seen as a little bit on the dim side and what's also I think quite significant here is that although the kings of Norway and the kings of Sweden are imagined as being descended from the god Odin or the god Freyr, and they can trace their genealogies back to him, Thor himself, though he was venerated, apparently,

in the great temple at Uppsala in Sweden, doesn't seem to have, after Maudhí and Magni and his daughter Trúðr, he doesn't seem to have any further descendants. And since no royal families could trace their ancestry back to him, he kind of drops out a little bit from the sense of continuity in the post-Viking age, if you like, the move into the establishment of dynasties in the main Scandinavian countries. And so when it comes to the revival of his reputation in the 19th century, it takes quite a long time for people to become interested in Thor again,

because he's not part of the legend of your own particular royal family. And do you think some of that has to do with the role of Christianity? I mean, obviously, we already said that this is all written down in the Christian context, but the gods survive and they're linked to the royal families and all of this but is there something about this character then that's less desirable in a Christian context than the other gods do you think? I suspect it does have to do with the conversion to Christianity to some respect but I don't think it's so much that Thor is undesirable but rather at least in the accounts of Christian conversion that we have of Iceland, and to some extent in Norway as well, he seems to be the main competitor God to Jesus.

And so when missionary kings or actual Christian missionaries come to preach the gospel, the person that they have to compare Christ with is Thor. Nobody is saying Jesus is much better than Odin, generally. And there's some discussion of that in some poetry, but that's because poets are particularly dedicated to Odin. But for ordinary people, you put Thor and Jesus side by side and try to weigh up whether one of them was superior. And we do have a story from Iceland of a missionary who was sailing around the island and was shipwrecked. And one of the very few verses composed by women that we have from that period taunts the missionary, a priest called Thaunbrandr, saying that his bison of the sea was smashed up by Thor,

and his god, the white Christ, could not protect him against Thor. And so although we don't think of Thor as a sea god particularly, he is a weather god. And so the storm that shipwrecked Thaunbrandr shows the superior power of Thor over Christ. But over time, it's clear that Thor's effectiveness was on the wane. We have stories about idols of Thor in temples in Norway, which turned out to be simply hollow wooden shells harbouring rats and toads and mice, who fed on the food that was given to the idol in sacrifice. And it's very easy to knock one of these idols over and go, look, he has no power at all. And so, although we do have an interesting mould found in Denmark,

which seems to have the possibility of casting in metal a Thor's hammer at one end and a Christian cross at the other, so that kind of allows you to hedge your bets as far as your divine protector is concerned. Eventually, Thor was destined to lose out to Jesus. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. So let's go on to the modern world now a little bit. You already mentioned briefly that it took a long time for this to be picked up again. When does that happen? When do people become interested in Thor again in the more modern world? It seems to me broadly in the 19th century that the poetry about Thor begins to be re-edited and particularly the idea of Thor as the god who destroys giants then becomes adopted into a sort of nationalist agenda. You can see the kind of political advantage of saying that Thor represents Denmark or he represents Germany

and the enemies that are being smashed to pieces. It might be the Prussians or it might be the Swedes or it might be whoever the country is fighting at the time. And so Thor becomes a kind of emblem of national identity, but he's also to be found in poems composed by people like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, maybe best known for composing Hiawatha, who find the idea of Thor quite romantic as the storm god. And there is a tendency in 19th century American and British culture to see Thor, as we see him now in a sense, as this kind of mighty elemental figure, the god of the thunder, of lightning, the one who can bring about meteorological phenomena, the one who rides through the sky in his chariot drawn by

these two goats. And although Longfellow in his poem The Challenge of Thor has Thor blustering away saying, I'm the greatest god, but even in that poem, he recognises that Christianity has prevailed over him. And so there's a sense in which the kind of anarchy of Thor and his violence is quite attractive in the 19th and following that in the 20th century. As long as it can be harnessed and used against the right people. Someone who can be harnessed and used against the right people. And that Thor, as a superhero, doesn't just lash out indiscriminately with the idea that he's not too clever. Just go after the wrong people.

But rather he has to learn some discipline. He has to tame himself or he has to listen to his father, Odin, and be directed against the right kind of enemies. And then it takes another turn, doesn't it, when he becomes part of the Marvel Comics universe. How did that come about? What sort of impact did that have? Well, it seems to be that in the early 1960s, Stan Lee and other writers who were working in the Marvel Comics industry, which had been going for several decades before that, decided they needed a new character.

Instead of inventing somebody like the Incredible Hulk from scratch, they decided that they would pick up Thor, partly because he came with a nice hammer, a flowing cloak, and a helmet with wings on the side and they had a very clear sort of iconography for Thor worked out already and because one of the co-writers on the Thor project seems to know quite a lot about Norse mythology he brought in not only Thor but this kind of family relationship as well so we have Odin as Thor's father.

In the Marvel Universe, we forget about Earth as Thor's mother, and it's Frigg, Odin's legitimate wife, who is seen as his mother. And then this very interesting move to make Loki his adopted brother. Now, in the Norse myth, Loki is kind of an outsider. His father is a giant, and his mother seems to be a goddess called Lofé. Though in the Marvel Universe, Lofé is made into the giant father of Loki. And so this sense of Loki not quite belonging, which we already have in the original myths,

somebody whose loyalty is always slightly elsewhere and at the end of the world of Ragnarok he will come out as the kind of giant inside man. Loki's not quite belonging makes a really interesting family dynamic and gives you a villain within who is redeemable and who kind of loves you too but kind of hates you and resents you. And he works alongside whatever the main threat to the gods or to humanity is in the storyline. Usually some kind of monstrous figure who doesn't necessarily belong in Norse mythology at all, but somebody like the Destroyer or in the latest film, there's a figure called the God Butcher, who just objects to gods in general, it seems,

and goes around trying to work them out. And we don't have that in Norse mythology at all. But it's interesting, I think, particularly over the Thor movies, how the family dynamics and Thor finding his way out of being just kind of a strong boy into kind of full manhood, someone who thinks before he acts, somebody who weighs up the ethics of situations, how that emerges over the films is a really interesting development, I think. And so that is in quite contrast, I suppose, to the original sources and sort of the way he is represented in those medieval sources. Yeah in a sense because the gods are the gods I think in the medieval

sources and they don't really have a trajectory of changing so we don't see the young Thor growing up into the fully mature Thor in the sources and he is actually fairly unchanging. Odin spends his time going around visiting giants and men, trying to find out information about Ragnarök. And perhaps we can say he learns various things, though I think probably what he's doing is more trying to find out if anybody has a different story from the one that he knows, which will end in his destruction. different story from the one that he knows, which will end in his destruction. But the movies, I think maybe particularly because the first one was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who is, of course, a very distinguished Shakespearean actor and director. It has a kind of Shakespearean feel to it. At the centre, it's a family drama of Thor making mistakes in Asgard, being thrown out, being sent to Earth to

learn some humility and to grow up a bit essentially and growing into his power and then coming back to Asgard to fight off an attack from the Frost Giants having learnt some useful lessons and so it's very much a kind of Shakespearean drama in that respect. The second movie mostly takes place on Earth so you haven't got the family background going on there and I think most people think the second movie Thor the Dark World has very spectacular special effects you see the whole of Greenwich being destroyed and the Royal Naval College going up in a puff of dust and so on. But it doesn't have

the same kind of interesting family dynamics that you have in the first movie. And then the third movie takes place on a different world altogether. And without being too spoilery, I guess, about the third movie, it is called Thor Ragnarok. And so it does stage the end of the world, which Thor, first of all, is fighting to try to stave off, but then he realises he's kind of part of a plan. It's already written, in a sense. Thor realises eventually that he can't stave off Ragnarok, that it's already written as part of a fated plan that he's only a part of. And so there are some interesting things, particularly, I think, about who writes history, how conquest happens, who then gets to talk about conquest afterwards, what happens when you try to

read the distant mythological past in terms of a present, where the stories are now diverging from the way that the people involved would tell the story if they were around. That's a very interesting sub-theme in the movie, which Taika Waititi is a director of colour, the New Zealand director, is very interested in the kind of what we might call a subaltern version of the great myths of Asgard. And so when we see the trailer for the forthcoming movie, we've started already in a place where Asgard has been destroyed completely and we now have new Asgard and that looks like it could be a kind of reset but the trailer makes very clear that Jane Foster the love interest from Thor's time on earth has now and this is something that was a development that was in the comics as well has now taken over Thor's identity she's got the hammer quite how she's got the hammer since it was destroyed in the third movie

isn't entirely clear but I'm sure it will be explained she's got the costume she is now Thor so there's a kind of gender swap going on which is a bit surprising for Thor obviously when he comes face to face with his ex-girlfriend being him but he's also going through what's described as the midlife crisis. Does he want to be a god? Does this role really belong to him? Can he just go through life smashing people with hammers? He's not even ruling a new Asgard. He's gone away and left it to a female ruler, to Valkyrie, to run this new kingdom. And so there are all kinds of interesting questions, I think, again about Thor's psychological journey that are going to emerge in the movie.

And as we've seen him maturing, it will be really interesting to see how he resolves his midlife crisis. Does he get his hammer back again? Presumably he's going to have to fight some fairly terrifying enemies. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. His father died in the last movie, so he doesn't have Odin anymore. Or does he? Because Odin is in the cast list. And of course, he's always got to cope with Loki,

doing whatever it is that Loki's up to in a particular storyline. So I think there's going to be lots to look forward to in the movie, and lots for people who are interested in Norse mythology to try and drill down a bit and see, OK, where getting that from does that fit with what we know or is this just wildly inventive but one of the things I've really liked about researching the movies because superhero movies actually are not really my thing at all but watching these I've been really impressed by the clever way in which the scriptwriters have taken actual mythological themes and said, okay, we're going to use this, or we're going to use this, but with a twist, or we're going to forget about this entirely, in order to make the story conform to that kind of

superhero pattern that the audience is expecting, but not in a predictable way. And that's, I think, what the great achievement of these films is in some ways. And actually, that's a topic that comes up quite often. And as any researcher on a topic that has a good sort of popular culture interest, like the Vikings, for example, I'm always asked, you know, what do I think about all these films and all the drama and all of that? And to me, it's very much that interest that these programs and shows and books trigger in the genuine background to it and I mean as you are somebody who specializes in Norse mythology and you teach it and you research it do you see an increased interest in that that real sort of

academic background from films like this? Yeah I think so I guess over my career working with Norse mythology, which has spanned quite a few decades now, journalists have always been asking me, is Norse myth having a particular moment? And I always say, well, it's been having a moment for 200 years. But actually, at the moment, it is having a moment, I think. And I think this has a lot to do with the Marvel franchise, but it also has to do with young adult novelists like Joanne Harris, Francesca Simon, writing stories which riff on the Old Norse mythological universe. Stories in which it has to be said Thor usually turns up with his hammer in the Thor is a bit of an idiot violently smashing mobile phones because he doesn't like to look at them and just shouting a lot and eventually always having to dress up as a woman in some way to defuse that masculinity so I think there is a way in which Norse mythology really is becoming a thing to think with. It is shaping the way we think about quite a lot of really key questions around the nature of masculinity, the nature of violence, the ways

in which gender is understood, the ways in which we think about the other people who are not the same as us. Is the best policy to whack them over the head with a hammer first and ask questions later? Clearly not, it's not really working in the kinds of scripts involving Thor these days. So yeah, I think Earl Norse myth has kind of escaped from the sort of Tolkien-y, Wagner-y, quite high cultural place that it had in the mid part of the last century. And it's got out into popular culture in all kinds of very interesting ways. Some which are healthy and allow us to talk in an open way about some of the problems that we face in contemporary society and it has to be said too some which intersect with ideas of white supremacy

and alt-right thinking which are not healthy at all, which are disturbing, and where we find ideas about what Thor stands for being adopted for political purposes, which Vikings, whatever Vikings are, would not have recognised, and which promote a vision of what it means to be a man, which is not, I think, anything that would have been recognised by the culture that originated these stories. I think that's something that we have to beware of, Thor being dragged into fights which essentially are not the fight that he's designed to be carrying out. So what do you think then is the most sort of enduring and positive legacy of Thor for the 21st century? I think it is a willingness to stand up for what's right and to stand up for the oppressed as well because the whole earth and all of

humanity would have been wiped out several times I, had Thor not intervened in the movies. And we don't find that so much in the novelistic versions of Thor. Sometimes there are people who are reborn as Thor and they have to prevent the end of the world. They have to track down Loki's avatars and destroy them in a kind of video game sort of way. But I think there is a kind of ethical dimension to Thor, which harks back to maybe the reason that people wore those Thor hammer amulets all those years ago, that he does stand for a kind of good, defending against a kind of evil. And he is interested in helping humans in a way that the other gods, in helping humans in a way that the other gods who are rather more distant from the everyday concerns of Norse farmers or sailors or warriors. Thor seemed to be the protector of mankind as he's called in some of the poems about him, the protector of the sanctuaries, and I think perhaps

it's that sense that he can still offer us some protection today against forces we can't quite imagine yet. I think it's that that's his main cultural task. I suppose that is a good reason for him to keep on being used and reused in media projects for decades and centuries in the future, I suppose. I think it's an enduring quality of Thor which we're never not going to need anymore. Caroline, thank you so much. Actually, I never not going to need anymore Caroline, thank you so much, actually I wasn't going

to see the films but I think after all of this I'm going to have to, it's not really my thing normally but I think I want to go now but thanks so much and I cannot wait for your new book to come out and just as a reminder if anybody wants to look up any of your other work you can check out her most recent book All Men Must Die

Power and Passion in Game of Thrones so that's away from the Norse mythology, but still in the medieval universe, isn't it really? So thank you all so much for listening. This has been an episode all about Thor with Professor Caroline Larrington. We will be back again next week. In the meantime, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and also to our Medieval Mondays newsletter. Just look in the episode notes wherever you found this podcast and you can find out how to do so. you