Gone Medieval - The Origins of Thor

Episode Date: July 12, 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.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. 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 and 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 app, 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 Gives. 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 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 systematizing in a nice round number by the author of the treatise on the gods Norris Dutthuson. But the most important gods are Othin, the Oral Father, the King of the Gods, and Thor is his son, not by his wife, the goddess Frig, but by Yirth, whose name means earth and who is a giantess. And so Thor is probably the second most significant god after Othin in our sources, and probably in real life, if we can call it that,

even more significant than Othin 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 Mothi and Magni, and also a daughter who is called Thruwther. And all of the children's names mean something like strength. So it's obviously quite an inheritable characteristic. So the sort of 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 up in a little bit, 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-Scanonabians 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 a 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 Sturtleson, 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 Othin of the spear. And if you're going to make sense of that, you need to know who Othin 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 Gilvi and three of the Aisir, 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 Skaldic 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 describing them. In the Old Norse it term is Yurtin, 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 and, as you've already said, these come from a Christian setting and after the Viking age. 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 Mithgard 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 Thorbjorn or Thorndes or Stainthor. 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 Freire, who also turns up, but not anything like as 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 Othin's Great Spear Gungnir. But in order to kind of double the hall, 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 set to work and starts making Gutlimbursi, the famous golden battle pig that the god Freya rides. And he also makes the hammer, Mjutnir, 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 Mjt Nir 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 Mjoknir,

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 Broker, 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 can take my head sure but you can't take any part of my neck at which part Brocker 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 Mjotnir 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 find the hammer has vanished. And it's been stolen by a rather opportunistic giant called Thremer. We don't know quite how Threma got into Thor's home to steal the hammer, but nevertheless Loki finds out that Threma has the hammer and he will only return it if he can marry the goddess Freya. So Loki and Thor go to Freya and ask her to get ready because she's going off to Giant Land to marry Thrimer.

And Freya 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 Freya and send him off to Giant Land, which they duly do with Loki as his serving maid to do the talking for him. and Threma is very pleased his bride has come at last Thor, it has to be said, is heavily veiled but Thor almost gives the game away because his eyes are very red

with rage at the situation he's in and when Threma peaks 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 look he 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, Threma thinks this is a little suspicious. But look, he says, well, she hasn't eaten for eight days and night. 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 grass, smashes Threma and all the giant guests at the wedding to pieces and makes his way home again to his own territories. So the possession of Mjol-Nir 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 it's 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 scolding poem I mentioned before, Thor's Drauporpe, where Loe, Loki has been captured by the giant Gayruder. And in order to affect his escape, Loki has to promise to lure Thor to Gayruder'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 Gayruthers' 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 friend. giant has called Grither, and she lends him a pair of magic gloves. And they make their way with some difficulty to Gereuth's house. Gereld's daughters try to stop Thor by pissing in the river,

which he is trying to cross and almost drowning him. But they get to the house and are invited in. Thor sits on a chair and is almost crushed against the ceiling because giant's daughters are lurking underneath and they rise up and try and squash him. But he presses down, he calls him. 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 in low-key, kind of dust off their hands, probably return the magic gloves to Greather 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 Mjornir 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 the new film, which just for full disclosure here, we're recording this before the new Thor film was out, so neither 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 violence and very hyper masculine image, but how does he actually treat

the women in his life and his wife? Because of course in a lot of the stories about the gods, they have quite open views and relationships and they have affairs and 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 Olin, 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 there are other people's wives. 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 to 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 his 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. And so while himself, he's quite a good family. 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, say, 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 patrolling 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 Olin or the god Freire, and they can trace their genealogies back to him,

Thor himself, though he was venerated apparently the great temple at Uppsala in Sweden, doesn't seem to have, after Modi and Magni and his daughter Thruther, 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 and the post-Viking age, if you like, the move into the establishment of dynasties in the main Scandinavian. in countries. And so when it comes to the reviver 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 than 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 Othin, generally. There's some discussion of that in some poetry, but that's because poets are particularly dedicated to Othin. 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 were shipwrecked. And one of the very few verses composed by women that we have from that period towards the missionary, a priest called Thangbrander, 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 didn't think of Thor as a sea god particularly,

he is a weather god, and so the storm that shipwrecked, Thang grande, 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, harboring 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 the 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. Millions dead, a higher proportion of civilian casualties than in the Second World War, America, Britain, Russia and China all involved in a conflict that technically remains active to this day. So why is the Korean War of 1950 to 53 called the Forgotten War? The North Koreans and the South Koreans, even today in the 2020s, they're still officially at war. This July, we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out what this unique conflict was all about. From the halls of power?

I've seen documents in the last week where the British Chiefs of Staff are telling Clement Attlee, this might lead to World War three. This might be a nuclear war. To the battlefront. During the Korean War, the ship fired its guns far more than ever did in the whole of the Second World War, because that's what we were doing, die in, die in, down. Join me, James Rogers throughout July on the Warfare podcast from History Hit. As we remember the war, the world forgot. 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 be 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 and his chariot drawn by these things. who goats. And although Longfellow in his poem The Challenge of Thor has Thor blustering away saying,

I am 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 could 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, Othin, 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 are 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 Ozen as Thor's father. In the Marvel universe, we

forget about Earth as Thor's mother and it's Frigg, Oden's legitimate wife, who is seen as his mother. And then this very interesting move to make Loki, his adopted brother. Now, in the Northsmith, 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's 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 the 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, and I suppose too, the original sources and sort of the way he is represented in those medieval sources? Yeah, in the 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. Othin spends his time going around visiting giants and men, trying to find that information about Ragnarok.

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. 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 Alaskard 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 Alisgard 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. 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 Grinich 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 to 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 realizes he's kind of part of a plan. It's already written, in a sense. Thor realizes 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 interesting 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 would 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. His father died in the last movie, so he doesn't have Othin anymore. or dutty because Othin is in the cast list. And of course he's always got to cope with Loki doing whatever it is that Loki is 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, okay, where are they getting that from? Does that fit with what we know? Or is this just wildly inventive? 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 script writers 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 to these films is in some ways.

And actually, that's the 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, 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 programmes and shows and books trigger in the genuine background to it. And I mean, as you are somebody who specialises in Norse mythology and you teach it and you research it.

Do you see an increased interest in 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 novelist 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 as a bit of an idiot, violently smashing mobile phones because he doesn't like to look at them and just shouting a lot. 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 thought these days. So yeah, I think Old Norse myth has kind of escaped from the sort of Tolkieny, Wagnery, 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 to 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 promotes 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 think, 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 hocks 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 the kind of evil. And he is interested 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 re-use. 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 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 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,

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