The Germanic Thunderweapon Part II: Thunder Goes Clubbing
When is a hammer not a hammer? When it's a club.
Thor wasn’t always Thor. In fact the word Thor is just an anglicized version of Old Norse Þórr that was adopted by English-speaking scholars who had apparently forgotten that the English language already had a perfectly good, native name for the exact same character: Thunder.
Over two millennia ago, Indo-European settlers in southern Scandinavia developed a word that served to describe both the loud, crashing sound heard during thunderstorms, as well as the divine being who personified or created this sound. Their word was *þunraz, a Proto-Germanic word that was itself derived from the earlier, Proto-Indo-European *(s)tenh₂-, a root that ultimately gave rise to a plethora of words in other languages such as Irish toirneach, Latin tonō, Persian tondar, and Sanskrit stánati, all referring to thunder.
Proto-Germanic *þunraz eventually yielded even more words as the various members of the Germanic language family began to take their own shapes over time. To name just a few examples, this word became þórr in Old Norse, donar in Old High German, and þunor in Old English, which itself evolved into the Modern English word thunder. Thus þórr and thunder are, at their core, the exact same word.
Throughout the pre-Christian, Germanic world, this word served as a name for a commonly shared thundergod1. However, just as language and culture evolve over time, so does religion, and so did the notion of the god himself. Whereas he is best preserved in the Norse corpus as Þórr (Thor), consistently wielding the mighty hammer Mjollnir to crush the skulls of his enemies, archaeology provides some clues that this may not have been the only story, or perhaps not the full story.
In the 3rd century AD, a particular funerary trend arose among Romans living north of the Mediterranean wherein certain women and children were buried or cremated with small, club-shaped pendants. These pendants were most commonly worn as earrings or necklaces, and, though shaped to resemble wooden clubs, were typically made of gold.2
The pendants themselves are easily reminiscent of the type of wooden club one might imagine in the hand of the demigod Hercules. Many are adorned with what appear to be “branch scars”– small protrusions made to look as though branches have been crudely broken away from the body of the club. One particular find from Köln-Nippes even sports the inscription “DEO HER”, which Werner reconstructs as “DEO HER[CVLI]” and confidently asserts has “secured in writing” an association between these pendants and Hercules3. Based on Werner’s analysis (and literally, this is all the substantive evidence he presents), these amulets have come to be known as “Hercules clubs”.
Around the time this trend seems to have died off, a similar trend started to pick up among Germanic groups across the Roman border. Similar to the Roman trend, Germanic graves of women and children began featuring small pendants of a similar shape4, although the artistry tended to be less literal. The finds are typically conical or prismatic in shape and the branch scars are often replaced by circular designs or geometric patterns.
The Germanic club-pendant trend continued from the 4th through the 7th centuries5, terminating roughly 100 years before the canonical beginning of the Viking Age in 793 AD.
Germanic club pendants have been found across wide-ranging territory, from places like modern Serbia in the east to Britain in the west and various areas in between, though none had been found north of Schleswig-Holstein prior to Werner’s perennial paper and, as far as I know, the situation remains the same. Werner argues that these clubs, along with the seemingly-related, Roman Hercules clubs and later Thor’s hammer pendants (which didn’t reach their height of popularity until about the 8th century) all shared the common purpose of apotropaea6. In simple terms, they were supposed to ward off bad things.
It’s worth noting that one of the Germanic gods, usually assumed to be *Þunraz, is sometimes interpreted as Hercules in the Roman record7. Hence Tacitus wrote in his 1st century work Germania:
Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims. Hercules and Mars they appease with more lawful offerings.8
Although *Þunraz was most famously associated with Jupiter by ancient Germanic peoples when translating Roman weekday names9, some evidence exists for a Germanic association between their own thundergod and Hercules as well. The archaeological record contains, for example, cult figures like Hercules Magisanus and Hercules Saxanus, often thought to be mergers of *Þunraz and Hercules that sprang up in Germanic areas particularly influenced by Roman culture10. Werner concludes that Germanic club pendants are forerunners of the later Mjollnir pendants11, and has dubbed these pendants “Donar amulets,” so named for the Old High German version of Thor as no Scandinavian club pendants have yet been found.
Interestingly, Saxo Grammaticus, in his 12th century Danish history Gesta Danorum12 also places a club in Thor’s hands. Saxo is, of course, a Christian author delivering a euhemerized account of the old gods here. But even though he is clearly aware of the concept of sacred hammers in Scandinavian history13, he still presents the following account of a fight between Thoro (Thor) and Høtherus (Hod) in this way:
But Thor shattered all their shield defenses with the terrific swings of his club […] Neither shields nor helmets could withstand the impact of his oak cudgel. Nor were bodily size or huge muscles any protection. Consequently victory would have gone to the gods, had not Høther, whose line of men had bent inwards, flown forward nimbly and rendered the club useless by lopping off the haft.14
Saxo’s club with a lopped-off haft is reminiscent of Snorri Sturluson’s hammer with a defectively short handle as presented in the Prose Edda and appears to be drawing from a similar tradition15. The question then becomes, why did Saxo prefer to equip Thor with a club instead of a hammer? Living in Denmark, could he have been aware of an old, southern tradition wherein the thunder god preferred a club? As intriguing as this idea may be, it is highly unlikely. Taggart suggests (and is probably correct), that Saxo’s decision to give Thor a club is based on a desire to accentuate Thor’s similarities with Hercules16. After all, the prologue to Snorri’s Prose Edda also takes great, fanciful leaps in its quest to tie Nordic history back to Hellenic cultures.
In any case, Saxo’s story happens to fit well with Werner’s analysis of Germanic club pendants, and it’s also not the only story we have wherein Thor uses a weapon that is more like a club than a hammer. In the Prose Edda, Thor battles the jotuns Gjalp and Greip explicitly without the aid of his hammer, instead relying upon a sturdy staff called Gríðarvǫlr (Grid’s Wale), which he uses to break their backs by pushing against the ceiling when they attempt to lift him up in his chair17.
These stories, as well as the existence of the physical club pendants, leave us to wonder about the nature of the thunderweapon, especially during the Migration Period, and whether certain continental and British versions of Thor might have been thought to carry a club rather than a hammer.
For some small insight into this, we can query the Eitri database18, created by Katherine Beard in 2019 in order to catalog discoveries of Mjollnir pendants. As it turns out, most potentially-early, hammer-shaped pendants are dated to a relatively wide range of time, commonly between 500-800 AD or later (according to the data), so, for most of them, it’s hard to tell how many of these are truly contemporary with the club trend or whether they are just phasing in as the clubs are phasing out. What is interesting, however, is that whereas Eitri does contain a few Mjollnirs that can be conclusively dated to the time of the club pendants, they are all Scandinavian. In other words, they come from areas where the club pendant was not in use. In the areas were the club pendants were fashionable, no contemporary hammer pendants have been found (at least, none that appear in Eitri). During this period of overlap, it appears North-Germanic people were trending toward hammers while West-Germanic people were occupied with clubs, potentially being worn for the same purposes, and potentially symbolizing the same character.
As a side note, a few hammer pendants have been found in Kent, UK that can be conclusively dated to the time of the Germanic club trend but it is unlikely that these 6th-century finds are actually intended to be Thor’s hammers, given their context. They seem more likely to be part of a separate, contemporary trend of wearing small models of various weapons and tools19, thus leaving our notion of a possible, West-Germanic, club-wielding thundergod unscathed.
See my post “Norse vs. Germanic”.
Werner, Joachim. “Herkuleskeule und Donar-Amulett.” Jahrbuch Des Romisch Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz, no. 11, 1964, pp. 176-199.
Werner, p. 177.
Werner, p. 178-179.
Werner, p. 176.
Werner, p. 181.
See the Wikipedia entry for interpretatio graeca and interpretatio romana for introductory information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_graeca
Church, A.J. and Brodribb, W.J. trans., Publius Cornelius Tacitus: Germania, s 9.
Simek, R., Dictionary of Northern Mythology, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007). p. 174-175
Simek, p. 141-142.
Werner, p. 182.
Friis-Jensen, K., ed., and Fisher, P., trans., Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
Saxo, Vol I. Book 8.
Saxo, Vol I. Book 3.
Taggart, Declan. How Thor Lost His Thunder: The Changing Faces of an Old Norse God. Routledge, 2019. p. 157.
Taggart, p. 104.
Faulkes, A., trans., Snorri Sturluson: ‘Edda’ (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/EDDArestr.pdf, p. 82.
Meaney, Audrey (1981). Anglo-Saxon Amulets and Curing Stones. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. pp. 148-162.