The Germanic Thunderweapon Part III: The Thunderstone
When is a hammer not a hammer? When it's a stone.
Snorri tells a fascinating story in the Prose Edda wherein Thor must overcome a series of obstacles without his hammer in order to overthrow a jotun called Geirrod1. Hammerless Thor’s first challenge in the story is to cross a raging river made all the more perilous by Geirrod’s daughter Gjalp who stands astride the river, causing it to rise, presumably by urinating into it:
Þá tók Þórr upp ór ánni stein mikinn ok kastaði at henni ok mælti svá: "At ósi skal á stemma.” Eigi missti hann, þar er hann kastaði til.
Then Thor took up a great stone out of the river and cast it at her and spoke thusly: “At its source shall a river be stemmed.” He did not miss what he had thrown toward.
After reaching Geirrod’s dwelling, Thor is attacked by Gjalp again, this time alongside her sister Greip. Although he does not have his hammer, Thor does have access to a sturdy staff called Gríðarvǫlr (Grid’s Wale). In imagery that is remarkably reminiscent of a thundergod with a club2, Thor uses the staff in this story to steady himself against the raging river and, presently, to break the backs of Geirrod’s daughters.
As a side note, I can’t help but wonder about a possible connection between this staff and the “scepter” (sceptro) mentioned in passing by Adam of Bremen, as described in the hand of Thor at the pagan temple in Uppsala. Adam says, “Thor with his scepter apparently resembles Jove3”. Might the scepter have been drawn from the same tradition as Gríðarvǫlr? Or, as Taggart suggests4, did Adam or one of his sources simply gloss Thor’s hammer with a scepter?
Returning to our narrative, Thor finally confronts Geirrod himself:
En er Þórr kom gagnvart Geirrǫði, þá tók Geirrǫðr með tǫng járnsíu glóandi ok kastar at Þór, en Þórr tók í móti með járngreipum ok færir á loft síuna, en Geirrǫðr hljóp undir járnsúlu at forða sér. Þórr kastaði síunni ok laust gegnum súluna ok gegnum Geirrǫð ok gegnum vegginn ok svá fyrir útan í jǫrðina.
And when Thor came over against Geirrod, then Geirrod took with tongs a glowing iron ingot (from the fire) and cast it at Thor, but Thor caught it with iron gloves and raised the ingot aloft, but Geirrod ran behind an iron pillar to save himself. Thor threw the ingot and it smashed through the pillar and through Geirrod and through the wall and onward outside into the earth.
The motif of Thor solving problems by throwing things at them also shows up in stories wherein the hammer is present. He throws it at the World Serpent, Jormungand, during his fishing trip with Hymir5 and also at the jotun Hrungnir during the pair’s epic duel6. In the Geirrod story, two problems are solved by throwing either a literal stone or stone-like object. But things get even more interesting when we add in Saxo’s take from Gesta Danorum7:
…Thorkil, who was well aware of the reasons behind things, taught them that once the god Thor, harassed by the giants’ insolence, had driven a burning ingot through the vitals of Geirrøth, who was struggling against him, and when this fell farther it had bored through and smashed the sides of the mountain; he confirmed that the women had been struck by the force of Thor’s thunderbolts and had paid the penalty for attacking his divinity by having their bodies broken.8
Saxo’s mention of “thunderbolts” — the word he uses is actually fulminum in Latin — is interesting in that it calls to mind not only the images of other Indo-European thunder gods who wield both a swingable weapon and projectiles (e.g., Perkunas, Perun, and Indra), but also the surprisingly common folk belief in thunderstones.
A thunderstone is not always an actual stone, but quite often describes a stone-age flint axe or similar tool that has been misunderstood as having fallen from the sky during a thunderstorm or with a bolt of lightning. Folklore involving thunderstones is found across an enormous expanse of territory from Western Europe all the way to Japan and down through Africa. According to Blinkenberg, in all of these areas, the folklore exists in “remarkably similar forms9”.
In Danish folklore specifically, a stroke of lightning quite literally is the descent of a thunderstone wherein “the flash and the thunder-clap are mere after-effects or secondary phenomena10”. These phenomena, of course, are widely believed to have been the domain of Thor, although Taggart eloquently calls into question every single one of our reasons for thinking this. Still, if Thor is a thundergod, ruling over “thunder and lightning” as Adam of Bremen asserts11, it is hard not to imagine Saxo’s burning ingot blasting through Geirrod and careening downward into the side of a mountain, as well as the stone Thor throws at Gjalp in the river, as possible incarnations of the thunderstone.
To be fair, Saxo does not directly tell us that Geirrod was slain by Thor’s thunderbolts, only that “the women” were. But even in this detail we have an implicit association between Thor’s more standard attack (which, even in the form of a hammer is often still a projectile) and thunderbolts. If we allow ourselves to believe that Thor’s hammer is in any way a representation of lightning, as some possible etymologies for the word Mjǫllnir could suggest12, and if thunderstones are also believed to be either the result or cause of lightning, then it would begin to seem as though there may be some kind of connection between the hammer and the thunderstone.
It is admittedly hard to prove this idea and we should be careful about assuming Thor’s weapon was associated with lightning, a la Taggart’s whole schtick. But with that said, archaeological evidence indicates that folklore surrounding these stones stretches deep into the pagan period, likely having been carried to Britain during the Anglo-Saxon migrations13. In that case, even though our oldest written Scandinavian attestations of thunderstones only reach back to the 16th century14, perhaps an appeal to linguistic information from related languages may prove useful in finding an association between the stones and Thor.
The German word donnerkeil (lit., “thunder wedge”), has historically been used to denote both a thunderstone and a thunderbolt, as in, the object hurled by Zeus15. The root keil was borrowed into Swedish from Middle Low German16, yielding the modern Swedish equivalent for a thunderstone: torkil. In the German version, the element donner derives from Old High German donar, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *þunraz which, in both of those languages, not only denoted the sound of thunder, but was also the thunder god’s actual name.
This is somewhat speculative on my part, but if the Germanic practice of naming these stones with a common word for thunder is old enough to have been derived from a Common Germanic origin, then there would have been a time in Germanic history when a “thunderstone” and a “Thor-stone” were linguistically identical terms. This would paint a clearer association between the god and the stones prior to the Norse period. Additionally, if that origin dates back to the earliest Indo-Europeans in Scandinavia, at a time when the thundergod’s weapon would have been conceptualized as made of stone, then phrases like “thunder hammer” and “thunder stone” may have once been synonymous as well.
Mallory discusses17 a root in Proto-Indo-European from whence Proto-Germanic derives, something like *ak’mon — Kroonen reconstructs this as *heḱ-mon-18 — that has yielded the meanings of stone, hammer, and sky, especially when those concepts are related to Indo-European thundergods. What Mallory calls a “complex of seemingly unrelated meanings” is resolved, in his thinking, by folk belief in thunderstones19. In this, we see another possible early connection between the stones, the hammer, and the god.
Blinkenberg and Taggart, on the other hand, prefer to disassociate Thor from the stones. Both note that the element tor in the Swedish torkil, although descended from Old Norse þórr, may have originally been a reference to the thunder phenomenon and not to Thor himself20. And indeed this is supported by words like the Danish tordenkile, which more clearly means “thunder stone” and not “Thor stone” (though even here, the word torden is derived from an Old Norse compound meaning “Thor din”).
So even in light of the associations that both Thor and the stones seem to have with thunder, it is consistently hard to complete the triangle with a clear and obvious association between the Viking-Age, Scandinavian Thor and the stones themselves beyond a few possible clues in the Geirrod story.
With that said, the hints are hard to ignore. Thor often attacks via throwing things, including his hammer. There is an old, linguistic connection between words meaning hammer and stone. Thor throws a stone-like object twice in the Geirrod story, even in the poetic version wherein his hammer is present. Saxo refers to these projectiles as Thor’s thunderbolts. There is a direct, Proto-Germanic equivalence between Thor and thunder, and these stones are anciently associated with thunder. These hints together seem to paint a relatively strong silhouette of a bludgeoning-but-also-thunderstone-throwing, Germanic deity that pre-dates the poetry that informed our written sources.
Faulkes, A., trans., Snorri Sturluson: ‘Edda’ (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/EDDArestr.pdf, pp. 81-83.
See my post “The Germanic Thunderweapon Part II: Thunder Goes Clubbing”.
Francis J. Tschan (trans). Adam of Bremen: History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen. Columbia University Press, 1959. p. 207
Taggart, Declan. How Thor Lost His Thunder: The Changing Faces of an Old Norse God. Routledge, 2019. p. 102.
Faulkes, p. 47.
Faulkes, p. 79.
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.
Blinkenberg, Christian., The Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore: A Study in Comparative Archaeology, (Cambridge: The University Press, 1911). p. 4-6.
Blinkenberg, p. 1.
Adam, p. 207.
Simek, R., Dictionary of Northern Mythology, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007). pp. 219-220.
McNamara, Kenneth J., “Shepherds' crowns, fairy loaves and thunderstones: the mythology of fossil echinoids in England” in Geological Society, London, Special Publications, no. 273. p. 289
Taggart, p. 159.
Grimm, Jacob and Grimm, Wilhelm. Deutsches Wörterbuch, (Leipzig, S. Hirzel, 1854). Col. col. 1244-1245. Searchable online version: https://woerterbuchnetz.de
See the Svenska Akademien Ordböcker: https://svenska.se/tre/?sok=kil&pz=2
Mallory, J. P. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth. (Thames and Hudson, 2003).
Kroonen, Guus. Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic. (Brill, 2013). p. 206.
Mallory, p. 122.
Blinkenberg, p. 60. Taggart, p. 159.