The Thundergod is Humanity's Hero
Explaining Thor's violent relationship with the jǫtnar
What role did deity play in the day-to-day lives of ancient, Germanic people?
Sadly, the vast majority of information regarding the pre-Christian belief system of the north has been lost to history. Most of the time, we are forced to turn to surviving myths, legends, and poetry to suss out clues as to how the ancient religious mind operated and how it conceptualized its relationship to deity. But the full picture is far from clear, and every once in a while, archaeological evidence will surface providing new insights that help explain the meaning behind the narratives we find in myth.
Such is the case with the Canterbury Charm1, the Kvinneby Amulet2, and Sigtuna Amulet I3 (links point to Wikipedia for intro-level information).
Before we dive into them, what do we know about the Germanic thundergod? For one, his very name is the common word for thunder in most Germanic traditions (e.g., *Þunraz in Proto-Germanic, Þunor in Old English, and Donar in Old High German). We also know that he typically wields a unique weapon that he uses for killing trolls, jotuns, thurses, and their ilk. In the Norse tradition, Thor is usually not at home in Asgard at the beginning of a story, but often quickly returns when called upon to deal with some supernatural problem causer (i.e., the fortification-builder4, Hrungnir5, or even Loki6). When Thor is absent and we are told where he’s been, he seems to have always been somewhere in the east, the semi-canonical location of Jotunheim, at drepa trǫll (“killing trolls,” in which the word trǫll is a catch-all term for any scary, evil creature, and in this case is used synonymously with jǫtnar and þursar).
But why does Thor take such pleasure in killing jotuns? Is it the result of some genocidal mania driven by self-hatred? After all, his own mother originally came from among the jotun populace7 as did his grandmother on his father’s side8. As it turns out, the artifacts I mentioned above can actually fill in some missing details here. So let’s take a look at their inscriptions:
The Canterbury Charm
The Canterbury Charm exists in the form of two lines of Old Norse runes found etched into the margins of an Anglo-Saxon manuscript from 1073 AD. The normalized Old Norse reads as follows:
Gyril sárþvara far þú nú! Fundinn er þú! Þórr vegi þik, þursa dróttinn, Gyrils sárþvara, viðr aðravari.
And in my own translation:
Gyril Sore-Causer, leave now! You are found! May Thor strike9 you, lord of thurses, Gyril Sore-Causer, against blood infections.
The implication here is clear. The source of a human ailment (in this case a blood infection) is named as Gyril, a “lord of thurses”. The writer of the charm has uncovered this fact, perhaps by mystical means, and now commands Gyril to depart, with an added invocation of a smiting by Thor. The intended result, which is obvious though not explicitly stated, is that whoever is afflicted by the blood infection will be healed once Gyril is gone.
The next two artifacts each repeat parts of this formula.
The Kvinneby Amulet
The Kvinneby Amulet is a small, square, copper plate containing a runic inscription discovered in Öland, and possibly dating to between 1050-1130 AD. It has proved a bit tricky to read in some places, but the overall message is similar in different proposed translations. Here is a direct transliteration of the runes:
h(i)ʀiurkimsutiʀkuþiʀbirk bufimeʀfultihu þisþeʀuisinbral tilufranbufaþorketih ansmiʀþemhamrisamhyʀ hafikamflyfraniluit feʀekiafbufakuþiʀu untiʀhanumaukyfiʀhan um
And here is the Pereswetoff-Morath translation10:
Here I carve (may I carve/carved) help for you, Bove, with complete assistance. Fire is safe for you (known to you), (the fire which) took all evil away from Bove. May Thor protect him with the hammer which came from the sea. Flee from the evil one! Magic (evil) achieves nothing with Bove. Gods are under him and over him.
Here again, Thor is invoked to use his divine power for protecting a human being against attacks by some evil being. In the Canterbury charm, we see a direct association between the evil thurse and disease, and it is therefore not a stretch to assume the "evil one" mentioned in the Kvinneby amulet is also a jotun/thurse. But is there any reason to believe that this "evil one” attacking Bove is doing so by way of disease as we see in the Canterbury charm? Not directly, but the Sigtuna Amulet provides another attestation of this idea.
Sigtuna Amulet I
This is another 11th century runic amulet, this time found in Uppland. The normalized Old Norse reads as follows:
Þurs sárriðu, þursa dróttinn! Fljú þú nú! Fundinn er[tu]. Haf þér þrjár þrár, Ulfr! Haf þér níu nauðir, Ulfr! <iii isir þis isir auk is unir>, Ulfr. Njót lyfja!
And in my own translation:
Thurse of sore-fevers, lord of thurses, flee now, you are found. Have yourself three torments, wolf (metaphorically, “monster”). Have yourself nine needs, wolf. With these "i" runes, "iii" (used here as a magical incantation), the wolf is appeased. Enjoy healing!
We will look more closely at the magical uses of runes in another post. For now, we see again in this case that a thurse is causing a "sore-fever" (perhaps a fever induced by an infected wound). But this time, rune magic is invoked to curse the thurse and thereby heal the human victim.
What this information shows in total is that evil, supernatural creatures were believed to be the direct cause of human ailments in Norse (and perhaps more broadly Germanic) religion. Thor would often be invoked to kill those creatures and thereby save the afflicted humans. Thus, when we read that Thor was commonly away from Asgard at drepa trǫll, we are almost certainly meant to assume that he was constantly and dutifully doing so in answer to human supplications, rescuing humanity from the ailments caused by evil creatures.
There is an ever-growing trend within pop-culture representations of Norse mythology to depict gods and jotuns in various shades of moral gray. Perhaps the gods aren’t so virtuous, suggests a trendy entertainment studio, and perhaps the jotuns deserve our sympathy. But this suggestion is fully antithetical to the historical conceptions of these groups born out time and time again by source material and archaeological data: it is the gods who are motivated to maintain order in the cosmos and preserve the lives and prosperity of humanity, whereas the jotuns as a group are motivated to destroy these things.
At a micro level, when it comes to the way this cosmic tension plays a role in the life of the average believer, there are jotuns in existence who will, for whatever reason, decide to personally attack you, and it will require a magical incantation, and perhaps an appeal to Thor himself in order to be rescued from this attack. Thor is not the big, dumb, murderous lacky of the gods so often portrayed in pop culture, but a mighty hero who, in many ways, serves as a type of savior. As he tells us himself in the poem “Hárbarðsljóð”:
Þórr kvað: “Ek var austr ok jǫtna barðak, brúðir bǫlvísar er til bjargs gengu; mikil myndi ætt jǫtna ef allir lifði — vætr myndi manna undir Miðgarði! Hvat vanntu meðan, Hárbarðr?”
Thor quoth: “I was eastward and I fought jotuns, bale-wise brides who went into the mountains; mighty would be the jotun kin if all had lived — there would be no humans under Midgard! What were you doing meanwhile, Harbard?”
Faulkes, A., trans., Snorri Sturluson: ‘Edda’ (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/EDDArestr.pdf, p. 36
Faulkes, p. 77-78
Pettit, E., trans., The Poetic Edda: A Dual Language Edition, (Open Book Publishers, 2023), p. 305
Lindow, J., Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 205
Faulkes, p. 11
The runes here are written ᚦᚢᚱᚢᛁᚵᛁ (þuruigi) which has often been translated as Þórr vígi (i.e., may Thor hallow/bless) following the common pattern found in inscriptions such as the Velanda Runestone, calling upon Thor to hallow the runes. This, however, is not necessarily an intuitive message when read literally. Why would Thor be blessing an evil creature? As it turns out, the ⟨ᛁ⟩ rune was used to represent both the sounds /e(ː)/ and /i(ː)/ in Old Norse, thus allowing for a more expected reading of Þórr vegi (i.e., may Thor strike), as we see repeated in Eddic poetry such as “Lokasenna’s” ek vęit at þú vegr (I know that you [Thor] strike) and “Skírnismál’s” þat sverð es sjalft vegisk við jǫtna ætt (that sword which strikes by itself against jotun kin). If indeed the word is supposed to be vígi (hallow), it must be taken with an understanding that Thor’s powers of consecration will work to destroy an evil being. The effect is the same regardless of which word we choose. It is therefore also quite possible that the scribe was aware of the ambiguity inherent in the spelling ᚢᛁᚵᛁ and the fact that this word could be read as either strike or hallow is a deliberate aspect of this inscription. In any case, I have opted for a non-traditional reading here in order to keep the message simple.
Pereswetoff-Morath, Sofia. (2019) “Viking-Age runic plates. Readings and interpretations” in Acta Academiae Gustavi Adolphi 155. Runrön 21. Uppsala. pp. 113–151.