Thor, Norse god of thunder.
A fearless warrior who protects his people from monstrous giants.
He was the idol of Vikings and Barbarians
in the darkest age ever known to man.
But few know the reality behind his myth.
He battled the ancient world's most colossal sea monster,
and he was the last hope for Europe's pagans
as they defied the armies of Christendom.
Fact and fiction collide
in the myth of the mighty Thor.
Two arch-enemies battle to the death.
Thor, the thunder-god against a staggering beast.
A giant snake who strikes with lethal force.
It is man versus monster.
Thor unleashes his deadliest weapon,
lightning from his magic hammer.
As thunder rocks heaven and earth.
The myth of Thor is filled with these epic showdowns.
Heroic battles against creatures who threaten mankind.
Thor is the champion of the gods.
He is the great fighter who can be brought out when something is really bad.
You don't go to Thor for wisdom,
you go to Thor because he's going to protect you against the evil monsters.
Tales of Thor's adventures provided escape
from one of the bleakest periods in human history.
The dark ages of the first millennium A.D.
It was a time when the Norse world,
stretching from the British Isles to the Baltic Sea,
was in turmoil.
The agricultural society, where people were farming and
surviving kind of at the very edge of how it was possible to survive,
because it was cold, it was the northern part of Europe,
it wasn't around the Mediterranean where it was much easier to grow things,
and it tended to be, from everything we can tell, quite violent.
War, famine and death
were daily facts of life
on the desolate northern fringes of Europe.
But the myth of Thor brought a sense of order to the chaos.
It was a religion of the countryside.
Paganism actually is a Latin word that describes that,
what the country people believe in,
and paganism is not really well organized either.
It's not like the Greek Pantheon in the sense that it's very well organized
and everybody knows whose responsibilities
and who's more important than whom.
It's very different.
The view of human life in that mythology
was a fairly dark and fairly stern one.
Human beings didn't look forward to the kind of salvation and heaven
at the end of time that's promised in the Christian stories.
They had a kind of a darker, a more sorrowful view of life.
People have to show great courage and hardiness
in the face of enormous obstacles.
For inspiration, the people looked to Thor.
Thor was the quintessential hero.
He was strong.
Unlike some of the other gods he was not deceptive,
he was not treacherous, but he was steadfast,
and as this hero figure, I think, people could identify with him best.
In the myth, two of Thor's weapons help him conquer evil forces:
A belt that doubles his strength
and a hammer that shoots lethal bolts of lightning.
No matter how far Thor throws his trusty hammer,
it will return to him like a boomerang.
And each time thunder roars, it means Thor's hammer has struck a giant.
Thor is the master of lightning,
and this is not uncommon in other mythologies.
The obvious parallel here is Zeus in classical mythology,
for he is the thunder god.
The thunder and lightning god is the protector god.
He's the strongest fighter, so he has that capability that Zeus has,
the thunderbolt, the hammer for Thor, that can destroy the bad guys.
Thor's myth begins with his birth to two all-powerful parents.
His father is Odin, the god of the heavens,
and his mother is Jord, which is Earth, and so, in a sense,
he is of the sky and of the earth,
which makes him the perfect god for Middle Earth,
for "midgard", where humans are.
In Norse mythology, the world is made up of three levels,
all represented in a form quite familiar to the ancient Norse: a tree.
They used to make housing that roughly resemble American tepees,
and the entire view of the cosmos by the old Norse
was really based on that construction of housing.
You had a centre pole that would hold up the walls.
It would have been the skeletal structure of the house.
It would have been the skeletal structure of the cosmos -
so the small representing the large.
That's one of the reasons why trees become so very important.
In the mythical tree's highest branches is Asgard,
the dwelling place of the gods.
At the opposite end, beneath the roots,
is a cool, dark realm known as Hel.
This is the land of the dead,
and it's from this tradition that our word "hell" originates.
The middle of the tree is "midgard", the earth,
a world inhabited by humans.
This is Thor's domain.
As the warrior god,
it is his duty to destroy mankind's enemies in Midgard,
the evil giants.
The giants represent chaos.
They represent destruction.
If an avalanche killed you,
if an earthquake got you or a flood or something else,
it was the work of a giant.
So they represent all the things that could go wrong
with a civilization that was really kind of on the edge of survival
because of the climate, because of how dangerous it was.
One can imagine living, for example, in a valley in Norway and seeing,
as winter progressed, the frost coming down from the valleys,
sort of the frost giants, if you will, and then spring comes,
and one can see that as being Thor
battling back the frost giants back up the mountain,
and we will be able to have order restored.
Today, echoes of Thor's mythical battles with the giants
can still be heard in the forests and frigid plains that flank the North Sea.
Throughout Scandinavia,
mysterious stone memorials dot the landscape, dating back to the pagan era.
They were erected between the fourth and twelfth centuries AD
the to mark territory, record important events,
and serve as tombstones for kings and warriors.
They are called runestones,
and they are the only clues left behind by a society
that didn't write down its stories.
On the stones are Runic inscriptions, much like our Latin alphabet.
They sort of describe a piece of mythology or a piece of a story
that we sometimes are lucky enough to have in written form.
There is one figure who features prominently
in many of these inscriptions:
The thunder god himself, Thor.
There are quite a number of cases in runestones
where Thor's name is carved in the runes
with something like, "may Thor bless these runes. "
They wanted his power to somehow come through and protect them.
In Norse myth, each god
battles his own personal enemy from among the evil giants.
The runestones reveal the identity of Thor's nemesis,
a giant who takes the form of a snake:
the Midgard serpent.
This is snake that gets larger and larger,
and it's foretold that it's gonna help bring about the doom of the gods
and the end of the universe.
Snake fear is actually hardwired into us.
It's cross-cultural, and the old Norse picked up on that.
Snakes are bad, and they're scary,
and that's sort of just the background
that you can then build good mythology out of.
According to the legend, the Midgard serpent grows so huge
it can stretch around the Earth and envelop the world in chaos.
It was the Midgard serpent that was circled entirely around Middle Earth
as a symbol of the edge of the world
but also a symbol of the danger of going past that edge.
This is the ultimate adversary, one Thor is determined to vanquish.
But victory will not come easy, even for a god.
This ongoing contest between Thor and the Midgard serpent
really represents the contest between the force that is protecting order,
protecting the world of the gods and the world of men,
against this ever-present threat of outside chaos
that always is there to threaten to destroy us.
Order versus chaos:
It is a classic theme that resonated in the harsh Norse world.
In the myth of Thor, it is often conveyed with a sense of humour.
In one part of the story,
Thor wants to get close to the Midgard serpent without being detected,
so he transforms himself into a young boy
and asks an ogre named Hymir to take him fishing at sea.
And they go out deep and deep, deeper and deeper
and further and further out and further and further out,
and finally, Hymir says, "well, I think this is far enough,"
and Thor says, "No, no. We can go further out yet. "
Off the coast, Thor reveals his true identity
and lures the serpent to the surface with the head of an ox.
And he throws the entire ox head with a giant hook in it over the side.
Well, the Midgard serpent bites on it, and Thor hauls it up,
and so this gigantic Midgard serpent is now sticking its head out of the water,
and Thor is excited about this.
He's thrilled. He's reaching for his hammer.
He's like, "now I finally got you,"
but Hymir, the giant who's in the boat, is terrified.
As Thor raises his hammer to strike,
the ogre cuts the fishing line,
and the serpent dives back into the sea.
Thor is enraged.
He has lost a rare chance to kill his archenemy.
So Thor keeps having these encounters with the Midgard serpent.
Sometimes it's disguised, sometimes someone interferes,
but in each case, the serpent gets away,
and that's probably because the serpent is being saved in some way or another
for the final battle between Thor and the Midgard serpent.
This is not the only myth that features a clash
between a thunder god and a giant serpent.
It is a theme found in every corner of the ancient world.
In the Hindu holy book of Vedas,
there is a fight between the storm god Indra and a monstrous snake.
And in Greek mythology,
a serpentine beast named Typhon battled Zeus, the god of lightning.
These myths were created thousands of miles apart
and thousands of years apart,
but they all tell essentially the same story:
A god of thunder and lightning
out to destroy a serpent who threatens the world.
But how could so many different societies have shared the same myth?
It is likely they emerged from common experience.
Could the serpent in these stories be based on a real sea monster?
And if so, does that creature still prowl the depths of our oceans today?
Surprising evidence suggests it just might.
The Midgard Serpent, archenemy of almighty Thor,
a snake so colossal it can wrap itself around the planet.
In the myth, it represents chaos and evil in the world,
but what could have inspired such a terrifying creature?
Sightings of giant sea serpents have been reported for centuries.
In the old Norse sagas, which are thought to be based on real history,
there are even tales of ships being capsized by the beasts.
They often describe a gigantic creature with long tentacles
that could reach out and snatch down ships and drag them to the bottom.
This was often referred to as the "kraken".
The kraken was said to have a long slithery body
that moved at lightning speed, just like the Midgard serpent.
But tales of monster sea snakes aren't limited to northern Europe.
They can also be found
in ancient Greece's most famous adventure story: the Odyssey.
It describes a massive serpent with a taste for human flesh.
The Scylla.
Scylla is this terrifying sea monster
with many heads and many arms who,
you know for a fact, will grab up six of your men
and eat them.
Scylla, kraken, the Midgard serpent:
Are these mythical sea monsters coincidence,
or could they be based on something real?
A chance discovery in the 19th century teased that possibility.
Fishermen in the North Atlantic
encountered a massive unknown sea creature and succeeded in capturing it.
The longest tentacle measured 35 feet.
It was a giant squid.
The amazing thing is that nobody had actually been able to prove
the existence of a giant squid up until the 1870s,
when finally, after countless reports of these things by sailors
who were never really believed,
finally dozens of them washed into the shore in Newfoundland,
proving that there really were these amazing creatures.
A thousand years earlier,
tales of these sea monsters terrified Scandinavia's most rugged seafarers,
roving bands of marauders who built an empire by dominating the waves:
The Vikings.
The Viking... the word "viking" itself means to plunder, to raid,
and so the name that was applied to these people
refers to the actual act of what they were doing.
When the fear of giant sea creatures threatened their voyages,
the Vikings looked to one god:
Thor.
We would have to imagine the Norsemen
getting into their ships for plunder in the North Sea
and praying to Thor for protection,
to help guide them to where they were going,
so Thor took on certain kind of significance
that elevated him above the other gods in the eyes of the warriors.
Viking raiders performed a special ritual in Thor's honour
to guarantee their safety on the high seas.
The ritual involved dismantling a temple dedicated to Thor
and taking the pillars of the temple onto the boats with them
and dropping them over the side into the ocean
in order to show that Thor was dominating the ocean,
that they, as Thor's servants, were going to be able to have safe passage.
The pillars cast into the sea were usually cut from oak trees.
Oak had a special connection to the thunder god:
It was the wood most often struck by lightning.
In fact, the central place to worship Thor was not a temple or a church.
It was a tree known as Thor's Oak,
and it was the Mecca of the ancient Norse world.
We are told that this oak signifies Thor.
They would call upon that oak as... maybe even as if it were Thor himself.
For generations, Thor's oak was the scene of bloody pagan sacrifices.
His followers frequently left offerings of flesh at its base.
Oftentimes, the sacrifice was in connection
with ensuring that harvest and agriculture and things of this nature
would be good for the following year.
During particularly bad times,
it was claimed that nine of every animal would be sacrificed,
and sometimes, in really bad years, then you would even sacrifice a human being.
We have enough evidence that there were sacrifices or executions
associated with paganism and pagan sites,
and it's no stretch of the imagination to think
that they would have taken place at Thor's oak also.
According to legend,
Thor's oak stood here
in the town of Fritzlar, Germany, until 723 AD.
That was the year everything changed.
When the forces of another religion arrived from the south,
determined to convert all nonbelievers.
They set their sights on the symbolic centre of the pagan world:
Thor's Oak.
During the conversion of the Norse, Saint Boniface came.
He gathered people together and says,
"If Thor exists, if he is so powerful,
"then surely he'll strike me down if I cut down his great tree. "
The Christian account says that a mighty wind then came
and knocked the tree down, and when people saw this,
they perceived it as a miracle and they converted on the spot.
The fall of Thor's Oak was a symbolic turning point in Northern Europe.
To the pagan faithful, it was as if Thor himself was falling,
but it would take far more than this to make them surrender.
The pagans had their own symbol to counter the Christian cross:
Thor's magical hammer.
In the myth, Thor uses it to strike down those who challenge his authority.
But what if the thunder god were to lose his most treasured weapon?
The consequences for both Thor and mankind would be devastating.
In the myth, this is precisely what happened.
For centuries, Thor's hammer was a symbol of power and pride in the pagan world.
In the myth, it shoots lightning and helps Thor vanquish giant monsters.
The hammer is so important because it separates humans from everything else,
and it gives power that you have from tools,
power that you couldn't have with only your bare hands,
no matter how strong they were, and that's really important about Thor.
As strong as he is, he still needs his hammer.
In one pivotal story, the thunder god loses his prized weapon.
Without it, he is powerless to take on the giants that threaten the Earth,
and the fate of humankind hangs in the balance.
In the palace of Valhalla, sanctuary of the Norse gods
a ghastly ogre king quietly invades Thor's bedchamber
and steals his hammer.
The ogre knows that without it, Thor is helpless,
and he plans to use it as blackmail.
When his hammer gets stolen,
that's a stripping away of that human level of culture and technology
that separates you out from the animals.
So Thor wakes up one morning,
gropes around, discovers that he is missing his hammer,
so who does he go to first?
Strangely enough, he goes to Loki.
Loki is Thor's servant, but he is also a god.
He is crafty, conniving,
and says he knows exactly who stole the hammer.
He sets out for the land of the ogres to get it back.
There, Loki meets with the ogre king, Thrym,
and the king names his price.
And Thrym the giant says, "I have taken Thor's hammer and I have hidden it
"and no one will find it unless they give me Freya as a bride. "
Freya, of course, is this beautiful, sensuous goddess of love,
fertility, and sex, and the giants, the dwarves, everybody wants her.
Freya is also Thor's sister.
When she hears what the ogre wants, she refuses to surrender.
But something must be done to get Thor's hammer back.
Well, his hammer is one of his identifying features.
His hammer is what he uses in order to kill the giants.
Without his hammer, the gods are in trouble.
The people are in trouble.
Everyone's in trouble without Thor's hammer.
The gods call a special meeting to discuss the crisis.
They agree on a risky strategy:
To dress Thor up as his sister
and send him as the bride instead.
"We'll put the bridal gown on him,
"put the veil over him, and we'll send him down disguised as Freya,
"and then perhaps he can get the hammer and come back. "
Thor is very upset at this.
Thor is the super macho uber-masculine god
and was not about to, you know, go in drag.
But Thor has no other choice.
He gives in and puts on Freya's bridal outfit.
Only his red eyes are visible beneath the veil.
Well, now this is very comical, isn't it?
Here we have the big, macho god who's gonna now dress in women's clothes.
What exactly is Thor's hammer?
It is the symbol of his masculinity,
and in a sense, it's also a phallic symbol,
and of course Thor's now lost this symbol of his masculinity,
and so now he has to become the opposite.
He has to become a woman because he's no longer able to be a man.
With Loki at his side, Thor heads for the land of the giants.
The thunder god is not the most radiant bride,
but to get back his precious hammer, he must swallow his pride.
Thrym sees him coming and says,
"Ah, Freya, the only thing lacking in my world is Freya, and here she comes,"
so the first thing they do is have a party, and Thor eats all the food.
And then, of course, "she" drinks all of the beer.
Thor's binge immediately raises suspicions.
How can a blushing bride be such a drinker?
And Loki says, "Oh, no, don't worry about it.
"The bride just traveled for eight days and nights.
"She's really, really thirsty. "
But when Thrym takes a closer look at his bride-to-be,
he notices that her eyes are red and fiery.
Thrym jumps back and says, "What's going on with Freya's eyes?"
And Loki, again, quick with the answer, says,
"Oh, well she hasn't slept in a week either. She was so excited to get here. "
"Okay," says Thrym.
Finally, the king is convinced
and hands the magic hammer to his bride.
In an instant, the hammer fully restores Thor's power.
The thunder god is back with a vengeance.
This is the myth, but what is the reality?
As Christian armies fought their way north in the first millennium AD,
the Norse drew inspiration from this story of Thor's resurgence.
When Christianity was being forced upon people,
the idea of Thor and the symbolism of Thor
presented some kind of pagan resistance movement
to the overambitious attempts to baptize people.
The Christians had the upper hand in wealth, weapons, and men,
but the pagans were prepared to fight to the death.
The stage was set, the battle lines drawn.
The armies of Christ would take on the followers of Thor
for the souls of Northern Europe.
The armies of Christ against the followers of Thor.
The prize: Control of Northern Europe.
This is not a mythical showdown. It actually happened.
For 300 years in the dark ages,
kings and chieftains across the continent collided on the battlefield.
Gradually, the Christians fought their way north into pagan Scandinavia.
By the 11th century AD,
the front lines reached the Swedish kingdom of Uppsala,
home to some of the last surviving followers of Thor.
There, every nine years, the pagan faithful
engaged in a bizarre and bloody ritual to honour the thunder god.
At this time, both men and animals were sacrificed to Thor
and their carcasses were hung up around the temple and in the trees.
It was quite a grisly ritual.
In the late 11th century,
this practice was challenged by Sweden's new king,
a Christian named Inge the Elder.
When Inge came to power, most of his subjects still worshipped Thor,
but he was determined to change that.
He enforced Christianity
and ended the sacrifice of horses and other animals
and forbid the pagan rites, and his people did not like this very much.
Among the pagan holdouts in Inge's kingdom
was his own brother, Blot-Sweyn.
He seized on the religious unrest and made a play for power.
And we see this clash between them,
where we have the Christian brother trying to impose Christianity
but his pagan brother driving the Christian brother into exile.
Initially, the pagans succeeded,
but a few years later, Inge regained the upper hand
with a surprise attack on the pagan temple.
By force and fire, Thor's followers were defeated,
and the Christians claimed Sweden.
Conflicts like this occurred in kingdoms throughout Northern Europe.
Today the scars of these clashes can still be seen.
In the Swedish town of Uppsala, there is a Christian church
with foundations that date back to the 11th century,
the same period when king Inge burned down the pagan temple.
The church may even have been built
directly over the ashes of that temple as a symbol of Christianity's triumph.
People who are used to going to those places to celebrate their old religions
will now come to the same places and celebrate the new religion,
and that was in line with what had happened all across the area
when the conversion to Christianity came.
Adjacent to the Christian church,
there is a series of pagan burial mounds dating back to the dark ages.
It's believed that this is the largest pre-Christian gravesite in Sweden.
Mounds like these can still be found throughout Scandinavia.
Many have been excavated,
and they often turn up an unmistakable symbol of Thor,
small hammer amulets.
They were often cast in bronze and worn around the neck.
These amulets are identifying markers that either "I still believe in Thor,"
or worn as sort of a representation of trying to evoke
the power of these gods in particular circumstances.
These artifacts demonstrate the power of Thor's myth in the ancient Norse world.
To the Norse, Thor's appeal was in his humanity.
He was a god, but he also had weaknesses.
He possessed strength and courage but also uncontrollable rage.
And just like humans, Thor struggled with his own limitations.
He's not always the brightest.
He is strong and brave and courageous, and he defends mankind,
but he can be deceived,
and usually the things that deceive him
are the same things that deceive us.
In the myth, Thor's shortcomings
are revealed in his struggles with the giants,
who symbolize an unconquerable foe:
The wrath of nature.
Nature was very much a threatening force.
Nature was a thing that could betray you.
Nature was what was out to get you.
So all of these stories are meant to show Thor
as the champion of man,
but even in the face of forces of nature, he will lose.
In one story, an ogre king named Utgard-Loki seeks to humiliate Thor,
so he assigns him three impossible tasks,
each secretly tied to the forces of nature.
The first challenge is to drink a horn full of ale.
It seems easy enough until Thor tries it.
And he drinks with all his might,
and he seems to be barely able to change the level of the ale in the horn.
He's very surprised and a bit embarrassed about this.
After all, you know, a god as lusty as Thor
ought to be able to down at least one horn of ale.
The thunder god has failed his first task,
and the next is even tougher.
Thor is told to lift the paw of a giant cat.
And so Thor says, "Well, of course I can. "
He's trying to lift this cat off of the ground.
He can barely get one paw off of the ground.
Now this is getting embarrassing. If he can't lift a cat, what is wrong?
Strike two.
Perhaps Thor is not so powerful after all.
With his reputation on the line,
the thunder god faces his final challenge.
He must wrestle a feeble old woman.
Utgard-Loki, again laughing,
and the other giants laughing at Thor's discomfiture, says,
"Well, we'll try an easy one then.
"Here is this old lady. Can you wrestle an old lady and beat her in a fight? "
As he prepares to pounce...
Thor is overpowered.
The ogre's plan has worked.
Thor is humiliated.
The king now reveals his secret.
Utgard-Loki explains what's happened.
"Thor, you were drinking from a horn, but the horn was set into the sea,
"so there was no way you could drink from the entire sea.
"Secondly, I asked you to pick up my cat.
"Well, the cat was the Midgard serpent.
"Who can pick up something that rings the Earth?
"And thirdly, I asked you to fight with my grandmother.
"Well, that wasn't just my grandmother, that was old age,
"and who can defeat old age? None of us can. "
Thor flies into a rage when he discovers the trick.
But the king instantly vanishes into thin air.
Utgard-Loki has used magic to trick Thor.
This story shows the contest between Thor's brute strength
and the giant's dark, magical powers.
To the ancient Norse, this story demonstrated that even the gods
can't overcome the awesome power of nature.
According to Norse belief,
Thor would battle nature's evil ogres until the end of time,
then one final epic clash
would unfold between the forces of order and chaos.
It would be called Ragnarok, the Viking Armageddon.
As Ragnarok's apocalyptic events unfold,
the entire Earth will erupt in tremors, the sun will darken,
and a bitter winter will grip the Earth for three full years.
Not only will, you know, fire begin to consume everything,
but mountains will begin to fall into the sea.
There will be great earthquakes and terrible floods.
Ragnarok paints a grim picture of mankind's final fate,
but it isn't entirely unique.
Many cultures throughout the ages have predicted a catastrophic doomsday:
Nostradamus,
the ancient Maya,
even the Romans.
And there is one ancient text that predicts an eerily similar end of days:
The Bible's Book of Revelation.
The similarities between Revelations and Ragnarok
are in the area of weather phenomena
and monsters rising from the deeps and from the sky
and the destruction of physical world
and the bringing together of all the people who've ever existed,
bringing their souls together and judging them.
Ironically, despite centuries of bloody conflict between Christians and pagans,
their final prophecies are intertwined.
But while the Christian and pagan apocalypse stories may have similarities,
in one respect, they are dramatically different.
In Ragnarok, the gods die.
Ragnarok, the final chapter in Norse mythology:
It is the ultimate clash between order and chaos.
Ragnarok is the great battle between the giants and the gods
and, really, all the bad guys and all the good guys.
Everything is brought into disarray.
Everything is brought into chaos,
and every god meets his antithesis in his opposite.
It is a cataclysmic battle.
Everything that would be normative in the world will be turned upside down.
This seismic clash will culminate in a long-awaited showdown:
The thunder god, Thor,
against his arch nemesis, the Midgard serpent.
Thor's been itching to fight this Midgard serpent ever since it was created,
and finally, he gets his chance.
This time, there's nobody interfering.
It's just straight-up mayhem between the two of them.
The Midgard serpent wraps its coils around Thor
and is squeezing the life out of him, but Thor has on his belt,
which gives him the extra strength,
the power that he needs to even lift his own hammer,
and so he's able to break free of the coils.
After a vicious back-and-forth struggle, Thor lands a fatal blow,
but in a cruel twist of fate,
he is exposed to the lethal venom that drips from the serpent's wound.
Thor will pay the ultimate price for his victory: his life.
So these two arch adversaries
who have been at each other throughout the mythic cycle
finally destroy each other,
and we have the meeting of chaos and order canceling each other out.
According to the myth, when Ragnarok unfolds,
the world as we know it will come to a terrifying end.
All the gods, giants,
and most of mankind will die along with Thor.
In the aftermath of this,
the only thing that survives is the world tree,
and within it, a man and a woman have hidden.
The grass grows again and they meet on the plain where Asgard had been,
and they set about creating a new cosmos.
A Viking Adam and Eve.
Strangely, the end of Norse myth bears a striking resemblance
to the beginning of the Bible,
but this is more than a coincidence.
When the Ragnarok myth was finally written down in the 13th century,
Christianity was already firmly rooted in Northern Europe.
To help sway Europe's pagans,
Christian missionaries made Norse mythology
a prequel to the Old Testament.
The Norse gods die, and Adam and Eve are born.
We can see Ragnarok as looking at the end of the pagan world,
and obviously, after this great devastating and destructive event,
then a new world can come and Christianity will arrive.
So even though this is the doom of the gods they kind of wipe the slate clean.
Now there's a fresh start in a paradisiacal world,
and in this beautiful world, there's a chance to start afresh
and to do things properly and to be good.
This was a way that you could get the old Norse as the backstory
and get it to mesh with the Christian idea
that there was an Adam and Eve and a beginning and so forth.
As Christianity consumed the Norse world,
the followers of Thor went underground for good.
The cult of Thor seemed to fade as the Christian conversion of the north
began to really take hold.
The conversion itself took centuries
to really fully penetrate to everyday custom and belief.
So it was a slow sunset for Thor's religion.
Centuries after the Christian conversion,
Thor's legacy quietly lives on.
The fifth day of the week,
Thursday, is named after him.
It is Thor's day, and he endures in popular culture
as a comic book and movie hero.
But centuries ago,
Thor was far more than a footnote from a lost religion.
He was the divine protector of the world's most terrifying warriors.