Thor is The Champion of The Gods, of Earth and of The Human Race.
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-organised
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 Mjolnir,
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.”
