The Midgard Servant

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 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.