Phil used to post a Friday Fight every week in this space, so I was amused when Floyd at Threedonia posted a “Friday Night Fight” this afternoon. Even more amusing, it’s this clip from a TV movie, “Hulk vs. Thor.”
Marvel Comics’ Thor was always a dilemma for me. I only saw a few issues as a kid, and I was grateful that they paid some lip service to actual Norse mythology. But they made Thor a blonde, and shaved off his beard. (A friend told me that he understood that the artist had determined from the first that he wanted Thor to wear a red cloak, and red hair would have tended to bleed into that. I say that if you prioritize wardrobe over authenticity, you must be gay.)
Aside from the aforementioned cosmetic problems, the big change Marvel made was to make Thor bright. The Thor we meet in the Norse myths does not have what you’d call an analytical mind. He solves problems by a) hitting things with his hammer, or b) getting help from a smarter friend.
Historically, this may be a residue of class prejudice. The myths as we have them come from Viking Age poems. These poems were written by poets (skalds) who congregated around royal courts and made their fortunes by their language skills. They were intellectuals. Odin, being a god of poetry, attracted their worship, and they gave him credit for high intelligence. Thor, on the other hand, was the popular god of the common people, and the skalds portrayed him as a country rube. I suspect the farmers had other myths which portrayed Thor in a more positive light, but they didn’t get into poems that have come down to us.
The Norse gods have been something of a challenge for me in my fantasy novels, and Thor in particular. I try to follow orthodox Christian theology in my presentation of the supernatural. Christianity has generally considered heathen gods to be either a) a delusion, or b) demons (“No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God….” 1 Corinthians 10:20). It works best for fantasy purposes to treat the old gods as existent beings.
Odin’s easy. He’s smart, crafty, a liar, and it’s no stretch to imagine him as completely evil.
Thor is harder. It’s hard to envision a dumb demon.
So when I gave him a scene in The Year of the Warrior, I pretty much played him as what he is in the myths—sort of a force of nature, powerful and dumb. I cast him in a comic scene, which I think was just as corrosive to his worship as demonization.
As you have seen below, we’ve been tagged for a “Creative Writer” Blogger Award. The rules are”