Deity · Norse · c. 1270 CE
Thor
Also called Þórr, Donar · also recorded as Ðunor, Thunor, Þunor (per Wikidata)
The defender who kills giants and will meet Jormungandr at Ragnarok. Whatever the poems give Odin, Thor was by far the more widely worshipped.
Well sourced
The god the stories are actually about. Snorri gives him the journey to Útgarða-Loki, where he loses three contests to a giant's illusions — a drinking horn that is the sea, a cat that is the world serpent, an old woman who is old age — and is told afterwards that he did better than anyone had a right to. Adam of Bremen, writing a century and a half earlier and from outside, puts him at the centre of the temple at Uppsala and describes him as the god asked about weather, crops, famine and plague, which is a different religion from the literary one where Odin presides. The hammer amulets in the archaeology are the ordinary version of the same fact. Saxo, writing in Latin for a Christian court, has him beaten in battle by a mortal.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Gamla Uppsala, where Adam of Bremen puts him in the middle of the temple with Odin and Freyr on either side; and the Thórs- place-names scattered across the whole Norse world.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum · c. 1075
- Rank
- Thunderer
- Pantheon
- Norse
- Order
- Norse pantheon
- Base of operations
- Gamla Uppsala, where Adam of Bremen puts him in the middle of the temple with Odin and Freyr on either side; and the Thórs- place-names scattered across the whole Norse world.
- Era
- c. 1270 CE
- Traditions
- Norse
- Placed in
- The Nine Worlds
Traits
- Domain
- Thunder, protection of the enclosure, the fight against giants
- Traditional form
- Red-bearded with the hammer Mjölnir
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
Where Adam of Bremen puts Thor in the middle of the temple, with Odin and Freyr on either side.
59.894, 17.639 · Wikidata Q433032
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Thor, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial3
- malefic1
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
4 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 4 texts that names Thor, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
4 texts spanning roughly 195 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Thor, Thoro, Þórr
Placed at the centre of the temple with a god on either side, and described as the one who governs thunder, weather and crops, invoked against famine and plague rather than in battle. An outsider reporting which god is asked for what is a different class of evidence from a poem, and it puts the sky god at the head of the cult where the literature puts Odin.
Reduced along with the rest, and reduced specifically as a fraud: his hammer and his thunder are attributed to contrivance and to the credulity of the people who accepted them. Saxo also has him beaten in battle by a mortal, which no Norse source would countenance.
The god the anecdotes are about. Snorri gives the journey to Útgarða-Loki, where Thor loses three contests to a giant's illusions — the drinking horn that is the sea, the cat that is the world serpent, the old woman who is old age — and is told afterwards that he did better than anyone should have. It is the fullest surviving Norse story of a god being defeated by trickery and told so.
Fishes for the world-serpent, wins back the hammer from Thrym, and dies of the serpent's venom at Ragnarok.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Identified with Indra
Thunder-wielders who fight the serpent — the Germanic and Indic reflexes of one pattern.
Identified with Zeus
The same comparison drawn to the Greek instead of the Roman. Recorded by Wikidata (P460); not asserted by a text this corpus carries.
Opposes Jormungandr
They kill each other at Ragnarok.
Identified with Perun
Slavic and Germanic thunder gods, both associated with the oak and the thunderstone.
Identified with Shango
Thunder-orisha and thunder-god, both wielding an axe or hammer — a functional parallel, not a historical link.
Identified with Jupiter
The interpretatio romana of the Germanic thunderer; Thursday is his day. Recorded by Wikidata (P460); not asserted by a text this corpus carries.
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
The most continuously present of the Norse gods in ordinary English: Thursday is his day, the hammer pendants worn today by practitioners of Ásatrú copy tenth-century originals, and Marvel's version has been in print since 1962. The comic supplied the modern idea of him more than any Edda did — clean-shaven at times, blond, and speaking a fake archaic English — and it also, in the way of these things, sent a good number of readers to Snorri, where they find the drinking horn that is the sea.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Thor?
Is Thor the same as Indra?
What rank is Thor?
How else is Thor spelled?
What is Thor said to do?
How old is Thor?
Nearest in the corpus
If Thor is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Odin
Allfather · Norse
Hangs himself on the world tree for nine nights to win the runes — a sovereign god who is also a liar, a sorcerer and a chooser of the slain.
Loki
Trickster · Norse
Companion of the Aesir and their eventual destroyer — a figure whose slide toward the demonic is visible within the surviving texts themselves.
Fenrir
The Bound Wolf · Norse
Loki's son, bound by a fetter made of impossible things at the cost of Tyr's hand, and fated to kill Odin when the binding fails.
Freyja
Lady of the Vanir · Norse
Goddess of love and of sorcery who takes half the slain — the other half, not Odin's, which is rarely remembered.
Hel
Ruler of the Dead · Norse
Daughter of Loki, and ruler of the realm that gave English the word 'hell'. Hers is cold, and nobody in it is being punished.
Jormungandr
World Serpent · Norse
The serpent that rings the world and bites its own tail — the Norse entry in the chaos-serpent pattern that runs from Tiamat to Leviathan.
The books behind Thor
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum
Adam of Bremen · c. 1075 · Latin
Read Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum in full ↗The Prose Edda
Snorri Sturluson; tr. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur · c. 1220 · Old Norse
Read The Prose Edda in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Unknown author · Wikimedia file page
The Poetic Edda
Anonymous; compiled in Iceland · 13th c., from older oral material · Old Norse
Read The Poetic Edda in full ↗Cover: Public domain · The Elder or Poetic Edda; commonly known as Sæmund's Edda. Edited and translated with… · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.