Thor’s Hammer as an Instrument of Blessing, Consecration, and Protection

Thor’s hammer was certainly a weapon – the best weapon the Aesir had, in fact – but it was more than just a weapon. It also occupied a central role in rituals of consecration and hallowing.

The hammer was used in formal ceremonies to bless marriages, births, and probably funerals as well.^[5] In one episode from medieval Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, Thor once killed and ate his goats, then brought them back to life by hallowing their bones with his hammer.^[6] (Talk about having your cake and eating it, too!) The medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus records that huge hammers were kept in one of Thor’s temples in Sweden, and that periodically the people would hold a ritual there that involved beating the hammers against some kind of drum that would resound like thunder.^[7] This could have been a ceremony to bless and protect the community and ward off hostile spirits.

Historian Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson provides an excellent summary of the uses of the hammer:

It would seem indeed as though the power of the thunder god, symbolized by his hammer, extended over all that had to do with the well-being of the community. It covered birth, marriage, and death, burial, and cremation ceremonies, weapons and feasting, travelling, land-taking, and the making of oaths between men. The famous weapon of Thor was not only the symbol of the destructive power of the storm, and of fire from heaven, but also a protection against the forces of evil and violence. Without it Asgard could no longer be guarded against the giants, and men relied on it also to give security and to support the rule of law.^[8]

Of all of these consecration ceremonies, the use of the hammer to bless a marriage is especially well-established. The existence of this rite is assumed in the tale of Thor as a Transvestite, where the giants stole Thor’s hammer and he went to retrieve it by dressing as a bride to be married to one of the giants, knowing that the hammer would be presented during the ceremony. When it was presented, he seized it and promptly smashed the skulls of all of the giants in attendance. A Bronze Age rock carving from Scandinavia apparently depicts a couple being blessed by a larger figure holding a hammer, which indicates the considerable antiquity of this notion.^[9] Historian E.O.G. Turville-Petre suggests that part of this blessing consisted of imparting fertility to the couple, which would make sense in light of Thor’s connections with agriculture and the fertilization of the fields.^[10]

These roles of the hammer were inseparable from its use as a weapon to defend Asgard from the giants. As the famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade discusses in The Sacred and the Profane, one of the universal patterns in human consciousness is the concept of the cosmos, a realm defined by sacred time and space, and chaos, a realm defined by profane (ordinary) time and space. The cosmos is typically envisioned as a circle, an island in a sea of chaos.^[11]

In Norse mythology, cosmos and chaos were called, respectively, innangard and utangard. Asgard, the homeworld of the gods, and Midgard, the homeworld of humanity, both have the element -gard in the modern English versions of their names. This suffix (garðr in Old Norse) denoted a fortress or an enclosure, something which was circumscribed by a wall, a fence, or some other kind of boundary to separate it from the areas outside of it. It was a cosmos that was protected against the utangard chaos that surrounded it. The world of the giants was called either Jotunheim or Utgard. Jotunheim simply means “the home of the giants,” while Utgard means “outside of the gard,” just like the more general term utangard. The Aesir, humanity, and their worlds were seen as being innangard, a cosmos, while the giants and their world were seen as being utangard, chaos.

When something or someone was consecrated with Thor’s hammer, it (or he or she) was taken from the realm of chaos and absorbed into the cosmos. It was protected from the ill effects of chaos and its denizens, and sanctified and sanctioned by the social order and its divine models. The profane was banished and the sacred was established.

This pattern is borne out both in the use of the hammer as a weapon and in its use as an instrument of blessing, consecration, protection, and healing. When Thor smote giants with the hammer, he was defending the cosmos and banishing the forces of chaos. When he blessed a marriage, a birth, a field, or a dead person with it, his act had the same religious/psychological significance.

How Thor’s Hammer Was Made

The story of how Mjöllnir came into existence is told in the tale of The Creation of Thor’s Hammer. To briefly summarize:

One day, the trickster Loki was feeling especially “tricksy,” and cut off the long, golden hair of Thor’s wife, Sif. Enraged, Thor was about to kill Loki when the latter swore to go down to Svartalfheim, the land of the dwarves, who were renowned as the greatest smiths in all of the Nine Worlds. There he would obtain a head of hair for Sif that was even more marvelous than the one he had lopped off. Thor consented to this plea bargain.

While in the cavernous smithies of the dwarves, Loki was able to acquire his prize, and, by cunningly challenging several dwarves to prove who was the best smith, he acquired several more treasures for the gods as well. Among these was Thor’s hammer, which was short in the handle because Loki, in the form of a fly, bit the eyelid of the dwarf who was forging it.

When Thor saw the hammer, the finest weapon in the universe despite its flaw, he agreed to let Loki live.

Thor’s Hammer as a Symbol in the Viking Age

It seems reasonable to suppose that the people who wore hammer amulets would have believed that they provided the same benefits as Thor’s hammer in the mythology: protection, consecration, and general blessing.

Intriguingly, Viking Age soapstone molds have been discovered in Denmark and Sweden that have molds for casting both cross and hammer pendants.^[13] What was the thinking behind this? Was this the work of a shrewd, entrepreneurial blacksmith, or of someone who devotedly followed both Thor and Christ, or of someone with some other set of motivations? Such questions are, of course, unanswerable due to the ambiguity and scarcity of the evidence.^[14] One way or another, however, the molds are a clear indication of the parallel usage and symbolism of the hammer and the cross,^[15] as are pagan memorial stones that depict Thor’s head next to the hammer in imitation of the common Christian practice of depicting Jesus’s head next to the cross.^[16]

These amulets and memorial stones also exemplify the coexistence of Christianity and paganism in Scandinavia during the Viking Age, however tense or amicable it may have been in different places and at different times.^[17] As I point out in The Vikings’ Conversion to Christianity, “paganism” and “Christianity” were highly fluid categories during the Viking Age. Many, perhaps even most, people had elements of both religions in their beliefs and practices. Thus, the cross and the hammer could be used simultaneously without apparently causing much of a stir or creating cognitive dissonance. Consider, for example, the grave of a woman buried near the trade town of Hedeby. Her body was adorned with a cross necklace, yet her coffin was decorated with hammers. Likewise, some of the inhabitants of the village of Pollista in central Sweden were buried with both cross and hammer necklaces.^[18]

The fact that the Norse pagans chose Thor’s hammer to symbolize their adherence to their ancestral gods rather than the spear of Odin, the ship of Freyr, the necklace of Freya, the horn of Heimdall, or any of the other available options, is a testament to how preeminent the veneration of Thor was among the common people at the time.