THOR AND THE GIANT'S BRIDE

by Riti Kroesen - Leiden

When the first Scandinavian settlers arrived in Iceland, there was one god, whom they loved and worshipped above all others: Thor. The testimony of the Islendinga Spgur is abundantly clear on this point. Though we cannöt deal extensively with it here, these texts are amply supported by other evidence, both direct and indirect, Icelandic as weIl as non-Icelandic. It seems that in the beginning Thor was revered more than the other gods in at least large parts of Scandinavia.1 On the other hand, we have the stories of the two Eddas2, in which Thor generally plays a subordinate part and even cuts a sorry figure; sometimes he seems to be present only as a source of fun for both gods and men due to his silliness and lack of brains. His rashness is apt to cause hirn continual trouble, and his enormous appetite makes everybody shudder. But true - he is still the best fighter of all the gods - and he is the most htmest of them all, one might like to add. In the Eddas, Odin is the most important and in some in- stances the omnipotent god, the father and king of all gods and men. The explanation of this, which has often been given before, is that Odin must have pushed Thor to the background, at least in court-circles. Odin, the old god of war and death, was the protector of both the Danish and Norwegian kings - the latter from the southern part of Norway and like their Danish colleagues

1. Helge Ljungberg, Tor. Undersökningar i indoeuropeisk och nordisk religionshistoria, Uppsala universitets Ärsskrift 1947,9. Jan de Vries, Sur certains glissements fonctionnels de divinites dans la religion ger• manique, Kleine Schriften, Berlinl965, pp. 151-161 Magnus Olsen, Hedenske kultminder i norske stedenavne, Bd. I. Skrifter utgitt av Det Norske Videnskaps Akademi i Oslo, Hist.-ftlos. Klasse, 1954,4, Oslo. 2. Quotations are from the poetic Edda, ed. Gustav Neckel/Hans Kuhn, Heidelberg 1962; prose Edda, ed. Finnur Jonson, Copenhaguen 1900. Quotation from skaldic poems are from Den norsk-islandske Skjalde• digtning B I, Copenhaguen 1915. 60 mainly war-kings - and the poetry of the eIder Edda, from which the stories of Snorri Sturluson were mainly de• rived, must have originated in a courtly atmosphere. Odin be• came the god of the courtly skalds too, though their skaldic poems still testify of their attachedness to Thor. All sources agree on one point: Thor is an indefatigable fighter and slayer of giants. As such he is the great protector of poor helpless human beings. He protects them from the dark destructive forces of existence, which threaten to make every• day life impossible. As a fighter and hero he acts alone; he does not lead an army nor does he want booty. Ljungberg has put forward the opinion that in the beginning Thor was not only a thundergod and a skygod but much more that that: the universal god of heaven or his son3. His ideas attractive as they are, cannot be discussed here. I will only mention the fact that, according to Adam of Bremen, Thor was seated in the centre of the famous temple at Uppsala, with Odin and Frey at his sides. Usually the middle seat is the seat of honour, so this suggests to us, that Thor is more im• portant than the other gods. His slaying of giants, Le. monsters, is in complete agreement with this. Monster-slaying gods and heroes are found in mytho• logies all over the world and they are universally revered. We might mention Indra, Marduk, Mithra, Zeus, Apollo among the gods, Herac1es, Perseus, Theseus, Beowulf, Sigurdr/Sieg• fried and the Christian St. George among the heroes. Here one might think also of heroes of quite a different stature: the heroes of the European folktale. (The term ''folktale'' is preferred here above "[airytale", as there are no fairies in these stories). Some folktales possess an undeniable affinity with mytho• logical stories and heroical sagas. It is very difficult to assess their exact place and value as compared with the other genres, because they were not recorded in a systematic way until the beginning of the 19th century4. They have been delivered to

3. Ljungberg , op. cit. pp. 9-36. 4. The problem of the relationship between myth, heroical saga and folktale was treated by lan de Vries, Betrachtungen zum Märchen, be• sonders in seinem Verhältnis zu Heldensage und Mythos, Folklore Fellow Communications (FFC) 150, Helsinki 1954; id., Heldenlied en heldensage, Aula, Utrecht/Antwerpen 1959, Chapter XI-XII, pp. 194-222.