look closer

Thor's fist at the top of the swing, the hammer Mjölnir in it and lightning breaking behind him. Held up like that, the head and the shaft make a cross.

Odin got the poetry and Thor got the people. The evidence is in the ground and in the phone book. About 1,000 small hammer pendants have been dug up, from Scandinavia to Russia. Farms and villages carry his name, and so do people: Thorstein, Thorbjorn, Thorgeir, Thora, all still in use. He was the god of weather and of the working day, called on by farmers who needed rain and sailors who needed less of it. His job in the myths is simple. He stands between people and the giants, and he does it with a hammer. The conversion of the north, when it came, was rarely a debate. It was kings. Harald Bluetooth announced a Christian Denmark on a rock. Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson pushed it through Norway hard enough that both of them died fighting and both of them ended up in the sagas. Iceland settled it in court. At the Althing, the yearly assembly, in the year 1000 the law-speaker went under a cloak for a day and a night. He came back and ruled that everyone would be Christian, with private sacrifice allowed to carry on for the time being. What the change actually looked like sits in a museum in Copenhagen. It is a soapstone mould from Trendgården in Jutland, cut so a smith could cast a Thor's hammer and a Christian cross side by side, in the same pour. Whoever made it had customers on both sides and no interest in the theology of either. Some amulets from that period can be read either way, depending on which end goes up. Mårten Eskil Winge painted Thor in 1872 for a Sweden busy inventing a national past. He gave him everything at full volume: the hammer up, the lightning, the black goats, the giants falling away underneath. King Charles XV bought it, and it is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. The mould from Trendgården would sit in the palm of a hand, and it does more explaining.