look closer

Mjölnir at the top of the swing. Thousands of hammer amulets have come out of the ground across Scandinavia and the Danelaw.

Odin gets the poetry and Thor got the people. The evidence is in the ground and in the phone book: thousands of small hammer amulets recovered across Scandinavia and the Danelaw, place names built on his, and personal names by the cartload, Thorstein, Thorbjorn, Thorgeir, Thora, still in use. He was the god of weather and of the working day, invoked by farmers who needed rain and sailors who needed less of it, and his job in the myths is straightforward: 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 announcing a Christian Denmark on a rock, Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson pushing it through Norway with a directness that got one of them killed and both of them into the sagas. Iceland's version was the strangest and the most Icelandic, a legal ruling at the Althing in the year 1000 in which the assembly's law-speaker retired under a cloak for a day and a night, came back, and declared that everyone would be Christian, with private sacrifice permitted for the time being. What the transition actually looked like sits in a museum in Copenhagen: a soapstone mould from Trendgården in Jutland, cut so that a smith could cast a Thor's hammer and a Christian cross side by side in the same tool, in the same pour. Whoever made it had customers on both sides and no interest in the theology of either. Amulets of that period turn up which can be read as either, depending on which way up you hold them. Mårten Eskil Winge painted Thor in 1872 for a Sweden busy inventing a national past, and gave him everything at full volume: red beard, the goats, the hammer up, lightning, giants going down under the wheels. It hangs in Stockholm. The mould from Trendgården is four centimetres long and does more explaining.