Episode 15 - Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones

Once upon a time, Thor made a journey into jǫtunheimr without his magic hammer. Or at least, that's one version of the story. So along the way he had to make due with other weapons. But do these other weapons preserve a more ancient memory of the thunder god's arsenal? And by the way, has Mjǫllnir always been a hammer? Let's dig in together.

Sources:

• “Agricola’s Ukko in the light of archaeology: a chronological and interpretive study of ancient Finnish religion” by Unto Salo, 1990
• “Dictionary of Northern Mythology” by Rudolf Simek, 2010
• “Encyclopedia of Russian & Slavic Myth and Legend” by Mike Dixon-Kennedy 1998
• “Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic” by Guus Kroonen, 2013
• “Gesta Danorum” transl. by Karsten Friis-Jensen and Peter Fisher, 2015
• “Hamarinn Mjǫllnir: The Eitri Database and the Evolution of the Hammer Symbol in Old Norse Mythology” by Katherine Beard, 2019
• “Herkuleskeule und Donar-Amulett” by Joachim Werner 1964
• “How Thor Lost His Thunder” by Declan Taggart, 2018
• “In Search of the Indo-Europeans” by J.P. Mallory 1991
• “Lithuanian Mythology” by Gintaras Beresnevičius
• “Shepards' crowns, fairy loaves and thunderstones: the mythology of fossil echinoids in England” by Kenneth McNamara 2007
• “The History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen” transl. by Francis Tschan, 2002
• “The Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore” by Christian Blinkenberg 1911
• “The Poetic Edda”, transl. by Carolyne Larrington, 2014
• “The Prose Edda”, transl. by Anthony Faulkes, 1995

Contact:

• Write in: waelhraefn (at) gmail (dot) com
• Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/Nvw5hmkRsW

Music:

Celebration by Alexander Nakarada (www.serpentsoundstudios.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/