The Hammer of Thor

Mjolnir is the hammer of Thor, the thunder god of Norse myth, and one of the most storied objects of the Eddas. In the myths it is a weapon against the giants that always strikes its target and returns to the hand, forged by the dwarf brothers Sindri and Brokkr with a handle left short because Loki, disguised as a fly, bit the smith's eyelid at the crucial moment. It is not only a weapon but an instrument of blessing and consecration: the Poetic Edda poem Thrymskvida tells how the giant Thrym stole the hammer and demanded the goddess Freyja as ransom, so Thor dressed as a bride and had the hammer laid in his own lap at the wedding feast to reclaim it and use it, a scene in which the weapon simultaneously hallows a marriage and destroys the giants who arranged it.

The Prose Edda has Thor use it to raise his goats from their bones after eating them, and to consecrate Baldr's funeral pyre, so across the surviving sources the hammer functions as much to make holy and to restore as to strike down, a double sense that later Heathen use of the symbol still draws on. The name Mjollnir itself is usually traced to a root meaning to crush or grind, a sense some philologists connect to Slavic words for lightning, such as the Russian molniya, which would make the weapon's name a description of the thunderbolt it stands for, though the derivation is not settled and other readings have been proposed.