Thor

Thor is Mjolnir's wielder and the gods' chief defender against the giants, traveling by chariot pulled by two goats he can slaughter and restore. The poem Hymiskvida, preserved in the Poetic Edda, tells a different kind of confrontation, one fought from a boat rather than a chariot. Traveling to the giant Hymir's hall under the pretext of borrowing a great cauldron, Thor takes a fishing trip out to sea with his reluctant host, having first killed one of Hymir's prize oxen for bait by tearing off its head. Rowing farther out than Hymir wants to go, Thor baits his line with the ox head and hooks Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent, the monstrous offspring of Loki. Thor hauls the serpent's head up to the boat's edge and raises his hammer to kill it on the spot, and the poem gives two endings depending on the source, in one Hymir cuts the line in terror before the blow lands and the serpent sinks back into the sea, in another Thor strikes and the serpent survives regardless, setting up their final battle at Ragnarok. Either way, the episode is the one story in the corpus that puts Thor's and Jormungandr's fated final combat on display in miniature, centuries before it is due to happen.

The atlas records Thor's veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult, and the same eleventh-century account of the Temple at Uppsala already used for Freyr and Frigg in an earlier band names Thor as the most prominent of the three idols standing inside it. Adam of Bremen describes three images enthroned together, Thor at the center, holding a scepter and flanked by Wodan (Odin) in armor and Fricco (Freyr), and states plainly that of the three Thor was reckoned the mightiest, invoked above the others in times of plague or famine, exactly the everyday crises a farming population would have prayed hardest against. The temple's own festival, held every nine years, is described as drawing worshippers from across the whole of Sweden. Modern scholarship treats Adam's account with caution, since he wrote at a Christian remove from the practices he describes and some specific details are disputed, but his placement of Thor at the physical and devotional center of Scandinavia's most famous pagan temple is consistent with the wider pattern historians read across the region's surviving place names, where compounds built on Thor's own name vastly outnumber those built on any other Norse god's, a popularity in everyday naming that Uppsala's own arrangement of its three idols reflects exactly.