Thursdays are particularly nebulous to me. You would think that they’d have a sturdy mid-week character, bracketed by central W and terminal F, but I believe the general rise in three-day weekends and the very fact that Friday is sometimes the last full day of the school or work week and yet other times is the first full day of the weekend (to say nothing of going way back to public school and the frequent Friday half-day hybrids) makes Thursday that much harder to pin down by proximity. Nothing particularly comes to mind when I first think of Thursday, and nothing rushes to fill the void upon further reflection. Sure, there’s an admittedly weak association with good old Must-See-Tee-Vee – I’m as televisually opiated as any other patriotic cable-subscriber. But it’s not as if that goes anywhere interesting, leading to theories of government media manipulation and programming the good stuff on Thursday night so that people will bother showing up to work at all on Friday, if only for the water-cooler discussions, thus giving Thursdays overall the shadowy-paranoia vibe.
It’s as if Thursday is a pale reflection of Tuesday, but where Tuesday is all about the possibilities of wild abandon and riotous unpredictability, Thursday is the time of week anything can happen because it’s a blank gray blob. Thursday doesn’t even get its own proper monogram; the aforementioned W and F are typically found on either side of fourth-place R, or sometimes Th, a gangly lowercase appendage necessitated because life-of-the-party Tuesday has already called dibs on the T.
So, if the only noteworthy characteristic of Thursday is its lack of identifying characteristics, I seem to have set myself up for a short post here. That will never do. Instead, let’s take a little sidetrip into the realm of mythology, which is apt if for no other reason than the fact that, to the Germanic-influenced English speakers we are, today is Thor’s day.
You may have noticed my not-too-infrequent invocations of Thor, as well as other Norse gods and legendary figures, as everything from improvised oaths and cusswords to exemplars of raditude. I really love all kinds of mythology, going way back to age ten or eleven or so, which was when I discovered that if I wrote book reports on the latest pulpy swords-and-sorcery paperback my father had been reading on his commute my teachers would roll their eyes, but if I turned in book reports on Myths of Ancient Greece, they were deemed much more academically worthy. From my perspective they were still both stories about dudes killing monsters, but I was more than willing to exploit a good loophole when I found one.
Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian and Indian mythologies are all fascinating in their own ways, but when I got around to the Norse myths in sixth grade they really resonated. I have a hyper-vivid recollection of reading one particular tale about Thor, which I have no doubt is an extremely inaccurate personal memory, because I’ve replayed it in my mind so many times that it has taken on layer upon layer of my own personality, a modern adult personality that bears little resemblance to the pre-adolescent version of me reading condensed translations of eddas in middle school. Still. Here’s a story about a story, and how I became smitten with the Aesir.
It starts out as fairly standard myth, with Thor and Loki roaming Midgard (Earth) in mortal guise, riding around in Thor’s chariot drawn by Thor’s pet goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr (which translates to Snarler and Grinder, and if you think we are deep into bad-ass territory now, hold on). They stop at a farm for dinner and Thor pulls off one of his stock magic tricks: he tells the farmer to kill the goats and the farmer’s wife to cook them. Thor plans to resurrect the goats from their skeletons in the morning and ride on (he does this all the time) but he doesn’t tell the farmer, his wife, or their son about that part of the plan. He just sternly warns them not to break any of the goat bones while eating dinner.
So, of course, the farmer’s son accidentally breaks a leg bone and when Thor resurrects the goats in the morning one of them is lame, and following the logic of myths the farmer’s son (I honestly don’t remember his name, let’s call him Olaf) is now pressed into indentured servitude and must attend to Thor and Loki on the remainder of their journey.
Thor, Loki and Olaf end up in a land of giants and the giants present themselves as friendly and hospitable but it soon becomes apparent the giants have no intentions of letting the three travelers continue on their journey. Olaf freaks out a little, and Loki starts scheming a way to escape, and Thor mostly just gets annoyed. I find this fairly endearing, the thought of a storm-controlling warrior god becoming just ill-tempered enough to grumble passive-aggressively at everything, like he’s spending the weekend with his wacky in-laws instead of being held prisoner by giants.
Loki comes up with the idea of challenging the giants to contests rather than combat, and the king of the giants accepts, being so magnanimous as to allow the trio to pick the subject of each contest to suit their own strengths and talents. Olaf, with youthful exuberance, volunteers himself to run a footrace, since he considers his swiftness to be his greatest asset. The giants produce their own champion runner, and Olaf ultimately loses the footrace, although just barely. Loki watches this go down and then volunteers himself for an eating contest. Loki assumes he’s probably going to lose the contest, so he might as well get a good meal out of it, and I gotta say, I like where his head’s at there. So the giants lay out this preposterously long banquet table piled high with all kinds of amazing food, set Loki at one end of it and their champ at the other, and start the contest. Loki works his way down the table and ends up meeting his giant opponent at the exact midpoint, which would seem to be a draw, except Loki only ate the edible foodstuffs, whereas the giant ate the bones inside the meat, the seeds inside the fruit, the plates under the bread, and a fair amount of the table surface itself. So Loki loses.
Now the giants turn to Thor and ask him what kind of contest he wants, and he basically says he doesn’t want to play. But the giants press and press asking him what he’s really good at, what he can do absolutely without peer, and finally Thor can’t take the badgering anymore. He growls, “They say that I can drink.”
I didn’t get properly drunk until I was 17 years old, and in fact had a bit of an anti-alcohol bias before that, yet that moment stuck fast in my 11-year-old brain. Partly because it’s faintly hilarious that Thor is essentially using the contest – which for all intents and purposes his life and the lives of his companions depend on – as an excuse to drink. Loki did the same thing to pig out, but you expect that kind of behavior from Loki. Thor is supposed to be the good guy! And he’s their last chance, the third and final contest! And on top of that, he has to be cajoled into it, and when he finally gives in his response is so beautifully understated. (It really doesn’t matter if I’m remembering a translation verbatim or not; these are the words at the crux of my memory so that’s what I’m going to focus on.) It’s not “I can drink you MF’ers under the table!” (At 11 I was still a bit naïve and underinformed, so I wasn’t really aware of the possibility that Thor wasn’t trying to get drunk, but rather suggesting he could drink a lot and stay sober while someone across from him blacked out. Again, I learned more about those kind of drinking contests later in life.) It’s “They say that I can drink,” like he’s too cool to even care about it one way or the other. It’s not even false modesty; it’s utter indifference. That’s how Thor rolls, doing his thunder god thing. To other folks it might seem like he puts an awful lot of mead away every night, but that’s just Thor being Thor. In any case, I just loved the subversion of the heroic concept here. Thor doesn’t nobly rise up to vanquish a threat. He resigns himself to having no choice but to play the giants’ game.
The giants don’t give Thor an opponent, though; they just hand him a gigantic drinking horn and say “Finish this and you win.” Thor tries three times but can’t quite drain the horn. So it looks like all is lost for the trio of travelers.
But at that point the giants reveal how they rigged the three contests. Their runner was actually, literally (following the weird dream-logic of myth) the wind itself. Their competitive eater was fire. And the horn of mead was actually the sea (as the Norse would have understood it, meaning the entire planet’s water supply). So the giants actually respect Olaf for running almost as fast as the wind, and Loki for eating just as quickly as fire could burn through things. Thor, on the other hand, scares the hell out of them. He almost drank the whole world! (This myth just keeps echoing through my life. I woke up some mornings in college feeling like I had drunk the whole world, which is a sensation I do not miss in the slightest. I also had people tell me on occasion that I drank so much the night before I scared the hell out of them. Again, I’m not particularly proud of this, but it’s all part of what makes this myth so personally resonant.) The giants let the travelers go because it has dawned on them that if Thor were to progress from “mildly annoyed” to “screw this, I’m outta here” he would absolutely annihilate them.
I don’t remember if the story keeps going after that or just kind of ends with the trio charioting off, but that’s beside the point, because there’s so much to love in what I’ve permanently lodged in my brain as reflected above. I love that it gave me a version of gods who were not embodiments of Pure Good and Pure Evil, but capable of roadtripping and squabbling along on adventures together. I love that Thor’s stubbornness plays such a central role in both his early refusals to compete and his full-throttle attempt to win once he realizes he has no choice. I love that what ultimately resolves the conflict is just the hint of the raging monster that lurks inside the protagonist-by-default thunder god. If I may reach for my second quotation of this post, this time the immortal words of Nathan Explosion: “That is BRUTAL!”
Although I often find myself wishing for the ability to control the weather and/or the power to smite my enemies, I don’t really want to be the Thor of my favorite Norse myth. When I was little my father used to express to me a certain worry that I might emulate fictional characters I read about who were not, in fact, Good Role Models. I always found it hard to explain that I wasn’t looking for direction, but simply was fascinated by different, interesting ideas. And I suppose to a certain extent I still am. I’ve been thinking about Thor and the giants for a quarter of a century now (on and off) and I still don’t really know what kind of higher instruction one is supposed to get from it, if any (other than that Vikings totally kick ass). That in and of itself was kind of a revelation in sixth grade, after a steady diet of the same morality plays in different stage dressings over and over and over again. Sometimes the moral of the story is that not all stories have morals.
(Kind of like how not all blog posts have a point. Or even a strong conclusion.)
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