Thor? A Space Warrior?

So, I just recently saw the Marvel Comics film Thor. I can definitely say that I had no idea of the Marvel back story for Thor. I wasn't an Avengers comic fan, and my only knowledge of Thor is relegated to my little understanding of Norse mythology and the brief scene in Adventures in Babysitting.

Thor, in mythology is the god of thunder, and by different pronunciations, we get different days of the week in different languages. Historically Thor was written as Thor, Thur, Thonar, Donar, Donnar...some of these variations come from the letter of the alphabet that was used to write the first letter of this god's name. The letter was the Old Germanic form of the Greek theta, the letter for the 'th'sound. In the Old Germanic alphabet, it looks remarkably like a Latin alphabet 'd'. Maybe it's a coincidence. Our day is Thursday, 'Thor's-day'. In German the same day of the week is Donnerstag, 'Donners-tag', 'Donner's-day'. In German, 'donner' is also the word for thunder, so here Thor's name has been used for their word for thunder, and I imagine that in English there's also an etymological connection between the two.

Back to the recent movie. Apparently Asgard is a city on a cloudy asteroid in space, and some kind of spinning transporter shoots people through space to one of the different 'Nine Realms'. There's also a rainbow road, Anthony Hopkins with an eye plucked out, and Natalie Portman playing all gaga with the hulking Thor. I couldn't help but crack up anytime she and him were on screen together. She barely looks like she can remember her lines.

Thor's weapon of choice is Mjlnor, a war hammer. I did some research and learned that actual war hammers would never be as large or as bulky as Mjlnor, and that war hammers developed when armor got better; it was easier to bash a foe when you couldn't pierce his suit.

In the Marvel universe, Thor's hammer is the only object that can dent or otherwise damage Wolverine's adamantium-covered skeleton.

In the movie, it seems like the hammer is a capacitor for energy; it collects it, stores it, and releases it upon demand of the holder of Mjlnor, who it turns out has to be Thor.

This post isn't intended to be a trashing of Thor, because I liked it. I thought the silly space warrior back story was fun, as long as a person takes my brother's advice and leaves their science hat at home.

I was explaining to Corrie while we watched the opening minutes: when you see two kids, one blond and one dark-haired, they're brothers, and the blond kid has the same name as the title of the movie, you know automatically that the dark-haired kid will be the main bad-guy when everyone's an adult.

That's just how American movies work.