A 1,000-year-old amulet of Thor's Hammer found in Sweden shows the lasting popularity of the ancient Norse deity, who has now won a new audience with Chris Hemsworth's portrayal of the Viking god of war in Marvel movies.
A 1,000-year-old amulet of Thor's Hammer discovered in Sweden shows the lasting popularity of the ancient Norse deity, who has now won a new audience with Chris Hemsworth's portrayal of the Viking god of war in Marvel movies.
Archaeologists unearthed the amulet over the summer during excavations near the southwestern town of Ysby, Per Wranning, the head of archaeology at the Cultural History Museum in Halland County , told Live Science in an email. The region faces Denmark across the strait between the North Sea and the Baltic, which for centuries has been called the Kattegat —"cat's passage" — because it is dangerously shallow.
It's cast in metal and has intricate embossed designs on its upper face; and it may have been gilded or silvered, but the archaeologists won't be sure until it's been properly cleaned and preserved, he said. Such amulets might have been worn during the religious transition of the region at the end of the Viking Age as a symbol of adhering to the old Norse gods, rather than to the"new" religion of Christianity.
Although the other treasures included a ship that could fold up and be placed in a pocket, and the gold-bristled, glow-in-the-dark boar called Gullinbursti that could be ridden into battle, Mjölnir was judged the most marvelous and was given to Thor for his wars against the giants, she said. Thor was also a god of the weather, and through that association he was a god of seafaring."If you're sailing from Norway to Iceland, you want decent weather, you don't want a storm — and Thor is very much connected with that," Larrington said.
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