Thor’s Hammer, Swastikas, and Me

While my resurrection of Thor’s Hammer in my Ethan Gage novel “The Dakota Cipher” was not quite as lucrative as the reported ohmigosh quarter-of-a-billion dollars the movie “Thor” took worldwide in its opening weekend, it is evidence of art sharing art.

Not only is Thor in both “The Dakota Cipher” and the unrelated movie, he turns up in a line from my upcoming novel “Blood of the Reich,” being released June 28. That’s because of the god’s identification with the swastika, a symbol omnipresent in human culture long before the Nazis came along.

The more I learn of history, the less it seems like a linear strand and more like a woven web.

Neither my books nor the Thor comic books that inspired the movie invented the Norse hero, of course. But all writers draw from the same global well. The god of thunder excited me as a boy, especially his mighty hammer Mjolnir. The weapon smote enemies with thunder and lightning before returning to Thor’s fist like a boomerang.

Better than a light saber, no?

In the movie, the god Thor finds himself in modern times. In my book, a very odd and powerful hammer is found by Ethan Gage in the wilderness of western Minnesota in 1801, as evidence that Norwegians reached the area at least 130 years before Columbus “discovered” America.

To my knowledge, the comic book Thor is thorough (and thoroughly entertaining) fiction. My story, however, is based on a real historical dispute that dates back more than a century to the discovery of a runestone, or stone carved with Norse letters, called runes.

The stone, found near Kensington, MN, in 1898, suggests that post-Viking voyagers made it all the way to the middle of North America, a claim historians and forensic archeologists have been arguing about ever since.

Regardless of who is right, in “The Dakota Cipher” the righteous Magnus Bloodhammer drags Ethan along in pursuit of this idea. My use of Thor’s hammer at the site is pure fiction, but it certainly provides an “electrifying” climax for the book.

Coincidentally, Thor shows up again in “Blood of the Reich” when Nazi SS Chief Heinrich Himmler informs my villain that the swastika is a symbol of the god Thor. This idea was not original with Himmler. It was claimed by Nazi theorists and apparently argued by English antiquarian Hilda Ellis Davidson, among others. It was observed that the hammer shape can be seen in the hooked cross symbol common in early Celtic and Germanic culture. Some have suggested the swastika even represents a spinning hammer.

This doesn’t mean the Nazi symbol originated with the Norse god. The swastika is very old, dating at least back to the Bronze Age, and is still a common symbol in Buddhist and Hindu art. It may have been invented in the Indus Valley of India or in several places simultaneously, since basket weaving provides a swastika-like pattern. Hitler knew a powerful symbol when he saw it, and dipped into the global well himself.

Thor, presumably, would not be amused.

In any event, it’s great to see Thor getting some screen time. And great to see that my own interest in the old myths and their symbols is clearly shared around the world.