Þórr in Later Traditions
Rome read Þórr as her own thunderer, and the weekday names say it: Latin dies Jovis became Old English Þunresdæg, German Donnerstag and English Thursday, mapping the Norse god onto Jupiter by function. Medieval writers drew the same parallel differently: Adam of Bremen describes the great temple at Uppsala where 'Thor, the mightiest', sits enthroned between Wodan and Fricco, master of thunder and lightning, and Saxo Grammaticus rationalizes him as a usurping warrior whose hammer-strokes were long remembered. The Hercules comparison recurred as well, since both bludgeon chaos-monsters. Under Christianization the cult left durable fossils: Mjölnir amulets are found in graves beside crosses, and his name survives in hundreds of Scandinavian place-names and in the English weekday. The nineteenth-century romantic revival — and after it, modern Ásatrú — restored him from folklore to godhood, a journey no other Germanic deity travelled quite so far.