Þórr (Thor)

Thor is the strength the Norse world leaned on. Red-bearded, vast-appetited, quick to anger and slow to subtlety, he is the thunder-god who rides his goat-drawn car across the sky and guards gods and men alike against the giants with the hammer Mjöllnir, which never misses and always returns to his hand. Where Odin schemes, Thor simply swings. He wades rivers, out-drinks halls, fishes for the Midgard-Serpent that coils the world, and — in one of the corpus's great comedies — suffers himself to be dressed as a bride to win his stolen hammer back. He is the most beloved of the gods precisely because he is the least godlike: blunt, loyal, enormous, and on humanity's side. At Ragnarök he will kill the World-Serpent and fall nine steps from its venom — strength spending itself utterly against the thing it cannot finally outlast.