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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 6681373" data-attributes="member: 6683613">Come on, dude, lighten up.  At the risk of stating the obvious:  there is no "real Thor".  I could be pedantic and point out that it's actually spelled Mjǫlnir and it's actually spelled Þórr.  But that would be stupid of me, because they're not  actually spelled that way; those are the standard spellings in modern  texts, but spelling in the actual Viking Age wasn't standardized at all. Nor was the folklore itself. We get a rather false impression of what Norse mythology was like because we have exactly one major source -- and even that source, I remind you, was only written down a couple of centuries after Scandinavia was Christianized.  Do you think the actual pagan Norse held the stories of Snorri as "canonical"?  Snorri hadn't even been born yet!In short, there's more than one way to imagine the Magic Thunder Man.  And varying interpretations of traditional figures and stories are what  give a folklore richness and texture.  Sherlock Holmes, for example, is  very much better off for being played so differently in parallel by  Benedict Cumberbatch, Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Downey, Jr., and now Sir  Ian McKellen.  There is no "real Holmes" just as there is no "real Thor" -- and that's a good thing.</blockquote>