MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thor crosses borders generic and temporal from its opening moments, as scientists Jane Foster and Erik Selvig watch an atmospheric disturbance which turns out to be the Norse god Thor cast to earth from Asgard for his arrogance, telling an epic and an origin story at once, with significant recourse to Norse mythology. The film’s medievalism is shown in the interactions between the medieval worlds of Asgard and Jotunheim and the modern Midgard in which Thor finds himself. And if Asgard seems like the Middle Ages with really great technology, it also constructs its medievalism with references textual and structural; the great hall of Asgard references Hallgrimskirkja, Rekjavik’s central church, which itself references a Viking ship. The film, due to its plot and Branagh’s direction, was often called a “Shakespeare Play.” Of course, using Norse Mythology as a kind of poetic imperative that reaches beyond its origins as religion and becomes a methodology for varying kinds of narration is nothing new; it finds its origins in the Prose Edda, in which a Christian author both preserves and rationalizes the function of his people’s pagan history by exploring its utility as poetry. Just as Thor crosses the borders of time and genre, offering a superhero film that tells a Shakespearian story using Norse mythology, so too, does the Edda use the same material as an opportunity to create a uniquely Norse poetics. Early portions of the Edda draw from biblical and classical sources to locate Norse material in a larger literary context, while the end of the text offers a discussion of skaldic and metrical poetry. For Snorri Sturlusson, as for Kenneth Branagh, the mythological past crosses the border into the present in its utility as a literary form that can explore and invigorate contemporary concerns.