Character Analysis: Thor Odinson (Part 3

Powers

Stamina

Enhanced Lung Capacity

Thor’s lung capacity is far beyond that of an ordinary human. His lungs can swallow oceans and his voice can echo across all creation in the right place. Even early in his history it’s been noted that he still needs to breathe in some form, but that he and other gods get around the universe so fast they don’t run out of oxygen. Generally, Thor is able to survive in space or underwater to a prolonged degree, but how prolonged is fairly inconsistent. Sometimes he can only handle a vacuum briefly, other times he’s able to have extended confrontations and fights in space with no apparent issue, even when knocked out. Exact figures for how long Thor can hold his breath range from an hour, multiple hours, or even days. Even beyond this, two comics which came only a year apart gave entirely opposite answers on if gods can drown at all, but more modern comics have depicted Thor as being able to have extended fights underwater with no visible struggle, so it shouldn’t be an issue by and large. It’s also been noted that Thor has the ability to speak in space due to being a god and that his Asgardian nature allows him to breathe fine on an alien planet with an atmosphere so thin there wasn’t enough breathable oxygen to sustain the Hulk. Even without Mjolnir, Thor has enough control of his body in space to drift himself in certain directions and reach solid land. Since Thor still needs oxygen to some degree, it is possible to try squeezing the air out of his lungs to weaken him.

As a result of this large air capacity, Thor also has a rarely used super-breath ability. He can breathe whirlwinds at his foes and subdue entire groups of people with hurricane breath. Bizarrely, he was once able to exhale with hurricane force while fading into another dimension, which pierced a dimensional veil before it could be fully closed, allowing Thor to return to the third dimension.

In classic Superman-style, Thor once used his “super-developed vocal chords” to throw his voice and trick a gangster into thinking the police had arrived. Super-Ventriloquism is inescapable.

Super-Senses

Asgardians have naturally enhanced senses, most prominently in their sight and hearing, and Thor is no exception. His eyes are strong enough to stare into supernovas unharmed and precise enough to identify chemicals in his food, while his ear can hear sounds from light-years away. Even beyond just his godly physiology, Thor knows every rock, tree, castle and pillar of all Nine Realms and can recognise them by sight via being Odin’s son. More esoterically, Thor is able to spot and traverse the Bifrost, existing alongside the curvature of the Earth, and even when Hela magically makes the Bifrost invisible, Thor is able to somewhat tell where it is and use it. Gods can also see and detect entities invisible to mortal eyes, and even entities like trolls have shown the ability to see Loki’s astral form. Similarly, Thor has on many occasions displayed some kind of mystical sense which has allowed him to find his loved ones or detect danger.

Sensing

Super-sight

Super-hearing

Super-schnozz

All-Speak

Gods in Marvel bypass language barriers via the All-Speak, a mystical language which lets them understand and be understood by anybody. Whatever Thor says, it will be heard in the language of whoever is listening, though on Thor’s end it doesn’t translate specific slang. Thor has been described as knowing most earthly languages and can instantly understand alien languages upon hearing them, even highly esoteric tongues such as the Builder code language. This extends to different dialects, with Thor speaking all languages on Earth and variations on top of countless alien languages, including languages long dead and hidden from history, allowing him to perfectly slip into Orange County dialect. Thor can also talk to frogs, with all animals understanding and swearing loyalty to Thor. Hercules has similarly used the All-Speak to decipher alien text and, bizarrely, to read the body language of others to win at card games.

Of note is that the actual reason Thor talks the way he does is that Thor and the other Asgardians learned how to speak English from Geoffrey Chaucer, which is why they speak in a Shakespearian manner. Volstagg, meanwhile, learned English from Benjamin Franklin and taught him the secret of electricity.

Resilience and Healing

Asgardians have a high threshold for damage and a superhuman ability to heal from damage received. In the very explicit words of the Marvel handbook, it takes dispersion of a major portion of an Asgardian’s bodily molecules to actually kill him. A completely ordinary Asgardian can survive for 5 minutes after their heart is removed and could even recover if it’s put back in place, seen with Kelda. This healing is enhanced further when Thor wields the All-Power, which lets him instantly recover from severe injuries, though it has been noted that not even the All-Power could let Thor survive decapitation or being ripped to pieces.

That last point is worth harping on, since there’s a few instances one could use to argue Thor having a higher level of regeneration. In one depiction of Donald Blake’s backstory, it was stated that Thor’s spirit “gathered solid matter unto itself” in an instant upon being released in-order to create a new body for himself. With the All-Power, it’s been stated that as long as the All-Power exists in some form, Odin cannot truly die. While Odin has personally been able to heal from getting stabbed and his skull being caved in from a headbutt, at the most extreme, Hank Pym, after Ultron destroyed his body and devoured his soul to leave just an echo in Ultron’s systems, was able to use Odin’s power to reconstitute himself from that echo, body, mind, and soul. Obviously, these are very high-end showings, and it’s most consistent that sufficient physical damage will put down Thor, even with the All-Power.

Healing

Pain tolerance

Thor’s pain-tolerance is immense, able to keep fighting even after being stabbed and having his body parts flayed. He’s been undeterred by having his insides frozen and liver turned into glass, and was able to withstand torture from Gorr the God-Butcher for 17 days straight. While cursed by Hela with immortality, he endured the pain of being hit so hard he was literally jellified.

Immortality

Asgardians are immortal, but not in a conventional sense. They’ve been described by official sources as simply being extremely long-lived and not true immortals like the Olympian gods. Thor himself has said his lifespan is normally endless, with his classic fate being to die in the events of Ragnarok, and Zeus has stated he couldn’t kill Thor due to his fate being transcribed in the Book of Ragnarok. Thor’s exact age is imprecise, but has been called incomputable, which makes sense when you consider that a century passes like a year to the Asgardians.

Of course, the Asgardians can still be killed conventionally, with the Marvel Handbook very precisely noting that an Asgardian will be killed once a major portion of their bodily molecules have been dispersed. Upon death, an Asgardian will typically go to the afterlife of either Valhalla, Hel, or Niffleheim based on the actions they took in life. If these realms are destroyed, Asgardians simply cease to be upon death, and reaching the realms upon death requires the Valkyries to ferry the soul there. Thor has been seen travelling to Valhalla and back while alive and ferrying spirits there. Thor, of course, has also died multiple times, with his soul being in the contention of multiple death gods simultaneously, meaning it’s inconsistent what realm he goes to upon death. He’s been seen going to Hel, Valhalla, and, uniquely, the Limbo-Place, a realm where gods go to die outside of space-time, via a space-time rift on his chest. While in this limbo, Thor began to slowly lose his identity and was about to be consumed by the Demogorge, but was able to recall Mjolnir to him from across dimensions, restoring his identity and allowing him to smash through the Demogorge to return to life. Fafnir once claimed that there needs to be an intact body for the body to be transmigrated to Valhalla or Hel, though this is the only time this ever came up and it doesn’t really make much sense, since it’s explicit that the soul is what’s transported to Valhalla and Hel and not the body, and we’ve seen someone who died in a huge explosion still go to Valhalla.

Another notable example is early on in his history, where, after being killed, a spark of life still existed in Thor, with his astral self rising to confront Hela who was unable to ferry his soul, and he operated as a living wraith to defeat Wrecker. In his astral form, Thor could not be seen or touched. After Hela had departed, Thor was able to re-enter his body and return to life, with his body having grown stronger in the meantime. It’s unclear what exactly happened here or if it would constitute resurrection. I would interpret this as basically being Thor having one more in him as opposed to true regeneration, as it’s later specified Thor was able to resurrect the first time because Hela lost power over him when she turned away, and that Thor can live until he’s mortally wounded again, at which point Hela will claim him. Even with this in mind though, it speaks to the extent of Thor’s survivability.

After All-Father Thor ended the cycle of the gods in Ragnarok, he ascended to a higher plane and went to a well-deserved rest, which took the form of his absence from Marvel’s present-day comics from 2004 to 2007. Despite Thor’s slumber, Mjolnir itself was able to tear through dimensional planes across Hell to reach Earth. Due to Doctor Doom having been touched by the Asgardians’ energies while trapped in Hell, his touching of Mjolnir ‘woke up’ the hammer, and seemed to summon Donald Blake back to Earth, who activated the hammer upon contact. Doing this contacted Thor in the void he was slumbering in, Vidblainn, and Blake managed to convince Thor to return to life. By grabbing on to Mjolnir, which Thor seemed to summon to himself in Vidblainn, he was able to restore his powers, and live again, Blake summoning him back into reality with a strike.

While a soul in Valhalla, there is no exit except for the summons of the All-Father, who can grant leave from it on a whim. If the All-Father ‘kills’ a spirit in Valhalla, the spirit returns to life, at the cost of sacrificing their place in Valhalla and ensuring their next death is a permanent one. Similarly, as Odin built Valhalla and knows its entrance and exit, he could simply walk out of it to return to life at the cost of losing his ability to return to Valhalla. This was also seen earlier on when Odin sacrificed himself to give Thor the full All-Power, his spirit reaching Valhalla, seeing it was empty, and then returning back to life by itself by inhabiting Mjolnir as a vessel. When Thor was acting as the All-Father, Loki suggested Thor could do similarly to return to life upon death, but Thor himself rebuked this by stating that death is a force even he has to bow to, and Sif later noted that while Thor can briefly bring back someone from Valhalla, he cannot resurrect them, as unlike Odin he did not build Valhalla. This was shown to be true at the end of The Immortal Thor, where the All-Father Thor’s death sent him to Vidblainn, now revealed to be a void-land outside all realms from which there is no escape, described as true death for even a god. Notably, when Thor is briefly killed earlier in the run, he is also sent to Vidblainn before being resurrected in the physical world.

Other esoteric methods of resurrecting upon death have been used by denizens of the Ten Realms. Most notably, prior to Ragnarok, Surtur invested a portion of his soul in the Netherworld, allowing him to return to life if he gets through the portal, but Odin stops him every single day, both dying and coming back to life each time ever since Surtur’s death in Ragnarok and up to eternity. As the All-Father, Thor noted he could resurrect Odin’s spirit in the Netherworld if he wanted, specifically noting that anything he can touch he can bring back from the dead, which he later did by smashing his casket (note that by the time he actually did this, Thor had lost the All-Power).

As noted prior, the Asgardians are not true immortals, but seem to operate as such. The reason for this is due to the true source of their immortality, Idunn’s golden apples. These apples are plucked by the goddess Idunn, and provide the gods with their youth. If starved of the apples, the gods will grow old and decay, eventually falling into the death sleep. The apples provide the gods their vitality, and it’s been seen that Thor becomes decrepit rather quickly when deprived of the apples past the point he has to eat them. Eating an apple instantly restores a god’s youth, and has also been shown to grant a god immortality, healing them from fatal wounds. They’ve been described as giving the gods wisdom, youth, vigor, and verve, their divinity and power. The apples also only work on Asgardians (though this has arguably been contradicted on occasion). Eric Masterson has claimed each Asgardian only has one apple corresponding to them at a time.

If you’re wondering why we don’t constantly see Thor scarfing these apples down, it’s because they’re only needed on Asgard. On Midgard, gods remain as true immortals, so Thor doesn’t age while he’s there (though there have been instances of the gods needing the apples on Earth in spite of this). How often an Asgardian needs to consume one of the apples to retain their immortality isn’t clear, but writer Al Ewing has suggested once every 10 years as a possible timeframe, which seems reasonable to me.

Worship and Belief

A consistent and key element of gods in Marvel, even from early in their history, is that their existence and strength is fuelled by belief and worship from others. Odin has explained that gods believe in men while men believe in gods, and that gods only exist because of this belief, meaning gods only have power in the domain of their belief, with the fate of all gods being tied to Midgard. Similarly, Gaea has explained that gods are manifestations of a world’s spiritual life-force given shape and sustenance by the collective consciousness of its highest physical life-form. They draw power from the energy of the human mind, so as long as there is belief or knowledge of a god, they will live. Since belief in Asgard had waned at the time of her saying this, what little was left was not strong enough to survive their recent destruction. Without their followers, a god will ultimately cease to exist. As gods are living stories as opposed to true history, it is the magic of human storytelling which conjures the gods into existence retroactively. This also explains why the history of the Asgardians is so inconsistent and contradictory, as like the myths that created them, the history of the gods is mutable and stories blend into each other. A god’s power is (at least partially) influenced by the plane they are on and the amount of worship they receive there, explaining Odin’s large variances in power. Similarly, magic itself is dependent on belief, described as telling a lie so convincing the universe believes it to be real.

Ironically, Thor is partially an exception to the above. Odin mated with Gaea for the express purpose of creating a son whose strength would not be derived from the same source as his own. As a son of Gaea, Thor has greater strength on Earth than any other god, and a natural affinity for the planet, since he derives strength from the Earth-spirit itself. This means Thor is able to draw power on any plane of reality, even ones where Odin cannot. That said, Thor does still draw power from belief to some degree. While bouncing through time, the Vikings' belief in Thor pulled Eric Masterson Thor into the 9th century, so when they stopped believing him, he disappeared into the early 20th century. The most extreme example of belief affecting Thor occurred during Chaos War, where Thor was physically, spiritually, and psychically torn to shreds by the Glory, and ended up manifesting on Earth in the form of a memoryless Donald Blake. Despite this, an individual woman’s prayer and belief restored Thor from Blake’s form and fully regenerated him, her merging into him as he transformed. It’s specified that Glory ripped apart Thor’s very being, and he only survived due to the woman’s prayer, her belief resurrecting Thor from Blake. As Thor is the most famous god in all creation, known even in the most remote corners of the universe, he certainly isn’t likely to run out of belief any time soon.

Weather Manipulation

While it is more limited without Mjolnir, Thor is still the God of Thunder, and has a natural ability to control the weather via inheriting Odin’s sky-powers. Mjolnir has been described as being what gives him “true control” over his latent abilities. Electricity literally courses through his body constantly, to the point a clone of Thor had electricity in his very cells, and all storms of the world are his to command, with him being able to sense incoming storms. Rainstorms are stated and shown to be capable of restoring Thor’s fading strength, and he’s claimed being hit with electricity just leaves him refreshed. Ironically, some of Thor’s most impressive weather manipulating feats have been when he’s without Mjolnir, with him able to create lightning bolts as big as planets and storms intense enough to shake all of Yggdrasil..

Worth noting is that as the God of Thunder, Jane Foster was once able to move “like lightning”, performing brain surgery on an entire ward of people simultaneously at super speed so fast Doctor Strange couldn’t even see her and melting the scalpels via speed. She says she didn’t know she could move this fast, and it’s suggested to be an ability innate to being the God of Thunder, so it’s unclear if Thor can do the same.

With the All-Power, Thor’s ability is enhanced further, and his intuitive mastery of the storm has allowed him to navigate time storms and has interfered with the storms of other weather manipulators like Storm, able to redirect any lightning thrown at him even from the likes of Zeus. He can also wield lightning as a sword. Odin and others have frequently employed the All-Power’s control over the skies for drastic effects Thor may be able to replicate when he has the All-Power. These include summoning meteor bolts, commanding the bed of the sea to soften, subjecting Absorbing Man to a “molecular cyclone”, Odin’s brothers summoning an arctic storm in Surtur’s domain which freezes his demons, Odin making it rain fire on Svartalheim, and Heimdall summoning meteors from the heavens to smite Thor.

Storms

Wind

Lightning

Earth

Cosmic

Prayer

Thor can pray to summon the visage of those he might need help from, having done this multiple times to call upon Odin to solve a problem, though he can also do it with other beings, even non-gods like Doctor Strange. Thor is also Highly Responsive to Prayers, able to hear those praying to him from across the universe or between dimensions.

Magic

Thor has a few miscellaneous magical spells he’s occasionally used, such as magic to ascertain Asgard’s defenses or collate the corpses of his 8 horses into Sleipnir. Most notably, he once used a spell to make it appear he had slain a troll ally of his to Malekith. This stunt fooled even Thor’s allies. In his own words, he picked up a few tricks from Loki.

Telepathy

During the period he was turned into a frog, Thor telepathically communicated with Moonstar to reassure her. Much later on, after the living planet Alter-Ego consumed part of Thor’s life-force, Thor was able to communicate with the entity inside his head via that shared link. In one story, Thor let himself be consumed by the god-slaying Demogorge, and resisted its absorption to hijack the Demogorge’s body and briefly pilot it until its will overcame him. Only a year later, Thor would reference this incident and describe it as him entering the Demogorge to achieve mental mastery over it. He tried to employ the same tactic again against the techno-organic being Terminus, smashing into his body to achieve mental control over his being, though in this case Terminus managed to resist. So, Thor has some kind of consistent ability to hijack beings mentally from the inside.

Warrior Madness

Warrior Madness is an Asgardian mental affliction, where the victim is consumed by an insatiable bloodlust and loses all control of themselves. This lack of restraint makes them an enormous threat, and any known to suffer it are punished with banishment from Asgard. To humans, it is known as berserker rage. As a viking warrior who’s been in countless battles, Thor has succumbed to the madness multiple times throughout his history, typically when experiencing some kind of reason for emotional outburst (though he has crashed out for no real reason sometimes).

Typically in versus debating spheres, Warrior Madness has been described as a 10x strength multiplier, based on Thor attempting a magical chant to invoke what’s implied to be Warrior Madness (and failing), which he says increases a warrior’s strength “tenfold”. I think this most likely isn’t literal though, Thor is speaking in a pretty poetic manner here and a letters page makes it clear that all the madness actually does is give a boost via hysterical strength, the violent anger and adrenaline giving Thor a constant power boost while under the madness, which is more consistent with its actual showings. It’s also important to note that Warrior Madness isn’t some sort of magical Asgardian-specific state, as it’s been said many times throughout the comics that ordinary humans or other races enter what Asgardians call Warrior Madness when they’re in a berserker rage, meaning it’s simply just what Asgardians call berserker rage in a general sense. Even Jeanne d’Arc has been implied to have been affected by the madness during the Battle of Orleans. While the madness is sometimes referred to as incurable, Thor has managed to free himself of it on his own before.

The most prominent arc the madness has featured in is the Blood and Thunder story arc from the 90s, where Thor was being mentally influenced by his goth gf tulpa called Valkyrie to lose all control, strengthening him in a way which shocked even gods like Pluto as he rampaged through the cosmos. The Valkyrie was a purely mental construct that had no spirit, but had enough hold over Thor’s mind to challenge the Goddess’s mind control during the Infinity Crusade event. Interference from Moondragon briefly turned Valkyrie into a physical being, and she was only merged back with Thor after a psychic battle with Thor’s madness matching the entirety of the Infinity Watch. It took Odin’s intervention to help Thor overcome the Valkyrie in his head and finally free himself of the madness. The reason I’m bringing all this up is that despite being the most prominent appearance of Warrior Madness by a long-shot, it’s revealed at the end of the arc that Thor’s madness actually comes from the instability in his soul arising from Odin having grafted Donald Blake to him, with Odin stating that this isn’t true Warrior Madness and that Thor can be saved. However, later sources still refer to the state Thor was in during this arc as Warrior Madness, which you can chalk to either a retcon or the writer just not knowing about the reveal at the end. Either way that means I have to count it as an instance of the madness.

Occurences

Godblast

The Godblast is well-known in versus debating spheres and is Thor’s most powerful ability, a massive energy blast he can fire from Mjolnir that can threaten and kill cosmic beings like Galactus. Despite that, it’s also incredibly nebulous. The most elaboration it has ever been given is the Marvel Handbook describing Thor as having the power to channel his own godly energies into blasts from Mjolnir powerful enough to slay immortals. The name “Godblast” didn’t even exist until 2011 in Astonishing Thor, where Thor says that through Mjolnir he can fire a Godblast which would render Ego insensate for a time, like he’s done before, and later notes that a Godblast to Alter Ego’s core would render him comatose, with Thor aiming to do the same to Ego after. Writer Jason Aaron would later use this name when answering a fan question.

Despite this, you can generally get an idea of what the Godblast is and when it's actually been used based on context clues. The key tell is Thor’s own dialogue, as he’ll usually give a speech about uniting his “godly life-force” or “strength” with Mjolnir, specifically with the phrasing “hammer supreme”. Its description as drawing upon the source of Asgardian immortality would actually seem to suggest its source of power is Idunn’s golden apples, though this connection has never directly been made in the comics. There’s also an instance of Thor describing it as channeling Odin’s power, which suggests it’s tied to the Odinforce in some form. After saying these sacred chants, Thor fires out a large beam of energy which has threatened the likes of Galactus, Surtur, Ymir, and the Black Winter, and can also close large dimensional rifts on a multiversal scale. Thor once seemed to use a form of the Godblast to drain Loki of his own immortality, permanently killing him (Loki only came back later via a past version of himself being pulled into the present). The Godblast has been stated to heavily drain Thor upon use, but the extent is inconsistent, and he’s used it multiple times without this occurring and has even said he could do multiple in a row. He also doesn’t seem to need Mjolnir to perform one, though it’s unclear how.

Writer Tom DeFalco is the one who really codified the Godblast as being an actual ability, and the majority of the power’s explicit appearances come from his work on Thor. Thor has used the Godblast roughly 11 times throughout his history, typically against large cosmic threats he deems himself otherwise unable to stop, but since the ability is so ill-defined and doesn’t have a solid indicator, there’s multiple edge-cases and instances that may or may not be a Godblast. Given how vague it is, I’ve elected to just list every instance I think is a Godblast occurring in-order and in-full below.

NO. 1: Thor puts Mjolnir on a stand and grasps it, channeling his godly strength through the hammer and unleashing the energy as a blast in a single astro-second. The Asgardian energy engulfs Galactus with force waves which hurl him back and drain his strength. Galactus escapes and says that if he does not flee, he will surely die

Thor says he once beat Galactus, but only by channeling “the power of Odin” referencing the Godblast, and only after Galactus was weakened by hunger and exhausted battling Ego. He doesn’t know if Odin could beat peak Galactus

Gaea Power

Thor’s mother is Gaea, the elder goddess of the Earth itself, and he combines Odin’s sky-powers with his mother’s earth-powers. Thor is naturally attuned to the Earth as a result, able to hear the planet’s screaming, and can call upon her strength to bend the earth around him to his will, such as calling upon Gaea to withdraw a sealed sword within Hell. His connection to Gaea is intrinsic enough that in one instance it even made him more susceptible to earth-based mind control from Morgan Le Fay. With the All-Power, Thor has invoked her power by striking the ground to create a massive chasm between two areas in Africa which stretches across the entire region.

During the events of the Empyre series in 2020, Thor went on an off-screen journey (cause Covid cancelled the book which was supposed to show what Thor was doing) to learn to harness Gaea’s will, and channeled his power to destroy all the Cotati’s magic vegetation growing across the planet. He would then use this power of Gaea to bring life to a dead planet, causing vegetation to grow across it, though it’s said that doing this sacrifices the ability from Thor for good.

Despite this, Thor has still used Gaea’s power since. While later fighting the God Tempest, Thor would call upon Gaea’s power to conjure a massive energy tornado surrounded by rocks. Reed explains that the tornado acts as a barrier which no force on Earth could break through, and Freyja says that as the son of Gaea, the Earth bends to Thor’s knee. Thor would then use Gaea’s power to crush the Mother Storm in a huge prison of rocks and plant life, trapping Mjolnir in its walls.

Phoenix Power

For a good stretch in the comics it was strongly suggested that Gaea being Thor’s mother was a lie, and that his true mother was the Phoenix, the elder goddess of life itself. Ultimately it was revealed that the Phoenix was actually the midwife for Gaea, the Phoenix Firehair having used her power to resurrect Thor when he was stillborn. This resurrection imbued Thor with the latent flame powers of his godmother. Thor has channeled the power of the Phoenix to launch a flame blast at a dark AU version of himself and burn him away, and later used the power given to him by Firehair to fire a massive flame blast, which provided enough power to push back the omniversal tidal wave of the First Firmament. A few pages later it’s noted the Phoenixes are exhausted of their power, though it’s unclear if this applies to Thor. Thor hasn’t been seen using these powers since, likely just due to them stemming from a widely disliked retcon. Also note that Thor has only used these abilities while he had the All-Power, though since they’re a separate power-source he should likely be able to use them even without it, similar to his Gaea-derived abilities.

Runes

Like in myth, runes act as both the Norse alphabet and a form of spell-casting, with individual runes boasting unique esoteric effects. Famously, Odin hung himself upon Yggdrasil to gain all the knowledge in the world and mastery over the runes. While the Odinforce comes from Odin’s mastery over the runes, writer Al Ewing has said he envisions the Odinforce and rune-magic to be two separate things. Thor would later do this ritual himself during the climactic events of Ragnarok. The runes are described as magic called Seid which can divine the future and cast spells. The magic of the runes and wisdom from Mimir’s well gave Thor the power to know the past, control the present, and guide the future, seeing through the veil of time past quantum structure, seeing the future of all things, and ultimately realising Odin sent him to Earth to end the cycle of Ragnarok. This ritual gave Thor the title of Rune King and allowed him to end the cycle of fate and put all gods to rest. It’s been suggested that even after Thor’s resurrection, he still retains the knowledge gained during this ritual, and has been occasionally seen using rune-magic, most prominently during The Immortal Thor. Doctor Strange considers rune magic particularly tricky, and not something any amateur can use.

Usage by Thor

Other uses of runes

Rune-magic is frequently employed by other spell-casters, most prominently serving as the basis of Loki’s repertoire of spells. Since Thor has knowledge of the runes, he may have knowledge of some of its more esoteric applications, though this is speculatory.

Knowledge

You know how I said just before that Thor replicated Odin’s ritual to gain the knowledge of Yggdrasil? He’s actually done that twice, once during the events of Ragnarok and once much later during the War off the Realms, recounted below. As said, Thor retains all these memories and the wisdom given to him by the rituals, with this knowledge being what allows him to tame the All-Power.