Thor and the Racists

Posted 10:57, Friday 28th January 2011

I hear there are some right-wing racist hate groups up in arms over the casting of a black actor as Heimdall in the new Thor film. I found this out visiting the Penny Aracde website. They made a strip about it and linked to this article. And the whole thing made me feel kind of weird.

You see, I read and studied a lot of Norse mythology and Icelandic literature at Uni and it's my favourite mythology. I love it to bits. And I love all these little weird details that nobody knows that you can find by reading the original stories. For example: did you know that Thor has a chunk of whetstone lodged in his skull? I always picture that as being like the guy from Diablo II. And only one nation has written any of this stuff down. A lot of people refer to the Norse as the Vikings, which is about as accurate as calling Americans the Pharmacists, but really vikings are too busy having adventures and capturing each others' pirate ships to write down any of their literature, it isn't until they move to Iceland and stop being Vikings when they decide to fill those long Icelandic nights by creating the only source material we have for Scandinavian folklore and mythology. You've got the Icelandic sagas, the mythic poems and you've got Snorri Sturuson's Edda which is this masterpiece of writing trying to make sense of all these somewhat contradictory vesions of the same mythos. It is to Norse Mythology what Paradise Lost is to The Bible, except in this case we don't have The Bible. No in fact, we just have Edda. Between that and the poems they collectively form pretty much the only source material we have for all of Norse Mythology. Everything we know about Odin, Loki, Thor, Freyja, Heimdall and all those pesky frost giants, it's all there. And I've read it all. And it's awesome.

It's almost unfair that I got to spend most of my degree reading and translating this stuff, because I spent the whole time geeking out. And like many before me I am now a die-hard fan of Medieval Icelandic literature. So... imagine my feelings towards the Marvel comics interpretation of that mythology. I kind of hate it. Where do I even start? Odin and Loki are foster brothers, not father and son. So Loki is Thor's foster-uncle, not his brother. And Norsemen didn't have horns or wings on their helmets so both those characters look wrong. And these being Norsemen practically everyone should have a beard, even some of the women. Everything that's going on with the Thor comic and therefore the Thor movie is non-canon as far as I'm concerned. If they were doing it properly Thor would look like a cross between Gimli and a brick shithouse and he would spend all 90 minutes of the film breaking frost giants' skulls. That's... that's why you don't make a Thor film.

But they're not going to do it properly and they never will, and that's a damn shame.

If you look at Snorri Sturluson's Edda and the original mythic poems it was based on you'll see there's a lot to geek out over. It's boils down to an epic battle between the forces of order and the forces of chaos - friendships are sundered, revenge is sought, everyone has to choose a side, the dead return from the afterlife to join the battle, there's a GIANT WOLF MONSTER that eats Odin. It's like one of those big comic book events in which all the characters we've followed individually are brought together in a final reckoning. Did you know that J R R Tolkien wrote his own Norse Mythology fan fiction? Yeah, it's called The Lord of the Rings. You know dwarves, elves, wizards, trolls - these guys all come from Norse Mythology. This is the ur-text of all geekdom. Just flicking through Edda you can't move for cunning dwarves, cursed treasure and epic quests. Then you turn the page to Lokasenna and you're reading about Loki crashing a party and calling the rest of the pantheon gay. Then you flick over to Þrymskviða and it's the kind of hilarious sitcom situation you normally find in Japanese animated TV shows. The giant Thrym has stolen Thor's hammer and won't give it back unless they give him Freyja as his bride. When Thor hears this he immediately goes to Freyja and says "Put a wedding dress on, we're off." Freyja is not best pleased by this, as one might expect, asks what kind of floozy he thinks she is and refuses to go. But they still need Thor's hammer back to defend Asgardr from the giants. So the rest of the gods persuade Thor to put on a wedding dress himself to fool the giants into thinking he's the goddess Freyja and with the help of Loki he sets out to con the giants so that he can get his hammer back. Now, if that didn't sound like the first 7 minutes of the best sitcom in the world then somebody must have beaten your capacity for joy out of you with a hammer at an early age. Thor, the brick shithouse, disguising himself as Freyja, who is supposed to be this beautiful goddess, and all he has to help him is a dress and a fast-talking trickster who's good at weasling his way out of trouble? That's like Brian Blessed disguising himself as Angelina Jolie with the help of David Hyde Pierce. What follows is appropriately sitcomy, too, where Loki has to quickly think up explanations for Thor's manly behaviour. Just sit back and think about how cool that is. In a mythology that details the creation of the world and its destruction, in amongst epic battles and talking dragons, the Icelanders find room for farcical situation comedy.

The worst part? No-one will ever see that. Nobody is ever going to do a faithful cinematic or televisual adaptation of that story, at least not in my lifetime. And its not like a lot of people are going to read the orginial poem because hardly anyone knows about this stuff. Had you heard of Þrymskviða before today? The Egyptians had the Egyptian gods, the Greeks had the Greek gods, the Romans had... the Greek gods. And these are my gods. My ancestors would have actually believed in these amazing characters and now nobody knows anything about them except that they had horns on their helmets - which they didn't. Now if I do a Google Image search for Thor I just get hundreds of pictures of Marvel Comics Thor.

And the closest we'll ever get to a faithful film adaptation of that mythos is the Thor movie - which is like if Twilight was the nearest thing Bram Stoker fans had to a Dracula adaptation. That's a little sad, right?

But I'm getting sidetracked. We're talking about racists. People are complaining about the casting of Idris Elba as Heimdallr. And by "people" I mean the Council of Conservative Citizens, so I'm using the term generously. Get it? CCC? Like KKK except they don't wear hoods. I guess that's... better? The CCC says it will "denigrate the European-American heritage". These guys demonstrably don't know anything about that heritage except that it's white. So fuck them and fuck their protestations. They haven't read Þrymskviða so they can just shut the hell up. The reason why the whole thing makes me feel icky is that whilst I myself am not a racist I really do consider Norse mythology to be one of the foundations of my culture and heritage and I want to see it treated with the fidelity it derserves. And it's hard for me to say that without sounding like a racist. Especially considering the Norse mythology I love so much has been co-opted over the years by Nazis - and not just Nazis in the same way that the Council of Conservative Citizens are Nazis but actual motherfucking Nazis. So these days there are two kinds of people who care about Norse Mythology: Medieval Literature geeks (like myself and J R R Tolkien) and goose-stepping white supremacists. So why am I wading into this debate again? Well, because Penny Arcade drew a connection between my beloved Norse characters and white supremacy and I wanted to briefly dig into the evidence and set the record straight. For Frodo.

Okay the point they make in that article I linked you to and the point that Idris Elba makes is that Norse Mythology is all made up anyway so who gives a shit? Well, I give a shit and that argument is underpants-on-head-dribbling-out-the-corner-of-your-mouth stoopid. That's like saying Pride and Prejudice was all made up so you should be able to cast a 9-foot battle robot as Elizabeth Bennet. That said, from what I can tell by looking at the screenshots of the film, the Norse pantheon all seem to be wearing futuristic scifi-armour and Asgard seems to be in outer space. So if these aren't really the Norse gods but actually crazy outerspace alien men who happen to share their names with Norse gods then fine, make whatever choices you like, give them all fruit hats, I don't care. If it's supposed to have some bearing on actual Medieval history then, no, you can't just make it all up and do whatever you want. Or at least you shouldn't.

Well, were Medieval Scandinavians white? Yes. They weren't all blond-haired and blue-eyed as many imagine them to be but they were white. Were their gods white? Almost definitely. (Although Thor himself is actually associated with the colour red.) These characters are imaginary, I will grant, but I don't think the Vikings made it as far as Africa so I can't think of a reason why they would even have a reference point for imagining their gods as black. But does it matter that they cast a black actor as Heimdall for the Marvel film? Well, no, it doesn't. Because canon means nothing to these people and the poxy comic has almost nothing to do with Icelandic Literature or Norse Mythology. It should be equally upsetting that they cast a Welshman as Odin. Heck, I'm sad that Thor doesn't have a whetstone in his head. But since there is no whestone in his head and Thor has no beard and since at no point in the film Thor dresses up as a woman to recover his stolen hammer, casting is really the last thing anyone should be worried about. Therefore the Council of Conservative Citizens, by picking on this one inaccuracy out of so many others, have demonstrated that they actually know jack shit about Medieval European literature and by remaining ignornant of their own literature and history they are actually contributing to the denigration of the culture they claim to be protecting. Learn to read Medieval Icelandic and then we'll talk, you stupid racist fucks.

So make whatever casting choices you want, Hollywood, if only to piss off these ignorant old crackers. I just wish you'd spoken to me first. I would have asked "If you're going to cast a black actor as a Norse god, why pick Heimdallr?" Because there's this one issue that only I and the other 20 people who've read Þrymskviða are going to pick up on. It's like the only description we have of the god Heimdallr. Heimdallr is - and I'm quoting from Þrymskviða - "hvítastr Ása". That means "the whitest of the Aesir". The whitest. I know they didn't know but in retrospect it's a pretty unfortunate choice.

But wait! I'm not done yet.

The "whitest" here doesn't refer to the colour of Heimdallr's skin. Well, it might do. More likely it refers to him being effeminate. Yeah, let's look at the evidence. Thor has lost his hammer. They need to get it back but Freyja refuses to marry a giant, she's a classy lady. So all the Aesir put their heads together to come up with a plan. Then right off the bat, without any other suggestions being made, Heimdallr immediately proposes cross-dressing. That's the first thing you think of? Put the bearded man in a dress? Loki goes along with it but then Loki has spent time as both a woman and as a pregnant horse so he doesn't really have a leg to stand on. Loki is a gender-bender. Even Odin is said to have spent some time as a woman. And out of all the gods Heimdall is the gayest? What are they not telling us about this guy? Odin knows. The only other story we have about Heimdallr involves him engaging in three-way sex with a husband and wife. Three times. To clarify, that doesn't mean three times with one couple, that means one time with three couples.

The point is, I'm concerned about my culture and heritage being destroyed by this film. It's too late for Thor, that film's already been shot. But we can still remedy this in time for Thor 2 - Lost in New York. So here's my list of demands:

- Thor needs a whetstone stuck in his head. Pronto. How are children going to learn not to throw whetstones around if their parents can't tell them it causes the one in Thor's head to vibrate?

- Thor needs to spend a minimum of 10 minutes of screentime crossdressing while his friend Loki makes up excuses for his hairy forearms.

- Everyone should have a beard. No exceptions.

- Loki needs to turn into a lady horse and be impregnated by a giant's stallion and give birth to Sleipnir the eight-legged steed of Odin.

- Freyja needs to sleep with four dwarves in return for the Brísingamen necklace.

- Loki needs to have his lips sewn together by angry dwarves.

- Did somebody say threesome?

- You can cast a black actor as Heimdallr, as long as said actor plays him gay. Not just gay: the gayest.

That said, I only have one last thing to say to the CCC. You're welcome.

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