Monday, December 11, 2017

Thor:Ragnarok spoilers

One of the advantages of having absorbed a lot of very old media (the Bible) is the pleasure of recognising elements when they recur in popular culture.

Thor spoilers follow -

Hela returns when Odin passes on and reveals how she was his deadly right hand in his conquest of the nine realms, his first daughter and she revelled in the bloodletting as the Goddess of Death.

Compare this to the female personification of wisdom in Proverbs 8:22-ff. 'I, Wisdom, was with the Lord when he began his work, long before he made anything else. I was created in the very beginning, even before the world was set up.'...':30 'Then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of humankind.'

I doubt that the contrast with Wisdom was much in the mind of the creators of Thor:Ragnarok, but I think it makes a good illustration of the way that the Lord was not always or exclusively understood as essentially warlike, for all the wars his people were engaged in.