Asgardians in Marvel: Are Thor and Loki Aliens or Gods?

Marvel's Thor was Stan Lee looking for someone stronger than the Hulk. Journey into Mystery #83, dated August 1962 and drawn by Jack Kirby from a plot by Lee and script by Larry Lieber, has a lame doctor, Donald Blake, find a walking stick in a Norwegian cave that turns him into the god of thunder; the Asgard the comics built over the next decades was a golden city on a floating disc of land at the top of the world tree Yggdrasil, one of Nine Realms linked by the Rainbow Bridge and ruled by Odin from a throne hall, with Frost Giants in Jotunheim, dwarves in Nidavellir and the dead in Hel. Kirby drew it as a place where architecture and machinery were indistinguishable, and that ambiguity became the character's rule: the Asgardians are gods, and their gods' tools look like technology.

The films resolved the ambiguity in one direction. Kenneth Branagh's Thor (2011) opens with Odin explaining that the Norse worshipped the Asgardians because they had visited Earth to fight the Frost Giants in the year 965, and the astrophysicist Jane Foster identifies the Bifrost as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a wormhole, and the Asgardians as visitors from another world in another part of the universe. Thor's line to her that his people's magic and her science are one and the same is the films' thesis: the gods were aliens, the myths were memories, and Mjolnir is a machine. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) destroyed Asgard by the prophecy of its own myth, and Avengers: Endgame (2019) settled the survivors in a Norwegian fishing village as New Asgard.

An Asgardian is a human with the numbers turned up. The films give the species a lifespan of about five thousand years, a body dense enough to survive falls from orbit and blows from a Hulk, strength in Thor's case beyond any measure the films bother with, an immunity to Earth's diseases and a metabolism that lets him drink a tavern dry. Odin, at his death in 2017, was roughly five thousand; Thor was 1,500 in Infinity War and looked thirty; Frigga and Hela, Odin's wife and firstborn, spent centuries as they appeared. The comics keep the Asgardians young with the golden apples of Idunn, and both versions agree that the species can die, in battle or of grief, and mostly does not.

The Bifrost is the technology that makes the species a visitor rather than a neighbour. In the comics it is the rainbow bridge of the Eddas, guarded by Heimdall, who can see every soul in the Nine Realms; in the films it is a machine, an observatory at the edge of Asgard that fires a beam across space and drops its passengers in a scorched Norse rune, and after its destruction in 2011 Thor travels by dark energy, by ship, and finally by the axe Stormbreaker, which opens the bridge on its own. Jane Foster's identification of it as an Einstein-Rosen bridge gave the Marvel films the one piece of theoretical physics they have used consistently: a wormhole is a real solution to Einstein's equations, and no one knows whether one could be crossed.

The films let the myth finish. Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods in the Norse sources, is the end of Asgard by fire at the hands of the giant Surtur, and Thor: Ragnarok (2017) plays it straight: Thor, unable to defeat his sister Hela, sets Surtur loose on purpose, the city burns, and the Asgardians leave on a ship as refugees. Half of them are killed by Thanos in the first minutes of Infinity War; the survivors settle in Tønsberg, Norway, the town where Odin had hidden the Tesseract and where he chose to die, and Endgame and Love and Thunder (2022) show the species as a small, tourist-dependent community with a king, then a queen, and a fishing fleet.

New Asgard makes the species' status explicit in a way the comics never had to. A people from another world living in a Norwegian village, recognized by the Norwegian government and protected by the Avengers, are refugees with a claim on the planet they were once worshipped from, and the films use the setting for comedy and for the question the earlier films dodged: whether a god who has lost his home and half his people is still a god. Thor's answer in Endgame is to leave the throne to Valkyrie and go to space, which is the answer of an alien, not a deity.

The films' premise is Erich von Däniken's. Chariots of the Gods? (1968) argued that the gods of every mythology were visitors from space whose vehicles, weapons and appearances were recorded by people who lacked the words for them, so that Ezekiel's wheel was a landing craft and Thor's hammer a tool; the ancient astronaut theory article sets out the claim and the evidence archaeologists find missing. Odin's prologue in Thor, in which the Norse mistook a visiting army for gods, is that argument with the conclusion assumed, and Marvel's later Eternals (2021), whose immortal visitors seeded human civilization on behalf of cosmic Celestials, is the same theory a second time. The Anunnaki of Zecharia Sitchin, gods who were really a species from a distant planet managing humanity for their own ends, are the Asgardians' Mesopotamian cousins.

The comics resisted the reading, and the resistance is interesting. Their Asgardians draw power from belief, live in a realm that is mythic rather than astronomical, and die and return on the cycle of the Eddas, which is closer to how the myths work than to how a species does; the films' decision to make them aliens was the choice of a studio that needed the gods to share a universe with a scientist in armour. The aliens and religion article covers the wider exchange, in which UFO movements borrowed gods from scripture and scripture's readers borrowed spacecraft from UFO lore; Marvel's Asgard is where the two meet at the box office.