Not Your Average Thor: A Norwegian Founding Father, a Family Sapling, and a Very Bad Ram

I'll save everyone the trouble of the comment section. Yes, I know there's already a Thor. Yes, he has a hammer and a red cape and a very good publicist. This is not him. This is my Thor, several generations back on my own family line, and I promise you, the resemblance to the movie version is not entirely a coincidence, because the man was built on the same scale as a legend and nobody told him he wasn't allowed to act like one.

Thor's great-grandfather, Paul Harildstad, was a freeholding farmer and military man from a respected local family in Gudbrandsdalen Valley. He sat down at Eidsvoll Manor in 1814 to help write Norway's constitution, the actual founding document of the country. The valley itself carries the name of a Viking-age chieftain who ruled it centuries earlier with something close to royal authority, so this family tree carries roots running deep into Norwegian history.

None of that status or land made it down to Thor directly, though. His own mother was one of three sisters, and the inheritance did what inheritances so often do and slid sideways to a cousin instead. So the man who eventually crossed an ocean was, technically, a direct descendent of one of the men who helped found a nation, quite possibly descended from Viking lords, and he still ended up without the deed to the family land. I like to think he took it personally.

In 1814, 112 representatives gathered at Eidsvoll Manor to write Norway's constitution, a defining moment in the nation's history. Among them was my ancestor, Paul Harildstad, whose legacy would eventually inspire one of the families at the heart of The Sunstone Path.

What Paul did leave behind was a physical piece of that history, a maple tree he planted on the family farm in Gudbrandsdalen, grown from a sapling he brought back from the historic Eidsvoll grounds in 1814. When it came time for Thor to leave, he carried a living sapling cut from that very tree, wrapped carefully enough to survive the voyage across the Atlantic.

In a pivotal scene from The Sunstone Path, Thor faces the hard choice to leave the safety and comfort of his brother's home in St. Paul to forge a life of his own. Resting on the mantel was the sunstone he had brought with him from Norway, a piece of Iceland spar that Vikings once used to navigate uncharted waters. Looking to the stone as their compass forward, he turns to his wife:

“God is steering the ship, Inga. He’s placed the sign right here on our mantel. We are staying in a house that was built for someone else's life. It’s time we followed the light on our own like my ancestors did centuries ago.”

Legend has it that Thor planted that piece of the Eidsvoll tree in the American heartland. Decades later, a massive, ancient Norwegian maple stood guard in the front yard of my grandmother's home in Washington State, spreading its roots half a world away from the valley where it all began.

Legend has it this maple tree began as a sapling my ancestor, Thor, carried across the Atlantic from Norway. Long before I knew the story, I was beneath its branches, filling wheelbarrows with the leaves of a tree that had become part of our family's history.

It’s easy to look back at scenes like that and imagine a man who lived entirely in heroic, cinematic moments. But history has a way of balancing out a legend, and family lore remembers the rest of the man, too. Because long after he followed that compass west, Thor had to deal with the daily realities of building a life on the land.

And then, of course, there was the ram.

A man can carry the voice of a god and the roots of his ancestors across an ocean and still, somehow, lose a turf war with livestock. His was a stubborn, ill-tempered ram who apparently took Thor's presence in the barnyard as a personal insult, and more than once sent him airborne into a hay bale with all the dignity of a man who absolutely deserved better. Thunder god by name, mildly defeated by a sheep in practice. I think that's the part of him I love most.

It also explains a few things about my own father, who happens to be Thor's great-grandson. Big voice, big laugh, absolutely committed to the bit even when the moment calls for something more serious. I've been calling him "Ranger Rick" around here for exactly the same reason I'm telling you about a man named after a thunder god. Some personalities just don't skip a generation, they wait a few and come back louder.

And he will do dramatic things I'm not ready to talk about yet, mostly because I haven't finished writing them, but I'll say this much: the story I'm building around him doesn't stay funny and it doesn't stay simple for long. There's a reason I keep circling back to him. Some family lines just carry more weight, and apparently more chaos, than others.

Not every Thor carried a hammer

So tonight, when you see lightning cracking across your screen and a name that sounds like it belongs in a comic book, know that it belongs to someone else first. A real man, a real voice, a real ongoing war with a ram, and a real story still being written, generations before anyone thought to put a hammer in his hand.

Step onto The Sunstone Path

Thor’s journey is just the beginning. The Sunstone Path is Book One of Before the Anchor, an upcoming 5-book historical fiction series tracking the resilience, faith, and untamed spirits of those who carved out a new future across generations.

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