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73 pages 2 hours read

Rick Riordan

The Hammer of Thor

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016

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Chapters 35-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 35 Summary: “We Have a Tiny Problem”

After leaving Randolph’s, Magnus and Alex meet up with Sam, Blitz, Hearth, and Stanley, an eight-legged horse they previously met while infiltrating a giant’s home for Thor. While Sam takes Hearth and flies to Jotunheim, Blitz, Alex, and Magnus ride Stanley to the realm of the giants, Magnus sitting at the back in the place he refers to as “the seat from which you will fall off and die in case of rapid ascent” (280). Without anyone falling off, Stanley runs, leaps, and rolls to move between Midgard and Jotunheim, only for all three passengers to get knocked off by a low-hanging branch in the forest.

Upon closer inspection, Magnus realizes the branch is a cable, which is actually the shoelace of a giant who goes by the name Tiny. Tiny is on his way to Utgard-Loki’s bowling alley for a tournament. Magnus asks if he can give them a lift, to which Tiny says the alley isn’t safe for such small people who haven’t proven their friendly guests. Instead, if the group carries Tiny’s bowling bag, he’ll make sure everyone knows they’re friends. The group agrees, and Tiny takes two steps over the horizon and away, leaving the group with his bag, which resembles “a sheer dark cliff that rose five hundred feet to a wide plateau at the summit” (286).

Chapter 36 Summary: “Solving Problems with Extreme Fashion”

Blitz inspects the bag, learning it has no name. In dwarven culture, objects are not fully formed until they are named, and Blitz believes he could stitch a rune into the bag to name it and make it weigh nothing. To do so, he’ll need hair of Frey (Magnus) and blood of a shape-shifter (Alex), and Alex agrees for both of them by saying “let’s make a magic bowling bag” (290).

Chapter 37 Summary: “Meat S’mores Roasting on an Open Fire”

It will take Blitz the rest of the day and night to enchant the bag, and while he works, Alex and Magnus set up camp. The cut Alex got from crashing into Tiny’s shoelace is infected, but when Magnus offers to heal it, Alex pushes him away; Sam told her that Magnus sees people’s thoughts and experiences when he heals, and she doesn’t want him in her business. Feeling chastised, Magnus says he just wants to help, and Alex finally relents, knowing she can’t let the wound get any worse. Magnus heals her with the barest touch and learns nothing so that Alex is “still a mystery wrapped in a question mark” (294).

As Blitz works, Magnus and Alex try and fail to make smores out of the leftover falafel they took from Amir. Eventually, Magnus asks Alex why she uses Loki’s symbol in her art. She explains the symbol hasn’t always belonged to Loki and that she uses it to take back any power Loki believes he has over her. Magnus remembers his dream about Loki talking to Alex as a woman and realizes that Loki is Alex’s mom, not her dad. Magnus tells Alex about his dream, which makes Alex angry that he was in her head. Before a fight breaks out, Blitz calls them over to look at his work.

Chapter 38 Summary: “You Will Never, Ever Guess Blitzen’s Password”

Blitz and Jack embroider the bag with runes that will make it shrink when a command word is spoken. Magnus asks what the “password” is, but “password” is the password, so the bag shrinks. Blitz is exhausted, and once Jack returns to pendant form, Magnus passes out and has dreams of “nothing except dolphins happily leaping through a sea of leather” (303). By the time everyone wakes, a full 24 hours have passed with no sign of Sam or Hearth. After an hour walk, they arrive at the bowling alley, which is easily the size of the city of Boston. Inside is Utgard-Loki holding Sam and Hearth.

Chapter 39 Summary: “Elvis Has Left the Bowling Bag”

Since Magnus, Alex, and Blitz fulfilled Tiny’s requirements, they are granted guest rights. Utgard-Loki shrinks the room so Magnus and his friends won’t be so small, and Tiny retrieves Elvis, his bowling ball, from the bag, hugging it to his chest. Utgard-Loki has been nudging the group along so they wouldn’t fall into Loki’s trap. He’s the only giant who wants to help them, but the only way Magnus’s group will leave the bowling alley alive is if they prove themselves against all the other giants. Utgard-Loki invites them to have a drink, and after that, either “you best us in competition. Or you die trying” (314).

Chapter 40 Summary: “Little Billy Totally Deserved It”

The group swaps stories of the last 24 hours. While Magnus, Alex, and Blitz enchanted the bowling bag, Sam and Hearth fielded a series of impossible tasks from the giants, meant to make them appear weak. Occasionally shouting insults to trick his followers, Utgard-Loki tells the group he doesn’t care whether Thor’s hammer is retrieved as Thor will fall at Ragnarok with or without it. Rather, he worries about Loki’s plan and that Thrym won’t hand over the hammer. Sam asks if Thrym would really renege on Loki’s deal, to which Utgard-Loki says “[W]edding gifts will be exchanged! But perhaps not in the way you imagine” (320).

The games begin, and Sam challenges the giants to best her at ax throwing. Utgard-Loki pits her against Little Billy, a kid who perfectly throws three axes into a wood cutout of Thor. When it’s Sam’s turn, she throws an ax into Little Billy’s head, who transforms into an “ugly” creature with claws and leathery skin. It’s Fear, and Sam attacked it because “the only way to conquer Fear is to attack it head-on” (324). She’s named winner of the contest, and Utgard-Loki calls for the others to challenge the giants.

Chapters 35-40 Analysis

These chapters directly hearken back to plotlines in the previous book in the series. In The Sword of Summer, Blitz competed in a crafting competition against a rival dwarf in Nidavellir, where he won by crafting fashionable things that dwarves find useful, such as armor. Chapter 36 calls to this competition and the lessons Blitz learned, and he uses a combination of crafting and fashion to complete the bowling bag according to dwarven customs and also enchant it so it’s light enough for the group to carry. Stanley also appeared in The Sword of Summer, and Magnus recalls the harrowing ride by noting that he’s likely to fall off Stanley’s back because Stanley enjoys rapid ascents and high speeds.

In Chapter 37, Magnus and Alex argue about Magnus healing Alex’s wound. Altogether, their conversation shows how people make a decision they think is best, but if that decision is based on fear or potentially incomplete information, they may not be making the best choice. It also speaks to the importance of establishing boundaries and accepting the boundaries of others. Magnus only has Alex’s best interests in mind, but to Alex, his insistence on healing the wound is a threat. As comfortable as Alex has gotten around Magnus, she still hides herself and isn’t ready to trust him fully. She hasn’t yet internalized that Magnus isn’t going to judge or try to “fix” her. While Alex is in her rights to protect herself, she also bases her decision to do so on incomplete information. Magnus did see Hearth’s thoughts while healing the elf, but Hearth was close to death at the time. Magnus gave so much of himself to the healing that he and Hearth fused in a way. Alex doesn’t know any of this and chooses to believe what Sam told her rather than asking Magnus for clarification. If she had asked instead of jumping to conclusions, she could have gotten her cut healed sooner and avoided unnecessary anxiety.

The tournaments the friends must participate in with the giants do much to characterize this fantasy species. First, these scenes show that the giants of Riordan’s story world are competitive and unconcerned with matters of the mortals and gods. They have accepted that Ragnarok is coming and are resolved to enjoy whatever time is left. The tournaments themselves suggest giants admire skill over all else, and the nonchalance with which they cast spells to cheat shows that they are most impressed by their own skill, especially when that skill also lets them win. While Utgard-Loki is the king of these giants, he cannot give the information to Magnus’s group without first appeasing his subjects. This means that giants are volatile creatures who won’t hesitate to overthrow whoever’s in power if they dislike something their ruler is doing. If Utgard-Loki wants to keep his power and position, he must go through the motions of maintaining the loyalty and respect of his subjects, even though doing so greatly inconveniences himself and Magnus’s group.

In the first of the tournaments against the giants, Sam selects ax-throwing because, as a Valkyrie, she is proficient in the sport and has more confidence that she’ll win. Little Billy is the spirit of fear in disguise, and while there is no direct equivalent to this spirit in Norse myth, fear is a universal concept. It’s unclear how Sam recognizes the spirit, but this fear is a stand-in, representing how Sam is truly competing against herself and the fears she carries. Sam says the only way to defeat fear is to attack it head-on, which is at least partly true: Fear itself can never truly be defeated, but the only way to deal with it is to face it. Ignoring fear only gives it power, and in this metaphor of Sam facing her own fears, she has taken the first step toward living with them.

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