Thor is the god of thunder in the old Norse (Viking) stories — the myths of Scandinavia. He is the strongest of the gods, and he carries a hammer called Mjölnir. In the stories, thunder is the sound of that hammer, or of his goat-drawn cart rolling across the sky. He is not the king of the gods; that is Odin, his father. Thor is the one you call when something has to be fought.

His name is inside an English word you say every week: Thursday is 'Thor's day'. Old English speakers had their own form of him, Þunor, whose name was simply their word for thunder — so 'thunder' and 'Thor' really are two branches of the same old root.

Today, when your students hear 'Thor', many will think first of the Marvel films rather than the myths. That is fine, and worth saying out loud in class: the film Thor and the myth Thor are relatives, not the same person. The myth version has red hair, gets angry fast, and is often the comic one in the stories — not the polished hero of the screen. As a name, Thor is also a real given name in Norway, Denmark and Sweden today, and the piece 'Thor-' sits inside many Scandinavian names (Thorvald, Torsten, and, through Old Norse, the English surname and first name Thurston).

Write it with a capital T. It is a name, so it takes no 'the': say 'Thor', not 'the Thor'.