Clash of the Gods – Thor

Okay, I just got around to watching this, thanks to the magic of the DVR, and I’m disappointed.  They obviously didn’t do their homework. 

I mean, they did the whole battle between Red Thor and White Christ wonderfully.  My riff is with the Midgard Snake.  The storm god versus the serpent is a common motif in mythology.  As they mentioned, you have Indra and Zeus (later Apollo) battling snakes.  However, they overlooked the fact that Vedic, Greek, and Norse cultures were all Indo-European.  The stories are so similar because they evolved from the same exact legend.  Even the Hittites had a version of it.  Same thing with the World Tree, though the kind of tree changed from culture to culture, depending on what grew in the area they came to inhabit.

Snake and tree stories, I know, are older than any of these, and are common to cultures not Indo-European, the Marduk and Tiamat myth from Babylon, for example, but the versions mentioned by the so called scholars on this program were.  The Maya sea monster legend being the exception.

I wonder if there will be a second season of this show?  And what myths and legends they will explore.  It seems to me, sense they discussed Beowulf, there should be a couple of episodes on Arthur.  The Founding of Rome with the whole Romulus and Remus story and the Rape of the Sabine Women.  The cult of Mithras.  Isis, Osiris, and Horus.

By the way, I noticed this in the Beowulf episode and it continued to irritate me in this one, but isn’t Odin supposed to have only one eye?  I thought he sacrificed the other one for wisdom.