THOR

Monday, November 2, 2026Earth-616 canonThor Annual Vol. 1 #5 (1976)

Today's Fact

Two goats pull the thunder god's chariot, and the oldest clause in their contract is also the strangest one on the menu.

THOR'S CHARIOT GOATS CAN BE DINNER ONE NIGHT AND BACK IN THE HARNESS BY MORNING — MJOLNIR UNDOES THE MEAL!
The Featured Fact

Every Asgardian war band needs transport, and Thor's has hooves. Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder — English renderings of the Old Norse Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjost — hauled Thor's chariot into Marvel Comics in Thor Annual Vol. 1 #5 (1976), by Steve Englehart and John Buscema, and they have been his road crew ever since.

The pair carried their mythology's grimmest perk into the Marvel Universe: they can be slaughtered, cooked and eaten, then restored to life the next morning when Thor raises Mjolnir over their preserved hides and bones. Dinner, in other words, is a loan rather than a loss, provided nothing from the carcass goes missing overnight.

That proviso has teeth of its own. In the old tale Marvel inherited, a farmer's son named Thjalfi split a leg bone to reach the marrow after Thor had shared the meal with his hosts. The resurrected goat came back lame in that leg, and the boy and his sister Roskva entered Thor's service to settle the account.

Why It's Obscure

A god who can fly by hammer keeps a goat team anyway, because the goats predate the flight plan by several centuries of storytelling.

1976
The Marvel debut — Thor Annual Vol. 1 #5 (1976) introduces Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder as Thor's chariot team, adapting the goat pair straight out of Norse myth.
The names
Teeth, twice — Tanngrisnir reads as teeth-barer and Tanngnjost as teeth-grinder, names Marvel softened into Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder for its English-speaking readers.
The one rule
Keep the bones whole — the resurrection only restores what survives intact, so a single cracked bone returns to life as a permanent limp.
Still working
Modern mileage — the goats were still pulling Thor through the Tenth Realm during the Original Sin era, centuries of service and at least one dinner notwithstanding.

Sources

Every fact on this page was checked against at least two independent sources before publication.

Bullpen Bulletins

  1. Thor's Goats in the Comics — Marvel.com Marvel's own history of the pair, covering their comics role as Thor's chariot team and their roots in the older myths.
  2. Why Thor's Goats Are the GOAT — SlashFilm Records the goats' creation by Steve Englehart and John Buscema in Thor Annual #5 (1976) and the eat-and-resurrect trait, marrow warning included.
  3. Thor's Goats Almost Appeared Earlier — ComicBook.com Confirms the pair's first Marvel Comics appearance in 1976 and recounts the nightly feast and morning resurrection from the source tales.