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| St. John, Douglas Adams' college, Cambridge, England |
Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third novel in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, sees the unraveling of the not-so-friendly foursome of Arthur, Ford, Trillian and Zaphod. Zaphod, the two-headed ex-president of the universe, decides there's some crucial facts that he's hidden from his conscious (collective) mind. So he wanders off after awhile, and is never heard from again. Likewise, when Arthur meets up with Trillian at a party, she seems cold and distant. Again, she leaves with someone else. This time it's Thor, the Norse god of Thunder.
The way these two characters just drop out of the novel, as well as The Hitchhiker's Guide series at this point, without any sort of resolution to their individual plot arcs, seems weird. Then again, before this novel was published, Adams had an affair with novelist Sally Emerson while she was separated from her husband. After the affair ended, and she returned to her husband in 1981, Adams dedicated Life, the Universe, and Everything to her. So perhaps, the way Zaphod and Trillian abandon Arthur and Ford ties in with events in Adams' life, and the theme of abandonment I noticed in the first two Hitchhiker novels.
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| The Round Church (next to St. John), Cambridge, England |
Thor has been on my mind for many years now, as he plays a large role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. My wife and I collected the comic for several years, after Thor Odin-son lost his worthiness to wield the hammer, and an Earth-woman, much to Odin's displeasure, took on the mantle of Thor.
Recently, Neil Gaiman published the book Norse Mythology, in which he updated some of the Norse myths about Thor and Asgard for today's readers. Dark Horse is currently adapting these stories in a comic book series. Thor's hammer hangs on my wife's keychain, and she has read Rick Riordan's series about the Norse gods. A print of the Marvel character Thor, taken from an original painting by my late friend comics colorist Justin Ponsor, hangs in our living room. So it's interesting to me that in a series that extrapolates so heavily on scientific concepts, Douglas Adams chose to make Thor, a character from ancient mythology, a character in two of his novels.
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| Grantchester Common outside Cambridge, England |
I
wonder what attracted Douglas Adams to the Norse god of Thunder, and
what he would make of the character as portrayed in the Marvel movies.
Did he grow up reading the Norse myths about Thor like Neil Gaiman? Or did he grew up reading Marvel's Thor comics, and that was
why he placed the Norse god in two of his books?
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