How to Find the Holy Grail, and 8 Other Lost Treasures

If you’re looking for Thor’s hammer (aka Mjölnir), you’re in luck. All you need to do is defeat the Daughters of Lerion, don Thor’s helmet, and travel to the Northern tip of Norway and—wait, that’s in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. In real life, finding Thor’s hammer will prove more difficult, because Thor wasn’t a real person and so could not have owned a hammer.

Thor is a mythological god and the hero of a popular comic book and movie franchise. The ancient Vikings believed he was real, though, and the symbol of his hammer was central to their faith. Centuries later, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS, believed Thor’s hammer was not only real, but a “highly developed form of war weapon of our forefathers” that “implies an unheard of knowledge of electricity.”

Himmler’s evidence for this ancient super-weapon was the fact that there are a lot of lightning bolts on Viking artifacts—I didn’t even make that up.

If you’re fascinated with lost artifacts, you will eventually run across a ton of Nazis. They (well, mostly Himmler) really did spend money and resources searching for ancient artifacts, from the Ark of the Covenant, to The Holy Grail, to evidence that Tibetans were descended from exiles from Atlantis. This is all depicted in Marvel and Indiana Jones movies, but in those fictional universes, the relics the Nazis search for are powerful items, so the forces of good must prevent the Nazis from acquiring them lest doom befall the world. In the real world, many of these artifacts are not even real, like Thor’s hammer, and acquiring ancient relics was important to Nazis only because the Nazis were unimaginably stupid.

Nazis were really looking for evidence that supported their theory that a prehistoric Aryan super-race was responsible for everything positive that humanity ever achieved. They were unsuccessful because there was no such ancient race. Nazi archeology is only notable for its absolute failure—all it managed to prove is that Nazis, both historical and modern, are dumb as shit.

Chance that you could find Thor’s Hammer: Zero point zero percent.