NorsePlay.

While reading James George Frazer's The Golden Bough  (1890 CE) I ran across a possible reason behind the story of Thor's journey to the land of giants in  Gylfaginning as to why you do not break the bones of his goats to suck out the marrow:   "... a belief that, if the bones are preserved , they will in course of time be reclothed with flesh, and thus the animal will come to life again . It is, therefore, clearly for the interest of the hunter to leave the bones intact since to destroy them would be to diminish the future supply of game." This above is from the Native American traditions, and only few sentences later Frazer, in his amazingly associative way, brings this taboo back around to Scandinavia (implying the similar belief traveled via migrations of people in the circumpolar regions): "In sacrificing an animal the Lapps regularly put aside the bones, eyes, ears, heart, lungs, sexual parts (if the animal was a male), and a morsel of flesh from each lim...

While reading Frog's  Mythology and the Lived Environment (2024 CE), he goes a little more into Finnish and Baltic mythology to flesh out his approach to myth as a "symbolic matrix" as a way to broadly reconcile all previous framings. This interesting & novel redefining aside, at one point Frog uses the idea that every time the Baltic storm god Perkūnas uses lightning and we hear thunder a devil is hit and/or the noise makes them flee from fear of getting hit . This idea of devils being scattered by thunder then made me think of how trolls in the Norse Lore are quite put-out by the sound of church bells, so if we look at this dynamic of audial repellence , it's probably comparatively easy to extrapolate that Thor's fatal lighting & roaring thunder got replaced in the process of conversion tactics to the clapper of a church bell instead hammering the lip to gong away trolls within earshot. In this the church displaces Thor as humanity's protector agai...