The fun people over at Movoto Real Estate Blog have come up with a great listing for Thor’s castle. By Odin’s Beard! Thor’s bachelor pad is worth a godly amount! Check out Asgard’s latest real estate offering.
Read the rest of the listing and see how they valued it below:
I may be bringing the thunder with this statement, but I’m going to go ahead and put it out there: 2011’s “Thor” movie was by far my favorite Marvel Comics movie adaptation yet. So you can imagine how excited I am for the upcoming release of “Thor: The Dark World”.
Thankfully, I’m not the only one who’s excited for the film. The Movoto Real Estate office—and by that I mean just the blog team—is gearing up, pre-ordering tickets, and asking those Big Questions. Will Thor defeat the ancient race led by the vengeful Malekith? Will Thor and Jane Foster end up together in the Asgard Castle? And—holy golden towers, Batman—just how expensive is that castle anyway?
While we can’t exactly answer those first two, we can give you the inside scoop on the castle—and hold on to your hammers, because it’s not cheap.
This castle fit for a Thunder God will set you back $212,716,200—and that doesn’t even include Bifrost!
To put that into perspective for you, that’s over two and a half times more expensive than Cinderella’s Castle, but just a cool $8 million more than Hogwarts.
To find out just why this castle is so expensive, read on.
The Rainbow Bridge to Our Price
Just as Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge, serves as a connection between Asgard and the human world, the internet serves as our connection to information. So in order to find the price of Thor’s castle, I relied heavily on this tool to find three things:
•The location
•The size
•Comparable Properties
Once I did a little research on the world of Asgard, finding the location of its equivalent on earth was no problem. But when it came to finding the castle’s size and comparable properties, well, that’s when things got tricky. More on that in a moment—let’s start with the location.
Finding Asgard
In Norse mythology and, more importantly, Marvel Comics, Asgard is described as floating in a “sea of space.” It is not round, like the earth; it is flat, and apart from a brief stint where Thor decides to re-build Asgard outside of Broxton, Oklahoma in the comics, Asgard is completely otherworldly.
So I set about researching what our world’s equivalent of Asgard would be. The answer? Uppsala, Sweden. Here’s why:
First off, I knew that Thor’s hometown equivalent had to be somewhere in Scandinavia, seeing as his entire world is pulled straight from Norse mythology. So that narrowed things down to Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark. Then I started looking for specifics.
In Norse mythology, along with the Marvel comic books, Asgardians maintain their youth, vigor, and virtual immortality by snacking on the Golden Apples of Idunn. Sweden is the largest producer in northern Europe, let alone Scandinavia, of the Akero Apple—a sweet, golden apple.
One of the most important features in all of Asgard is Yggdrasil (pronounced like… oh I have no idea. I call it Iggy.) Yggdrasil is an immense ash tree that connects Asgard to the other worlds through its three roots. Our world’s equivalent? The Sacred Tree at Uppsala, Sweden.
Asgardians are known as the peacekeepers of the Nine Realms. Sweden is ranked one of the 10 most peaceful nations in the world.
The wildlife of Asgard may as well have been taken straight out of southeast Sweden. Odin’s ravens? Check. Fenris, the giant wolf of Asgard? Yep. The two mystical goats who pull Thor’s chariot? Absolutely. And though the steeds of Sweden may not have eight legs, like Odin’s buddy, they are still plentiful.
Finally, Uppsala may not have a portal, like Bifrost the Rainbow Bridge, but it is pretty close to Stockholm International Airport.
So we know where the city of Asgard would be. But just how big is the castle?
Abso-Freaking-Lutely Ginormous
Finding the size of Thor’s castle is where things got a little tricky. In re-watching the movie (for research purposes only!) and in looking at photos from the film, one thing is clear: the castle is clearly abso-freaking-lutely ginormous. In fact, it seems to take up most of the city. In doing a bit of digging in the realms of Marvel and Norse mythology, I was able to uncover this little tidbit:
Thor’s mansion on Asgard was known as Thruthvanger, the Paddocks of Power, where his castle hall Bilskirnir or Lightning stood. Thor’s mansion possessed five hundred and forty rooms, the most extensive mansion known to man.
So I clung to this fact like Thor to his hammer, and began searching for real-world castles with about as many rooms and that compared visually with Thor’s castle from the films.
What I came up with was the Grand Kremlin Palace, one of the largest in (our) world. It has a few more rooms than Thor’s place, at about 600, and it is much wider than it is tall, as opposed to Truthvanger; but I think that the two stack up to be about even, at 259,410 square feet. To put that into perspective for you, Thor’s castle is about 10 times bigger than his buddy Tony Stark’s mansion. It’s probably a sensitive subject.
What Is Like Thor’s Castle?
As mentioned previously, the Grand Kremlin Palace is like Thor’s castle, as are several other gigantic palaces all over the world. But in order to find the average price per square foot in the area, I needed to find properties that were like Thor’s castle near Uppsala. So I did the next best thing and found several mansions and estates for sale in the Uppsala/Stockholm area.
After looking at 10 of these beautiful homes, I determined two things: I want to live there and, also, the average price per square foot for a luxury home in the area is approximately $820.
Hammering It Home
Okay, last hammer joke, I promise.
With a price of $820 per square foot, and a size of 259,410 square feet, Thor’s castle, should you want to buy it, will only set you back $212,716,200. That’s almost twice the price of Stark’s mansion—though don’t bring this up to Tony. He’s probably still a little bitter from that whole Avengers having to save Asgard against the Siege and Thor rebuilding Heimdall’s observatory atop Stark Tower.
But hey, we’ve all been there.