Thrud is Thor's daughter — her name literally means "strength" — and she stars in one of the funniest poems in the Eddas without ever speaking a line. A dwarf named Alvíss claims Thor's daughter as his bride — the poem never names her, but she is usually taken to be Thrud; Thor, unimpressed, talks the claimant to death. Literally. It is the only myth where Thor defeats an enemy with conversation, and Thrud is the prize who never asked to be one.
Thrud
Norse pantheon
Domain: Strength, Thor's lineage
Who are Thrud's parents?
Thrud's mother is Sif, Thor's golden-haired wife, which makes her the full sister of Móði and half-sister of Magni (Thor's son by the giantess Járnsaxa) and Ullr (Sif's son by an unnamed father). She belongs to the crowded blended household of Asgard's first family — the children who will inherit the world after Ragnarök, since Móði and Magni will carry Mjölnir into the renewed age.
Her name is the whole character description the sources bother with: Þrúðr means strength, might, power. The Norse named Thor's daughter Strength the way other cultures name princesses for beauty or grace — a small, telling difference in values. A valkyrie in the name-lists is also called Þrúðr, and scholars debate whether Thor's daughter moonlights as one of Odin's choosers or whether two figures share a name. The sources do not resolve it. Either way, the name fits both jobs: strength reaps the slain as surely as it swings the hammer.
The dwarf who wanted to marry her: Alvíssmál
The entire plot of the poem Alvíssmál ("Speeches of Alvíss") is a bride-contest with a trick ending. The dwarf Alvíss — whose name means "all-wise" — arrives in Asgard claiming Thor's daughter (usually identified as Thrud) was promised to him, presumably by someone with authority to promise. Thor, who has just returned from the east and was not consulted, does the last thing anyone expects from Thor: instead of hitting the dwarf, he proposes a test. Prove your famous wisdom, Thor says. Answer my questions until dawn.
What follows is the Eddas' great thesaurus-poem: Thor asks what each thing is called — earth, heaven, moon, sun, clouds, wind, sea, fire, tree, night, grain, ale — in the tongues of gods, giants, elves, dwarves, and men. Alvíss answers everything correctly, at length, delighted to perform. And Thor keeps him talking, question after question, as the sky pales — until the sun rises. "Day has caught you, dwarf," Thor says, "now the sun shines in the hall." The poem stops there; readers usually take it that the dwarf, caught above ground in daylight, is turned to stone. Thrud never appears. The bride is saved by bibliography.
The poem's joke lands on two levels. First, Thor outwits the being named All-Wise — the strong god playing the wisdom game and winning it. Second, Alvíss's wisdom is real but useless: he knows thirteen words for ale and cannot tell what time it is. It is the Eddas' warning against cleverness without sense, and Thor — of all gods — delivers it.
The Alvíssmál belongs to a beloved Norse genre, the wisdom contest, and knowing the genre sharpens the joke. In Vafþrúðnismál, Odin stakes his head against the giant Vafþrúðnir in a question-duel; in Hárbarðsljóð, Thor trades insults with a ferryman who is Odin in disguise (and loses, memorably). The rules are always the same: the questioned must answer truly, the questioner chooses the ground, and the stakes are life or honor. Thor, who lost the insult contest to Odin, wins the quiz against Alvíss by choosing the one ground where a dwarf cannot follow him — patience. He does not need to be wiser than All-Wise. He needs to be slower to leave. Dawn does the killing; Thor merely schedules it. For a god whose solutions usually involve a hammer, it is the most elegant victory in the corpus.
What does the Alvíssmál tell us about the gods?
More than it seems. The marriage was supposedly arranged in Thor's absence, which means someone in Asgard promised Thor's daughter to a dwarf without asking Thor — and the poem never says who. The leading scholarly suspicion falls on Loki, the pantheon's unauthorized promise-maker (he gave a giant the sun and moon as a wall-building bonus in another myth), but the text is silent. Asgard runs on deals made behind backs; Thor's temper is the audit mechanism.
Dwarves marrying goddesses is vanishingly rare in the myths — the traffic runs the other way, gods taking giant wives and concubines constantly. Alvíss's claim is presumptuous by cosmic standards, which is why Thor's response reads as proportionate to a Norse audience: the order of things defended, politely, until sunrise. For the trickster whose bargains kept putting goddesses on the market, see Loki in Norse Mythology.
Thrud after Ragnarök: the quiet inheritance
Thrud herself fights in no Ragnarök account and dies in none — she is simply absent from the end, like most of Asgard's women. But her brothers inherit the future: Móði and Magni survive, recover Mjölnir from the wreckage, and carry it into the new world. Thrud's line, through them, outlasts Thor's hammer-arm. The daughter named Strength does not need to fight at the end; her family wins the aftermath.
There is a valkyrie angle worth one more paragraph. If the valkyrie Þrúðr is Thor's daughter — and the name-lists in Grímnismál and the þulur place a Þrúðr among Odin's choosers — then Thrud spent the twilight years of the world doing the grimmest work in Asgard: choosing which warriors die. The silent bride of the poem becomes the silent reaper of the battlefield. The sources will not confirm it. But the Norse loved nothing more than a quiet figure with a second job, and Strength choosing the slain feels exactly like something they would invent and then forget to explain.
In the sources
Thrud's attestations: daughter of Thor and Sif in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál (via the kennings for her parents); the silent prize of the Alvíssmál; a possible valkyrie in the name-lists. That is the complete file — perhaps a hundred lines total, most of them the dwarf talking about the moon. No image, no cult trace, no folk survival. She is a figure the tradition needed (Thor's house needed a daughter) and then never used, except once, as a pretext for a poem about words.
The contradiction to note is the valkyrie question above — one Þrúðr or two? Scholars divide, politely, forever. This site counts them as possibly one, because the alternative (two unrelated Strengths) explains less. For the Edda-age afterlife system Thrud may have served, see Norse vs Greek Gods: Key Differences.
In popular culture
Marvel has a Thrud — sort of. Recent comics introduced Thor's daughter Thrúd (spelled with the accent), usually in future-timeline stories, inheriting the hammer or the name. The MCU has not gone there. The Alvíssmál itself, surprisingly, has never been filmed: the talk-a-dwarf-to-death plot is pure cinema waiting to happen, and Thor outwitting rather than outhitting remains the most underused page in his book.
Keep exploring
Thrud's mother keeps Asgard's household in Sif: The Goddess Whose Golden Hair Loki Cut — start there for the family. And for the two pantheons' different visions of death, the system Thrud may have worked within, see Norse vs Greek Gods: Key Differences.