This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Thor's Fight With the Giants belongs to a specific nineteenth century artistic current, Nordic Romantic Nationalism, in which Swedish, Norwegian and Danish artists reached for Old Norse mythology as source material for painting national identity into being. Writing for DailyArt Magazine, Lana Pajdas places Winge's painting squarely inside that movement, one nation choosing its own pre-Christian gods, Odin and Thor rather than Jupiter and Venus, as the imagery best suited to expressing who it believed itself to be.
Pajdas does not leave the story there, and this entry follows her in saying the rest of it plainly rather than leaving a reader to piece it together. The same article states that this movement's Norse imagery, and the broader Romantic movement alongside it, including Richard Wagner's own operas on this same mythology, was later misused by Nazi and other far right nationalist ideologies in the twentieth century. That is a fact about later political appropriation, not a claim about what Winge intended in 1872 or how his own Swedish audience understood the painting when it first went on view. The queue of visitors that formed to see it, and August Strindberg's own period praise of the work as depicting truth over falsehood, both belong to a moment decades before that later misuse occurred.
Naming both halves honestly, a genuine nineteenth century national artistic achievement and a later political corruption of its imagery that the artist himself had no part in, is more useful than picking one and dropping the other. Norse Paganism as a practiced tradition, whether in Winge's century or as a modern reconstruction today, is answerable for neither the appropriation nor the art that later movements chose to distort.