(No spoilers for IW, just references to a single, non-plot-related line of dialogue from it.)
Okay so I’ve been confused and annoyed about Thor saying he’s 1500, despite stating in Ragnarok that he and Loki were both eight during the snake/stabbing incident and the first film stating that Odin brought Loki back to Asgard no earlier than 965 (which already didn’t make sense because how the crap can Thor and Loki of mythology be based on the actual Thor and Loki if they were only born after Norway was already beginning to convert to Christianity?).
The out-of-story explanation is clearly that none of these writers can do basic math or care at all about their timeline. But there is an in-story explanation, which I have now accepted as my headcanon.
965 is a solid anchor point. Loki was definitely born after that, and Thor isn’t much older than him because we saw them both as similarly-aged little boys.
Now the MCU never mentions Allspeak, but it’s as good an explanation as any for why the Asgardians never have language barrier problems. It might, however, interact weirdly with statements about time.
So when Thor tells Bruce and Valkyrie about the snake/stabbing incident, Allspeak would automatically translate that into something Bruce could understand. What matters about that story is not the actual number age of Thor and Loki, but their level of maturity. They could’ve been 200, but they were the mental/emotional/physical equivalent of human eight-year-olds, so that’s what Bruce heard.
When Thor tells the Guardians he’s 1500, only one member of his audience is human, and Peter Quill has spent most of his life on other planets anyway. Earth years are meaningless in this conversation, so Allspeak would convert whatever age Thor said into the calendar system the Guardians are most familiar with. Probably some standardized system of the Nova empire, and in that system, Thor is 1500 instead of a few decades past a thousand.
The other two time references we get are when Loki snarks at Odin that Asgardians live roughly five thousand years longer than humans. Because humans are the point of comparison, I feel like he must be speaking in terms of Earth years, so that sets the average Asgardian lifespan at ~5000. That fits with what we know about Bor’s war against the Dark Elves. When Thor talks to Surtur, though, he says that he thought Odin had killed him “half a million years ago.” This, I attribute to hyperbole.
Bonus headcanon: Allspeak doesn’t work on bizarre non-languages like Groot, which is why it was taught separately as an elective on Asgard.
Bonus bonus headcanon: in the MCU, Norse mythology comes from some drunk Viking dude who fell into that pool in the Norn cave from Ultron. He got possessed and saw the future, and then a several-centuries-long telephone game ensued, which is why the myths bear very little resemblance to the real Thor and Loki and have been around longer than them.
There. Now there are no timeline or historical discrepancies in the Thor movies (or about Thor in the Avengers movies). This has been my official application for the job of Keeper of Continuity for the MCU. Thank you and when can I start?
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