been thinking about worldbuilding and. oh my god guys. i know it's a throwaway joss whedon line, but even so... i think bilgesnipe might be jotun wildlife, not asgardian.
what do we know about bilgesnipe?
they have an insulting-sounding name, which at first glance inspection doesn't make much sense. normally, a "snipe" is a small game bird. this could just be a sort of joke, like a tall man nicknamed "tiny", but it could also imply that asgardians see these creatures primarily as things to shoot at. (fun fact: the word "sniper" actually comes from the amount of skill it takes to shoot snipe! bilgesnipe definitely aren't small targets, but they might still be hard to take down.)
meanwhile, "bilge" means the bottom of a ship, and the water that gathers inside it. this might imply that these creature live somewhere dirty... or that they tend to try to sink ships? (let's also remember that asgardian ships often travel the air, not the sea.)
thor summarises bilgesnipe as: "huge, scaly, big antlers". this doesn't precisely match the jotun creature we see in t1 (which i've taken to calling a dragon, for lack of other terms), but it's close. that creature is the size of a whale, with hairless, leathery blue skin and spines down its back - which could easily lead to the misconception that it was scaly. between this creature and the jotuns themselves, massive size and tough skin seem like they might be typical traits of species from jotunheim.
thor calls bilgesnipe destructive and repulsive, and uses them as an example of "uncivilised" behaviour. this reflects asgardian attitudes towards the jotun people, but it's an unusual level of animosity to hold towards an animal - especially considering that aggressive megafauna, even "exotic" ones, are often valorised by hyper-military cultures (all those european coats of arms with lions and tigers...), unless they're frequently in direct opposition.
so what is this opposition? IRL the mediaeval norse has an ambivalent relationship to wolves, because wolves preyed on their livestock. but bilgesnipes have antlers, which, at least on earth, are a herbivore trait. deer/etc can be aggressive when competing for mates or defending their young, but the danger is simple enough to avoid if you just stay out of their way. they're rarely seen as monsters for it...
but large herbivores are very often domesticated as beasts of burden - horses, donkeys, llamas, camels, elephants, and in the arctic, reindeer. and, depending on social context and the hardiness of the animals themselves, some of these beasts of burden go on to be used in warfare.
we already know that jotuns have domesticated large carnivores for military use (or maybe, originally, hunting) - specifically, they run down enemy foot-soldiers like prey on command. it's not a stretch to say there might be other species jotuns use for other military purposes.
SO. specifically. i think bilgesnipe could be giant jotun war-deer, trained to rake and crash low-flying enemy ships ("bilge"-snipe), and to stampede enemy armies ("destroy everything in their path".)
of course, the phrase (idiom?) "battling like bilgesnipe" itself could very easily refer to some natural phenomenon like rutting stags, as a metaphor for hypermasculine competitiveness, rather than anything about the animals in a real military context... but the way thor describes these creatures and the extreme negative attitude he takes to them still feel like something more to me. (and it's just more fun that way.)
(and finally, since it didn't flow above: thor assumes that midgard has, or at least knows about, bilgesnipe. and yes, this could be read as implying they're a completely everyday animal to thor, and therefore asgardian - but i would argue it could also go the other way: they're an exotic-but-familiar creature to him, like lions to a european, and he's carelessly conflating his "lesser realms", like a european thinking lions live in "the jungle".)
