Which Norse Symbols Are Actually Viking? Sources and Corrections

The vegvísir, the "Viking compass", is first attested in an Icelandic manuscript written in 1860. The helm of awe is a medieval word, but its eight-armed picture is seventeenth-century. The valknut is the reverse: a Viking Age picture with a modern name. Thor's hammer is the one that survives every test. This page gives the source for every slide, and says plainly what is still disputed.

Every factual claim in the five content slides of our Norse symbols carousel, with its source. Section numbers match the number at the top of each slide.

Slide by slide

Cover. It first turns up in the year Lincoln was elected

The earliest surviving witness to the vegvísir is the Huld manuscript, ÍB 383 4to in the National and University Library of Iceland, compiled by Geir Vigfússon in Akureyri in 1860. Abraham Lincoln was elected on 6 November 1860. Huld is a compilation and its exemplars are unknown, so 1860 is the date of the oldest copy that survives, not proof that the stave was invented that year. No earlier witness has been found.

Sources: Alessia Bauer, dated list of Icelandic magical manuscripts, Vísindavefurinn (University of Iceland), 21 June 2021; Tomáš Vlasatý, Projekt Forlǫg, on the Huld manuscript.

01. Where the staves live

These symbols belong to the Icelandic tradition of magical staves, galdrastafir. The oldest surviving Icelandic manuscript that contains them is AM 434 a 12mo in Copenhagen, from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Of the entries on Alessia Bauer's dated list that we could read, it is the only one securely older than 1550; the next is Lbs 143 8vo, which Bauer dates 1670, and most of the corpus is from 1780 to 1880. Bauer writes that the Icelandic staves have parallels and even models in European books of magic, naming the Key of Solomon, the Corpus Hermeticum and Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia. Her article makes no connection between the staves and the Viking Age. The runes the Norse did carve are a separate alphabet, and our rune translator writes any name in them.

Sources: Alessia Bauer, "Hver er elsta þekkta heimild um galdrastafi á Íslandi?", Vísindavefurinn, 21 June 2021. Bauer's list includes the Galdrabók, dated only "15th to 17th century", which is why we say "securely".

02. The vegvísir: first attested in 1860

The Huld text reads: Beri maður stafi þessa á sér villist maður ekki í hríðum né vondu veðri þó ókunnugur sé: if a man bears these staves on him, he will not lose his way in blizzards or bad weather, though he does not know the way. There is nothing about ships, the sea or navigation. The word is stafi, staves, plural. Two other nineteenth-century manuscripts come from the same corner of northern Iceland, and one adds that the stave works if you believe in God, in the name of Jesus.

Sources: Huld, ÍB 383 4to (1860), text as transcribed by Foster (2015) from library imaging, and independently by Vlasatý; Lbs 2917 a 4to (1868 to 1869); Lbs 4627 8vo (nineteenth century). Scholars differ on whether three or four manuscripts carry the name, so we give the date, not a count.

03. The helm of awe: Sigurd took it out of a treasure pile

The word ægishjálmr is genuinely medieval. In Fáfnismál, preserved in the Codex Regius of about 1270, the dragon says: Ægishjalm bar ek of alda sonum, meðan ek of menjum lák, I bore the helm of awe over the sons of men while I lay on the treasure. In Völsunga saga Sigurðr takes the ægishjálm out of the hoard together with the sword Hrotti and a golden mail coat. In neither text is it a drawn sign, and no medieval text attaches the word to any drawing.

The eight-armed stave now sold under that name first appears in Lbs 143 8vo, a vellum manuscript dated to the mid-1600s by Magnús Rafnsson and to 1670 on Bauer's list. Its instruction is to make it in lead and press it to your forehead. An even older form exists in a leechbook kept in Copenhagen, which gives it no name at all.

Sources: Fáfnismál 16 and 17; Reginsmál, prose; Völsunga saga ch. 18 and 19; Magnús Rafnsson, Vísindavefurinn, 25 October 2018.

04. The valknut: the picture is real, the name is not

Three interlocked triangles are carved on Gotland picture stones dated to about 700 to 1000, among them Lärbro Stora Hammars I, where they sit beside a man hanged in a tree. The Gotlands Museum edition calls the scene probably a burial or a human sacrifice and does not mention Odin. Some scholars read these figures as triquetras rather than three triangles. The figure is also reported on objects from the Oseberg ship burial of 834.

The name is another matter. Valknútr does not exist in the Old Norse corpus; it was applied to the symbol by modern scholarship. The only medieval name for a three-cornered carved sign is in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál: the giant Hrungnir had a heart of hard stone with three corners, svá sem síðan er gert ristubragð þat, er Hrungnishjarta heitir, like the carved figure since made, which is called Hrungnir's heart. Snorri does not draw it, and whether his figure is the one on the Gotland stones is an inference, not a statement in the text.

Sources: Gotlands Museum picture-stone edition, GP 253 (Lärbro Stora Hammars I) and GP 258; Tom Hellers, Valknútr: Das Dreiecksymbol der Wikingerzeit (Vienna, 2012); Snorri, Skáldskaparmál, the Hrungnir episode. The Oseberg attribution is from secondary sources; we could not open the museum catalogue record.

05. The one that survives everything: Thor's hammer

Thor's hammer pendants are countable and datable. Jörn Staecker catalogued 121 hammer pendants from 86 sites; Jensen's 2010 count, made a different way, has 237 loose pendants and, separately, 322 hammer rings. They run from the 700s to the 1000s, and the ordinary one was iron, with silver a clear second. A small gilded bronze hammer found at Købelev on Lolland in 2014, dated 900 to 1000, carries the runes hmar is, "this is a hammer", read by Lisbeth Imer of the National Museum of Denmark. The museum's own headline is Runer bekræfter: the runes confirm the identification.

Of the amulet graves in Jensen's corpus, only eleven were osteologically sexed. They held six hammers: four with women and two with men. The National Museum of Denmark concludes that there was nothing specifically masculine about Thor's hammers in the Viking Age.

Sources: Jörn Staecker (1999); Bo Jensen, BAR International Series 2169 (2010); National Museum of Denmark on the Købelev hammer (RuneS signum Syd 18). We never add Jensen's pendants to his rings: they are different objects.

What we do not claim

• That 1860 is when the vegvísir was created. It is only the date of the earliest surviving copy; no earlier witness survives.
• That any other object is the real "Viking compass". The half-disc from Uunartoq in Greenland is sometimes given that title; two archaeologists who examined it think it may be a priest's confession disc, and leave navigation open as one possibility.
• That the valknut meant Odin, or death. No Viking Age or medieval source states its meaning.
• That Hrungnir's heart is "the valknut's real name". It is the only medieval name for a three-cornered carved sign, which is a narrower thing.
• That wearing any of these is wrong. Wear what you like. We only date it.

Corrections

None yet. If you find an error, tell us, with a citation.

Frequently asked questions

Is the vegvísir a Viking symbol?

Not on the evidence we have. Its earliest surviving source is the Huld manuscript, written in Iceland in 1860, about 800 years after the Viking Age, and the charm there is about not getting lost in a blizzard, not about the sea.

How old is the helm of awe?

The word is medieval: it appears in Fáfnismál and Völsunga saga as a thing or a power the dragon Fáfnir had. The eight-armed stave sold under that name first appears in an Icelandic manuscript of the 1600s.

Is the valknut from the Viking Age?

The picture is: three interlocked triangles are carved on Gotland picture stones of about 700 to 1000. The name is not. Valknútr is not an Old Norse word, and no source securely tells us what the Norse called the figure or what it meant.