Valknut

Where the triangles were carved

The name is modern. Valknut is a Norwegian compound, “knot of those fallen in battle” in Encyclopaedia Britannica’s translation, and what the sign was called in the Viking Age is unknown, as Nordiska Asa-samfundet also notes. The oldest examples are on picture stones from Gotland, from the 700s. Britannica names the stones from Stora Hammars and Tängelgårda, and adds that some scholars call their emblems triquetras instead. On the Tängelgårda stone, as Britannica describes it, three of them stand between the legs of a horse in a scene read as a fallen warrior’s procession into Valhalla.

A gold Anglo-Saxon ring of the 700s or 800s, found by an eel fisherman at Peterborough in 1855 and now in the British Museum, clearly shows the three triangles. In Norway the Oseberg ship burial held a bed with a similar sign cut into one of its posts and a bucket with one on its lid, and similar emblems appear on Anglo-Saxon cremation urns.

Most of these finds have to do with death, and Odin is often near. Christopher Abram of the University of Notre Dame puts the link with Odin down to the fact that “it tends to accompany pictures of warriors”; what the sign meant in these settings is unknown, Asa-samfundet says. In Snorri’s Edda the giant Hrungnir has a heart of hard stone “pointed with three corners, just like the carved symbol” called Hrungnir’s heart ever since. Whether Snorri meant the valknut or the triquetra is uncertain, and historians disagree.

The other valknute of Norwegian folk art

In Norwegian the word valknute also names a knot in folk decoration. Store norske leksikon lists valknuter among the common motifs of the coverlets called ruteåkle, alongside eight-petalled roses, crosses and chequers, and describes the valknute as “a knot without beginning or end”, used both to protect against evil powers and as a symbol of eternal love. It appears in the simple carved decoration called kroting, and the coat of arms of Lødingen in northern Norway, adopted in 1984, shows “a five-pillared valknute in gold on a red ground”, standing for the town as a junction.

Worn today

Nordiska Asa-samfundet, a Swedish Heathen community, calls the valknut a popular symbol “within and outside the heathen sphere”: people have it tattooed and wear it on sweaters, although, the community adds, what it meant is “hidden in the past”. Practitioners of Ásatrú have claimed it as their own, Britannica notes. Asa-samfundet holds that a symbol's meaning is fixed and “doesn’t change according to the wearer or their beliefs”. Asked who owns the valknut, Thor's hammer and the world tree, Henrik Williams, professor of Scandinavian languages at Uppsala University, told the Norse Mythology Blog: “Nobody and everyone.”