Valknut

The evidence for this symbol is entirely archaeological. No text from the Norse world mentions it, describes it, or gives it a name.

What survives is a small set of objects. On Gotland picture stones, notably Stora Hammars I, the figure occupies a prominent position within a scene that also shows a spear, a hanged man, a bird and what is generally read as a burial mound. It recurs on the Tangelgarda stone, there drawn in unicursal form, below a horse. It is carved on a bedpost from the Oseberg ship burial in Norway and appears on tapestry fragments from the same find. It is engraved on a gold finger ring from the Nene valley in England, dated to the eighth or ninth century. A seventh-century coin found near Norwich carries both the figure and a Christian cross, which is a useful corrective to anyone treating it as a confessional badge.

Two geometrically distinct forms exist: three separate interlocking triangles, and a single continuous line folded into the same outline. Whether the makers regarded these as the same sign is unknown.

That is the whole corpus, and it is worth registering how thin it is: a handful of objects, spread across Sweden, Norway and England, over perhaps three centuries, none of them captioned. The find contexts are also mixed in a way that resists a single explanation, since a bed from a rich woman's burial and a gold ring worn on a hand in Anglo-Saxon England are not obviously the same kind of statement.

Everything beyond the objects, what it meant, whether it had a name, whether the people who cut it into a bedpost and the people who cut it into a memorial stone meant the same thing at all, is inference from context, and the context is itself being interpreted.

Valknut is not a Viking Age word. It is a modern term, and no record survives of what the symbol was called when it was in use. This is worth dwelling on, because the name is often glossed as knot of the slain and that gloss is then treated as evidence of meaning. It is not evidence of anything; it is a modern coinage being read back into the material as though it were a source.

The association with Odin is an inference, and a reasonable one. The figure keeps company with imagery of hanging, sacrifice and the dead, and Odin is the god of exactly those things. Hilda Ellis Davidson proposed a link to Odin's stated power to bind and loose the minds of warriors in battle. Rudolf Simek suggested more cautiously that it relates to practices surrounding death. A comparison is sometimes drawn with the Prose Edda's description of the heart of the giant Hrungnir as three-pointed, which is a genuine textual detail but is not said to be this figure. These are scholarly proposals. They are not attested doctrine and should not be repeated as such.

The modern difficulty is separate and should be stated separately. The symbol has been taken up by some white supremacist groups, and it is catalogued as such by the Anti-Defamation League and comparable bodies. That does not make it a hate symbol in the way that certain other appropriated signs have become one: it remains in ordinary use by heathen and Asatru practitioners, by museums, and as a Scandinavian decorative motif, and the organisations that list it say so explicitly. The appropriation is a fact about the present. It is not a fact about the eighth century, and the two should not be allowed to contaminate one another in either direction.