The Hammer Carried Close

Sunniva Aalto
Field Correspondent, The Northern Reaches

Fieldnotes — the Uppland grave-fields, midwinter

The pendant is smaller than you expect. Most of the silver ones I have handled in museum stores would sit in the cup of a palm, a stub-handled hammer no longer than a thumb, hung from a loop and worn close against the skin. Iron and bronze versions turn up too, plainer, heavier, clearly made for use rather than show. They come out of graves from Iceland to the Volga, worn by men and women both, and they are common enough across the ninth to eleventh centuries that no single find explains them. What they meant to the people who wore them has to be pieced together from poems written down after the fact, and from the shape of the objects themselves.

The story the Norse told of the hammer's making is in the Prose Edda, in the section called Skáldskaparmál. Loki, having cut off Sif's hair as a prank, is sent to the dwarves to have it remade in gold, and ends up wagering his own head on a contest between two pairs of smiths. The brothers Sindri and Brokkr forge Mjölnir for Thor, working the metal while Loki, in the shape of a fly, bites at Brokkr's eyelid to spoil the work. The bellows falter for a moment and the handle comes out shorter than it should be. It is a small flaw, and it is the reason, the story says, that the hammer can be swung one-handed, close, in a tight space, rather than needing the long haft of a war-axe. Whether that detail was already old when it was written down, or whether it was shaped to explain a pendant shape that already existed, I could not tell you. The versions do not agree, and the written sources come from Christian Iceland, two centuries or more after the objects were being buried with the dead.

What the hammer did, in the stories, was hold the world together. Thor used it against the giants, the jötnar, who threaten to unmake order at every turn in the mythology; a hammer thrown at chaos, again and again, standing between the settled world and what lies outside it. But it also blessed. In the poem Þrymskviða, when the giant Thrym steals the hammer and demands the goddess Freyja as ransom, it is Thor himself, disguised as the bride, who gets it back, and the poem has the hammer laid in the false bride's lap to hallow the marriage before it is used to settle the debt more violently. Thor is also said to have used it to raise his goats from their bones after they had been eaten and the bones kept whole overnight. Consecration and violence sit in the same object without apparent contradiction, which is not unusual for a Norse god.

The amulets themselves carry a harder question. A soapstone mould turned up in Jutland with two cavities side by side, one shaped for a hammer, one for a cross, so that a single pour of metal could produce either, depending on what the smith needed to sell that week. It dates from the period when Scandinavia was turning toward Christianity, unevenly, household by household, and it suggests that for some wearers the hammer was worn not against the new faith but alongside it, or in place of it, or as a kind of hedge while the matter was still undecided. I do not think the pendant ever had one fixed meaning even among the people who wore it. It was protection, certainly, worn at the throat the way a great many cultures have worn things at the throat. But it was also an allegiance, a household mark, possibly a joke, possibly a genuine plea against a world that could still, at any point, come apart.

Sunniva Aalto is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Northern Reaches. High latitudes, deep winter, standing water — she works in the months when the light is briefest, on the theory that the north's stories were made at that time of year and are best understood in it. She travels alone and says little about it.