amuletsMjölnir pendantMjǫllnir

Around a thousand hammer pendants have come out of the ground in what are now the Nordic countries, England, northern Germany, the Baltic states and Russia. As of 2004, a tenth of the finds came from graves, nearly all cremations, and those burials are often identified as women's. The rest turn up in hoards and in the dirt of trading towns.

The pendants appear to have grown out of an older north Germanic habit of wearing pendants, and scholars have connected them to the club-of-Hercules amulet worn by other ancient Germanic peoples. Their surge in popularity during the Viking Age, and some of the shapes that surge produced, may have been an answer to Christian cross pendants, which were appearing in the same region as Christianisation advanced. Two signs, two workshops, one neck.

What the hammer was for is said out loud on one object. The Kvinneby amulet, an 11th-century copper plate from Öland in Sweden, was likely worn at the neck and carries a Younger futhark inscription that runologists Mindy MacLeod and Bernard Mees translate: "May Thor protect him with his hammer which came from out of the sea. Flee from evil!" The poems agree on the hammer's second job. In Þrymskviða, Mjölnir is fetched to hallow a bride; in Gylfaginning, Thor consecrates Baldr's burning ship with it. A hammer that kills is also a hammer that blesses.

In 1999 the German archaeologist Jörn Staecker proposed a typology of the finds by decoration and material — amber, iron, silver. In 2019 the American scholar Katherine Suzanne Beard extended it by hammer shape and suspension type and launched Eitri, an online database of hammer finds with their composition and discovery context.

The second span starts much later. The hammer is worn again today by adherents of Heathenry, and scholars Jenny Blain and Robert J. Wallis wrote in 2006 that Thor's hammer is the most common of heathen sacred artefacts. In the United States the National Cemetery Administration issues the Hammer of Thor as emblem #55 for veterans' headstones. The symbol has also been taken up in white nationalist and neo-Nazi circles: the Anti-Defamation League's symbol database records that white supremacists sometimes build swastikas and other hate symbols into the decoration, while noting that its traditional origins are non-racist. Beard's position is that "most people who wear hammer pendants today do so for cultural, religious, or decorative reasons and maintain absolutely no ties to any racist groups or beliefs". The dating block below covers the excavated Viking-Age span only; the revival is a separate, living span that this record describes in prose rather than folding into the same bar.

Cast or cut in iron or silver, occasionally amber, pierced or looped at the haft end, and strung. In Viking-Age cremation graves around Mälaren, in Åland and in Russia, archaeologists also find Thor's hammer-rings: iron rings hung with several amulets, many but not all of them hammers, recovered from cinerary urns and found in graves of both sexes but more often women's. Their exact function is unknown, and this atlas leaves it unknown.

Made and sold worldwide as of 2026, in silver, steel and pewter, by museum shops, by Heathen craftworkers and by mass-market jewellers. Whether a cast reproduction is the same object as an excavated one is the argument this atlas reports rather than settles; so is who gets to wear the sign, and the ADL entry and Beard's sentence above are the two ends of it.