Vegvísir – Is the Icelandic “Wayfinder” Stave Really a Viking Symbol?

On page 60 of the manuscript ÍB 383 4to, known as “Huld,” an Icelandic sentence appears beside two star-shaped drawings: whoever carries these staves will not lose their way in snowstorm or bad weather, even if the path is unknown to them. Geir Vigfússon (1813–1880) wrote these lines down in 1860 in Akureyri.

It is the oldest known evidence of the sign that today travels the world as the Vegvísir – as an alleged Viking symbol on tattoos, jewelry, and souvenirs from Reykjavík. Between this manuscript and the end of the Viking Age, usually dated to 1066, lie roughly 800 years.

Three Manuscripts, One Decade

The Vegvísir is attested only a few times, and all attestations lie close together. Three manuscripts show the sign in its familiar form. All three are Icelandic, all date from the 19th century, all from the same region: Eyjafjörður around the town of Akureyri in northern Iceland.

The oldest is the aforementioned Huld manuscript of 1860. Its numbering poses a small problem: various scholars cite the passage as “page 60,” others as “folio 27r,” still others as “26v” – the page numbering and the folio numbering of the manuscript diverge. Anyone consulting the source should know both. The page contains two variants of the sign, numbered XXVII and XXIX in the manuscript.

Eight to nine years later, in 1868/69, Olgeir Geirsson (1842–1880) compiled his “Galdrakver” in Akureyri, the manuscript Lbs 2917 a 4to. There the Vegvísir appears on page 27 as the 27th sign; the caption largely matches that of the Huld.

The third source, Lbs 4627 8vo, also a “Galdrakver,” names neither author nor place nor exact year. All that is certain: 19th century, the Eyjafjörður region. Among the 32 pages of this manuscript, folio 17v carries the Vegvísir – this time with a noticeably longer, explicitly Christian addition. The staff works only, it states there, “if you believe in it – if you believe in God, in the name of Jesus.”

The number three is not final, however. Alessia Bauer and Alexandra Pesch, in their 2023 study, count four 19th-century Icelandic manuscripts that carry the name or a closely related form. This changes nothing in the overall picture: all known attestations come from the same century and the same area.

The three manuscripts named above are today held in the Landsbókasafn, the National Library in Reykjavík, and can be viewed digitized on handrit.is.

Vegur and vísir – The Etymology

The name is composed of two Icelandic words: vegur, “way, road,” and vísir, “pointer, indicator.” Literally, then, Vegvísir means nothing other than “that which shows the way.” In German, “Wegweiser” matches this word formation almost exactly.

The word itself reaches much further back linguistically than the symbol: Old Danish has veivisere, Old Swedish væghvisare, both traceable back to the 15th century, used both literally and figuratively.

Herein lies precisely the risk of confusion. An old, well-attested word in a North Germanic language does not prove that the sign is old as well. In this case, language and symbol have two entirely different birth dates.

The Gap Before 1860

The Vegvísir appears in no stanza of the Poetic Edda, in no chapter of Snorri’s, and in no saga. No rune stone bears it, no piece of jewelry, no find from the Viking Age.

More importantly: even the written tradition of Icelandic magic signs itself does not know it before 1860. The Galdrabók, the oldest known Icelandic grimoire, from the late 16th or early 17th century – today in Stockholm – does not contain it. Nor is it found in Lbs 2413 8vo, the great magic-sign collection from around 1800, that is, immediately before the manuscripts in which it then suddenly appears.

This gap cannot be argued away. It forbids dating the sign’s secured transmission back before 1860.

This does not rule out that an older, now-lost source existed – it is known that many of the galdrabækur, the Icelandic grimoires of the 16th to 19th centuries, have not survived. But historians distinguish between possibility and proof. What is attested is what stands in surviving manuscripts, and that begins in 1860.

Keep the Galdrabók in mind. It appears again further below, and that is where it gets interesting.

The Comparative Case of Ægishjálmur

How differently “old” can turn out to be for Icelandic magic signs is shown by the Ægishjálmur.

Its name already appears in the Fáfnismál, a poem of the Poetic Edda – there, however, as a real, wearable helmet that instills fear, not as a graphic symbol. The eight-armed pictorial form known today appears only much later: the oldest known example of this form is found in Lbs 143 8vo, around the middle of the 17th century – a good two hundred years before the first attestation of the Vegvísir, but likewise centuries after the Viking Age.

The Vegvísir does not even have this bridge of a name. No eddic poem mentions it under any name at all.

The Ægishjálmur, then, allows us to study how a word from the Viking Age and an image from the early modern period can grow together across centuries. This case does not apply to the Vegvísir: here, the name too is young.

Christian or Pagan – An Open Dispute

Where does the star-shaped basic form of the galdrastafir actually come from? Two positions stand opposed.

One sees the root in Christian-Mediterranean magic. Star-shaped magic signs are attested in England as early as the 15th century, for instance in the “Magical Treatise of Solomon” (Harley MS 5596, folio 31r), a text of Christian mysticism. Eirik Storesund (2018, blog Brute Norse) locates the typological origin of the galdrastafir as a whole primarily in this Solomonic tradition.

The reservation, however, comes from scholarship itself: that the Icelandic staves descend directly from the pentacles of the Clavicula Salomonis or any particular other work is not established – especially since the known Solomonic signs resemble the Ægishjálmur more than the Vegvísir.

Both readings stand side by side. The available source material does not settle the dispute.

From Grimoire to Global Symbol

How a marginal note in three manuscripts became a global symbol can be dated – and is itself the most interesting part of the story.

In 1903, Ólafur Davíðsson probably published the first printed version, together with a German translation: in his essay “Isländische Zauberzeichen und Zauberbücher” in the Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, page 278, plate V. A second wave of dissemination came in 1940 with the Galdraskræða by Jochum Eggertsson, who wrote under the name “Skuggi.”

The Error That Explains Everything

In 1989, Stephen Flowers, under the pseudonym Edred Thorsson, published an English translation of the Galdrabók. This made the Icelandic grimoires known internationally. Flowers moved in esoteric-Odinist circles, and in this context the Ægishjálmur and the Vegvísir reached an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Only the Vegvísir is not actually in the Galdrabók at all.

Flowers inserted it. It comes from Ólafur Davíðsson’s 1903 essay, not from the manuscript of around 1600. Flowers himself corrected this in a later publication and correctly credited Davíðsson as the source.

By then it was too late. Anyone searching for the Vegvísir today reads almost the same sentence everywhere: that the sign comes from the 17th-century Icelandic grimoire Galdrabók. This claim has exactly one cause – an insertion by the 1989 translator that has since been passed on as source evidence.

A false source attribution that traces back to a single book and yet appears in thousands of texts. This is the reason this page cites shelf marks and page numbers.

Björk – Two Dates, Not One

In 1982, at the age of seventeen, Björk Guðmundsdóttir had the Vegvísir tattooed on her left upper arm, together with her friend Didda, at what was then Iceland’s only tattoo studio.

The sign did not become popular through this – not yet. In 1982, Björk was an unknown Icelandic teenager. She spoke publicly about the tattoo only in the 1990s, once she had become internationally known. She described it as a thousand-year-old rune compass that seafarers had supposedly painted on their foreheads with charcoal.

There is no source for this charcoal-on-the-forehead story.

Between the tattoo and its impact, then, lie roughly ten years, and the connecting link is her fame. After that, the motif spread rapidly as a tattoo design; by now, Icelandic souvenir shops sell it as an authentic Viking symbol.

The sequence is remarkable: Björk’s tattoo predates Flowers’ insertion. Two paths of dissemination, arising independently of one another, overlapped in the 1990s – one through pop culture, one through esoteric literature. This explains why the legend is so difficult to correct.

What in Today’s Vegvísir Does Not Come from the Manuscript

Two ingredients can be identified precisely.

The rune circles that surround many present-day versions are not present in the Huld entry. They were added during modern reception.

And the circular form itself is new. In the Huld manuscript, the Vegvísir sits within a square frame. The circular version that appears on practically every modern tattoo and pendant is a 20th-century redesign.

Anyone who wants the original takes the square.

Not a Compass, Not a Viking Navigation Device

Part of the modern legend claims that the Vegvísir literally showed seafarers the way, similar to a compass.

There is no basis for this whatsoever: no documented method makes the sign point north, it has no needle, no orientation to cardinal directions, no scale, and no transmitted instructions for reading it. Its radial structure recalls a compass rose but does not function like one. Nor does the manuscript text say anything of the kind – it promises that one will not lose one’s way, not that one will find a direction.

At this point, the sólarsteinn is often cited as the “real” Viking navigation instrument, the sunstone, likely a piece of Iceland spar. Caution is warranted here, for the very same reason as with the Vegvísir.

A stone of this name appears in Rauðúlfs þáttr, where King Olaf uses it to locate the sun under an overcast sky, as well as in a few church inventory lists. No medieval text describes it as a navigation device at sea. This interpretation is modern: Thorkild Ramskou proposed it in 1967, and even the identification with Iceland spar is a 20th-century reconstruction.

Whether the technique worked is disputed among scholars. Whether it was ever actually used is not transmitted but inferred. In any case, it has nothing to do with the Vegvísir.

Sources

Manuscripts. Huld (ÍB 383 4to), compiled by Geir Vigfússon in 1860 in Akureyri, sign on page 60, foliation given variously as 27r and 26v. Galdrakver by Olgeir Geirsson (Lbs 2917 a 4to), Akureyri 1868/69, page 27 as the 27th sign. Anonymous Galdrakver (Lbs 4627 8vo), 19th century, Eyjafjörður, folio 17v with a Christian addition. All three held at the Landsbókasafn Reykjavík, digitized on handrit.is. Bauer and Pesch (2023) count a fourth manuscript.

Negative evidence. No saga, no rune inscription, no eddic stanza names the sign. The Galdrabók (late 16th/early 17th century, today in Stockholm) and Lbs 2413 8vo (around 1800) do not contain it. The situation differs for the Ægishjálmur: its name appears in the Fáfnismál, while its pictorial form only becomes traceable in Lbs 143 8vo around the middle of the 17th century.

On the overall tradition. Alessia Bauer (2021, Vísindavefurinn, the science portal of the University of Iceland): the Icelandic grimoire tradition begins early, in the “Lærdómsöld,” the age of learning between 1550 and 1750; in 62 of 130 known Icelandic witchcraft trials between 1554 and 1719, galdrastafir or magic images played a role.

On the question of origin. More recent scholarship shifts the focus away from the older notion of a direct Germanic bind-rune succession. Alessia Bauer and Alexandra Pesch (2023, “Guidance from Ancient Symbols: Vegvísir, Ægishjálmur and Other Galdramyndir”) as well as Roberto Luigi Pagani (2025, “The Mediterranean Origin of the Galdrastafir”) locate the roots of the galdrastafir more strongly in the Mediterranean and Solomonic sphere, for instance in the pentacles of the Greek Hygromanteia text, transmitted in Harley MS 5596 from the 15th century.

On reception. Ólafur Davíðsson, “Isländische Zauberzeichen und Zauberbücher,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, 1903, p. 278, plate V. Jochum Eggertsson, Galdraskræða, 1940. Stephen Flowers, The Galdrabók. An Icelandic Grimoire, Weiser, York Beach 1989 – with the insertion of the Vegvísir, which is not part of the original text. Björk’s 1982 tattoo and her public account of it from the 1990s onward belong to the pop-cultural tradition, without a source of their own.

On the sunstone. Rauðúlfs þáttr; Thorkild Ramskou (1967) on the navigation hypothesis.

Open questions. Whether the Ægishjálmur already appears in the Huld manuscript is stated differently in different scholarly works. Equally open is whether a lost source existed before 1860.