Worn in Heathenry

Small hammer pendants are known from Viking-age graves and hoards, worn as protective amulets, and their popularity in the tenth century is often read in part as a response to the Christian cross spreading through Scandinavia; some silversmiths are recorded casting both cross and hammer pendants from the same mould, choosing only the pendant's final shape to suit the buyer. The clearest evidence that these pendants really were understood as Mjolnir comes from a bronze example found at Kobelev on the Danish island of Lolland in 2014, cast with interlace on one face and a short runic inscription on the other reading roughly Hmar x is, this is a hammer, dated to around the tenth century and now held by the National Museum of Denmark; it settled a long debate over whether the many wordless pendant hammers were amulets of Thor at all.

The emblem was revived in the modern Heathen movements, Asatru and related Norse Pagan traditions, that took shape from the later twentieth century, where a worn Mjolnir marks religious identity. Like other Norse symbols it has also been misappropriated by racist groups; in 2016 The Troth and more than 180 other Heathen organisations signed Declaration 127, publicly repudiating the Asatru Folk Assembly's exclusionary folkish stance and rejecting any claim that Heathen symbols imply racial belonging.