What Urnes is

Urnes is the last of the four great animal styles of the Norse world, running roughly from 1050 to 1125. It is named after the carved north portal of the stave church at Urnes in Sogn, western Norway — a set of panels reused from an earlier building on the same site, which is why they predate the church around them.

The name is an art-historical label, not a claim about origin. Calling a design "Urnes" says the same thing as calling a chair "Regency": it places the work in a period and a manner. It does not mean the design came from that village, and it does not carry any meaning beyond that.

How to recognise it

Three things separate Urnes from the styles before it:

1. The animal becomes a ribbon. Earlier styles keep recognisable bodies. Urnes reduces the beast to a band of even width that loops through itself.
2. The line never breaks. You can trace a well-drawn Urnes animal with one finger and never lift it. If the line stops and restarts, it is not Urnes.
3. There are two thicknesses, not one. A thick ribbon for the main beast, a thin one for the tendrils that bind it. The tension between the two is the whole effect.

Four mistakes

These come up constantly, and each one is spotted instantly by people who study the material.

• Horned helmets. A nineteenth-century invention, largely from opera costume. No Viking-age helmet with horns has ever been excavated.
• Elder Futhark in a Viking setting. Elder Futhark has twenty-four characters and had fallen out of use well before the Viking Age. Old Norse used Younger Futhark, which has sixteen.
• Letter-by-letter transliteration. Swapping each English letter for a rune is not how the writing system works. You write the Old Norse word, or you write nothing.
• Calling later Icelandic staves "ancient Viking symbols". Vegvísir and the Helm of Awe come from manuscripts of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries — six hundred years after the period they get attached to.

The last one is worth dwelling on, because it is the one with commercial consequences. Those two designs are among the most searched in this category. They are also, right now, in the middle of a public argument about who else is wearing them. We are not printing them.

Where we stand

The art of the Norse world belongs to anyone who cares enough to learn it. You do not need Scandinavian ancestry to wear a motif from it — the only thing we would ask is that you know what is on your shirt. That is why the style, the century and the source object are named on every product page, and why this page exists at all.

We also keep a public list of what we refuse to print, and the reason in each case. Some of it is straightforward: emblems created by or adopted wholesale by hate movements are not reclaimable and we do not touch them. Some of it is a judgement about timing rather than the symbol itself.

And where a drawing is simply ours — the fjord, the ice, the ship — we say so and make no historical claim at all. The word "authentic" is only worth something if we refuse to spend it.

Sources

• Signe Horn Fuglesang, Some Aspects of the Ringerike Style — on the transition into Urnes.
• James Graham-Campbell, Viking Art — the standard survey of all five styles.
• Riksantikvaren, documentation of the Urnes stave church portal panels.
• Jackson Crawford, lectures on Younger Futhark orthography and the dating of Icelandic staves.

If we have got something wrong here, write to us and we will correct it on this page with a note saying what changed.

The print from this piece

Urnes Wolf

Urnes style, c. 1050–1125. Drawn from the carved north portal at Urnes.