Do you have any info on the Ginfaxi symbol? Seen a heathen who had it tattooed on their throat and immediately had alarms go off in my head.
I'll post what I know about Ginfaxi, but it won't tell you anything more about the person you saw than you already know. I like thinking and writing about this stuff so I wrote a lot but, yeah, none of this is really going to narrow anything down for you. I'm trying to put the rest behind a break but Tumblr doesn't like breaks anymore, and keeps moving this one around, so we'll see what happens.
I assume that what you mean by "ginfaxi" is this:
This isn't the only symbol that gets called that (more on that below) but it is the most common, and it's what comes up when you Google it. I don't really know anything about how modern people are using ginfaxi but here are some off-the-cuff thoughts:
it's probably on its way into popularity because Ægishjálmur and Vegvísir are too well-known to be mysterious and cool anymore
while less common than those, it's been commercialized for just as long. You, anon, probably know this already, because you probably googled it before asking me, and turned up all the same tchotchke shit that every other "Ancient Viking Magic" symbol is slapped onto. That has more determination over how people relate to it than any 18th/19th century black book does.
there's higher-than-average risk of it being made into a symbol of "Viking warriors" or similar because of its actual historical association with glíma even though conceptually it's closer to staves for winning at chess (which do also exist) than it is to actual combat
yeah I do think it has potential to be a "swastika with plausible deniability" but I honestly don't know if people are doing that and if anything its touristification might be the thing that prevents it
it occurs to me that TikTok is probably a serious vector for how people are experiencing this stuff, and it's something I know absolutely nothing about other than that people like to put runes and stuff on their faces. So I dunno, that could be an influence here.
When you're trying to figure out what it means when you see a galdrastafur on someone, it doesn't necessarily do you any good to learn about its background and history if the person who got it inked didn't bother to research that themselves, and I'm disinclined to believe that someone who got a vaguely swastika-like symbol on their throat did that. I have no idea if the symbol has any more frequency among racists than it does among sorta "general population" heathen/viking-interested people who relate to the past basically through the lens of the tourist gift shop, who would have been getting "Celtic" symbols if it were still the 90's, which seems to be the majority of people involved with this stuff at all. A radically different group of people also comes to mind: in my experience in east coast US, some crusty gutter punk types also use symbols like Icelandic galdrastafir and runes, and they're also more likely to get a tattoo on their throat or face or whatever than the average viking enthusiast. I know a guy who used to put runes and stuff on his panhandling signs and claimed they did get him more cash, and whether it was magic or just drawing attention or what didn't really matter to him.
Anyway, the point is, I think that tattoo was a bad idea, makes someone look like a nazi, and you should side-eye them until you know better, but for better or worse there are other possible explanations for how that symbol got there. I'm not making excuses for anyone, just stating the blunt fact that there are non-nazis who attracted to this symbol and decorate itself with it without even thinking about any of this.
It shows up in that annoying graphic of "Norse" symbols with no context that occasionally makes the rounds (that manages not to include a single symbol from the actual Viking age), with an incorrect or at least misleading description:
And as much as this sucks that is probably the main way that people experience symbolism that is related (whether in a historical or a recently-contrived way) to "the Norse."
The version of the symbol I've been talking about is the most well-known because it comes from Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri by Jón Árnason, the most important folklore and fairy tale collection from Iceland. I'm not sure where he got that particular image. When he was writing in the mid-19th century, he said that ginfaxi and gapaldur (which often accompanies ginfaxi) were among the most widespread symbols with the most variety of uses, and even mentions them before ægishjálmur. Ginfaxi was probably always used in glíma, and since that's the context it appears in in magic books while other uses seem not to have been recorded, the association with glíma became stronger over time. It was to be written on a piece of paper or wood-chip and put in the toe of the left show, while gapaldur was supposed to be under the heel in the right shoe (there is some variation in the procedure). According to Grunnavíkur-Jón Ólafsson (via Jón Árna) the two symbols together were also used for spookier things like going into hills (i.e. like huldufólk do, I guess, there's no additional context) and repel sendingar (sort of like ghosts raised by hostile wizards to harm someone) but I don't know where Grunnavíkur-Jón wrote about that or anything else about this. Here is a variant gapaldur from Jón Árnason:
According to Jón Árnason (link in Icelandic), it was rumored that the two staves were composed by hiding the names of different æsir in them. To me, that implies either a method of encoding that is totally opaque to me, or that belief pertained to an entirely different set of visual symbols (either of these are highly plausible). It seems the names ginfaxi and gapaldur (or gapandi) were better-known than the actual visual symbols themselves, and there are many variants that look hardly anything like the one in Jón Arna (this is not surprising -- there are also many symbols called ægishjálmur other than the one we all know). Probably many more people suspected others of having used symbols like these to gain advantage over them, than actually used symbols themselves, so that the idea of ginfaxi would precede anyone knowing how to actually draw it, and perhaps there never really was an original or fixed shape.
Jónas Jónasson (another folklore collector) identified this one from Lbs 977 4to as another ginfaxi although I don't know how he knows it's that and not gapaldur:
This one comes with a formula to recite that invokes Óðinn and Frigg and is specifically about winning at glíma.
These two are from the Galdrasýning á Ströndum website (only on the Icelandic version of the page for some reason), not sure where they got them either. With these you're supposed to carve them on a piece of turf when the moon is waxing and drop some of your own blood into them, then put them in your shoes and recite a verse.
I think it's worth showing what glíma is. True, when an Old Icelandic text refers to people doing an action that is uses the verb glíma to describe, it's talking about actual fighting, but this is the stuff that the glímugaldrar ('glíma-magic') that we have is about:
