10/06/2025
I am Eyvind, son of Hákon, and I have lived all my days beneath the wind-shattered skies of Orkney, where the sea is always near and the gods walk among our stones.
The Odin Stone stands between the lochs of Harray and Stenness, a tall pillar with a hole through its heart, like the eye of Allfather Odin himself. We islanders say he sees through it even now. Some say the gods carved the hole in the stone with their bare hands in the days before men, but I have heard others… Christian men from the south… call it folly, a thing of nonsense and shadows. Yet they do not know what it is to stand before the stone and feel the breath of the past in your lungs.
The Odin Stone is our truth.
I remember the first time my father brought me there. I was no more than ten winters old, and I walked with the stiffness of one unused to the cold. He told me to hush and look upon it with my whole self. “This is not a stone,” he said, “but a doorway.”
“A doorway to what?” I had asked.
“To promise. To faith. To fate.”
We walked around the stone, careful not to touch it until the moment was right. The hole in its centre was large enough to pass an arm through, and my father did just that, grasping my hand on the other side.
“Swear,” he said, his eyes locked to mine through the stone’s gap. “Swear you’ll stand by your kin, even when the gods test you.”
I swore. As did he. And just like that, we were bound not only by blood, but by oath.
The Odin Stone is not alone. The Ring of Brodgar lies not far to the northwest, great sentinels of stone in a wide circle, older than any tale told on these isles. And to the south of us sits the Stones of Stenness, sharper and taller, a ring of four that once were twelve. The old men say they were put there by the first folk, before even the Picts. Long before the Norse came in their dragon-prowed ships and took these islands from the King of the Scots and the shadowy Pictish tribes.
But it is the Odin Stone that we use for vows, and not just for warriors. When a man and woman would marry, they would clasp hands through the hole and speak their bond to all. If a babe was sickly or cursed, its mother might bring it to the stone and pass it through the hole, to be made whole again. If two clans feuded, they might send their chieftains to the Odin Stone to seal peace with an oath. Breaking such a vow was not only shameful—it was death. For the gods would strike down any who lied before Odin’s eye.
We knew these things as truth. No monk or missionary could take that from us.
But times were changing. It was the late harvest of my twenty-third year when the men came from the south with their iron crosses and books of foreign songs. They called themselves priests and spoke of a man who hung upon a tree, not unlike Odin himself, but they said their god had no need of stones. They laughed at our ways. Called them relics of a savage past.
Still, they did not laugh for long.
In those years, we answered to Earl Sigurd Hlodvirsson, called Sigurd the Stout. A hard man, broad-shouldered and cruel-eyed, but fair when it suited him. He ruled from the broch at Birsay, and his word was law. Though he wore a cross around his neck, as the Norse kings in Norway had begun to do, he did not yet forbid our old rites.
One winter, a feud broke out between the men of Orphir and the farmers near Firth. It began, as many feuds do, with land and livestock and pride. There was bloodshed, and it was feared the killing would spread. Earl Sigurd summoned both sides to the Odin Stone.
I was there, standing in the wind with my brother, Halfdan. We watched the chieftains each pass their right arm through the hole, clasp hands, and swear peace before the gods.
“They’ll keep their word now,” Halfdan said.
“They must,” I answered. “Odin heard them.”
And so he did. The feud ended. That night, we feasted under the moonlight, and I saw again the strength of the stone. Not as a weapon, but as a shield.
Years passed, and the Christian priests grew bolder. They built churches of stone and timber, and spoke against the old ways in the tongue of the south. They said the Odin Stone was heathen, a mockery, a false idol. They said those who passed their hands through it risked damnation.
But we islanders are stubborn. We listened, and still we went to the stone.
Then came a stormy spring when a man named Aethelwine arrived from the south with gold in his purse and words like honey. He had the ear of Earl Sigurd and brought with him craftsmen and masons. He called for a new church to be built in Stenness, and the Odin Stone, he said, must fall.
“We cannot have a monument to pagan lies standing in the shadow of Christ’s house,” he declared.
I remember the fury that welled in my belly. Not just mine. All across Orkney, voices rose in anger. Not even the Earl could ignore it.
In the end, the stone remained… for a time.
I took my own oath at the stone when I was wed to Sigrid, daughter of Olaf the Shipwright. She was fierce and tall, her eyes as blue as the waters of Scapa Flow. We clasped hands through the hole and bound our lives together. She bore me three sons and a daughter, and each time one of them was ill as a babe, I carried them to the Odin Stone and passed them through the hole. And each time, they grew strong.
Sigrid believed in the gods of our fathers. She sang to F***g in childbirth and burned oil for Thor when storms threatened the coast. Yet she was kind to the Christian priests, even once invited one to supper.
“They mean no harm,” she said. “They just believe in different gods.”
“Then let them build different stones,” I grumbled. “Let them leave ours in peace.”
But peace is as fragile as spring ice.
In my fortieth year, Aethelwine returned, now dressed as a bishop, and with more men. They spoke of unity and law. They said the King of Norway had accepted Christ and all his earls must follow. They said the stone was a relic of superstition. And then, without ceremony, they came with ropes and sledges, and they toppled it.
I was there. I ran with my son, Arne, when we heard the shouting. We saw it fall, the great Odin Stone, shattered at its base. Some say it was dragged away for church stones. Others say the priests left its pieces to be swallowed by the earth in shame.
The crowd stood in stunned silence. Sigrid wept. My daughter, Thyra, knelt and gathered a handful of the dust, as though she could carry home the spirit of the gods.
We buried a shard of the stone behind our longhouse, beneath the hearth. I have never told anyone this before.
Now I am old. My hands ache with the cold, and my beard has whitened with salt. The Odin Stone is gone, but not forgotten. I have told its tale to my grandchildren, as my father told it to me. I make them swear their oaths over the hearth where the shard lies buried, and I tell them:
“A true vow needs no witness but the gods.”
In time, the island will change. The Christians will build cathedrals, and men will forget the ways of oaths and stones. But not all will be lost. Beneath the turf, the earth remembers. The wind still whispers over the lochs, and the gods still walk in silence among the standing stones.
And sometimes, I still see it… tall and proud, the hole at its heart like the eye of the world. Watching. Waiting.
( I write these short tales to encourage curiosity and travel. Orkney is a beautiful place to visit. The Odin Stone was a real standing stone located near the Stones of Stenness in Orkney. It stood until December 1814, when it was destroyed by a local man who saw it as an obstruction and a site of superstition. Historically, it featured a round hole, and people indeed passed their hands through it to make vows… particularly for betrothals and oaths of loyalty.
It was part of a sacred Neolithic landscape that included the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness, some of the oldest known stone circles in Europe. )
https://www.seymourtravels.co.uk/2026tours-1
