Aurvandil’s toe: a frozen toe that became a star
The story is in Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál, written around 1220. Thor has fought the giant Hrungnir and come home with a piece of whetstone stuck in his head. A wise woman called Gróa, the wife of Aurvandill, sings her spells over him until the stone starts to loosen.
To reward her, Thor tells her some news. He had waded from the north and carried her husband out of Jötunheim in a basket on his back. One of Aurvandill’s toes stuck out of the basket and froze, ‘wherefore Thor broke it off and cast it up into the heavens, and made thereof the star called Aurvandill’s Toe’. Aurvandill, he adds, will soon be home. Gróa is so glad that she forgets her spells, and the stone stays in Thor’s head. That, Snorri says, is why one should never throw a whetstone across the floor.
Earendel, the rising light
English readers have a reason to look twice at this name. In the Old English poem Crist I, in the Exeter Book, a 10th-century manuscript, there is the line ‘Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast, ofer middangeard monnum sended’: ‘Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, sent to men over middle-earth.’ Earendel there means a rising light, the dawn. A Gothic Bible fragment probably reads auzandil for Lucifer, the morning star, in Isaiah. This is why scholars have long linked Aurvandill with Earendel and auzandil, as forms of one old name for a bright light in the sky.
Which star?
No medieval source says which star was Aurvandill’s Toe. Every identification is a guess. Jacob Grimm in 1835 thought, from Earendel, that the bright light might be the morning star, Venus. Later writers have suggested Venus or Sirius. The Cleasby-Vigfússon dictionary of 1874 offered ‘Rigel in Orion (?)’, with the question mark, and Stefan Schaffner in 2021 linked Aurvandill with Orion as a whole, which would make the toe the giant’s foot. You will also find Alcor, the small star beside the bend of the Plough, named online; we found no scholarly source for that at all.
There are doubts about the story itself too. Rudolf Simek has suggested Snorri may have made up the anecdote to explain a star name that already existed, and Christian Etheridge doubts that Aurvandill and Earendel are the same word. It is a good story either way. It is just not a star chart.