When choosing a tattoo to honour my grandmother, the greatest knitter I’ll ever know, the Selburose was a shoo-in. It’s a distinctive geometric shape with eight points; like most Norwegians, I grew up seeing this pattern everywhere, understanding it to be a proud and beloved symbol of all things Norwegian. It evokes a spectacular and forceful natural landscape, home to a pragmatic and intrepid people.
I live in London now, but I didn’t have to explain the symbol to the tattoo artist. He was from Lithuania, and the eight-point star is an old Baltic symbol, too. I wasn’t surprised to learn this, as I’d seen the stars in Slovakia years before, and I’d also spotted them in southern Spain. I had a vague sense the Selburose wasn’t uniquely Norwegian, but until I started looking in earnest, I had no idea just how universal the eight-point star really is.
A rose, a snowflake, a star, the sun—the eight-point star, as it’s most widely known, has many names. We have no way of knowing how old it really is, or who used it first. It’s almost certainly been invented more than once: it pops up in Chuquibamba textiles from around 1500 in today’s Peru, and it was carved into a rock by a Mi’kmaq artist around the same time. It’s still prominently used by First Nations people in present-day Canada.
But the eight-point star that’s had the biggest global impact is the one that originated in the Middle East. It’s all over the 9th century stucco found at Samarra in Iraq, one of the earliest remaining examples of Islamic art. There’s a good chance it’s even older, as this architecture was heavily influenced by the Byzantine and Sasanian cultures that came before. You can even find hints of the eight-point star in the Star of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of love from 4,000 BCE Mesopotamia.
As the eight-point star travelled outward from the Middle East over the centuries, it seeded itself all over Europe. It’s a geometric form that’s simple enough to replicate, yet complex enough to be interesting. Pleasing to the eye, it hints at communion with nature, handmade culture, and matters of the heart. The eight-point star made its way into architecture, crafts, and even religious symbolism, its simplicity making it seem as though it had always just been there. So with time, many of the cultures that adopted it started to consider the eight-point star uniquely theirs. If this is a symbol central to our people’s spirit, surely that means that the eight-point star was invented here? It felt true, so maybe it was.
But across every cultural reinvention of the eight-point star, its essential nature has remained. Throughout the world it’s associated primarily with protection, as well as love, divinity, and new beginnings. It is a good symbol, always. I know this because when Grandma saw my Selburose tattoo, she told me that while she doesn’t care for tattoos, she likes this one a lot. In fact, she’d quite fancy one herself. Even now, as it’s getting harder for her to keep her facts straight, she tells me this every time I see her. The eight-point star has a way of making itself your own.
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It was late February when my mother and I travelled to Selbu, the village in central Norway whose name is strongly associated with the symbol they call the åttebladsrose (eight leaf rose). While Selbu is only two hours’ drive from where I grew up, neither of us had ever been. Selbu, population 4,161, really is out of the way, I pondered out loud as the open fjord gave way to dense forest. But I wanted to see the village that knit itself to global fame—how did Selbu manage to put its name to a symbol that now represents the whole country?
As we entered the village it soon became clear we were in mitten country now: Selburoses are prominently displayed, including on the municipal crest. We made our way to Selbu Husflidscentral, the village’s cultural centre and museum, located in a traditional farmhouse from 1748. The floorboards creaked as we admired room after room of knitting. I thought I knew about eight-point stars, but every time I thought I’d found a favourite, there was another to marvel at. The pointed shapes became rounds and curls; soon plants and animals appeared, and the traditional black and white gave way to the whole rainbow.
The Husflidscentral is a testimony to a cottage industry that became the lifeblood of the village after millstones, its previous export, became obsolete. “Knitting was vital for the people of Selbu from the early 1900s and as recently as the 1960s,” Anne-Lise Valle tells us in Norwegian. “In 1950, over 2,000 people in Selbu were knitting to put food on the table.” People sometimes even traded mittens directly for food. The Husflidscentral (home goods exchange) was eventually established in the 1930s to ensure quality control, and to coordinate mitten sales in a network that extended around the world.
The Selbuvott design can be traced back to Marit Emstad, a milkmaid born in 1841 who knit the first rosavottene (rose mittens) as a teenager. She caused a stir when she wore them to church—it was an instant trend. Over the years, local knitters developed their own versions of the design. In Selbu Mittens, Anne Bårdsgård describes over 500 pattern variations, named for people and places, or for what they resemble: there’s bukkhånnrosa (buckhorn rose), mothjartrosa (opposed heart rose), kongro (spider) and snøkrystallen (snow crystal). But while Emstad deserves credit for inventing the unique Selbuvott, she never claimed the Selburose as her own, says Valle: “Marit said she’d copied it from an embroidered cloth she’d seen in the church.”
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Most Norwegians have no idea that their much loved eight-point star can actually be traced back to delicate garments imported from the Mediterranean, specifically star-strewn nightwear also used for burial. “These stars symbolised resurrection,” knitwear designer Annemor Sundbø tells me in Norwegian. Knitting became the medium of choice when Norwegians wanted to make their own starry shirts, and soon the stars would be added to clothes for soldiers. “Here we might understand the symbol as giving courage, as well as protection. The star has become a lodestar,” says Sundbø, who’s the author of Norway’s Knitted Heritage.
“As the star enters the Norwegian tradition, people often call it a rose. This ties it back to the Christian tradition, where roses are symbols of Jesus and love,” says Sundbø, explaining that this connection to Christianity was important as people looked for symbols to freely use in their crafts—Norway has a history of witch hunts. “People were afraid to deviate too much,” says Sundbø. “But any symbol you saw in church was safe to use.”
I ask Sundbø about the red-and-white knitted jumper she’s wearing, and she tells me it’s her own design, based on patterns from Setesdal, where she lives. “Traditional patterns belong to everyone. And the so-called Selburose doesn’t just belong to Selbu,” says Sundbø, listing off other villages that could just as easily have laid claim to it.
The many names of the eight-point star hint at its various purposes through the years. Some Norwegians called it the Mary star or cross, which might be used for protection during birth, or as a means to evoke the Virgin Mary when women didn’t feel they could take their menstrual complaints straight to the Lord. Although as Lutherans, they weren’t supposed to have saints anymore, so maybe it was safer to call it the Mare cross (for protection against nightmares) or the Maris cross, referencing the sea? “When things aren’t permitted, you end up with a lot being covered up,” says Sundbø. “You see lots of symbols getting additional names.”
In Estonia, the kaheksakand (eight corners) has three primary meanings: “It heals, it protects from all evil, and it also brings luck,” says Tuuli Tubin McGinley, exhibition and program manager at the Estonian National Museum in Heimtali. The protection was at times quite literal: McGinley shows me a photo of mittens with an eight-point star looming large between two beating posts, knit to offer protection against this form of punishment being doled out by the lord of the manor.
Independence from Russia in 1990 led to a renewed interest for Estonian national symbols. “Today the star is seen as an old symbol, one that feels good and necessary to use,” says McGinley, who believes the symbol emerged organically in the region: “The symbol can be found on so many old things in Estonia, from many hundreds of years ago.” It’s hard to know for sure, but the star certainly has a lot of secular usage in Estonia: “In old farmhouses, the symbol could be found above doors or windows, so the souls of [the departed] would know they could come visit,” says McGinley. “And when people went to pick berries in the forest, they would sometimes make the symbol of the eight-point star. It was believed that if you make this sign, you will find your way back home and not get lost.”
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The notion of protection is probably the strongest thread that ties together all the different cultural uses of the eight-point star. Sometimes the protection is literal—draw a shape and it will show you the way—and other times it’s symbolic, like a knit prayer for safe passage. Other times the protective factor is more ironic: the eight-point star is simply a safe choice to avoid accusations of impropriety. And other times it may just be practical, like if you’re a stonemason in need of a pattern that can be expanded exponentially. And then suddenly, you find yourself in the presence of divine geometry.
Islam has restrictions on the depiction of people or animals, so artists often express themselves through calligraphy, florals or line patterns—stars are safe to use. “These shapes echo the hidden geometry of the universe,” says Bita Pourvash, associate curator at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. She shows me pictures of intricate mosaics that seem to go on forever, centered on an eight-point star. “Everything starts from one dot, from the first circle that you draw. From one, you start unfolding the other shapes. This might reflect the Islamic notion of unity in multiplicity.”
The eight-point star has become a symbol that covers the vast span of Islamic art. “We see these stars shared between [Islamic] traditions,” says Pourvash. “But the arrangement and treatment might be different: in Morocco, we see it as multicoloured zellij tiles, while in Iran it might be seen carved into wooden doors.” The ceiling of the Alhambra in Spain is a spectacular example of the eight-point star in 3D: “You can take a star and pull it up to create a honeycomb structure within the dome, which has been used in Islamic architecture to create a heaven-like feeling.”
In Arabic the eight-point star is called shamsa, which is also the word for the sun. “In Islamic mysticism, light is a symbol of the divine.” But it’s difficult to pin a singular meaning to the eight-point star in Islamic art, and Pourvash stresses there’s a lot of interpretation at play. We cannot even really say for sure that this shape is Islamic in origin. While some of the earliest archeological sites with the eight-point star (such as the 9th century stucco found at Samarra in Iraq) are certainly tied to a Muslim dynasty, the stonemasons may well not have been Muslim, and they may have brought in the symbol from other cultures. “People of different faiths lived and worked together just as they do today,” says Pourvash.
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When the eight-point star was embraced by the Lakota people, it took on a whole new meaning. “The eight-point star represents the morning star, which is the beginning of a new day. The Lakota use this [to symbolise] new beginnings,” says LaRayne Woster, cultural specialist at St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota. The Lakota are the star people—according to their history, they’re in part made from stars.
In the Lakota tradition, it’s a great honour to be given a star quilt. While the patterns and colours vary, the quilts are dominated by a large eight-point star, sometimes depicted alongside eagles, turtles or medicine wheels. You may get a star quilt when you enter a new stage in life, such as graduation or marriage, for a sports achievement, or as a token of gratitude. “The quilts and the symbol are used from birth to death here on earth by our tribes,” says Woster, who’s a citizen of the Sicangu Oyate, the Rosebud tribe in South Dakota. When we spoke she was in the process of making a star quilt for her grandson: “It was one of my life goals, to learn how to make this,” says Woster, whose Lakota name is Morning Star Woman.
Quilting is a newer Lakota tradition. “Historically, our people made symbols on animal skins and decorated them with paint, porcupine quills or bones, and then beads,” says Woster. But as the buffalo was driven to extinction, and the Lakota were made to live on reservations, they were taught quilting by Europeans: “When they could no longer tan hides, our women had to make another form of blanket,” says Woster. “They began sewing.”
When I ask Dr. Craig Howe, the Lakota founder and director of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies about the origin of the star shape, he points me to the 1983 book The Hidden Half by Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine. They conclude that it’s unlikely that the star pattern evolved from traditional morning star designs: “It is more probable that [Lakota] Sioux women borrowed the star quilt pattern from the Anglo-Americans who taught them to quilt”—their craft traditions included the Star of Bethlehem and Lone Star designs—“and in the process of doing so, they transposed the symbolism of the morning star.” This would have been a very small leap, the authors add, as “there is such a striking resemblance in design.”
Perhaps it was the change of artistic medium that prompted the move to the eight-point star. It may also have been the safer design choice at the time. But it’s also possible that this new star was seen as a gift, embraced as a blank slate to be imprinted with the powerful meaning of the Lakota morning star. Woster points out that star quilts actually gain value when shared: “If a quilt was received as a gift, and they thought so much of it that they’re going to gift it [onward] to you, it adds a greater meaning.”
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For Norway to claim the eight-point star as its own feels pretty grabby in light of all this. But looking back, it actually stems from a young nation’s hunger to find itself. When Norway wrote its constitution in 1814 it became an independent nation for the first time in over 400 years, prompting a desire to identify and promote “true” Norwegian culture. As romantic nationalism surged, scholars travelled the country collecting fairy tales, folk songs, local idioms, and traditional crafts. Not long after, Marit Emstad knit her first Selburose, and as Norwegian emigration to the US peaked, many packed traditional knits in their trunks as a new culture of Norwegians emerged in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.
Vesterheim, the National Norwegian-American Museum in Iowa, has several examples of eight-point stars brought by Norwegian immigrants. “[Knits] were saved because they were meaningful,” says Laurann Gilbertson, chief curator at Vesterheim. Keen to preserve their culture, Norwegians in America arranged regional get-togethers and created formal associations such as Sons of Norway (where six out of eighteen founders came from Selbu). This was in part possible because they were given more latitude than many other immigrant groups: “They were able to keep more of their Norwegianness because they were perceived as white and hardworking, and they were Protestant,” says Gilbertson.
But the real boon for the Selburose came when Norwegians introduced skiing to the US. By the early 1900s everyone wanted to hit the slopes—and what better to wear than the most Norwegian design of all? “The Norwegian-American population in the Pacific Northwest popularised Nordic knitting design into the ski industry,” Dr. Susan Strawn, professor emerita of Dominican University in Chicago, writes in PieceWork. She notes that skiing celebrities first appeared in Selbu mittens in the spring 1938 issue of Ski Illustrated, and two years later, the Norwegian royal family were photographed wearing the same mittens during their visit to the US. Just as Marit Emstad caused a stir in her new church mittens back in Selbu, a craze was born: everyone wanted the curious black and white stars. And just like a snowball in the face, the eight-point star was hit with another layer of symbolism: a connection with the outdoors and nature, and a sense of freedom in the open air.
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Even after all this, I’ve found my core feeling of the star as a symbol of Norway hard to shift. I recently came across prominent eight-point stars in the tilework in the Great Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, and I called out to my father who was there with me. We admired them, but there was a feeling of not quite knowing what to do with this information. It didn’t fit into a lifetime of emotion attached to this shape, now presented seemingly out of context.
But it made me feel proud, too. This symbol that means so much to me has had an incredible journey around the world over several thousand years, maintaining its power as a mark of protection and goodness. There are so many people who can look at the eight-point star and feel a rush of emotion, the kind that can only come from looking at something that’s always been there.
The eight-point star holds a soft power—how else can we explain how it’s spread so widely, yet so surreptitiously? A bolder pattern would have remembered its origins, but the eight-point star seems to have arrived as a tool for us to use, like a cooking pot or whittling knife. We put it to work and forgot where we got it from—this old thing! But all this time it still looks the same, as it’s kept its shape. All around the world we can look at the eight-point star and recognize it as our own.
