If you want to know what people in Viking Age Scandinavia actually did, rather than what thirteenth century Icelanders wrote about what their ancestors did, the hammer pendant is one of the few places to look. Around a thousand survive. They are small, rarely more than a few centimetres, with a short handle and a wide flat head, cast or cut from silver, bronze, iron or amber, and often ornamented with punched dots, stamped triangles or filigree. They hang from a neck ring or a cord, sometimes several to a ring, sometimes alongside beads and other pendants. They come from graves, from silver hoards buried and not recovered, and from settlement soil, which means they were worn by living people and not simply provided for the dead.
The distribution goes well beyond Scandinavia: examples are known from the Baltic coast, from the river routes east into Russia, from the Danelaw in England and from Iceland. That is the geography of Scandinavian travel and settlement, and the pendants track it. What no pendant carries is a label. None is inscribed with the name Mjollnir or with the name of Thor. The identification rests on shape, on Thor's prominence in the written mythology, and on a small number of finds where a hammer appears in company with imagery that supports the reading. It is a strong identification but it is an inference, and it is worth keeping the two categories of evidence separate.