I have a dream of becoming a Viking reenactor going around Viking fairs and markets with some sort of thing I can sell. While I know that a Nazar is barely found in the north and especially at the time of the Vikings - I have been playing with the idea of well pretending to be a viking who have been traveling around the known world - we know they went to places like Constantinople. And so, a Viking merchant bringing home Nazars to sell and trade in my mind would not be unrealistic. But I've googled around trying to get an idea of if any ever were brought back, which seems not being the case. And then also trying to figure how they would have looked at the time? My research has lead me to a few archeological examples of eye amulets. The earliest being the eye of Horus from Egypt. And then a few examples of either amulets with writing about avoiding the evil eye or even with a crude eye drawn upon them. I can not find when the idea of the blue glass bead eye appears. A website claimed they were created so due to blue eyed invaders coming from the north inspiring the eye's look - yet no time of when this would have happened or citation to prove this mention. So I am at a loss. Would a viking have been able to bring home a glass blue eyed nazar? If not - how would they have looked at the time? And do we know anything else about them?
Thank you for your time!
I've never seen anything that looks like an evil eye amulet among Viking-Age artifacts. In fact, an online search for "Abbasid evil eye" turns up nothing that we would think of as a Nazar. The closest hit is a small clay fragment with a protective prayer in Arabic on it that was excavated from a Abbasid era [=Viking Age] floor in Jerusalem. This might have been a sort of ward to protect the building and its occupants from the evil eye, but the modern traditions surrounding the Nazar seem to be a later development in the Islamic world. At least in early Islamic societies, blue might even have been a taboo color!
The Wikipedia page on the Nazar does raise the possibility that so-called eye beads might also have been used as protective amulets against the evil eye. This is an important possibility, since beads of this style are found in Viking-Age contexts and were presumably imported from the Islamic borderlands and certainly made from glass produced in Islamic regions. Here's a few that were excavated from Iceland. However, Muslims at the time would probably not have worn beads. They were generally made for export and trade, and they don't even seem to have been very popular among non-Muslims in the Abbasid Caliphate, based on what I've seen. So although similar beads are associated with the evil eye today (but note that the Wikipedia section lacks any references!), it's doubtful that they would have been associated with the evil eye 1000 years ago.
In short, I've seen no evidence that the Nazar was in use during the Viking Age, and the one example of an amulet I've seen that might have protected against the evil eye was not the kind of thing that was made for export. Glass beads with eyes on them are common in the Viking Age, but they're also common throughout most of history, and so there's no reason to assume that these would have had an evil eye kind of function in either the Abbasid societies that exported them or the Norse societies that imported them. That said, it's an interesting question. Thanks for raising it!