The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Among the Sámi themselves, a fresh body of information upon their magical practices was generated in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the monarchies of Denmark and Sweden, that had partitioned northern Scandinavia and Finland between them, brought the native population under direct government. As part of this process, Sámi magicians were sometimes accused of witchcraft, and also caught up in the more general process of the enforced conversion of their people to Christianity. This generated further descriptions of their practices, even as the practices themselves were wiped out. The main magical practitioners were called noaidis or noaidies, who attempted to divine, influence the weather and heal. These were mostly male, and generally went into deep trances and lay immobile while their spirits left their bodies to work with attendant spirits, which often took animal form. Sometimes their own spirits duelled with each other for supremacy, and the loser sickened or died. Their main piece of equipment was a drum, usually painted with symbols, and at least at times their rites took the form of dramatic public performances. At some of these they had assistants dressed in special costumes.39

  All this sounds like absolutely classic Siberian shamanism. It is true that the data are not quite as good as may be wished. All of these early modern sources seem to be second-hand, and there appears to be no eye-witness account of a performance by a noaidi among them. The drums survive in large numbers, but it is not proven that they were used to induce trance, as in Siberia, although magic was certainly made by chanting or singing while playing them. Still, the detail of the descriptions has been sufficient for most scholars of the subject, from the nineteenth century to the present, to describe the noaidis as shamans.40 Recently, however, a leading expert on north Norwegian witch trials, Rune Blix Hagen, has questioned this tradition, noting that none of the actual testimony of noaidis themselves speaks of sending their souls from their bodies; which he takes (in the Eliade tradition) to be the definitive ability of a shaman.41 He has therefore suggested either that the label of shamanism be withdrawn from the Sámi or that the category of shamanism be broadened beyond spirit-flight. It may be suggested here that the latter course is by far the more appropriate, as the emphasis on sending out a spirit from a human body as the hallmark of shamanism is largely a legacy of Eliade’s work that does not match up, as stated above, to the records of actual Siberian practice. The noaidi is clearly portrayed by the trial records used by Hagen himself as playing the drum in order to contact spirits in order to aid other humans, in a dramatic public performance, and that is enough to fit the Siberian model.42 In addition, however, the chain of detailed reports by outsiders of the performances of Sámi magicians from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, are so strikingly like those of Siberian shamans that if they are not representing reality, this in itself is an anomaly remarkable enough to demand explanation.43

  A form of shamanism of the Siberian sort was also found among the neighbours of the Sámi to the south-east of their range, the Finns, who were another Uralic people. This was centred on the figure mentioned above, the tietäjä, who is recorded both in early modern trial records and modern folklore. Such people dealt with the same human needs as the noaidi, which were indeed the concerns of service magicians across Europe, and did so by going into altered states in which they sent out spirit helpers in human or animal shapes to do battle with evil spirits. Those states sometimes consisted of dream or intoxication, but mostly of exaltation or frenzied anger, accompanied by chants or songs and attained in front of clients and sometimes a larger audience. Their incantations, like the songs of many Siberian shamans, depicted the topography of spirit worlds.44 One of the foremost recent experts on these figures, Anna-Leena Siikala, has stated that it is ‘universally agreed’ that they were descended from shamans; indeed, those who had all of the characteristics delineated above could quite accurately be described as continuing to practise it, as only the lack of special equipment is missing in comparison to the Siberian template.45 The medieval Norse referred to the Sámi and the Finns indifferently as ‘Finnar’, and if both had the shamanic rite technique it is easy to see why they retained such a reputation for magical potency among other Northern Europeans. Modern British and American seamen still believed ‘Finns’ to be wizards of frightening power, especially over the weather.46

  A European Sub-Shamanic Province

  It may therefore now be proposed that the ‘classical’ Siberian shamanic province had an extension into Europe that crossed parts of northern Russia to Finland and northern Scandinavia. What may be asked next is whether this produced any borderlands in which shamanic features of magical practice were blended with those more familiar across most of the European Continent. Here an answer has been proposed regularly since the nineteenth century: that elements of shamanism were found among the medieval Norse who were neighbours of the Sámi and Finns, especially in the specific practice known to the Norse as seiđr. This has, however, been controversial for most of the time in which it has been stated, and the debate continues to the present. In 2002, as part of an extensive and much-admired work on Viking spirituality, which united textual and archaeological evidence, Neil Price argued that many aspects of its ritual were ‘fundamentally shamanistic’ in nature. He also concluded that the seeresses of medieval Norse literature exactly resembled the shamans of the circumpolar region and that seiđr was a ‘shamanic’ belief system.47 In another major study published seven years later, Clive Tolley responded that virtually all of the sources on which such suggestions rely are works of imaginative fiction produced long after the end of the pagan Viking era and so completely unreliable as evidence for its beliefs and practices. He was also concerned that the apparent elements of shamanism in representations of seiđr and other Norse magic could have derived from other belief systems and cultural contexts. None the less, he allowed that the literary portraits had to reflect notions of what was likely to have existed, and that those notions would in part have derived from tradition; and he concluded that the ‘evidence does, however, support the likelihood of some ritual and belief of a broadly shamanic nature’.48

  The present study has the advantage that it can avoid the whole issue of the reliability of the sources and the actual practices of Viking Age Scandinavians, because it is concerned with representations of, and beliefs concerning, magic and witchcraft. In other words, if the medieval Norse conceived of magical practices in a certain way, then it does not matter much to the needs of this book that we apparently cannot tell whether they were actually practised. That the portrayals took one form rather than another is significant enough. It is clear that the authors of medieval Norse sagas and romances often used the term seiđr as one for magic, without going into details with regard to its nature, but also that they had a particular tradition of it: as a form of divination, practised mainly by women who went into trance in a raised seat or on a platform. Such people often roamed around districts being entertained by landowners, who sought their services to find answers to problems or learn their future or that of their household members. The most elaborate and famous description of one, in the Saga of Erik the Red, concerns Thorbjorg, a Greenland seeress with an elaborate and decorative costume of mantle, hood, belt, shoes, staff and pouch (for charms). A retinue of women sat round her as she took her place on the ceremonial platform, and one sang incantations to call her spirits to her so that she could provide answers to the questions asked of her. She was the most famous and long-lived of nine sisters with the same gift.49 All this – the hereditary vocation, the visit to the home, the costume, the assistants, the sedate practitioner and the calling of spirits – is paralleled in Siberia: it is a classic shamanic performance. Only the platform is missing in Siberia, and a special seat or framework is sometimes found there. Arrow Odd’s Saga has farmers invite a similar woman to their homes to tell fortunes and predict the weather; she travels with a retinue of thirty young women and men to make a great incantation about her when she performs.50 Frithiof’s Saga tells of two
seiđkonur (women who know seiđr) hired to drown some enemies of their paymaster at sea. They ‘moved onto the platform with their charms and spells’, and sent out their spirits to ride a huge whale and raise a storm. Their intended victim, however, saw their shapes on the whale and sailed his ship at them and struck them. The whale dived and vanished and their bodies fell dead off the platform, with broken backs.51 This associates seiđr with the other shamanic trick of sending the shaman’s spirit out, in collaboration with an animal one, to achieve an effect. In Gongu-Hrolf’s Saga, twelve men are paid to use seiđr to kill a pair of victims, and set up a high dais in a house in a wood to do so, making a great din with their spells.52 Hrolf Kraki’s Saga tells of a king who engages a prophetess to locate two concealed rivals of his; she mounts a tall platform, yawns deeply (perhaps to take in spirits) and speaks verses to disclose the necessary information. Later in the story a queen sits on a seiđr platform, and perhaps animated by a servitor spirit, sends a huge boar to join a battle she is fighting against enemy warriors, and also seems to make the dead among her own followers revive to renew the battle.53

  Sometimes such shamanic features are found in stories without any explicit connection to seiđr. A famous case in Hrolf Kraki’s Saga concerns a warrior who sits motionless aside from a battle while a huge bear (either containing his spirit or one that he has summoned) attacks the enemy to great effect; it vanishes when his body is disturbed.54 The god Ođinn was believed to send his spirit to range the world in a variety of animal forms while his body lay asleep or dead.55 A magician in the Saga of Howard the Halt sent out his in fox shape to spy out a hall full of enemies. He had proofed his animal form against swords but was killed when somebody bit out its throat.56 A man in the Vatnsdalers’ Saga could make his friends invulnerable in a fight if he lay down motionless nearby (presumably sending out his spirit to aid them).57 Another much-cited Norse form of magic, ùtiseta, ‘sitting out’, seems to have consisted of sitting in a special place out of doors at night and waiting, perhaps in a trance state, to see the future or obtain other wisdom: as this is also found (forbidden) in medieval Norse laws, it was certainly believed to be practised.58 The staff which features as an important accessory of Thorbjorg appears as a significant magical tool in the saga tradition in general. In Laxdaela Saga, the bones of a woman are found beneath the site of a church, with a large ‘seiđr staff’. It is identified as the grave of an evil pagan magician.59 The Saga of the Sworn Brothers has two women who could send their spirits to spy out the land at night, each riding a magic staff, while their bodies slept.60

  In a fine discussion of the place of the staff in this literature, Neil Price notes that it was used for divination by the Chukchi people of Siberia; but the parallel is even closer than that, because it was, after the drum, the most common piece of shamanic equipment among Siberians.61 None the less, none of the examples quoted above, except the first four, which illustrate seiđr, amounts to the full Siberian (and Sámi and Finnish) rite technique. Rather, they represent aspects of that technique which are found without the whole assemblage, just as elements of seiđr sometimes appear in stories without the whole package of that tradition, such as women wandering the land to tell fortunes or one sitting in a chair at a feast to do so.62 The ritual platform is sometimes used by a magician or groups of magicians simply to send out spells or curses from it.63 A queen in one tale ‘moves her spirit’ to bring fierce animals to fight for her.64

  The idea that people can send out their spirits from their bodies in a shamanic performance to roam spirit worlds blends by degrees into that mentioned above, in which their spirit goes about in the form of a physically solid animal in the human world, while their body remains at home. It is a short step from that to straightforward shape-shifting, in which a human body turns into an animal one, while retaining a human mind, something not a feature of Siberian shamanism. A female magician turns herself into a walrus in Kormák’s Saga in order to attack a ship, but her opponent sees that it has her eyes and spears it, killing her.65 The Saga of the Volsungs held that seiđkonur had the power to change themselves into she-wolves or to take the shape of other humans; and two characters in it become wolves temporarily by donning enchanted wolf skins.66 A mother in Eyrbyggja Saga tries to hide her son from enemies come to kill him by turning him successively into a distaff, a goat and a boar; her power came from her eyes and was thwarted when a bag was put over her head.67 In addition, there is plenty of magic in the sagas which is not in the least shamanic, and is recognizable across most of Europe, such as passing hands over a person and chanting, or reciting spells, or cutting letters and speaking over them, or walking anticlockwise about a space while reciting or sniffing, or offering sacrifices to spirits with invocations.68 The medieval Norse language was replete with a proportionately wide range of terms for different kinds of magic.69

  It looks, therefore, as if this literature, virtually all of which was written in Iceland in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, represents a hybrid culture which blended elements of genuine shamanism with features of magic more familiar from elsewhere in Europe. Both Neil Price and Clive Tolley therefore seem to be correct: Price that the shamanic elements are both major and significant and Tolley that they may not be fundamental to medieval Norse concepts of magic. It is possible that they were survivals from a prehistoric past, and so native to the Norse, but it could also be that they were the result of contact with the Sámi and Finns who were such near neighbours and made an impact on the same literature.70 This would explain why such strong shamanic features as those manifested by Thorbjorg do not appear in the literature of the mainland of medieval Europe, south of the Baltic. If such an influence took place, then the Norse refashioned shamanism in their own way, dropping the drum, for example, and substituting the staff. The hybrid nature of the result also helps us to clarify the components of medieval Norse magic that are not shamanic, and seem to derive from a different tradition. One of these is the prominence given to women as prophetesses and diviners: as said, they formed a minority of Siberian shamans and a small minority of Sámi noaidis. Following a tradition going back to Jacob Grimm in the early nineteenth century, Clive Tolley has linked the Norse pattern to the ancient Germanic reverence for women as possessors of prophetic wisdom, discussed in the previous chapter of this book.71 He is surely right to do so, and his distinction between the two, that seiđrkonur were figures on the fringes of society and the ancient Germanic prophetesses central to it, does not really stand up. The seiđrkonur were invited into the heart of communities in the sagas, even if their peripatetic lifestyle prevented them from belonging to any, while the only ancient Germanic equivalent of whom we have relevant details, Veleda in the first century AD, lived isolated in a tower, and communicated with the local tribes by messenger.72 The semi-detachment of both seems equivalent. A comparison of Norse and Germanic cultures, however, also reveals distinctions between the two. The Icelandic sagas and romances and Norse law codes show none of the fear of the cannibal female witch, preying on her fellow humans at night, which features in the early medieval Germanic sources. Indeed, there seems to be no actual presence of a witch figure in the early medieval Scandinavian texts: no terror of a malevolent worker of magic concealed within local society who causes misfortune to others because of pure evil. Women and men both feature as destructive magicians, but always as part of the feuding that was a key activity of early medieval Scandinavian society and a major theme of its stories. Magic is one more weapon in the waging of factional and personal violence, though a cowardly and disreputable one except when used in defence against other magic or the supernatural.

  There are, however, figures in the Norse literature that can in some respects be equated with witches: women who ride around at night on enchanted physical objects or animals. In The Saga of Gunnlaug, a wolf is called svaru skaer, rendered by its English translator as ‘witch’s steed’.73 At times it is clearly their spirits that are making the ride while their bodies remain asle
ep at home, as in the Saga of the Sworn Brothers. The staff that is the means of transport for those characters is not the only such object used: there is mention in the literature of tunriđur, those who ride on a hurdle, fence or roof. In the famous poem Hávamál, the god Ođinn boasts of his ability to see such people ‘play frenzied in the air’, and thwart them by rendering them incapable of finding their ‘home shapes’, and their ‘true homes’ or ‘own skins’ again, once more suggesting that they need to get back to their everyday bodies by morning.74 A law from West Gotland of the early thirteenth century forbids various terms of slander against a woman, one of which is ‘I saw you ride on a hurdle, with hair dishevelled, in the shape of a troll, between night and day’.75 The ‘troll’ here would be one of the human-like, often malevolent, beings famously thought to haunt wild places in Scandinavian mythology, often with homes underground. The women who send out their spirits to ride a whale in Frithiof’s Saga are essentially performing the same trick in animal form. The reference to such night riders as ‘playing in the air’ suggests that they were thought to assemble for revels, and this is borne out by other sources; but where such assemblies are mentioned, they are not always thought to be composed of humans. In Ketil’s Saga, the hero meets a female troll, hurrying to join a gathering of her kind. It is on an island, where the tale states that ‘there was no lack of gandr rides’ that night: the term gandr could refer to a spirit, or perhaps an enchanted object such as a staff or hurdle.76 In the Tale of Thorstein, that hero follows a Sámi boy in a ‘gandr ride’ upon a staff to an underworld, to join a festival of its beings.77 Trolls and other underground beings were thought to possess, and to confer, magical powers, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century Norse law codes forbade the ‘raising up’ of trolls to gain such powers: the standard term for witchcraft in all Scandinavian languages later became trolldromr, and witches trollfolk.78 The night riders could be dangerous to humans as well as helpful to them: in Eyrbyggja Saga a boy is attacked while walking home alone after dark and wounded on head and shoulders. A local woman, suspected of being a ‘hurdle-rider’, is accused of having used him as her steed, though she is acquitted when twelve neighbours swear to her innocence.79 The literature, however, does not attest to any great fear of them, or belief that they affected other people as long as the latter kept to their homes at night. It seems, therefore, as if in some accounts of seiđr, spirit-projection of the Siberian and Sámi shamanic sort was being combined with a native Norse one of nocturnal revels, generally of superhuman or non-human creatures, to which humans could ride or fly in spirit using objects, animals or other people as steeds. It may therefore be concluded that there is good evidence for an extensive and compact province of ‘classical’ shamanism in the northern hemisphere, covering not just Siberia and adjacent parts of Central Asia, but the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones of North America, and extending into Russia and Scandinavia. In addition, the influence of this shamanism can be detected in a ‘sub-shamanic’ zone covering other parts of the Nordic world, such as Norway and Iceland. It is entirely legitimate to propose the existence of shamanic elements in magical practices elsewhere in Europe, if only because of the lack of any generally accepted definition of shamanism; but such a proposal cannot be made conclusively, and the evidence for it can be read in alternative ways.