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Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells.
Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland.
By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.
- Sales Rank: #1218740 in eBooks
- Published on: 2011-06-06
- Released on: 2011-06-06
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"…challenges established views in research in the field […] With this book, we have in other words gained a more complete and holistic understanding of the witchcraft phenomenon…" --Rune Blix Hagen, Historisk tidsskrift
"…a solid, impressively interdisciplinary contribution to our understanding…" --Edward Bever, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"…this well-written book will be of great interest […] an excellent study of 'religious' change"--Nicolas Meylan, The Journal of Religion
"The most impressive aspect of Mitchell's excellent study is his deft use of the full array of sources available for medieval Scandinavian magic" --Michael D. Bailey, The American Historical Review
"[a] thorough and subtle analysis […] of great value not only to scholars of Scandinavia but to anyone interested in the complex history of European witch-beliefs."--Jacqueline Simpson, Folklore
"…provides an excellent overview of research and at the same time shows in a convincing manner how popular conceptions of witches and sorcerers changed in the North during the Middle Ages." --Lars Lönnroth, Svenska Dagbladet
"a comprehensive and enlightening survey of beliefs and narratives concerning supernatural aggression in medieval Scandinavia…" --Thomas DuBois, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology
From the Back Cover
From the book: "Magic in pagan Scandinavia, as it has been reconstructed from the writings of foreign observers, the archaeological record, and--not least--the texts written in cultures tracing their ancestry back to the Viking world (most prominently, Iceland), suggests that many people were able to call on, and even command, supernatural powers. After the Conversion, Christian observers associated these activities with the church's evolving image of witchcraft and sorcery. Beyond such simple assumptions, however, there is little we can be certain of regarding the belief complexes, religious practices, and mythological systems from this early period, as they overwhelmingly come to us from several hundred years after the acceptance of Christianity. What sort of picture can we confidently draw about the world of Nordic magic before the wide-spread adoption of Christianity? And beyond the attempt to reconstruct Scandinavian paganism, how does magic 'work' in the medieval Christian world, not only in the most transparent sense of the term, but also in the way in which magic itself becomes a kind of metalanguage for communicating perceptions and important ideas about what it meant to be a pagan or a Christian?"
About the Author
Stephen A. Mitchell is Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University and author of Heroic Sagas and Ballads.
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Great for the scholar, hard for the casual reader
By Caleb Hanson
There's a lot of stories about pagan sorcery in the Viking eddas and sagas, and the big witch-hunts of the early modern period are well documented, but this book covers the time in between: after Christianity was well and truly established in Scandinavia but before the Reformation, or 1100-1525 to pick nice round dates; in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and sometimes Iceland. Mitchell looks at all kinds of evidence: narrative stories, laws, trial records, sermons, paintings on church walls, artifacts like runic and other charms, and so on and so on. (He does include many stories from the eddas and sagas since, as he points out, they were mostly written in the 12th century or later, and so do constitute evidence of what people in these later centuries *thought* pagan magic was like, better than they do of what the pagans had actually done or believed.)
Mitchell's main conclusion is that belief in magic and witchcraft definitely varied over the time and countries being covered: earlier in the period magic was small-scale and personal, mostly charms for love or luck; accusations of witchcraft that came to trial were matters of gossip and slander, and rarely if ever ended in conviction. It was only with the passage of time, and with growing influence from continental Europe, that witchcraft started to be seen as "institutionalized," with transvection and sabbats and pacts with the Devil, clearly building towards the great witch-burning hysterias of the Reformation. There was similar variation by gender: women accused of magic were usually doing it for some sexual motive, trying to get either more or less of it, and were generally punished (if at all) with fasts or pilgrimages or a stern talking-to; men were more likely to be accused of heresy and making a pact with the Devil, and were likely to be burned for it. And within fictional narratives, variation by the time of the setting: the further in the past the story is set, the more big ostentatious magic is a major element of the story; the more contemporary the setting, the more magic is confined to little things like portentous dreams, or old hags muttering ominously in the moonlight.
The scholarly apparatus is excellent, with 90 pages of notes and 50 pages of bibliography: if anyone wants to study the subject in depth, this book is a great place to start and will give you plenty of guidance on where to take it further. A related drawback, however, is the language: Mitchell uses the driest, most polysyllabic and scholastic style--I have never seen the word "reticulation" used so many times per page! It is as if he is trying deliberately to distance himself from the slightest hint of New Age sensationalism or popular magick fandom. The book demands (and rewards) very focused and active reading; you can't just skim it in hopes of picking up the general gist. So while I give it five stars, it might well perhaps rate fewer for the less scholarly inclined.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Go, Vikings!
By Stephen Morris
This was an excellent study! Well-researched, well-written, highly informative and entertaining! It was everything I'd hoped for -- and more!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Great book
By History Lover
Great book - I really loved it. I'm a big fan of history & have read many books on this particular subject. This is definitely one of my favorites. Highly recommend!
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