Having reviewed seiðr in the sources, we can now look to an overview of scholarly studies in this field. Though it means losing a little momentum in the pace of our argument, the work set out in the following chapters demands that we first make a brief survey of the ways in which Nordic sorcery has been taken up by previous researchers. The notes below are not intended as an exhaustive synthesis, and a great many more works are taken up as appropriate throughout the book. Archaeological studies which have tried to identify aspects of seiðr through the material record are treated separately in chapters 3 and 5.
Probably the earliest work to specifically discuss the role of seiðr in Norse religion appeared in 1877, written by Johan Fritzner, and it is significant that even at this initial stage of tentative interpretation we find these rituals being connected both with Sámi religion and the broader framework of shamanic belief systems. Fritzner’s paper is primarily a discussion of Sámi religion in a comparative context (a subject more fully explored in chapter 4 below), and although he devotes some space to the possible transfer of specific divinities from one culture to another, the bulk of his detailed discussion is concerned with sorcery. As we have seen above, the problem of distinguishing between the different forms of Old Norse magic has a long research history, and we can note that even in this first account Fritzner interweaves his discussion of seiðr and gandr without distinction (1877: 164–83, 188–200). Nevertheless, all the key elements are present in his analysis, including the use of staffs, the seiðhjallr and the metaphor of ‘riding’ – to all of which we shall return below – as well as the important relationship between human agents of sorcery and the various supernatural powers with which they communicate (the valkyrjur, dísir and so on). Most crucially of all, he addresses the use of these forms of sorcery for aggressive ends, with a discussion on magical projectiles (Fritzner 1877: 185ff, 208–10) – a subject avoided by the majority of subsequent seiðr-scholars, as we shall see.
Fritzner’s important essay stimulated a small but steady interest in the trance rituals of the Norse, resulting in a suite of publications over the next few years that included Bang’s 1879 study of Voluspá in the context of Græco-Roman oracular traditions, and Bugge’s arguments for the Christian overtones of Óðinn on the tree (published in 1889 but written in the early 1880s).
The first specific study of seiðr came in 1892 with Finnur Jónsson’s landmark paper in an Icelandic Festschrift to Páli Melsteð. As with Fritzner’s work, ‘Um galdra, seið, seiðmenn og völur’ set out a number of key aspects of seiðr and other forms of Old Norse magic that would come to be overlooked by the majority of twentieth-century researchers. In particular, Finnur focused on the practitioners of this sorcery, and made the first attempt to compile a terminology for them (ibid: 7ff). Crucially, he recognised that the different terms referred to different types of sorcerer – a realisation with far-reaching implications as we shall see below. He further addressed the performance and material culture of seiðr, reviewing the sources for seiðr platforms, staffs and various forms of songs used in the rituals (ibid: 17ff). This was also the first work to attempt to carefully distinguish the dual complexes of seiðr and galdr.
By the last decade of the nineteenth century, these ideas were spreading into other areas of Old Norse studies, for example to the analysis of dreams and their significance in the sagas (e.g. Henzen 1890); these preoccupations naturally also reflected contemporary developments in psychology and the interpretation of dream symbolism. The draumkonur – the strange spirit-women who appear as harbingers of ill-fortune and advice – and other inhabitants of dreams were compared to the soul-travelling agents of seiðr, and began to be linked to ideas about the personification of luck and the nature of the soul itself.
In 1902 Hugo Gering published the first major study of the new century, with his book on prophecy and magic in Nordic prehistory, in which the disparate strands of the seiðr complex began to be drawn together. The world of Óðinnic sorcery, the activities of the volur and others of their kind, the travelling soul and the power of dreams, all were seen to be connected, though as yet no overall structure could be proposed. Significantly, in this as in all earlier works no attempt had been made to integrate ‘magic’ into the wider social framework.
In the same year, 1902, an anonymous author contributed a paper to a German journal of sexuality, in which s/he discussed possible ‘contra-sexual’ elements in Norse sorcery. These included the ergi complex – the sexually charged state of dishonour which as we have seen from Ynglingasaga attached to men who performed seiðr.
Other authors focused on elements of this new sorcerous pattern that Gering had identified. Karl Krohn (1906: 158) argued that seiðr was the model for the Sámi shamanic rituals, and in 1909 Axel Olrik published a short paper on its ritual architecture, focusing on the elevation of the performer. In the same year Westermarck included a brief note on the sexual aspects of seiðr in his great treatise on the origins of morality (1909). In 1911, Wolf von Unwerth produced his thesis on Óðinn and death cults among the northern Germans and the Sámi, and the Nordic soul conceptions were taken up again in Ida Blum’s thesis from 1912. This latter work looked nominally at Schutzgeister, ‘helping spirits’, but in fact focuses on the fylgjur, hamingjur and dream beings of different kinds.
The first major twentieth-century works specifically focusing on Norse magic appeared during the First World War. In 1916 B. M. Ólsen and L. F. Läffler considered the puzzling strophe 155 from Hávamál, which seems to refer to the mobile souls of sorcerers in trance, and to which we will return several times in this book. Specific aspects of the seiðr ritual were also taken up by N. Å. Nielsen (1917) in two essays on runic inscriptions with magical formulae designed to protect the monuments on which they were carved. He argued that the ‘curse’ inscribed on the stones was intended to harm a (presumedly male) desecrator’s social standing by equating his actions with seiðr, in view of the latter’s strong associations with effeminacy.
Meissner’s piece from the same year, ‘Ganga til fréttar’, is a complex paper, philological in inspiration but nevertheless concerned more with Viking-Age conditions than with literary constructions. Again, this is in marked contrast to more recent work on the subject. Superceded by the publications of Strömbäck and others, Meissner remains nonetheless a fundamental source for the history of research in this field. Much the same can be said of the book produced in 1918 by Linderholm in Svenska Landsmål, which was intended to be the first part of a multi-volume work on Nordic magic from early prehistory to the coming of Christianity. Devoted primarily to pre-Viking ritual, the first volume was all that ever appeared but it did include a brief attempt to understand the complex socio-sexual phenomenon of ergi that will be taken up in the next chapter (ibid: 89f).
The inconclusive nature of this early work on sorcery may have been a contributing factor to the re-incorporation of seiðr research into a broader frame of reference in the 1920s. This first appeared in 1922 with Noreen’s study of poetic forms, in which he raised the question of insult poetry which was often used as a channel for allegations of ergi.
In 1923, as we have seen Ivar Lindquist published a book-length work on Galdrar, but with a narrower range than the title implies. Focusing partly on Old High German sources such as the Merseburg charms, and partly on runic inscriptions, Lindquist only briefly touched on seiðr itself. However, already we see Fritzner’s connection with circumpolar religion being perpetuated, as seiðr tydligen var ett slags sjamanism (‘clearly was a sort of shamanism’; ibid: 178).
In a rather simplified interpretation, Voluspá again formed the central motif for Höckert’s work on the Vanir from 1926, which was so heavily criticised that its author published a sequel in 1930 to answer his detractors. Seiðr is mentioned relatively little, but the small amount of space devoted to it contains much of interest. Here again, for example, we see an early emphasis on violent magic, on this occasion in relation to the Vanir’s vígspá, the ‘war-spell’ (Höckert 1926: 41f). Interestingly too, he sees the entirety of the prophecy in the Voluspá poem in the context of a seiðr performance, and as a ritual rather than ecstatic event (Höckert 1930: 72f). One of the main points of conflict between Höckert and the critics was his combination of seiðr and útiseta as part of the same phenomenon (ibid: 100–4). Wessén claimed that the sources showed these to be two quite separate practices, identifying one very important difference between them that has been only rarely taken up:
Sejd var åtföljd av en mycket stor apparat, en mängd ceremonier måste iakttagas, särskilt sång av galdrar och varðlokkur; det var därför alltid flera som måste hjälpas åt … I motsats härtill var útiseta en form av magi, som synes ha utövats utan några yttre trollmedel. Det viktiga är, att man, av källorna att döma, vid útiseta alltid befann sig ensam.
Seiðr was accompanied by a very large apparatus, many ceremonies had to be observed, special songs of galdrar and varðlokkur; this was why several people always had to help out … By contrast útiseta was a form of magic that appears to have been performed without external sorcerous equipment. The important thing is that, to judge from the sources, in útiseta one always found oneself alone.
Wessén 1927: 74; my translation
In the same year Reichborn-Kjennerud presented the first volume in his review of Nordic witchcraft, published a few months later in 1928. Eventually stretching to five volumes of which the last would not appear until after the war, this work consists primarily of short essays on individual subjects, arranged thematically in a broad chronological scheme. In part one Reichborn-Kjennerud briefly reviewed a similar range of supernatural beings as Blum had done in 1912, but created a new conceptual category within which they could be compared. In a section entitled sjelslivets åpenbaringsformer, ‘manifestations of the life of the soul’ (Reichborn-Kjennerud 1928: 33–45) we again encounter dreams, fylgjur and hamningjar, but for the first time they are discussed alongside beliefs in shape-shifting and lycanthropy, and beings such as the mara or Nightmare. This was an important breakthrough in the understanding of the socio-psychological background against which later studies of seiðr would be set. Reichborn-Kjennerud also elaborated Finnur Jónsson’s categories of sorcerers, but with a focus on what he called ‘the evil eye’ and ‘the evil tongue’ (ibid: 63–70). Once again, the idea of sorcerous, projected violence was made explicit. Seiðr itself receives little more than a page of discussion, as does galdr (ibid: 79–82), but in each case the author draws out key aspects such as the payment conventionally received for performances, the existence of sorcerous duels, and again, the projection of misfortune through these forms of magic.
Shamanism was once again taken up in relation to Óðinn by Rolf Pipping in 1928(b), in a short but important pamphlet. Here he argued for links with Finnish religion in the story of the god’s self-sacrifice on the world-tree, interpreting Óðinn’s hanging as a means to see into another world, and to obtain mystical knowledge in a state of trance.
In 1930, Konrad Jarausch published a long paper on magic in the sagas, in which he made an interesting attempt to isolate the different types of sorcerers described. In the second and third sections of his article Jarausch also tried to analyse magic-working by function and medium (ibid: 247–66), and to relate sorcery to the wider framework of cult. Much of his argument is rather abbreviated and the paper is essentially a kind of blueprint for future research, but it would be several years before anyone else approached Nordic magic with such precision.
Old Norse sorcery was briefly taken up again by Eggers in his 1932 thesis on magical objects in the Icelandic sources, though the paper focuses on more functional artefacts such as weapons, rather than the apparatus of witchcraft. In 1933 van Hamel returned to the subject of Óðinn on the tree, last raised by Pipping, but in many respects this again avoided a direct confrontation with the ritual itself. The following year, seiðr was also briefly treated in Aakjær’s discussion of sacral place-names, which were interpreted as the location of ritual acts.
From 1934 until the end of the decade followed the single greatest concentration of research in this field up until the present day. Three scholars – an Austrian and two Swedes – each produced a book either wholly or partly devoted to seiðr, and in doing so shaped the entire framework of discussion on Nordic sorcery for the remainder of the century. This was also the point at which modern political considerations entered the debate, with almost entirely negative consequences, as we shall see.
The first of the three works was published in 1934 by Otto Höfler, a Viennese historian of religions who held a Dozentur in his native country but taught at Uppsala. His book, Kultische Geheimbunde der Germanen, was intended to be a work in several parts but the first volume was all that ever appeared. This was devoted to what he called das germanische Totenheer, the ‘army of the dead’ which is found in many forms including the ‘Wild Hunt’ of Óðinn, and which Höfler saw as the mythological reflection of real warrior fraternities operating in the Iron Age among the Germanic peoples (see Kershaw 2000 for a critical review of the concept). It is in many ways a work of brilliance, collecting a vast range of material, sorting and re-interpreting it to produce a unifying model for ancient Scandinavian military ideology and its place in society. Amongst various topics, Höfler discusses the idea of demonic and animal figures in symbolic aggressive contexts, the masking traditions of Europe and figures such as the berserkir and ulfheðnar who appear to have been some kind of ‘totemic’ warrior elite connected to the cult of Óðinn. A discussion on shape-changing runs throughout, and indeed Höfler developed this further in an article two years later (1936). His work drew heavily on folkloristics, and among its important aspects is an emphasis on what later writers would call the ‘social embeddedness’ of ritual, and the manner in which vital elements of the Vikings’ belief system saturated everyday activities. Höfler applied this reasoning in particular to the prosecution of warfare. It is true that he devotes very little space to seiðr, but in this case the terminology is less important than his understanding of the social dimension of magic.
While Höfler was working on his military fraternities, during the early thirties an Uppsala scholar was preparing what still remains the absolute fundament of all modern work on Nordic sorcery. In 1935 Dag Strömbäck published his monumental doctoral thesis, entitled simply Sejd. Even now, over eighty years after its publication, this work still stands unsurpassed in the breadth of its scholarship and critical reflection. Its status is confirmed by the decision to reissue it in a new edition in 2000 on the 100th anniversary of Strömbäck’s birth, a step taken not merely as an honorific but with the explicit objective of bringing the work to a new audience.
Strömbäck was the first to conduct a systematic survey of the Icelandic textual material, paying particular attention to the family sagas, Landnámabók, and the fornaldarsögur. He also made a further review of references to seiðr in texts dealing with a later period, including the Sturlunga cycle and the Bishops’ sagas (Biskupasögur). He was one of the first to realise that while the sagas are a very poor source indeed for the higher levels of pre-Christian religion in a formal sense – the cults of the gods, the social functionaries of religion, and the afterlife – they are a mine of information about popular belief. Strömbäck’s work on Sejd was undertaken at a time when others were reviving the late nineteenth-century interest in the Vikings’ interpretation of dreams (e.g. Kelchner 1935), and it was in this area that he, correctly in my opinion, identified the key elements of the written sources: “fate, dreams and premonitions, fetches and shape-shifting, the unquiet dead and demonic beings, sorcery, curses, people of power and clairvoyance, enchanted weaponry or protective amulets and armour, customs of fostership and oath-taking, rites of office and the judiciary, battle customs and mortuary behaviour” (Strömbäck 1935: 3; my translation).
Crucially, it was Strömbäck who developed the shamanic interpretation of seiðr to its fullest extent at that time, making extensive comparisons with Sámi religion and also the circumpolar ethnographies. We shall return to Strömbäck’s book throughout the following chapters.
The third cornerstone for seiðr research appeared at the very end of the decade. In 1939 a historian of religions at Lund University, Åke Ohlmarks, published Studien zum Problem des Schamanismus, partly based on the controversial thesis that he had defended two years earlier. Taking a broad, circumpolar perspective, Ohlmarks examined the phenomenon of ‘sub-arctic’ shamanism, looking especially at helping spirits and the role of women in the rituals. His final chapter dealt solely with seiðr, and it is effectively in preparation for this that the arguments of his earlier chapters are built up (later the same year he extrapolated much of this in a separate article). Of the three great works of the 1930s, Ohlmarks’ is the one that has least stood the test of time, but this depends primarily on his racist attitudes towards the peoples of the far north, and his stubborn promotion of ‘arctic hysteria’ as the defining factor in the development of shamanism. As we shall see in chapter 5, this has long been discredited as part of the general folklore of early twentieth-century racial biology. However, where Ohlmarks broke new ground was in his detailed relation of the Nordic world to that of the Siberian cultures, and his recognition of the significance of female ritual domains (the ‘femininity’ of seiðr had long been obvious to scholars, but few had thought to consider it in depth). Whereas Strömbäck approached seiðr first and then tried to explain it, Ohlmarks looked at shamanism and then sought to say if and where Nordic sorcery fitted into its typological scheme. His work was also highly contentious, in that he set himself directly, and with great acrimony, against both Fritzner’s and Strömbäck’s interpretations. Ohlmarks rejected any Sámi affiliations for the seiðr ritual, on the grounds that it did not involve ‘true ecstasy’ and was in fact more typical of Central Asian shamanism. We shall examine these ideas below.
In late 1939 with the outbreak of war, everything changed in seiðr studies as in the rest of the world. The political overtones that some had sought in the study of Nordic ecstasy cults suddenly became explicit in the apparatus of archaeological propaganda set up by the German regime. The ‘Blood and Soil’ mysticism of the Nazis is well-known and need not be discussed here, but the extent of the National Socialists’ commitment to a state-controlled ideological agenda for archaeology should be emphasised: two government agencies were set up to oversee the political appropriation of the discipline, including one run by the SS; between 1933 and 1935 eight new professorships were created in Germanic prehistory; funding for excavations was made available on a scale unrivalled elsewhere in the world, and new museums were set up across the Reich. Infusing most aspects of this work was a politically-constructed, mendacious vision of the warrior Viking hero and the mystical power of Óðinn (see Arnold & Haßmann 1995; Müller-Wille 1996; Haßmann 2000; Price 2004c; Pringle 2006).
For the study of seiðr, the man chiefly responsible for bringing this under a National Socialist shadow was Otto Höfler. It does not seem to have been a coincidence that he published his great work on military fraternities the year after the Nazis came to power in Germany, and as the thirties progressed he actively embraced their ideas. In 1939 he published a short pamphlet on the ‘political achievement’ of the Migration Period, which dovetailed conveniently with the Nazis’ views on ethnic transportation and Lebensraum, and by the early 1940s Höfler had become a member of the SSAhnenerbe division under Himmler’s direct command. Early in the war he was ordered to prepare a memorandum on the state of morale in Scandinavia, drawing on his experiences in Uppsala. In this document he advocated winning over leading Nordic intellectuals “für einen freien ehrenvollen Dienst zu einem großgermanischen Reich”, ‘to render free and honourable service for a Pangermanic Empire’, which would work towards “eine germanische Zukunft Europas”, ‘a Germanic future for Europe’ (Jakubowski-Tiessen 1994: 135; Müller-Wille 1996: 170). That Höfler understood the popular resistance to this, and very clearly perceived the nature of the side he had chosen, is revealed later in the same document when he predicts what would happen if his strategies of cultural persuasion should fail:
Andernfalls können wir die Skandinaver möglicherweise niederhalten, nie gewinnen. Dann aber werden sie stets auf die Angelsachsentum hoffen und warten.
Otherwise we may be able to subjugate the Scandinavians, but never win them over. In such a case, however, they will always found their hopes on the Anglo-Saxons and wait.
Otto Höfler, cited by Jakubowski-Tiessen 1994: 135
In 1943 Höfler was appointed to head the Wissenschaftliche Institut in København, which had been founded two years earlier following the German conquest of Denmark (Haßmann 2000: 101–4 describes the archaeological measures taken by the Nazis in the Nordic countries). Following his orders, he continued to promote the prehistoric ‘continuity’ of Germanic culture in the North, right to the end of the war.
During the de-Nazification proceedings after the German surrender, like many of the Ahnenerbe personnel Höfler managed to avoid serious recriminations, but he bore the imprint of his SS uniform for the rest of his life. He lived until 1987, but never wholly regained the personal credibility he had lost (at least internationally) with the defeat of the Nazis. Höfler’s academic work is in a sense more problematic than his personal reputation. On the one hand its subject matter could hardly have fitted better with Nazi ideology, dealing as it did with secret military brotherhoods of berserkers, bound by mystic rites in the service of Óðinn. However, this does not mean that he was necessarily wrong about the Viking Age. The direction of Höfler’s research was deliberate in the political climate of the times, but its actual content is generally free from such bias and is indeed of serious quality. Höfler’s work is still very relevant today, albeit an uneasy read in view of the context in which it was written. With specific regard to Nordic sorcery, Höfler was probably the last to have tried to combine these strands of Viking-Age belief into a coherent whole. Because of his political choices, beyond the circle of those who specifically work on Viking-Age religion Höfler’s research is now almost completely unknown, and few archaeologists specialising in the period have heard of him.
Although by no means equally compromised, Åke Ohlmarks also more than flirted with the far right and paid the price after the war, though his problems seemed to stem more from his prickly personality than anything else (see Åkerlund 2006 for a perceptive account of his politics). In both Uppsala and Lund a number of student societies had flourished during the thirties, supporting a broadly pro-German political stance which in many cases continued after the commencement of hostilities in Europe (the academic atmosphere at this time is well described by Baudou in his biography of Gustaf Hallström, 1997: 231–63). Ohlmarks had been involved with such organisations in Lund, and in 1933 he took a lecturing post in Tübingen a few months after the Nazis came to power. A year later he returned to Sweden and wrote his doctoral thesis, which was presented in 1937 and met with a barrage of criticism. Angry at this, in 1941 Ohlmarks emigrated to Germany, eventually moving to Berlin. This combination of factors not surprisingly resulted in a kind of academic banishment, which only worsened after the war. Ohlmarks seems to have been especially quick to take affront, and in a climate of genuine opposition this descended into paranoia. Near the end of his life, he wrote about this period in his autobiography Doktor i Lund (1980, subtitled ‘a book on academic intrigues’), a fascinating if rather disturbing blend of obsession and conspiracy theories in which all the major seiðr and shamanism researchers of the thirties play leading roles. Ohlmarks does not seem to have mellowed with age, and the tone of the book can be judged from the way he refers to his academic rivals with a variety of patronising epithets – Noreen is the ‘Traitor’ (Förrädaren), Strömbäck is the ‘Hater’ (Hataren), and so on – while the university community in Lund is run by ‘Gangsters’ and ‘Terrorists’ (one can note that both terms were used frequently by the Nazis).
If his memoirs are any guide to his character, it is hardly surprising that Ohlmarks wandered into an ever-deepening professional wilderness in the post-war years. This was more than a personal misfortune, because the political vacillations that he shared with Höfler and others ensured that a stigma of Nazi associations clung to the mystical dimensions of Old Norse religion for decades after the war. This is the main reason why the work of Strömbäck (who had no such sympathies) and his contemporaries was never taken up into the mainstream of Viking scholarship. It remained known to academics, mainly philologists and historians of religions, but the whole complex of seiðr and its practitioners was not incorporated into the syntheses of the Viking world that began to appear regularly from the fifties onwards.
The weight of this loss is all the heavier because the thirties and forties were otherwise a period of great productivity in research on Nordic sorcery. This can partly be explained by the expedient enthusiasm for Viking mysticism discussed above, but it should be stressed that the political climate that encouraged particular subjects did not necessarily mean that the works in question were deliberately distorted to promote a party line.
Höfler, Strömbäck and Ohlmarks were certainly not the only ones working on seiðr in the thirties. In 1931 the Dutch historian of religions Jan de Vries published a book on Óðinn controversially seen as a fertility deity, with several discussions of sorcery in this context, together with another paper the same year on the role of magic in the Norse cosmogony. He followed this in 1934 with a paper on Óðinn on the tree, and the next year – simultaneously with Strömbäck’s Sejd – de Vries published the first edition of his monumental Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte.
Also in 1935 Nils Lid published a short piece on conceptions of Nordic sorcery, and Magnus Olsen compared sorcerous attributes between gods and mortals. In 1936 N. Beckman contributed a note on ergi. During the war years, the majority of work in this field was undertaken by German scholars. In 1941 Kiessling published Zauberei in der germanischen Volksrechten which included a brief section on seiðr, but unfortunately I have been unable to trace a copy of this work.
One notable exception to the pattern was the Cambridge doctoral thesis published in 1943 by Hilda Ellis (later Davidson), The road to Hel, a complex and much underestimated book that is still the best single treatment of Viking-Age responses to dying and the dead, despite being out of print for more than seventy years. The discussion of seiðr and possible shamanic elements in Old Norse religion that she would go on to develop twenty years later can be seen in embryo here (ibid: 124–7), set against a pioneering discussion of the soul with ground-breaking implications that have not all been absorbed by students of Viking religion even today. In particular, and like Fritzner, she focused on elements of violent magic-working which would remain almost ignored in subsequent decades.
The following year, 1944, Nils Lid returned to sorcery with an effective paper on magical projectiles in the context of gandr, which more than a decade on would result in his major book on the subject. Shortly after Lid’s work, Wilhelm Muster produced a thesis on shamanism in the sagas (1947), but despite its promising subject matter he confined himself solely to German translations of the texts, and also to German folklore traditions. In essentially ignoring the primary Norse material, a valuable opportunity was sadly missed. Later the same year, Folke Ström published a book on the supernatural powers of the dead in relation to Óðinn’s communication with them, echoing much of Ellis’ work. 1947 was also the year in which Åke Ohlmarks returned briefly to the study of seiðr, in a section of his Svenskarnas tro genom årtusendena, a survey of Nordic religion for a popular audience. The book includes some twenty pages on shamanism, mostly excerpted from Ohlmarks’ earlier work and comparing Óðinn to the ‘Scythian shaman-gods’ (ibid: 241–60).
In 1949, Carl-Martin Edsman took up the possible shamanic overtones of the Norse cosmology, in particular the nine worlds beneath Yggdrasill’s roots that are mentioned in Voluspá. In comparing them with Celtic mythology and other sources, he concluded that no such associations could be sustained (ibid: 53).
From the 1870s to the 1940s we can thus trace a group of key themes in research related to seiðr:
•Óðinn’s self-sacrifice on Yggdrasill
•possible initiation rituals
•dreams and their inhabitants
•communication with the dead
•spirits and the nature of the soul
•violent sorcery
•witchcraft
•connections between Norse and Sámi religion
•seiðr as some form of shamanism
For studies of Old Norse magic, the 1950s began retrospectively with Nils Lid’s book on Trolldom, which collected a number of his earlier articles. These were devoted primarily to folkloristic surveys from later periods but also included brief notices on seiðr. In 1951 N. C. Brøgger returned to seiðr as originally a Vanir practice, and proposed that it was a means of summoning either Freyja or other deities from this family. Some of this reasoning is strained, for example in the argument that Þorbiorg in Eiríks saga rauða is “clearly” present as Freyja’s representative, but like many of his predecessors he also reasserted the shamanic overtones of the rituals. In this he cited parallels especially among the Canadian and Greenland Inuit, working from Knud Rasmussen’s findings which had then been recently published (ibid: 48–52).
An important work on female supernatural beings, several of them operating within the overall complex of sorcery, was published by Ström in 1954. His Diser, nornor, valkyrjor remains a standard work on these creatures, supplemented by his Kulturhistorisk lexikon entries from 1958 and 1960.
In 1957 the second edition of de Vries’ Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte appeared, extensively revised and with an expanded section on seiðr. Although it was revised again in 1970, with fewer changes, this work remains even now the single most comprehensive study of Norse religion, at over 1000 pages of outstanding scholarship. Together with Strömbäck’s work, it provides the best modern overview of Nordic sorcery and is referenced extensively throughout the following chapters.
A major figure entered the sorcery debate in 1959, when Georges Dumézil criticised shamanic interpretations of seiðr, though strangely without reference to either Strömbäck or Ohlmarks. An entire chapter of his Les dieux des Germains was devoted to magic – significantly discussed together with war – but the general framework of these practices is only reviewed briefly.
From the late 1950s and onwards for just over twenty years, a steady stream of short notices of relevance to the study of seiðr appeared in what is still the most ambitious publishing project ever undertaken for the medieval North, the Kulturhistoriskt lexikon för nordisk medeltid. Some 22 volumes were produced between 1956 and 1978, which included expert analyses of Nordic sorcery from many different viewpoints. The entries for Óðinn, seiðr and the other magics, the different kinds of human sorcerers, most of the supernatural creatures involved in these rituals, and many more are taken up below.
The shamanic framework for the interpretation of seiðr became fully-developed in the 1960s, a time in which discussions of altered states of consciousness found a particularly receptive audience. At the beginning of the decade Vilhelm Kiil published an excellent paper on the special platforms used in the rituals (1960), which he followed two years later with one of the first attempts to discuss seiðr in terms of sexual performance. In 1961 Folke Ström also produced the first edition of his Nordisk hedendom, which included an entire chapter on seiðr and other forms of magic.
In 1964, Hilda Ellis Davidson returned to seiðr in her book Gods and myths of northern Europe. Discussing the rituals in the context of both Freyja and Óðinn (ibid: 117– 23, 141–9), she was the first post-war scholar to go back to the work of Strömbäck and Ohlmarks, and to propose a truly developed shamanic context for Viking sorcery. Over the following thirty years she extended this line of argument in several other works, including syntheses (1967: ch. 6; 1982: 45f, 93, 109ff; 1988: 155–62; 1993: 69, 76ff, 136ff, 159), studies of Óðinn (1972), the use of sorcery for aggressive ends (1973), and shape-changing (1978). Her research remains among the best published in this field, and is taken up below.
Just as Ellis Davidson produced her great synthesis in 1964, in the same year E. O. G. Turville-Petre published his similarly monumental Myth and religion of the North. It does not include a specific study of seiðr, but treats it in relation to the gods, especially Óðinn. Despite its strong focus on the more formalised ‘religion’ of the period, together with de Vries’ work this also remains a standard work to which we shall repeatedly return.
Access to the primary sources for the study of seiðr was considerably expanded in 1965 when Bo Almqvist published the first of two volumes on the ‘verse magic’ of insult poems (the second followed in 1974). An important aspect of these defamations concerned allegations of sexual perversity and dishonour which were characteristic of the male performance of sorcery. Aspects of Almqvist’s work were taken up by others in the 1970s and 80s as we shall see, but his study remains of fundamental value.
Another scholar of major importance for the study of seiðr also emerged in the 1960s, when Peter Buchholz devoted his doctoral research to shamanism in the Old Icelandic sources (1968, two chapters of which appeared in English in 1971). This will be discussed in more depth in the following chapter, but in the context of seiðr’s research history it is important to note how Buchholz was the first to explicitly set out what we might call the ‘shamanic parameters’ for Old Norse sorcery. Following a source-critical line with the Old Norse texts, Buchholz was the first scholar to emphasise that any shamanic discussion of seiðr must first be rooted in a discussion of shamanism itself, and that the definition of this concept is variable. He also focused on the cultural location of the Vikings in the circumpolar region. Searching for elements in the seiðr complex which he felt could be securely linked to a shamanic world-view, Buchholz proposed the following (1968: 22–77):
•religious phenomena
○the animal ‘auxiliary spirits’
○an ideology of transformation
○the specific form of the Norse soul beliefs
○the tiered worlds and the World Tree
•ecstatic techniques and social context
○stimulation through fire and heat
○spirit vision and altered states of consciousness
○special gender constructions for those who performed such rituals
○the place occupied by the performers of seiðr in Norse society
In the same year that Buchholz’s thesis appeared, Jere Fleck published his own doctoral work on the motif of acquiring mystical knowledge in Old Norse religion. Seiðr made a very brief appearance again in 1970, in Anne Holtsmark’s synthesis on Viking-Age beliefs, Norrøn mytologi (a Swedish translation appeared in 1992), which repeats the shamanic view of sorcery.
Also in 1970, Dumézil’s Du mythe au roman appeared, which took up his shamanic critique of seiðr once again. He is respectful to Strömbäck, though finds his interpretations over-extended, and stresses how all the sources which can be related to a shamanic view of seiðr are very late (ibid: 69–74). Dumézil also tries very sensibly to move the debate away from ‘black’ and ‘white’ forms of magic to a consideration of higher and lower categories, seen especially in relation to the formalised cults of the gods.
In 1971 perhaps partly in response to Buchholz and Holtmark, Fleck prepared two papers in which he tried to refute shamanic interpretations of Óðinn’s behaviour in Hávamál and Grímnismál; these are taken up in the next chapter. A year later in 1972, Thomas Markey made some interesting observations on the etymology of ergi, the special state of shamefulness associated with men who performed seiðr, examined in detail in the following chapter. In 1973 Margaret Clunies Ross published a paper which took up other aspects of this complex, in an analysis of an episode from the Ragnarsdrápa. Here Clunies Ross explored several instances of ‘anal insult’ and allegations of sorcerous homosexuality in the Old Norse corpus. Another important article on the same subject was put forward by Folke Ström in the same year, with an English version in 1974. All of this work was an important fore-runner to the more developed studies of ergi that would come later from Preben Meulengracht Sørensen.
In 1973 a veteran of the seiðr debate took the stage again, albeit briefly, when the seventy-two-year-old Otto Höfler produced a large thesis on transformation cults, effectively the abandoned follow-up volume to his 1934 book. In the sixties he had produced a few small works on Goethe, but was perhaps encouraged to return to his earlier field by the cultural spirit of the times. In his 1973(a) book, it is striking how much space is devoted to the various forms of hallucinogenic and narcotic stimuli that he believed lay behind the trance experiences of the Iron Age. He writes at length of ‘the cult of masks’ inherent in the rituals of Óðinn, and argues that sorcery played a major role in this, linked to his old ideas about totemic warrior fraternities.
Höfler’s book, Verwandlungskulte, Volkssagen und Mythen, is a difficult work that at times strays far beyond the Northern world in its proposals for universal mythical themes. It also contains slight hints of its author’s former ideological allegiances in the emphasis on martial frenzy, and I wonder (though cannot prove) if these may have been inspired by the work of Konrad Lorenz. The latter’s thought-provoking and somewhat notorious book on the behavioural reflexes of human aggression – Das sogenannte Böse, ‘The So-Called Evil’ – was published in 1963 and it is virtually impossible that Höfler had not read it given his interests in the anthropology of war. Its absence from Höfler’s bibliography can be explained by the fact that Lorenz had been (somewhat unfairly) accused of Nazi sympathies, with an obvious association to his own life that Höfler would wish to avoid. We shall return to Lorenz in chapter 6 and discover that his work in fact included explicit rejections of fascism and racism in all their forms. By contrast, Höfler’s published record contained the very opposite of such exonerations, and having managed to salvage some of his reputation he may not have dared quote a work that I am certain was a major inspiration. With all this in mind, it is nonetheless clear that Höfler’s book on shape-changing still has much to offer the student of Norse sorcery. Again, he effortlessly returns to the necessity of seeing ritual in a total social context.
Höfler was not the only giant of seiðr studies to resurface at this time. In the seventies and later, a number of smaller works by Dag Strömbäck also appeared, some published posthumously after his death in 1978. In these papers he returned to the subject of the soul in Norse tradition, including naturally some discussions of seiðr, but in a form that essentially summarises aspects of his doctoral thesis updated with literature published in the intervening period (e.g. 1975, 1989).
In 1975 a short monograph on seiðr was produced as an undergraduate dissertation by Anders Nordin at the University of Stockholm, in which he critically reviewed the shamanic interpretations put forward by Ohlmarks.
One aspect of Óðinn’s personality that had hitherto received comparatively little attention was the great number of internal contradictions in the god’s powers. Chief amongst these is his role as the male war-god and simultaneously as master of the ‘female’ sorcery of seiðr, which was supposedly shameful for men to perform. In 1976 Richard Auld tried to resolve this problem by subjecting Óðinn to literary psychoanalysis, and concluded that the god was a kind of “mediating synthesis between two psychic poles”, especially between the Æsir and Vanir (ibid: 149). This is an interesting idea, of Óðinn as the true unifier of the Norse world-system, but unfortunately many of Auld’s arguments are mired in rather strained Freudian semiotics – for example, he follows Neumann in seeing Óðinn’s cloak as “a feminine symbol of shelter and protection”, apparently forgetting that such garments were a standard part of male dress throughout the North (ibid: 150).
A new, structuralist approach to the Norse sorceresses was adopted by Lotte Motz in 1980, the same year as Aage Kabell published a masterly if over-worked re-interpretation of the whole skaldic institution, which he argued was closely linked to that of the shaman. His notes on the use of drums in Norse religion are especially interesting, claiming that they were used to provide a beat to which the skalds recited. Also in 1980, Jens Peter Schjødt produced the first of several sceptical articles on claims for shamanic initiations in the Eddic corpus; this work is discussed in the next chapter.
At the same time Preben Meulengracht Sørensen produced what still remains the fundamental study of ergi, the powerful and highly negative sexual associations with which seiðr was charged. This book, Norrønt nid (1980), was published in English in 1983 and we shall return to it in chapter 3.
In 1981, a French synthesis of Old Norse religion also included a focus on seiðr in a shamanic context, and also emphasised its links to the belief system of the Sámi (Boyer 1981: 148–57). Here, Óðinn is again described formally as a ‘god-shaman’. During the same period another French scholar, François-Xavier Dillmann, was working on a full thesis on the subject, completed in 1986 as Les magiciens dans l’Islande ancienne. In the same year as Dillmann’s thesis was submitted, Boyer also wrote his own book on Old Norse magic, Le monde du double (1986). At the time of writing the first edition of The Viking Way, Dillmann’s PhD remained unpublished and I was unfortunately unable to consult it, relying instead on summaries of its contents in some of the author’s later articles (1993; 1994). However, as noted above, in 2006 Dillmann’s book finally appeared in print, and forms a lasting textual resource for anyone interested in Old Norse sorcery.
The possibility that the Eddic poems may have been ritual incantations in themselves was also raised around this time, by Einar Haugen (1983). He suggested that the various cycles of mythical knowledge should be seen as different facets of Óðinn’s personality, interpreted as a series of ‘masks’ – both literal and figurative – that are slowly peeled away as an initiate approaches the true nature of the god. Despite the close fit with shamanic ideas, Haugen also rejects this particular view of Óðinn (ibid: 20). In the same year a brief comparison of Finnish shamanistic traditions with Nordic seiðr was published by Kuusi & Honko (1983: 24–32), though this mostly presented the Eiríks saga rauða episode for a new audience.
Also at this time the Norwegian historian of religions Ronald Grambo published two papers on specific aspects of seiðr, including one on Þorbiorg in Eiríks saga rauða (1984) and a second on sexuality in relation to the rituals (1989). The latter paper especially focused on North American gender constructions, such as the so-called ‘berdaches’ of the Plains. These will be examined in chapters 3 and 5.
Between these two publications, Gro Steinsland produced two important papers on the sorceresses (1985a & b), and similar themes were taken up by Grete Schmidt Poulsen in a paper from 1986, building on her unpublished doctorate from 1982. All these are again taken up below.
In 1986 W. I. Miller published a paper on dream figures in relation to sorcery, seen from the perspective of the period of the sagas’ composition rather than the Viking Age that they describe. Another important work for the shamanic interpretation of seiðr appeared in 1989, with Stephen Glosecki’s examination of similar themes in the Old English poetic corpus. He adopted many of Buchholz’s recommendations for a circumpolar frame of reference, and brought in both the Norse and Sámi as points of comparison for his Anglo-Saxon material. Significantly, as an American researcher Glosecki made extensive use of First Nations mythology, and it is in his work that the ritual complexes of the Viking Age were first compared in depth to the Northwest Coast cultures. We shall rediscover this material in chapter 5. Miller’s ideas surfaced again in a different context in 1991, with Gísli Pálsson’s study of witchcraft accusations in the sagas, which he argued reflected the ‘micro-politics’ of the early Icelandic commonwealth.
In 1991, Grambo returned to seiðr studies and published a short but influential paper in a conference volume on Nordic paganism. Subtitling his article ‘a clarificatory programme’, he set out to define the key problems linked to a study of seiðr, and to propose steps for their solution. Like Buchholz before him (1971: 7), Grambo understood that despite the monumental works by Strömbäck and others, there remained much that needed to be elucidated about Nordic sorcery. With this in mind, he laid out an eight-point plan for future research (Grambo 1991: 138):
1.the necessity for isolating seiðr’s constituent parts in order to create a typology
2.the necessity for understanding how seiðr functioned within the religious system of which it was a part
3.the analysis of seiðr as a social phenomenon, rooted in contemporary norms
4.the analysis of relationships between seiðr and Sámi shamanism
5.the necessity of studying seiðr in the context of the Eurasian thought-world, beyond the Nordic sphere
6.the analysis of the Norse myths to trace elements of seiðr, and to provide the foundation for a typology
7.to study whether or not seiðr changed over time, in terms of its morphology, structure and function, and especially around the time of the conversion to Christianity
8.the analysis of rock carvings in order to trace possible shamanic imagery
Having drawn up a programme for continued work, Grambo apparently abandoned the study of seiðr for other subjects, and as far as I am aware has never published on it again.
The 1990s began well for seiðr studies with Meulengracht Sørensen & Steinsland’s synthesis on religion (1990), which for the first time presented seiðr as an important and integral part of the Norse belief systems as a totality. Both authors drew on their work during the previous decade to good effect, with Sørensen’s studies of ergi and gender combining with Steinsland’s on the volur. The book is limited academically by being (intentionally) presented in a very popular style, but wins by its communication of these approaches to the widest audience. A more scholarly, though still public-oriented, overview presenting much the same conclusions was produced by them a few years later (Steinsland & Meulengracht Sørensen 1994).
An unusual contribution to seiðr studies was also made in 1990 by the Italian Annaliste historian Carlo Ginzburg, in his controversial survey of ecstatic cults. Ginzburg examines the complete corpus of evidence relating to European witchcraft, especially the archives of the Inquisition, and concludes that these practices were not only real but in fact a genuine reflection of shamanic traditions spanning the whole Continent and with roots stretching far back into antiquity. He takes up a great many familiar themes – including shape-changing, soul journeying and sexual sorcery – and includes seiðr in his review of European magical traditions. Most importantly, and extending from his 1966 work on a kind of shamanic soldiery in the Friuli region of Italy, Ginzburg devotes a substantial portion of the book to the notions of combat in ecstasy and animal disguise (1990: 153–204). At times his comparative survey is somewhat strained, covering the whole of Europe and much of Asia over thousands of years, but this is an interesting and thought-provoking work. Its contribution to seiðr research has been undervalued, and some of Ginzburg’s conclusions will be taken up below in chapter 6.
The early part of the 1990s was otherwise dominated by the application of gender perspectives to the interpretation of Norse magic, often with considerable success. In 1991 Katherine Morris published an interesting survey of the sorceresses as icons of medieval understandings of sexuality, to which we shall return in chapter 3. In the same year Jenny Jochens produced a useful exploration of gender roles in Nordic sorcery. She expanded upon this in 1993, just as Lotte Motz presented her own archetypes of femininity in Nordic myth. Jochens finally presented her research in full with the publication of Old Norse images of women (1996). These works contain a number of interesting insights into the gender mechanisms of seiðr, at times controversially so, and Jochens is the scholar who has taken the sexual elements of the rituals furthest. Her argument that the practice of seiðr incorporated literal sexual performance is discussed in chapter 3. The volur are also discussed by Helga Kress (1993), who interprets many of the sorcery narratives as signals in an ongoing conflict of gender. She argues that this is played out within the framework of Christian misogyny and directed against a predominantly female pre-Christian power base. This work forms the introduction to the first volume of the Nordisk Kvinnolitteraturhistoria (‘History of Nordic Women’s Literature’), which is a uniquely prominent position for research on the Norse sorceresses.
In the 1990s the philologist Clive Tolley also produced a number of original studies of seiðr, especially in comparison with Finno-Ugric practices (1993: ch. 5; 1994; 1995a). Tolley works almost exclusively with the shamanic parameters of seiðr, and has not so much addressed its functions in a social context, but his research is among the very best on the subject; my debt to his work on spirit assistants will become obvious below. Since the publication of the first edition, among other works Tolley has produced a truly monumental assessment of the sources for Norse shamanism (2009a), which is discussed in chapter 8. Tolley’s collaboration with Ursula Dronke on volume II of The Poetic Edda is also important, as this has meant that analyses of seiðr and its significance have for the first time been incorporated into a critical edition of this fundamental source.
Jens Peter Schjødt returned to his earlier theme of shamanic initiation ceremonies in 1993, with a paper on Óðinn’s self-sacrifice, discussed in chapter 3. The following year an interesting volume on Viking-Age totemic cults appeared in Polish, by the historian of religions Leszek Paweł Słupecki. The title translates to ‘Warriors and werewolves’, but unfortunately the work has no summary in another European language and so I have been unable to consult it. It appears to deal at great length with the berserkir and ulfheðnar, in much the same vein as Höfler’s book from 1934, and should thus be of great interest to scholars of Norse sorcery.
During this period a major study in folkloristics was being produced by the British-Icelandic scholar Terry Gunnell, whose thesis was published in 1995 as The origins of drama in Scandinavia. Like Haugen in the early 1980s, Gunnell focuses on the idea of Old Norse literature and poetry as reflecting actual performances, using later evidence of masking traditions and festive dramas to explore the ritual calendar of the early Scandinavians. In addition to the textual corpus, he employs with dexterity a large number of archaeological sources – very unusually for a scholar whose primary field is not material culture studies. Gunnell discusses seiðr at length, and his excellent work is treated in several chapters below; since the first edition appeared, this has been complemented by several other developments of the same theme, (e.g. Gunnell 2006, 2008a, and by his edited collection from 2007).
The Anglo-Saxon analogues for seiðr have been treated by Richard North in his 1997 study of paganism in the Old English sources. He makes many valuable observations on sorcery in the context of sexuality and regeneration, to which we shall return.
In the same year the great Icelandic philologist Hermann Pálsson published an important book on the landnám, suggesting that a considerable proportion of the ‘Norwegian’ settlers were in fact of Sámi origin. This well-argued thesis has been widely discussed, but in the present context we can note that Hermann includes some five chapters on different aspects of sorcery and the soul, including one each on seiðr and útiseta. He focuses on sorcery used for sexual purposes and in connection with aggression of various kinds, and supports a shamanic interpretation with its origins among the Sámi.
Also in 1997 an Uppsala scholar, Stefan Andersson, produced an undergraduate dissertation on seiðr as expressed in four Eddic poems – Voluspá, Þrymskvíða, Hávamál and Baldrs draumar – against a background study of circumpolar shamanism. Rejecting Strömbäck’s ideas about a Sámi origin for seiðr, and also Ohlmark’s ‘subartic’ theories, Andersson instead refers to Nordic sorcery as having developed along its own path from a common Eurasian root of what he calls urshamanism, ‘original shamanism’. Two years later Andersson expanded on these ideas with a short paper on seiðr in the Historia Norvegiae and Saxo.
In 1998 Słupecki published a second book on Norse religion, this time focusing on divination and prophecy, and with an English summary in addition to the Polish text. A chapter is devoted to seiðr, in which Słupecki follows Ohlmarks in arguing that this kind of sorcery cannot be truly considered shamanic as it did not involve deep ecstasy.
The following year, 1999, the American folklorist Thomas DuBois released an important work on Nordic religions in the Viking Age. In some ways this was the single most innovative publication on Scandinavian pre-Christian belief for several decades, and the key to this lies in the fact that DuBois is the first scholar to have attempted a systematic integration of Nordic and Sámi religion on equal terms. He is primarily a specialist in Finno-Ugric and Sámi languages and religions, and the book benefits enormously from his ability to access material often denied to Western scholars by the linguistic barrier. The volume is built up along similarly unconventional lines, abandoning the familiar concentration on the gods to look instead at the concept of the restless dead, the importance of spirits, and, especially, seiðr. The latter is given an entire chapter, one eighth of the book.
In connection with the reissue of Strömbäck’s thesis in 2000, several other authors contributed essays on seiðr scholarship since the book’s original publication. A contribution by Bo Almqvist is of particular importance here, as he expands upon Strömbäck’s catalogue of literary references to seiðr with several new excerpts. In the same volume Hans Mebius discusses some developments in Sámi research, which will be taken up in chapter 4.
Though not named as such, seiðr has also been briefly discussed in a recent general synthesis on shamanism by the folklorist and historian Ronald Hutton (2001: 139f). The bulk of the book is made up of an excellent study of Siberian religion, but unfortunately Hutton has been woefully misinformed about the Scandinavian source material. The practices of the Norse and Sámi are treated as a seamless continuum, for example, and he seems to be claiming that Eiríks saga rauða contains the sole reference to a volva in the entire Old Norse corpus! Hutton is a world-leading specialist on English pagan ritual, but one feels that on this occasion his usually exemplary scholarship has been spread a little thin.
In the same year an interesting thesis appeared from Oslo, in which the usual range of medieval written sources are employed by Dror Segev to analyse not Viking-Age sorcery but that of the Middle Ages proper. Segev takes this discussion in a number of exciting new directions, not least through a study of possible Jewish influences on the descriptions of medieval magic; we will revisit this work in chapter 8.
Prior to the publication of the first edition of this book, the two most recent specific studies of seiðr both appeared in 2001. The first of these was Jens Peter Schjødt’s consolidation of several years of work in a paper considering Óðinn as a shaman. In several conference presentations Schjødt has argued that the shamanic overtones of the seiðr ritual are no more than general tendencies, and here he completes his argument by suggesting that Óðinn should be considered as primarily a god of the elite, to whom a certain degree of supernatural power is inherent. He rightly draws attention to the source-critical problems in extending the saga accounts of seiðr with any security back into the Viking Age, and also finds contradictions in the notion of Óðinn’s supposedly shamanic powers and his other functions – for example, as a psychopomp, a god of kings and chieftains, and as a supernatural ruler-figure. These ideas are discussed in chapter 5.
The second publication on seiðr from 2001 was Catharina Raudvere’s contribution to the medieval volume in the series Witchcraft and magic in Europe. Focusing generally on trolldómr, Raudvere’s text is essentially a small book, and provides the fullest recent survey of seiðr and its analogues, perhaps even the most comprehensive since Strömbäck. Raudvere provides an excellent overview of the sources and in her introductory remarks gives one of the most nuanced analyses of their convoluted critical value that has yet appeared (ibid: 75–90). Most importantly for current research, she discusses Norse sorcery as something that had once been perceived as a reality, and thus brings a fresh approach to the exploration of familiar material. Her text is deliberately short on examples, and instead attempts to draw a bigger picture of changing attitudes to magic over the whole span of the early medieval period. In part the work is hampered by the externally imposed framework of ‘witchcraft’ inherent in the series, which has brought a somewhat anachronistic emphasis on accounts of sorcery seen through accusations and legal proceedings, but this does not detract from the overall achievement of the essay. This is one of the most important studies of seiðr to have appeared to date, and several of Raudvere’s ideas are discussed in the following chapters. Raudvere’s second major work on Old Norse sorcery (2003) is discussed in chapter 8 below, and referenced throughout.
A broadly similar line to that of Jens Peter Schjødt is taken in a new introduction to Norse mythology for gymnasial students and undergraduates (Näsström 2002a, see especially pp. 104ff, 237–42). Seiðr is briefly discussed, but the intentional simplifications of the text occasionally result in a somewhat superficial analysis. One interesting feature is the author’s total rejection of shamanic interpretations in any cultural context, on the grounds that the very concept of shamanism “is now a misused term … which embraces so wide an area as to essentially have no meaning” (ibid: 61). This will be critically discussed below.
We have now reviewed the background to Nordic sorcery, in the context of the mythologies of the Scandinavians, the range of supernatural beings that populate them, and the ways in which these have been approached by scholars. To this we have added the material world of Norse cult – the places in which the gods were approached, the people who did so, and the larger landscape (both social and physical) in which these were set. The relationship of magic to these complex of forces has been questioned, and we have begun to explore the terminology of sorcery. Having surveyed the sources for seiðr and the history of its study, we are now equipped to examine it in greater detail.