[T]o a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality – even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.
Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (1999: 48f)
In 1990 the Hungarian historian Gábor Klaniczay published a collected edition of his papers as The uses of supernatural power. As we have seen in chapter 6, his work has explored the almost universal permeation of everyday life in post-Reformation Europe by beliefs in sorcery and a ‘magical universe’ (cf. Wilson 2000). Crucially, Klaniczay understands the symbiosis between this social environment and the political structures with which it was suffused. The connections to my arguments in this book are obvious, and his chosen title could easily have been applicable to this aspect of early Scandinavian culture. It is no accident that the second edition of the present volume has a new subtitle: magic and mind in late Iron Age Scandinavia.
In this book I have tried to explore two sources of social power in the Viking Age, what we would now call religion and war, and to examine the relationships between them. These are problematic arenas of behaviour, as we have seen, perceived very differently in the early medieval period by comparison with our modern view of such categories. So, how should we understand their operation at the time of the Vikings – not as the dry definitions of academia, but in their fullest social context?
At the simplest level they share one feature above all, and through which they are joined, namely the battle-god, Óðinn. Keeping in mind this connection, we can then begin to follow the specific elements of Óðinn’s power in different directions, one connected with seiðr and its related rituals, another embodied (literally) in the concept of shape-shifting and what anthropologists would once have called ‘totemism’, the supernatural link between the natures of human beings and animals. Of course, all these elements are interlaced with one another, as we have seen, and any deconstruction of them should be seen as the unravelling of something that was in fact tightly wound.
Within these strands of belief and practice we have also encountered human individuals in whom they were manifested, people who took on and mediated these aspects of Óðinn’s nature. Within the seiðr complex there were many different types of sorcerers, as we have explored in the terminologies of chapter 3. For ease of expression here we can call them seiðkonur and seiðmenn – ‘seiðr-women’ and ‘seiðr-men’ – in the knowledge that behind these two terms lie a great many more, including some in which the conventional gender categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ were blurred and redefined. In the complex of shape-shifting and animal transformation, expressed as a semi-permanent aspect of human nature rather than as temporary sorcerous change, we find the lycanthropic warriors of Óðinn, the berserkir and ulfheðnar. These two groups, the ‘seiðr-people’ and the battle-mad fighters, were some of the means through which the ecstatic energies of the gods seem to have been channeled.
In the pages above, I have argued not only that many aspects of Viking-Age ritual were fundamentally shamanistic in nature (with all the necessary caveats of definition), but that one of the main purposes of this shamanism was as a kind of battle magic. The supernatural empowerment of violence encountered in the preceding chapter, I would suggest, formed a link between the sacred and profane in a ritualisation of the aggression crucial to a warrior society.
Human access to the unseen forces of battle would seem to have been within the gender domain of women and a special class of men seen as different from the socially-acceptable norm – our ‘seiðr-people’ of all kinds. This was supported by otherworldly, female agents of violence such as the valkyrjur and other spirit-beings. Equally subordinate to Óðinn were the predominantly male warriors who translated these forces into practice on the battlefields of the human world, through ‘totemistic’ identification with the animals that in other forms were themselves also a feature of the shamanic performances. Clearly there is an element of sexual division here, separating the warrior men and the magic-working women, but an easy binary of this kind is too broad-brushed to really capture the nuance of Viking-Age gendered realities. Alongside this we also see a range of other identities that are harder to define and which transcend these categories, the social actors and actions through whom the artificial simplicities of ‘religion’ and ‘war’ were expressed. Thus we can understand ritualised and physical aggression as different components of a larger whole, a gender-encoded fusion of these social forces through the medium of spiritual power.
If we focus on this as a kind of socio-political construct in late Iron Age society, as I have argued above, then there are two final elements that we can add. The first of these relates to all the other people, in fact the bulk of the Norse population, who do not fall into the categories discussed here. In a vital sense they are at the centre of this pattern, as are their leaders and those who perform cultic functions in other interactive situations with the gods. It is through all these individuals that these practices operated and acquired meaning.
The second element to add concerns the fundamental perception of existence, expressed in a myriad of different forms. Assuming we follow this line of reasoning to begin with, then in accordance with the broader studies set out in chapter 5 the seiðr-related aspects of Óðinnic power could clearly be encompassed within a ‘shamanic’ world-view. Is it going too far to suggest that the ‘totemic’ sphere could be called a ‘Viking’ world-view, in the exact sense of this term?
It should be emphasised again that this is an inclusive perception of society – we should perhaps think of the different sources of social power articulated here as instead covering the inner surface of a sphere. Although they are isolated and extrapolated for examination, this is merely a dissection of something that would seem to have been originally a functioning organism.
Becoming a Viking may not therefore have been simply a rapid route to wealth or improved status (or failing that, a deathly communion with Óðinn). It could also have constituted a profoundly religious act. The path of the ritual warrior may have been a deeply spiritual acknowledgement of the gods and their place in the cosmos, never forgetting of course the more avaricious agenda of personal gain. One of the continually recurring motifs in Viking poetry, and also on the inscriptions of runestones, is the preoccupation with remembrance and specifically with fame after death. It is important to note here that the amorality of the Norse gods was not thought to impair the ultimate dignity of humanity, and it is this that I would argue was the essence of the Viking warriors’ relationship to their deities. Similarly, this forms a key element of the ritualised aggression that I suggest was embedded in their ideology.
There is also a further dimension of warfare in which we find fundamental differences between modern sensibilities and those of the Viking Age, namely the manner in which the individual combatant is viewed by society in a broader sense. For the last two or three centuries, and especially since the First World War, our culture has been accustomed to seeing soldiers as victims (and sometimes as politicised heroes), a perception which is extended even to former enemies. Before the 1700s, however, this idea “would have been quite alien to many of our ancestors for much of history” (Keegan 1998: 47). For civilians up until the middle of the eighteenth century, an approaching army of any affiliation was inevitably to be feared, the key point being that until early modern times the warrior was by definition a hated figure: “soldiers ate and drank at the common people’s expense, uncontrolled by their officers; they … took what they chose, including sexual favours, paid for nothing and, if opposed, tortured and killed” (ibid: 48). Alongside the social embeddedness that we have discussed above, this perception of the fighting man and what he meant to those in his path is also characteristic of the Viking Age, and generally in contrast to the modern understanding of those who prosecute ‘war’. We can compare this with the historian Richard Cobb’s observations on the French Revolution, and in particular its years of simmering aggression that occasionally spilled over into acts of extreme violence:
Cobb never forgets that such moments are rare in a human life, as they are rare in human history. The fear, the anticipation, and the memory of violence may be pervasive, but the moment itself is surrounded and given context by a lifetime of work, love, mourning, illness, shopping, play, boredom, and so on.
Barnes 2002: 10
This has something important to say to us about life in a society for which war is a kind of norm.
All these forces apparently operated within the social structures of an Iron Age, essentially tribal or clan-based system – the system that to a large degree changed and evolved during the Viking period into the state-based polities with which Scandinavia entered the Middle Ages. The ‘shamanic’ rituals, the complex character of Óðinn and the other matters taken up in the preceding chapters all have a political context, but one which changes over time from a dispersed to a concentrate form. We should also remember those ‘domestic’ objectives of sorcery, as the prosecution of battle was far from the only purpose to which seiðr and its analogues were put. This book is not a synthesis of Viking magic, but rather an exploration of some of its primary functions. The same applies to the aspects of noaidevuohta and circumpolar belief that we have examined.
The ‘Viking’ identity that we have discussed fitted into this Iron Age society as an articulation of its warrior ideology, but also as a channel for the wielding of political influence.
This proposes more than the existence of a male military elite supported by a semi-religious power base (not an uncommon theory for Iron Age societies), partly by virtue of its scope and partly through its subject matter and approaches to it. The integration of such a power-base with a gender-encoded control of organised violence, such as I have here proposed, can be seen as one of the defining characteristics of what we have chosen to label the Viking Age. We can observe this even in modern contexts, when a ruling class imposes an orthodoxy of violence upon a population, in a manner that implicates every citizen regardless of where they stand in the intended scheme of things. In his analysis of the Rwandan genocide quoted at the head of the chapter, Philip Gourevitch identifies just such a phenomenon in what he has called “the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality”, through which leaders configure society in their own image (1999: 48f).
The many disparate ends of the Viking period came with a second, better understood and less controversial ideological change: the continuing process of state formation and the assimilation of royal power in Scandinavia within the orbit of Christian Europe. In effect this deliberate re-orientation of culture and ideology marks a different ‘choice’ of power structures, focusing on the transition to self-representation in a manner that makes much of the Iron Age ritual system not only obsolete but actively undesirable.
This is an important point because we should not always assume a ‘top-down’ system of power in these circumstances. In the early, definitively pre-Christian part of the Viking Age, we should ask to what extent did elites need men like the berserkir, and to what extent did the latter press themselves into the service of the former? Were such warriors ever a particularly sought-after part of the trappings of rulership? Indeed, instead of the Viking identity mentioned above we might almost conceptualise this as an identity of violence itself. In very many ways, by the late tenth century the cultures of Scandinavia may have been approaching the limits of what they could absorb in terms of the socially-situated aggression laid out in this book. It was beginning to outlive its usefulness, and the transformations that today make us set a terminus of c.1050 for our artificial ‘Viking Age’ partly relate to this.
In parallel, we can see other, perhaps deeper changes in social structure. One of these concerns sexuality and gender. Throughout the later Iron Age it is possible to perceive a need to negotiate sex as a form of cultural expression. During the late Viking period especially, what it meant to be – in our terms – a heterosexual or a homosexual was changing. Social attitudes towards women were also being transformed, mostly for the worse in terms of their sanctioned potential for self-determination as their agency was constrained by Christianity. The ambiguous identities that were created through the war rituals of seiðr and its correlates may also have proved difficult to sustain. We may view similar tensions in other contexts. For example, how did the sexual aspects of these complexes play out in the ordinary domestic sphere, in as much as such a thing may be said to have existed? Who married the volur, or the seiðmenn? What was it like to be the partner of an ulfheðinn, or for that matter of any Viking who returned home from months of murderous rapine abroad?
In part, the nature of human beings themselves was being redefined, and we need only look to the conceptions of animals to understand this. Many of these changes were of course related to the steady impact of the new faith, but many of them also took place independently as the overall needs of society altered. Nevertheless, other aspects of this pre-Christian view of things survived through the Middle Ages and beyond. In Iceland still today, for example, the majority of the population believe in an active supernatural world, following a changing but genuinely ancient tradition that can ultimately be traced back to the mentalities of the Viking Age and the sagas. Either replacing Christian ideas or operating alongside them, this form of spiritual knowledge especially concerns the extra-corporeal aspects of the self such as the fylgjur, but also the power of dreams and foresight, the restless dead, and more ambiguous beings such as álfar and huldufólk, the ‘Hidden People’ – all familiar from Norse mythology (see Erlendur Haraldsson 1978; Hastrup 1998; Heijnen 2001; Gunnell 2008b).
In much of what I have written above, as in most works that deal with spiritual belief, there are passages in which the ‘reality’ of what is described is not clarified. Of course, there are not ‘really’ any troll, gandir, valkyrjur, and so on? From my own generally materialist perspective I would agree, unsurprisingly, but this is not the subject of this book. One of the key themes that I have tried to pursue here is that seiðr and all its attendant rituals, the whole complex of a possible Norse ‘shamanism’ and its correlates, is nothing less than a view of the nature of reality itself. And of course, what is real depends on how one defines reality in the first place.
This raises the question as to how this scheme of ritualised violence might actually have felt to those immersed in it. We can never know with certainty, of course, but it is possible nonetheless try to reunite the components of such a world-view that have been discussed separately above. What would the ‘battlefield of animals’ actually have looked like?
In the background somewhere, perhaps the nornir, or the terrible women of Darraðarljóð, are spinning the web of war that will decide the outcome of battle. On looms of power, perhaps made from human bodies, the grey cloth is slowly taking shape, dyed with blood. Each thread is a man’s life, weaving in and out of those around him. In Valholl and Sessrumnir, benches are being cleared and a reception prepared for those who will shortly be taking their places in the halls of the gods.
On the battlefield, the valkyrjur have arrived after their journey from the other world, their swan-wings spreading white behind them. Their horses gallop across the sky, with perhaps a light rain falling as they shake the sweat from their flanks. The fighting begins, and individual warriors live or die by the valkyrjur’s favour as they move over the field. They live up to their names: Herfjotur seizes the combatants, freezing their muscles as the enemy approaches; Mist lays a fog of confusion over their minds; Hlokk and Sveið exult in the deafening sound that rises from the mass of fighting men. This moment belongs to Skalmold, the ‘sword-time’. Hjalmþrimul’s voice is heard when blades bounce off helmets, and Geirdríful follows the showers of spears. As weapons take chunks out of shields, Randgníðr’s teeth and nails leave their marks in the wood. Sigrdrífa urges her favourites on to victory. Perhaps the heroes each have a special protector, standing behind them, flying above them, fending off the blows.
And who is to say that the weather is not also magically influenced, as the opposing army fights into the teeth of a storm or driving snow? Gale-force winds and sudden fog may appear, or terrible showers of hail. Lightning stabs about the field.
Behind the battle, some of the sorcerers whose aid has been called upon may be present in person, perhaps sitting on platforms. Volur, seiðkonur and the others are there, singly or in groups, perhaps ringed by a chanting enclosure of assistants. Perhaps some seiðmenn are present too, though most people shudder and give them a wide berth. Spells and counter-spells criss-cross the field – charms to render weapons unbreakable, or brittle as ice; charms to increase agility, or to induce a fatal stumble; charms to cloud the mind, or bring clear-sightedness; charms to make the wearer invulnerable, or to reduce the effects of his armour.
The sorcerers change form, their spirits fighting in the sky in constantly shifting animal shapes, sometimes even transforming into weapons or sharpened objects to pierce their opponents’ toughened hides. They try to overcome each new choice of form, thinking ahead to gain an advantage. Some try to block the route home between body and spirit, forcing the free souls of their enemies to drift to shapeless destruction.
On the ground below, berserkir and ulfheðnar echo the bestial theme. They run howling and foaming through the groups of fighting men. Some of them wear animal skins, some are naked, and some have thrown away shields and armour to rely on their consuming frenzy alone. Perhaps some of the greatest warriors do not take the field at all, but remain behind in their tents, their minds nevertheless focused on the combat. As huge animals their spirit forms wade through the battle, wreaking havoc.
Perhaps a pale man in a broad-brimmed hat can be seen walking here and there on the field, but indistinctly, always just out of the corner of your eye. He carries a staff and two ravens fly above him.
Apparently slain fighters return to life, shaking off their concussions and picking up their swords – perhaps seiðr has revived them? In the confusion of the fighting, especially if there are large armies in play, how can the endless stream of reinforcements be explained except by the dead coming back to swell the ranks again?
Great battle-trolls like Þorgerðr Holgabrúðr can also be perceived, standing alone or in groups around their masters, laying waste the men before them. Other beings like the gandir may be running about the field – the wolf breaths of the gondull, or something summoned and unleashed through útiseta. Underground, other creatures move to assist the sorcerers fighting above them.
None of this can be seen by the ordinary Viking, of course, but what else could explain that lucky spear-cast, that man’s amazing survival after such a blow, the incredible accuracy of that arrow? Why else would such a dexterous warrior trip like that, and how could such an imbecile manage to bring down that veteran of many battles? Where did this awful downpour come from, when the sky was clear an hour ago? It’s a good thing that your side has their own sorcerers, lucky you had those galdrar sung over you, and remembered to bring your amulets and charms. That jackdaw’s leg has never failed you yet. At least so far you’ve been able to rely on Óðinn, or Þórr, or Freyja, or any of the others – though there is always the risk that today you will be among the chosen slain, that you will quench the thirst of battle with a horn of mead that is always refilled, honoured at last to sit with the einherjar and to hear the words of the Eiríksmál from the lips of a god: Heill nú, vel skalt hér kominn ok gakk í holl, ‘Hail to you, be welcome here and come into the hall!’.
Nothing is certain except the wolf and the Ragnarok.
The above is a composite image, of course, like one of those reconstruction drawings that shows every household activity occurring simultaneously. Both on and off the battlefield a good deal of these perceptions were probably perfunctory, and unarticulated in any detailed sense. This does not mean that they did not run deep in social terms. In the written sources from the twelfth century and onwards there is little to suggest that the church was worried about the old gods returning to people’s minds: Óðinn had become an old-fashioned synonym for the Devil, albeit more charismatic and interesting than his biblical counterpart. Again and again however, we see a fear that the popular beliefs of the pagan period would surface. The world of superstition and sorcery, of everyday negotiations with the supernatural, the world of seiðr, did not disappear with the coming of Christianity. Indeed, it may even have been strengthened by the threat that the latter presented towards the end of the Viking Age.
In support of this, I cannot emphasise too strongly that the literary examples of Old Norse sorcery that I have taken up here represent only a small fraction of the total corpus. As I stated in chapter 3, the sagas are saturated with descriptions of socially-embedded magic of different kinds, and the supernatural in general. The material legacy that all this has left behind is meagre, but not unintelligible.
Clearly, a tight chronology is lacking for much of the data presented here. We have considered archaeology from all periods of the Viking Age and to some degree from the centuries before, skaldic poetry from its closing years, Eddic poetry of possible Viking-Age ancestry, and medieval sagas (themselves spanning several centuries). Beyond the Nordic scene, the Sámi and circumpolar sources range over an even longer span of time, with an emphasis on early modern accounts and ethnographies of the last three hundred years. We should not shrink from the acknowledgement that in one sense it is simply not possible to trace a detailed chronological line in this material, other than through the broadest distinctions of the earlier and later parts of the Viking Age. As I have repeatedly stressed, regional variation and change over time are hallmarks of these phenomena, but isolating or cataloguing this spectrum is a different matter entirely. We should at the same time be wary of approaching the people of the Viking Age in the abstract – it was the most particular of times, and almost every aspect of its culture needs to be viewed at the level of the specific rather than the general.
In looking at the written sources we need to ask what they hide, alter or obscure – up to a point, these questions can be answered in the archaeology. When we look at the material culture, we need to ask how representative it is, what larger world of the mind produced these objects. In considering the ‘intangibles’ that we raised in chapter 1 – religion, spirituality, belief – it is also important to ask what physical traces these might be expected to leave. The relative sparsity of the archaeology of seiðr and its analogues does not in any way refute the evidence of the written sources, nor should it surprise us. Still, given the preponderance of texts among our available data, should an archaeologist not give up and leave these problems to historians of religions, philologists and historians? Again, the answer is no, because it is only through an archaeological agenda that these sources can be approached in this particular way. In the first chapter I argued for the exclusively ‘archaeological’ nature of this book: I hope it is now clear what I meant by this.
Throughout this work, seiðr has expanded beyond the framework within which it has been conventionally interpreted. I have tried not only to tease out elements of sorcery buried in the sources, but also to illuminate those that have been neglected or even hidden by a different direction of scholarship. I have argued that the operative environment of seiðr and its related rituals can be traced from methods of seeing the future in a domestic setting, through a complex field of functions more or less related to daily life, to a convoluted form of sexual magic that pushed at the permitted boundaries of its social context, and finally to a formidable means of unleashing destruction in a variety of circumstances.
It might even have harnessed the very forces from which the worlds were created and through which they may, perhaps, be reborn. Nor is it unwarranted to expect the seiðr complex to have fulfilled such a primary role in some way or another – after all, as we have seen in chapter 5 a similarly fundamental social function is performed by almost all the shamanic belief systems of the circumpolar region. Why should that of the Viking-Age Scandinavians have been any different in this respect? Even if we qualify its ‘shamanic’ interpretation as I have done above, we are still left with the imperative of acknowledging the place of such a belief system at the core of its adherents’ view of the world. In the light of every known parallel, it cannot be relegated to merely being an interesting practice, to be discussed in passing.
I began this book by citing some examples of ‘different’ Viking lives that I felt had largely been overlooked or under-represented in our models of the period. These people should now be more familiar to the reader, and their actions can be set in context:
•the ‘naked and wary kindler of the pyre’ (in Foote & Wilson’s phrase, 1980: 411) comes from Ibn Fadlan, and may tell us something about the nature of spirits and the dangerous circumstances of a funeral, as the man seeks to ensure that nothing can emerge from the grave and enter his body;
•the six-legged reindeer appear on one of the Överhogdal weaves, and hint at lost histories of Sámi-Norse interaction, perhaps illustrating the supernatural animals that shamans believed they rode on their journeys to another world;
•the women weaving destruction on their terrible loom are from Darraðarljóð, and give us insights into Norse ideas about fate and doom, the nature of the valkyrjur, and the supernatural preordination of battle;
•the cross-dressing male-bodied Sámi is from grave 9 at Vivallen, and we have seen how his clothes that have traversed boundaries of culture, gender and context can reveal something of relations between the Norse and their neighbours, and perhaps indicate the equipment of an early medieval noaidi;
•the men who ran with the wolves are the father-and-son ulfheðnar from Volsunga saga, providing an intimate vision of shape-shifters in battle, together with the incestuous seiðr rituals in their past that ultimately led to them embarking on that path;
•the sword-bearing women can still be seen walking under their tree today on the tapestry from Oseberg in the stores of the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, contemporary witnesses to the war-rituals undertaken by female functionaries in the Viking Age;
•the sexual trials of an adolescent slave-girl on her way to the next life also come first-hand from Ibn Fadlan, and provide uncomfortably graphic proof of the importance of the erotic in the ritual world of the Vikings;
•the woman who went to her grave with exotic jewellery and the drugs that were a hallmark of her trade was found in the cemetery at Fyrkat, where she was honoured in her funeral gifts above all others buried in the shadow of Haraldr’s circular symbol of power – whatever label we apply, she is the tangible reality behind all the volur, seiðkonur and ‘riders’ of the saga stories.
These eight examples from alternating archaeological and written sources are not uncontroversial. Like any other aspect of the period they are subject to source-critical scrutiny, cross-examination and alternative interpretation. In one more thing too though, they are symbolic of the material presented throughout this book: whatever we think of them, we must nevertheless offer an interpretation. They cannot be ignored or marginalised.
When archaeological and textual perspectives, and the disparate sources they rely on, are permitted to illuminate each other rather than being kept within defensive disciplinary borders, I believe that the result is a new dimension of ‘the Viking way’ – a way of thinking and a way of being. The challenge laid down here is for students of the Viking Age to find a more plausible reading than mine.