And these people […] were a curious mix, rooted and practical, but living easily among dreams and stories and superstition, one ear always pressed against the night-world, or whatever it was, the correct name for that part of life people were forgetting how to address.
Andrew Miller, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (2018: 403)
In 2002, the preceding chapters attempted to offer something new in Viking studies, an acknowledgment of the variety, depth and social importance of sorcery in the lives of the early medieval Scandinavians – as a reviewer later put it, “not magic realism, but the realism behind the magic” (Carver 2004: 165). As we have seen, there had been many previous studies of its individual components, Strömbäck’s monumental study of seiðr probably chief amongst them, but they were never integrated into more general syntheses of Viking-Age culture, or even of belief and ritual practice. The volur and their kind may have saturated the medieval saga corpus, but they simply did not seem to register in the late twentieth-century perceptions of the actual period that the Old Norse tales claimed to retrospectively describe.
If The Viking Way achieved anything, it was to change this picture. For the first time, a critical assessment of the role of sorcery, and the lived experiences of its practitioners and commissioners, gradually began to take its place alongside the other, more familiar elements of the Vikings’ complex world. Sorcery and its contingent understandings of reality became more generally embedded in overviews of the Viking Age, sometimes with quite extensive discussion (e.g. Richards 2005; Clements 2005; Hall 2007; Jón Viðar Sigurðsson 2008; Ferguson 2009; Herschend 2009; Griffiths 2010; Hedeager 2011: part III, an especially important work with a focus on transformation, animal embodiment and gender; Svavar Sigmundsson 2011; Lihammer 2012; Kyhlberg 2012; Andersson 2013, 2016; Carroll et al. 2014; Eriksen et al. 2015; Barraclough 2016: ch. 3; Roesdahl 2016; Lund & Arwill-Nordbladh 2016; Shippey 2018).
This new inclusivity also extended to the level of the individual, when the volva and her sisters appeared among the serial social biographies in a collection of Vikingaliv (‘Viking Lives’; Harrison & Svensson 2007: 52–81), and would do so again in Swedish collections of Iron Age tales told through archaeology (Graner 2007: 52–61; G. Andersson 2015; K. Andersson 2018: 110–15, 168–73, 180–5). These women also took their place among female cult leaders (e.g. Rosengren 2008).
All this work after 2002 was supplemented by a raft of my own papers, which in their various ways helped to further synthesise these ideas and locate them within the critical scholarly consensus of the Vikings (Price 2003, 2004a–b, 2005a–c, 2006a, 2008b, 2014a).
A key element of my argument was for the contextualisation of important aspects of sorcery within an essentially militaristic ideology that implicated all of society. This has been widely followed, for example as the epilogue for a major synthesis of social development in the Swedish kingdom and its central focus on the Mälar valley (Hagerman 2011: 395), as aspects of archaeological surveys in the same region (e.g. Ljungkvist 2006; Anund 2007), and in the context of the main late Iron Age power centre at Gamla Uppsala (Beronius Jörpeland et al. 2017; Eriksson 2018). I have also used it myself as a means of discussing not the ‘Otherness’ of the Vikings (cf. ch. 1) but instead a disturbing connection:
[I]t is not often now we speak of a pre-Christian Viking ‘religion’ at all – it was far more than that: a total view of the world, a complete, and very different, understanding of the nature of reality itself […] That was what the Vikings’ victims were afraid of, and it is also what we are starting to really get to grips with. But there is something more. I think that fear of the Vikings not only arose because they were so different, but because in that difference lay some horribly unnerving kind of familiarity. The Anglo-Saxons, for example, knew that this Viking world-view was not so far removed from what theirs had been not so long before, and maybe, under the surface, still was – and I think that realization frightened them. The Vikings were not only conventionally terrifying, they were also a dark mirror held up to the image of what the English needed to believe themselves to be. The same probably applied to the Franks and the other Continental peoples.
Price 2015a: 7
The notion seems to have found a receptive audience, and has also now begun to be taken up by others (e.g. Williams 2017: 142; Blair 2018: 51).
Remarkably, the day after this new edition was submitted to the publishers, and thus included here as a last-minute addition, a new publication was launched that precisely captures the sense of the overlooked that I was trying for in chapter 1. In words of editor Amy Jefford Franks, Kyngervi (‘gender’ in Icelandic) “is a new journal focussing on the ‘Other’ in Old Norse studies, looking at anything Norse-related on themes of gender, queer, race, disability and animal studies – we aim to bring the marginalised to the forefront”. This is a very exciting development indeed, and sure to yield good things.
The first edition also found a different kind of reception beyond the academy, taking its own trajectory outside the span of my own publications. The ideas set out in The Viking Way were featured in several television documentaries and radio interviews, as well as a large number of public lectures, including some to predominantly Sámi audiences. The popular reception of the book also took on some unexpected forms. In Denmark, a trilogy of plays by Ebbe Kløvedal Reich and Jørgen Larsen was based on my interpretation of the woman in grave 4 at the Fyrkat cemetery. Presented as part of the annual Fyrkatspillet performed on-site at the Viking fortress, the sequence began in 2004 with Mandebod (‘Blood-Price’), continued the following year with Rejsen (‘The Journey’) and concluded in the summer of 2006 with Siri, named after the main female character. My views on the fighting rages of the berserkir were even discussed – from an unsettlingly practical perspective – by American troops serving in Iraq on their dedicated internet chat rooms, after someone had scanned and uploaded sections of the book there. In terms of more ancient combat, modern armourers have also used my work in their recreations of Viking Age weapons. By the same token, interest continued in the Pagan and Ásatrú communities, and I often see versions of the reconstruction drawings in this book being worn by participants in Viking markets and festivals.
Alongside specific responses to the book, Viking studies itself has hardly been static since 2002 (see Price 2005d, 2015a & c for attempts at an overview; cf. Brink & Price 2008). Of relevance to this book, we have seen the appearance of a number of new syntheses of Viking-Age religion, and several specialist studies of its individual aspects, including sorcery. Conferences and exhibitions have also been devoted to this topic. Not least, the exemplary Vägar till Midgård project in Lund and Stockholm has completed its publication programme, and this alone has added many hundreds of thousands of words to these debates (Andrén et al. 2001–2014). Circumpolar, Sámi and shamanic research has also continued to expand, as has the archaeo-anthropological study of warfare, violence and sexuality – all themes central to this book. Textual scholarship too has generated new insights into the ‘Viking way’ of my title, especially through landmark studies of Eddic poetry and witchcraft, and a number of new editions of key texts. These and other new publications are discussed in more detail below, broadly following the sequential narrative of the preceding chapters.
During the years of research on the first edition of this book, I was one of many scholars in inter-disciplinary Viking studies who in our various ways were all wrestling with what we saw as the problems of Norse religion. These concerns included the basic realisation that it could not viably be called a ‘religion’ at all, and indeed that there was no ‘it’ to begin with. Instead, the myriad beliefs, practices, superstitions and, probably, even the contemporary spiritual vaguenesses and confusions of the Viking Age began to fracture and run off in their own directions – like a previously smooth plain of ice cracking apart with the thaw (an image the Vikings would have liked).
At first it seemed all we could do to keep our footing – to extend the metaphor – and in chapter 2 I alluded to this discussion as things stood in 2002. Since then, however, there has been an exponential growth of research and we are standing on firmer ground. Alongside the overviews that incorporated the ideas of the first edition, as mentioned above, we see this increasing questioning of our terms and conditions in a number of key works (e.g. Berthell 2006; Brink 2007; Schjødt 2008, 2009, 2012; Raudvere & Schjødt 2012; Hermann et al. 2017; Terry Gunnell has also published more or less continuously on this theme over the past decade and more).
My reading of Old Norse sorcery and its place in the wider complex of spiritual belief has also been discussed in the specific context of mythology, folklore, ideology and the history of religions (e.g. Nordberg 2003, 2013; Steinsland 2005: ch. 19; Bonnetain 2006, 2007; Andrén & Carelli 2006; Lund 2006, 2009; Sundqvist 2007, 2016; Ingunn Ásdísardóttir 2007; Capelle & Fischer 2007; Ewing 2008; Patton 2009: ch. 7; Näsström 2009; Abram 2011; Jennbert 2011; Helmbrecht 2011; Andrén 2011, 2014; Winroth 2012: ch. 11; Gardeła 2014b; Murphy 2016; Ney 2017; Hultgård 2017; and several papers in Andrén et al. 2006; Kaplan & Tangherlini 2012; Tangherlini 2014; Tesch 2017; together with collections cited in the preceding chapters). Scholars of early medieval funerary ritual have also engaged with the book, not least in an Anglo-Saxon context (e.g. Williams 2006; Redmond 2007; Semple & Williams 2007; Sayer & Williams 2009).
While much of this work has been incorporated piecemeal into the revised version of the preceding chapters, the sheer quantity of new literature – easily running to a shelf metre or two – unfortunately precludes a detailed engagement with the many different ways in which my ideas have been adopted, supported, critiqued, opposed, and otherwise discussed in this liveliest of research fields. I can only urge the interested reader to dive deeper into the works listed above.
Special mention must be made of a key publication by Catharina Raudvere (2003) which appeared mere months after my own book. Her volume covers very similar ground to my own, though from the perspective of a historian of religions and in part using different material, but was produced in parallel with The Viking Way. Neither of us was aware of the other work in progress (Raudvere 2003: 7f), but I have incorporated references to the relevant sections of her book in the preceding chapters.
In parallel with these developments, the past decade or so has seen a fantastic proliferation of source-critical studies of the textual foundations of Norse ‘religion’. In terms of primary texts, the third volume of Ursula Dronke’s monumental edition of the Poetic Edda has at last appeared, sadly posthumously (2011), and the new eight-volume series of skaldic poetry is nearing completion as this present book goes to press (Clunies Ross 2008–2017). Richard North and colleagues (2011) have also produced an excellent compendium of new translations across a variety of key sources. In addition to some outstanding handbooks and companions on the Old Norse corpus as a whole (e.g. O’Donoghue 2004; McTurk 2007; Clunies Ross 2010; North & Allard 2012; Ármann Jakobsson & Sverrir Jakobsson 2017), there are now several fine collections on the intricacies of the Eddic poems (e.g. Acker & Larrington 2002; McKinnell 2014; Larrington et al. 2016), and also on individual saga genres (e.g. Lassen et al. 2009, 2012). Readers interested in the outline of Old Norse textual scholarship given in chapter 2 can now deepen their engagement with reference to these works.
In the years since the first edition, Norse mythology has also been gifted with at least three new interpreters from the literary world. Antonia Byatt (2011) has interwoven the stories with her childhood memories, in a collection that – quite by chance – resonates wonderfully with my choice of opening quotation in chapter 1 above. She also very properly (in my opinion!) emphasises Ragnarok as something that marks how the worlds, “…came to an end. A real End. The end.” (Byatt 2011: 9). More recently, two giants of fantasy writing have each contributed their own take on the Viking mind. Neil Gaiman (2017) gives a subversive slant on the gods’ personalities and behaviour, subtly tailored to contemporary concerns, while the man he calls “the Master” – Kevin Crossley-Holland – revisits his deep knowledge of northern legend and builds on an earlier collection that once inspired me as a teenager (1980, 2017).
As noted above, the years since the appearance of the first edition have seen a huge flowering of published work on Norse sorcery and its place in Viking lives.
Among the most significant of these works, François-Xavier Dillmann’s 2006 magnum opus on the sorcerers of ancient Iceland has been mentioned in chapters 2 and 3 above, in the context of research history and the social cartography of magical practitioners. Although the core of his work is the most comprehensive and source-critical review of the textual material ever undertaken, of course the book also has much to say about the interpretation of sorcery in the Viking Age.
Though based on his 1986 thesis, Dillmann’s treatise was not published until four years after the first edition of this book, and in many ways it offers a parallel, though subtly different, view of the same sources. To the degree that one can do justice in synthesising an 800-page work of densely-argued and impeccable scholarship, his ideas have been woven into this new edition. Like Mitchell (2011: 210) before me, I here draw on Jochens’ 2006 review to manageably summarise some of his conclusions:
[…] the magicians emerge as people who enjoyed the same rights and privileges as other Icelanders. With few exceptions they belonged to the class of free farmers; many were among the wealthiest and were often associated with political leaders through marriage. With the possible exception of volur (prophetesses), they did not constitute a special profession but survived like other Icelanders by engaging in animal husbandry and agriculture. Reinforcing their Icelandic identity is the observation that they were not newcomers to the country; their ethnic origins were not different from those of other Icelanders, and like them, they lived in settled households. Most were married and had children, but occasionally, widows and mistresses can be identified among the sorceresses. In short, the magicians constituted an intellectual, social, and economic elite within the Icelandic society.
Jochens 2006: 490
I do not entirely agree with Dillmann’s rather confident description of the nature of Icelandic sorcerers (as will be apparent from preceding chapters), but he makes some interesting points – not least in terms of elites, as we may here remember the wife of the Viking war commander who “gave her answers” on the altar at Clonmacnoise. Above all, I cannot see the same level of consistency and constancy in the sorcerers, as they seem to me to encompass a large variety of people and social circumstances.
Erudite and learned though it is, Dillmann’s book also has its boundaries. Importantly, he sees the world of magic so vividly described in the sagas as being based on genuinely ancient traditions, a position that is at odds with much of contemporary literary scholarship. While I am broadly sympathetic to this (unsurprisingly in view of the preceding chapters), it is not without its drawbacks. As Mitchell has noted (2011: 7), “the book is necessarily limited by the fact that it largely allows the surviving medieval Icelandic sagas to define both the range of its enquiry and the nature of its evidence”. As he makes clear, whatever their qualities and value, in the end these sources are products of the thirteenth century and later, and the creations (utilising uncertain, earlier source materials) of Christian minds. Of course, these are the source-critical problems discussed in chapter 2 above, and familiar to anyone attempting to use the later Old Norse texts to understand the Viking-Age world that they ostensibly describe.
This is a crucial point, because what Dillmann is omitting here is any category of evidence that actually comes from the Viking Age – most obviously in the form of archaeology. The geographic focus on Iceland is likewise purely a product of the literary source material, and does not reflect the wider spread of evidence, including other kinds of texts. This trend is also something of a characteristic of other works by textual scholars in the last decade or so, whether in the fields of philology, history of religions, or history.
Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir (2009, 2013: chs 2–3) has published eloquent studies of embodied female power in the Norse literature, which are models of textual analysis, but here again the emphasis is on the written sources alone. As Jóhanna writes:
The motif of women using magic proved extremely productive for saga authors. Its appearance in the Íslendingasögur primarily serves a narrative function; it was used for literary purposes rather than to record past pagan religious practices. Saga authors’ ideas about magic were imprecise and probably depended on oral tradition.
Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013: 57
She does not entirely close the door on a Viking-Age reality, but without engaging with the contemporary evidence (with or without archaeologists’ assistance) it is hard to see on what basis the depth of the medieval writers’ understanding of ancient customs can be assessed.
Another important example is the book by Nicolas Meylan (2014; and his earlier work, 2011) which takes this approach much further, and opts for a radically different take on the textual sources relating to sorcery. In Meylan’s reading, the saga narratives of magic in fact represent an Icelandic medieval recoding of ancient traditions and definitions (thus far broadly similar to Dillmann’s ideas), but activated in their own present as a subversive discourse directed at the growing power of the Norwegian kings. The study encompasses an array of contemporary moral perspectives on magic, not least in the context of its literary patrons focusing their sorcerous power up or down the social scale. Meylan’s book presents a series of closely argued textual case studies, ranging from Gylfaginning to Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, and Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, and on to saints’ lives such as Jóns saga Hólabyskups ens helga, building his argument in careful and convincing increments to present magic as a discourse of power and invective.
Meylan’s study is a considerable achievement, and maintains a constant pulse of internally consistent logic that is truly impressive. As I see it, however, his arguments stray into a slightly different sector of the same grey middle ground as Dillmann. Meylan is at least specific in his focus on the actual, medieval social context of the saga writers – their reasons for manifesting magic in the way they did, and for what purpose. However, besides alluding to vague substrata of earlier beliefs on which they supposedly drew for these political missives, he seemingly makes no acknowledgement that this older world – the Viking Age that the sagas after all claim to be delineating – even existed in reality, with its own contemporary concerns and ritual practices. Critiquing the first edition of this present book, as well as other texts such as Raudvere’s monographs (2001, 2003), he makes the interesting and accurate observation that for writers such as myself, “the actual practice of magic, whether in the pagan period or under Christianity, is taken for granted” (Meylan 2014: 5). He then contrasts this with the essentially hegemonic nature of the textual sources on which he believes such studies as my own are based, narratives firmly confined within literary arenas of political dominance that had nothing to do with the Viking period of centuries before.
Meylan is correct about the limitations of the written record that I have used in the preceding chapters, as others have done in similar studies; needless to say, I also hope that this is reflected in the appropriate source-critical caution of my arguments. What Meylan misses, however, like Dillmann before him, is the archaeological dimension of the Viking-Age material world. As we have seen, this not only provides extraordinarily close correlations to the later texts (the graves of staff-bearers, for example) but also a range of objects, places and milieu that go far beyond what later writers imagined – and all of it possessing a tangible materiality quite different to that of text.
At one point, Meylan spells out his position in plain language:
Besides documenting the response given by Icelanders to the challenge of dealing with kings when powerless, I have also sought to demonstrate that magic need not be studied as an actual, stable, and prediscursive phenomenon, defined by its agents, rites, and representations, but rather as a fundamentally discursive and protean category whose content could be adapted to fit with the wider political agenda of the text in which it was mobilized.
Meylan 2014: 198
This is Viking-Age magic as medieval discourse alone, a “protean category” generated within the pages of later, Christian books, and trapped forever therein. Readers will already have understood that what Meylan suggests magic need not be, is precisely the subject of my own volume: the beliefs and practices (though far from stable) of people who really lived in the Viking Age, as opposed to the fictionalised actions of textual characters in the sagas’ later mediation of a distant past. That said, this does not mean that Meylan is necessarily wrong about the motivations of the medieval authors who wrote of sorcery, simply that the prehistory to which they allude cannot be ignored. By the same token, every moment of the past was once the present, with its own urgently contemporary concerns of society and politics.
In theoretical contrast to this, there is the related field of magic – in the sense of genuinely-held, practical action, and social attitudes to it – in the Nordic Middle Ages proper. Closely linked to medieval beliefs in witchcraft, the ‘empirical environment’ of ‘real’ sorcery that permeated the saga-writers’ world is also relevant to understanding the works they produced, naturally with implications for the view of the Viking Age thus engendered. Though outside the scope of even this second edition, we are fortunate in having two important books that engage with medieval magic in great detail (Segev 2001, discussed briefly above, and Mitchell 2011, now the standard work).
Segev’s book sets the tone with its title, employing a refreshing specificity that overcomes the difficulties that we have seen in works such as Dillmann’s and Meylan’s: Medieval magic and magicians – in Norway and elsewhere, based upon 12th–15th centuries manuscript and runic evidence.
Mitchell’s volume delves much deeper. His timeframe is 1100–1525, and Viking-Age sorcery forms only a brief but necessary background to his study of magic in the Middle Ages proper (the first edition of The Viking Way is a frequent point of reference). Witchcraft and magic in the Nordic Middle Ages is a superb work, essential for understanding the place of sorcery in the medieval mind, and in my opinion perhaps the best meditation that has so far appeared on the social role of northern witchcraft in the neglected space between the end of the Viking Age and the Renaissance (it is furthermore written with an elegance that is often absent from works of such deep scholarship). Mitchell writes perceptively of the textual use of magic as, “a kind of metalanguage for communicating perceptions and important ideas about what it meant to be a pagan or a Christian” (2011: 25), as applied to the long process of conversion that began in the early Viking Age and was still not completed in the North until well into the medieval period. In particular he provides an outstanding analysis of the daily, domestic context of sorcery in the Middle Ages (ibid: ch. 2) that is very similar to aspects of its Viking-Age counterpart that I have attempted to bring out above; later in the work (ibid: ch. 6, see also Mitchell 2000), his studies of gendered magics also make a major contribution to these debates, and have been incorporated in the preceding chapters of this new edition.
A steady trickle of new works on shamanism in relation to Old Norse beliefs began to appear soon after the first edition was published (e.g. von Schnurbein 2003, focusing on the politics of its study rather than Viking-Age realities; Biering 2006 on its sociology). The publication of the first edition also led to invitations to describe Old Norse spirituality in the context of wider discussions of shamanic belief systems (Price 2010b, 2011, 2015b).
One work in particular has taken up these themes, and in culmination of long years of patient research Clive Tolley published his findings in a monumental two-volume work, Shamanism in Norse myth and magic (2009a). He is clear in his objectives, stated early: “to answer the question of whether Norse literature indicates that ancient Scandinavians had the notion of a practice which might reasonably be termed ‘shamanism’, whether as an actual phenomenon of ordinary life, or as a motif appearing in fictional settings” (2009a/1: xv). In the course of his work he also utilises folklore and ethnography relating to shamanic belief systems (unusually in northern studies, he is one of only a handful of scholars who also has a mastery of the Finnish material), and compares them with the Icelandic textual sources.
Over 21 chapters (with a usefully annotated contents list that is a model of its kind), supported by a volume of reference materials, Tolley first explores the definition and character of shamanic belief systems in general. He then proceeds methodically through the Icelandic corpus, and argues systematically for a lack of real correlation with Norse practices as reflected in the texts. Thus the various Óðinnic ‘initiation’ rituals have nothing to do with shamanism (Tolley 2009a/1: ch. 16), the World Tree is an Indo-European and Germanic feature rather than a circumpolar one (ibid: ch. 13), what might appear to be helping spirits are something else (ibid: ch. 9), and so on; Gardeła has made a more effective summary than mine in his 2011 review, which is also from the perspective of an archaeologist. It feels unjust to represent Tolley’s views so briefly, and the reader is very much directed to engage closely with his deeply impressive scholarship; the two volumes of his 2009 book together run to nearly 900 pages. However, the central drive of his work remains in the relentless decision (for that is what it is) to adopt positions against a shamanic interpretation, even when others equally plausible are available.
One extended example can serve to illustrate what I see as the problem, in the form of Tolley’s reading of Þorbiorg lítilvolva’s Greenlandic rituals in Eiríks saga rauða. In the course of a long study (Tolley 2009a/1: 487–95), her presence on the farm at Herjolfsnes, the reception she meets with, and the actions she takes, are all interpreted as a carefully deliberate satire on Christian episcopal ceremony, intended as a caustic comment on the supposedly recalcitrant heathenism of the Greenland colonists. This extends to every detail of the famous description, where in Tolley’s view we find, “the high seat she is provided with, recalling a bishop’s cathedra, and the staff she bears, adorned like a bishop’s crozier, along with her cloak and hat, a sort of parody of the bishop’s robes and mitre” (2009a/1: 491). This kind of filter is then extended further. In my comments above on Dillmann’s view of the sorceresses as elites, I made a brief comparison with Ota/Auðr on the altar at Clonmacnoise; here Tolley also refers to this, but to him it is just another Christian denigration, depicting pagan sacrilege to show how uncouth the Scandinavians are. As Gardeła has also noted (2011: 240) all this is to ignore the abundant archaeological (and other) evidence for precisely these things, actually from the Viking Age – we need only think of the women buried with staffs and the accoutrements of ritual; the evidence for unusual clothing; the platforms evident on cult sites; the miniature chairs; and so on. We will return to this point below.
Although he places greater credence than Tolley in the ultimate antiquity of the information encoded in the sagas, Dillmann also questions whether the rites described can properly be seen as shamanic. In the course of many meticulous dissections of saga episodes (Dillmann 2006: 238–308), again notably the rituals of Þorbiorg, Dillmann does not accept that the sorceresses entered trance, and as in his earlier publications (1993, 1994) he rejects the overall links between the practices of Norse magic and those of circumpolar belief systems.
Some years ago I discussed both these fine books in a career retrospective interview for Brathair, the Portuguese-language journal of Scandinavian studies in Brazil, in response to specific questions about how I saw Dillman’s and Tolley’s researches in the light of my own (Langer 2011). As I emphasised there, both their volumes are truly works for the ages – they deal comprehensively with primary data, which they catalogue and unpack with impeccable expertise, with an end product that is both exhaustive and authoritative. Both works will last far longer than mine, and their authors have done a service to anyone interested in the field.
However, both authors also claim explicitly to be assessing magic and sorcery, its practice and practitioners, in the Viking Age. What both of them are doing in practice, it seems to me, is exploring the vocabulary and description of magic/sorcery/shamanism as they appear in the medieval discourse-world of the written sources (in Tolley’s case, supplemented by even later ethnographies and folklore). Of course, I have also used these categories of source material, but as a complement to others for a more holistic picture. The problem is thus exactly what we have seen with Meylan’s work above, and like him, Tolley even takes pains to distance himself from the actual contemporary evidence. Early in his book, he states plainly that he finds archaeological material to be of little value in the absence of the written word, while also suggesting that the textual sources should be allowed “to speak for themselves as far as possible” (Tolley 2009a/1: 5, 12).
A reluctance to engage with material beyond one’s expertise and competence is a professional virtue, and worthy of respect. However, this does not mean that data and evidence from beyond one’s disciplinary comfort zone can simply be ignored as if it did not exist, and as though it could have no bearing on the conclusions drawn from a researcher’s primary field. Textual scholars sometimes comment rather sharply on archaeologists’ attempts to employ written sources without adequate advice from those trained in their analysis – but it seems to me a far greater problem to reconstruct a prehistoric world solely on the basis of things written down centuries later, while omitting the absolutely vast body of material that actually derives from the time and culture in question.
All this also raises the eternal question of definition, at times the bane of humanities research. To what degree can we really define Norse magic? Which terminologies should we use – those of the medieval textual sources; those of contemporary anthropology and history of religions; or those of a wider discourse into human cognition, spirituality and ritual practice? Or others entirely? In the preceding chapters my own position has hopefully become clear, employing the vocabulary and categories discernible in the texts, but activated in the context of later scholarly perspectives. At the time of writing the first edition, which comprised my doctoral studies, I met with a great deal of debate around exactly this issue, and was surprised to realise the degree of precision that some scholars believed was attainable in this matter. Years later, I was refreshed to read the views of another researcher – a Classicist – on the same problem in relation to the sorcerers of the Ancient World:
[authors should not] confuse the attempt to give final definition to an abstract concept, ancient or modern, which is self-evidently impossible, with the delineation of a coherent core of source material for study […]
Ogden 2008: 3
Ogden goes on to make rather more caustic remarks about his colleagues working on Classical magic, but raises the valuable point that, in the end, they are all grappling with the same material – in this case, documents with “very different textures” that nonetheless maintain an emphatic thematic coherence, wrapped up in “a strong tradition with a tight nexus of repeated motifs” (ibid). This captures my approach completely, as much the same is true for Norse sorcery, with the critical addition of the growing range of archaeological sources, plus a variety of evidence of different kinds, contexts and dates from the wider Viking diaspora.
At the core of the first edition’s explorations of Viking-Age sorcery as reflected in material culture are, of course, the staffs and the burials in which they have been found, taking up a large proportion of chapter 3. Perhaps the most tangible of impacts was that, after 2002, these objects began to be re-labelled in museum exhibitions, changing from the usual default identification as ‘roasting spits’ to the possible equipment of sorcerers. In the years since the original publication, these artefacts, together with their analogues and related paraphernalia, have also been included in many other scholarly publications as part of the regular corpus of Viking material culture.
At the most basic level, for some time after publication I received correspondence from museum curators and archaeologists for whom my book triggered memories of unusual objects that had lain in their storerooms and archives, unreported and unpublished. Could this possibly be one of these staffs, they asked? In quite a few cases, the answer was yes, perhaps it is. All these re-interpreted finds have now been incorporated in the revised text of chapter 3 above.
In terms of the corpus of staffs, one scholar in particular, Leszek Gardeła, has made an enormous contribution through many years of research into the materiality of Norse magic, including following its tangled connections through the byways of mortuary behaviour and ritual practice. Partly inspired by the first edition of this book (as he kindly acknowledges, Gardeła 2016: 7), over nearly a decade he has built up an impressive catalogue of works devoted to the theme (e.g. Gardeła 2008a–d, 2009a & b) culminating in his doctoral thesis from 2012 and a major monograph on the staffs in 2016 (with references to all his many Polish-language works on similar themes).
This latter publication is one of the most important to appear in this field, and like the handful of others of its kind, impossible to summarise in a manner that does it justice. Like me, he reviews the written sources mentioning these objects, and provides a detailed exploration of the funerary material, as well as the varying ways in which it has been interpreted. As both a complement to the present work, and a significant expansion of its themes, Gardeła’s 2016 volume is highly recommended. He also includes a comprehensive catalogue of staffs (Gardeła 2016: 268–347), recording a great deal more morphometric information than my own. For the purposes of this second edition, I have not attempted to replicate his lists, but instead (where necessary) simply amended points of detail in the existing discussion in chapter 3; it should be noted, however, that there are also several areas in which our interpretations differ.
The key takeaway from Gardeła’s work is his agreement that these objects are the equipment of Norse sorcerers, while not ruling out other, simultaneous meanings. However, he goes further in speculating about a much wider range of material culture (i.e. beyond the staffs, hallucinogens, ‘amulets’ and special clothing details that I considered) which he suggests may have been characteristic of sorcerers. I do not fully agree with his arguments, but of course he may be right; his ideas, developed throughout his book, will repay careful study by anyone interested in this field.
Although the focus of Gardeła’s research on sorcery has lain on its tools, he especially explores the ways in which they are also metaphors and manifestations of entanglement (cf. Hodder 2012). This can be seen as an expression of the phenomenon discussed in chapter 3 above, wherein design elements of the staffs are also found across a wide array of other artefacts (keys, chains, whips, ‘rattles’, lamps, musical instruments, and the like), while at the same time embracing a multiplicity of symbolic meanings (the staff as phallus, as supernatural steed, as weapon, and so on). This resembles Howard Williams’ (2016) notion of mortuary citation, an immensely useful concept for funerary research and of close relevance to the staffs.
Gardeła also raises the notion of ambivalence, a kind of intentional ambiguity of meaning to which we will return below. A particular line of his enquiry has been the notion of deviant burial, especially in relation to the possible graves of sorcerers. His emphasis here is on ritual trauma, such as the mutilation of bodies, or unusual treatment of the dead, such as prone burial or the use of large stones to cover the corpse. In several publications he has very much broadened my own discussions, to speculate about the mortuary handling of magic-users, and the social role(s) that this might imply for them in life (Gardeła 2008c, 2013a & b, 2017a). As part of this research, Gardeła goes rather further than me in terms of what he is prepared to tentatively identify as a staff – for example, the strange pointed object found in the undoubtedly ‘special’ double grave from Gerdrup near Roskilde (Christensen 1981; Kastholm 2016; Gardeła 2016: 82f) and a similar item from the nearby site of Trekroner-Grydehøj (Ulriksen 2011: 174–6; Gardeła 2012: 128f, 2016: 107f, 278f; Price 2014b).
Among the work arising from the first edition is the observation made by several scholars of an interesting image that I missed, the presence of a staff-bearing female on cross slab 123 from Kirk Michael on the Isle of Man (Wilson 2008: 83–5; Pentz et al. 2009: 226f; Bourns 2014: 25–7; Gardeła 2016: 197ff). A definitive identification is impossible, but in the context it would not be inappropriate to see her as one of the volur awakened to reveal details of the coming Ragnarok.
Other approaches to the staffs and their function have also been revisited over the past decade or so. The earlier interpretation of the staffs as instruments of measurement, possibly in connection with textile-working, has been mentioned in chapter 3 above. This was subsequently revived by Ingrid Gustin (2004: 129–33) in her excellent study of Viking-Age trade and exchange, particularly in the context of the entangled nature of cubo-octahedral design elements. Several years later in the wake of Eldar Heide’s work (see below), she expanded on this in detail to set the staffs in a very different context to my own interpretations, equally gendered and very plausible (Gustin 2010). Following their entangled similarities with other objects, as observed by Gardeła and others including myself, Gustin argues for the staffs as clear symbols of female power in the broadest sense. To her, they are measuring rods for cloth, metaphors of textile manufacture, possibly with overtones of supernatural power through the spinning connotations of seiðr – all without actually being staffs of sorcery in any practical sense. In terms of the funerary context, it seems clear that the Birka chamber-graves are of high status, but Gustin queries whether volur and their kind really were socially elevated, being instead actually on the margins of society. For burials Bj. 660, 834 and 845, the presence of quartered Arab coins is seen as indication of mercantile activity, again reinforcing the image of the deceased as in some way connected to the commercial production of textiles in a manner that suits the differing interpretation of the staffs (Gustin 2010: 349, 351ff).
These are interesting and convincing arguments, and like my own, of course impossible to really prove one way or another. I completely agree about the overlapping symbolic meanings of these objects, the entanglement of female-gendered things that Gardeła draws from Hodder, but there are other factors that, for me, mitigate against Gustin’s reading of these burials. First, there is no sense in which sorceresses everywhere enjoyed the same status or place in society – indeed, consistency is hardly a watchword of Viking-Age ritual praxis. Second, whatever we choose to call them, the objects are undoubtedly metal rods of some kind, and as such really do match the saga descriptions remarkably well: women of power associated with staffs. In their dress and objects (such as the necklace of amulets in Bj. 660), these women are clearly ‘different’ in some way. Third, in her 2010 paper, Gustin specifically addresses the same three Birka chamber-graves as I reviewed in chapter 3 of this book – to which we can now add a fourth in Bj. 760 following Gardeła’s resolution of the confusion with Bj. 660. But the argument connecting sorcery, staffs and the graves of unusual women is far larger and more complex than a handful of burials at this one site, as both editions of the present work have suggested. I do not find Gustin’s rejection of the staffs as tools of sorcery to be a convincing argument, but I think she is right that they were also freighted with many layers of associations to textiles and ‘women’s work’ seen as an arena of transformative power and status. In the end, the difference between the two is one of emphasis, and it is entirely possible that these objects were always intended to be markers of ambiguity. When a woman bearing a staff such as these was encountered, perhaps the effect was to push people off-balance, a disconcerting feeling of not knowing exactly who or what she was.
Another crucial set of works in the materiality of Norse magic has been produced by Eldar Heide (2002, 2006a–c), a Norwegian medievalist and specialist in folklore who has become a worthy champion of what he terms ‘retrospective method’ in the study of ancient religion – a field that now has its own peer-reviewed journal. Heide’s doctoral studies on galdr, as we have seen one of the major components in the Old Norse toolkit of sorcery, complement my own on seiðr. I believe he has solved many of the fundamental questions that I raised in the first edition of this book, and considerably enhanced what we know of magic and its functions in the Viking Age. His thesis includes detailed studies of the terminology of gandr and gondull (Heide 2006c: 14–37), and well as an extensive study of ‘riding’ in Old Norse magic, especially in relation to the names of sorcerers (ibid: 109–234).
A particular breakthrough comes in Heide’s speculations on the nature of the rituals themselves, and what it may suggest about their material correlates in the form of archaeological finds. Using a sophisticated application of etymological analysis (Heide 2006a, 2006c: 235–63), he suggests a new interpretation of the central motif in the rites of trance, namely the sending out of the performer’s soul to act at a distance. Heide considers the possibility that the soul was thought to be attached to the body by means of a spiritual thread, maintaining a connection between the travelling essence of the person and its physical shell (see also Heide 2006b). The necessity of safeguarding this link – containing nothing less than the life and mind of the sorcerer – could explain the presence of the assistants in seiðr rituals, and also the threat posed by counter-magic such as Óðinn’s tenth spell from Hávamál (155), that could sever ‘riding’ witches “from the home of their shapes / from the home of their minds”. These ideas of course also accord well with the wider symbolism of spinning and weaving in Norse thought, in connection with fate and war, the nornir and valkyrjur, as discussed in the preceding chapters.
Having explored this notion in principle through textual sources, Heide then turns to the postulated staffs themselves, on the basis of the examples set out in the first edition of my own book. It will be remembered that in chapter 3 above, one of the key elements in the typology and identification of staffs in the archaeological record was the presence of the expanded ‘handle’ construction, resembling a basket-like cage of iron rods joined at the top and bottom by discs or mounts. In the first edition, I speculated as to the degree to which this feature could be considered an actual handle – as it clearly is on the keys, for example – but there seemed to be no clear-cut answer. On some examples, such as that from Søreim, the construction was too big to be grasped in the hand, while on others, such as Klinta, the feature appeared in the middle of the shaft. Heide brilliantly solves this puzzle (2006c: 250–3) with reference to a number of wooden objects from early modern times that have a shape identical to that of the iron staffs: a wooden stock with an expanded ‘cage’ at one end (Figs 8.1, 8.2). The wooden examples are distaffs, more precisely termed caged distaffs, the basket-like arrangement being used to gather raw fibres by twisting them round the tines or rods, to be later spun into thread (for further discussion of distaffs in terms of technology, form and function, see Baines 1977). Heide’s conclusion is compelling, and in my opinion conclusive: many of the iron staffs were symbolic distaffs, used in the rituals of magic to ‘wind back’ the travelling soul on its thread, returning it to the body of the performer.
In this context we can also note that literary connections between Norse magic and distaffs were observed by Dillmann as far back as 1982, in a work of which I was unaware when writing the first edition (while he in turn was unaware of the archaeological parallels).
Fig. 8.1 A highly ornamented 18th-century Italian distaff of the caged type; the resemblance to the design of Viking-Age ‘staffs of sorcery’ is obvious (photo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Creative Commons).
Fig. 8.2 A hand distaff of the cage type, manufactured today for the handicraft industry. This form can be paralleled exactly among the Viking-Age staffs (photo by Stephenie Gaustad, Dragonfly Farms, used by kind permission).
Fig. 8.3 The Witch, an engraving made c.1500 by Albrecht Dürer, showing a naked witch riding backwards on a goat, a distaff held between her thighs. In the public domain.
To develop this idea further, we can consider that distaffs were well-known, almost stereotypical, items of equipment in the toolkit of later medieval and early modern witches (my earlier pers. comm. to this effect is taken up by Gardeła, 2016: 183f). Artists even depicted witches with such tools, as in the engraving from 1537 for Boethius variously titled The Spinner or Old Sorceress With Distaff, attributed either to Hans Holbein the Younger or to Hans Weidlitz, and showing a woman using this instrument to raise a storm. An earlier image, engraved c.1500 by Albrecht Dürer depicts a naked woman riding backwards on a goat, a distaff held vertically between her thighs (British Museum 1868,0822.188; Fig. 8.3). Especially the latter image, with its nudity, the clear phallic connotations of the distaff held and moved between the legs, and even ridden upon, again finds a ready parallel in the sexual dimensions of seiðr and Viking-Age magic. A curious late parallel, to be taken very tentatively but surely of interest, can be found in the Swedish folklore traditions that describe the Belt in the constellation of Orion as ‘Freyja’s (or Frigg’s) Distaff’ (Schön 2004: 228).
Heide’s ideas on the staffs and spinning have met with widespread acceptance, combined with my own work on them as tools of sorcery. Among many examples, Cartwright (2015) has built this into his studies of textile production, while Pentz (2017) has taken them up in connection with his work on the so-called ‘valkyrie’ icons on metalwork.
At the same time as Heide was working on his distaff theories in connection with seiðr and gandr, another scholar also began to explore these objects in a more domestic setting. Working with close analyses of floor surfaces in Viking-Age dwellings, Karen Milek has interpreted clusters of tiny holes as marking the places where distaffs have been rested vertically while in use – presumably by women in the context of the textile work that is thought to have been undertaken in such structures (Milek 2006: 224–7; 2012: 97, 100ff). Milek has further suggested that the iron staffs do not just resemble distaffs, but may actually have functioned as such (while not ruling out the kinds of ambiguous multiple meanings and uses that Gardeła and others have supported). In this context she also suggests that the rings, loops and perforations observed on some of the staffs could have been used to more closely bind threads to the shaft while working. Milek acknowledges that her theories would require unusually tall distaffs, of which none have so far been found, but her observations raise a range of new, intriguing possibilities for these ambiguous objects.
Since 2002 when the first edition appeared, gender studies have happily expanded exponentially in Viking research. This is not the place for a thorough overview, but at the time of my original publication there was still a tendency towards a somewhat basic dichotomy of biological sex, usually determined on the basis of osteology or genotype. Furthermore, masculinity formed a largely unconscious and unremarked baseline assumption, that at best was supposedly ‘balanced’ by specific studies devoted to the lives of women (the situation was ably deconstructed by Arwill-Nordbladh 1998; see also Hauptmann 2014). All too often, a supposedly gendered Viking Age in fact exacerbated the androcentric focus by relegating the lives of women to some kind of intensively-studied but nonetheless discrete category distinct from society in general (the classic example being the exhibition display case on ‘Viking women’, treating them in a manner akin to, say, ‘metalworking’ or ‘trade’, rather than as half of humanity).
In Viking studies, the standard work at the time was Jesch’s 1991 book, supplemented by a relatively small number of more socially-situated studies of women in Norway and Iceland, such as the publications of Dommasnes (1982, 1991), Kress (1993) and Clover (1993) – the latter a massively influential paper – as well as in the colonies (e.g. Stalsberg 1991, 2001). Womens’ lives as reflected in pre-Christian imagery (e.g. Göransson 1999) and late Viking-Age runestone inscriptions were also explored (e.g. Gräslund 1989, 1995, 2001b).
Jenny Jochens’ work (e.g. 1995, 1996) has been referenced extensively above, with its interesting divide between image and reality in female lives. The various literary figures that she describes have been addressed in a number of more recent works and collections (e.g. Anderson & Swenson 2002; Simek & Heizmann 2002; Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir 2013; Coleman & Løkka 2014; Hauptmann 2014; Jesch 2015: ch. 4), and we also have Auður Magnúsdóttir’s important work on concubinage and female sexual strategies (2001, 2008; cf. Raffield et al. 2018). Children have now made a late entry into integrated studies of Viking life (e.g. Callow 2006; Mejsholm 2009) and the last decade has seen vital studies of disability and definitions of the able-bodied (e.g. Bragg 2008; Arwill-Nordbladh 2012). This brief listing barely scratches the surface of the research undertaken, but one notable absence is the relative dearth of works on Viking-Age masculinity, deconstructed from a gender perspective rather than taken as read in hegemonic assumptions.
Perhaps the most radical rereading of sex and gender in the late Iron Age appears in the work of Ing-Marie Back Danielsson (e.g. 2002, 2007, and her ongoing publications). With a study focus on the gold foils of the Migration Period and later, she approaches them from a posthumanist perspective, looking at questions of agency, of the message the objects were designed to convey, and the processes of manipulation by which this was achieved. Most importantly, she critiques not only the simplistic gender constructions conventionally put forward for the period – especially for the foils (e.g. Back Danielsson 2007: 76–81) – but also the equally basic ways in which sex is made by archaeologists; her specific comments on burials will be explored more fully below. Going far beyond the gender categories of men and women, she sees instead arenas of bodies and beings, of mutable identities that could be activated according to circumstance and the media of expression: a vision that is original, bold and exciting. There is a real sense in which her image of the late Iron Age is almost an alternative world, predicated on quite different concepts to, for example, my own readings of magic (which she sees as reliant on a spurious advocacy of ‘scientific’ interpretation, that I myself cannot find in my own work; ibid: 95–8, 237ff). Her understanding of the late Iron Age is both compelling and erudite, but where we differ is that for me it seems to ultimately rest on a decision to see the past in this way, pursued along a path of speculative chain-thinking (cf. Wylie 1989). That said, I may be wrong, and she may not be; I would like to see my own work as more of an interpretive cable, made of mutually supporting but independent strands of evidence, but that of course is my own subjectivity speaking. Back Danielsson’s arguments are complex, detailed, highly critical of the first edition of this book – and well worth reading in full.
The engenderment of Viking life (and our research into it) is of course vital for the whole structure of late Iron Age studies, but it is of particular relevance to the present work for several reasons. As we have seen, sorcery and magic were deeply infused with gender codes, sexual connotations and perhaps physical acts, and with a symbolism and iconography that expressed these things in material form. In chapter 3 above we reviewed the early work on the gendering of magical practice, especially in relation to the concepts of ergi and nið (e.g. Anonymous 1902; Almqvist 1965; Meulengracht Sørensen 1980, 1983; Grambo 1989; Jochens 1993; and many others); aspects of these components were also discussed in the context of circumpolar beliefs, in chapter 5.
Following the publication of the first edition, others also addressed the sexual dimensions of magic, including Dillmann (2006: ch. 16) and Heide (2006c: 33–7, 264–99), the latter in the context of phallic aggression and penis symbolism in the various forms of staff. Dillmann also addresses ergi (2006: 439–56), arguing that it was not inherent to seiðr but rather an autonomous phenomenon that the latter sometimes activated. I would not disagree with this, though I would see it as rather more affirmative a part of magic as practiced by men. Dillmann also emphasises its connotations of effeminacy rather than perceptions of sexual perversion; again, I am not sure I agree, given the violent homophobia of Viking-Age norms. Other scholars incorporated my ideas on magic into wider studies of gender in the later Iron Age (e.g. Moen 2011: 40–5; Eriksen 2015: ch. VII-VIII – this work also links to Andrén’s earlier studies of door symbolism, but extends them much further).
Chapters 4 and 5 above raised the possibilities that shamans – for want of a more culturally specific term – can in many contexts viably be seen as a gender (or perhaps more than one) in their own right, beyond the putative norms of biological sex. In many ways this entire book has concerned the ‘differentness’ of magical performers in the Viking Age, and nowhere is their sex and gendered identity in greater focus than in their probable burials. Gender has long been identified as a problematic aspect of funerary archaeology as traditionally interpreted. Many scholars have wrestled with the need to reanalyse burials, and also with the consequences of doing so (e.g. Arnold 1991; Dowson 2006; Geller 2009; Ghisleni et al. 2016; Back Danielsson 2016); the issues that we face with this in the arguable ‘sorcerer graves’ of the Viking Age are far from new.
Too often concepts have been collapsed, the crucial distinctions between sex and gender are blurred, and indeed the very definitions of the terms themselves are also contested. Back Danielsson’s work has been mentioned above, but her starting point lies in an exceptionally eloquent rejection (2007: 49–90) of persistent convention in the gendering of burials – especially through artefacts, whereby oval brooches supposedly denote a woman, weapons a man, and so on. She also questions assumptions of sex and gender in the analysis of images (she puts forward a vocabulary of masking), and in the social roles of late Iron Age people in general. In short, she is right – though, as above, I disagree with the somatic conclusions she goes on to draw from this. Not least, it must be clearly stated that we are only beginning to discern the overarching patterns of normative, and deviant, mortuary practices in the Viking Age at all – let alone in relation to the burials of sorcerers (e.g. Wicker 1998, 2012; Svanberg 2003b; Gansum 2004; Andersson 2005; Callmer 2006; Price 2008a & c, 2010a, 2014b; Wessman 2010; Gardeła 2013a & b, 2017a; the literature on the Viking-Age funerary record is vast and covers tens of thousands of excavated graves).
On re-reading chapters 3 and 4 above in the course of revisions of this new edition, it was an education to see the level of assumptions present in terms of both sex and gender. For the majority of the possible graves of sorcerers, there are either no skeletal remains preserved (though it is clear that a body was present) or else no osteological sex determinations have been made; there is virtually no genomic data at all. The reading of these dead people as female-bodied, and gendered as women, is mine (and, to be fair, that of everyone else who looked at them previously). Although I have tried to amend some of the more glaring bias in vocabulary and terminology, some of this still remains in the text above, as to do otherwise would entail writing essentially a different book – but the issue must still be addressed.
Can we be sure that the people in the majority of the ‘staff graves’ examined in chapter 3 were gendered women? No, we cannot. They may have taken on a man’s social role, while retaining a woman’s identity (cf. Clover 1993). As Solli has persuasively shown (1998, 1999a & b, 2002, 2008), queer theory also provides a potentially fruitful means of engaging with these individuals. Their sense of self may have been, in our terms, non-binary or gender-fluid; identity may also have been something to negotiate, to choose and re-choose every day (e.g. Reeder 2008; Geller 2017). A transgender reading is also possible, and in a sense consistent with some of the shamanic patterns observed in chapter 5, though we should remember that – like much of our terminology – this is a politicised, intellectual, and Western term of the last century, and as such problematic (some would say impossible) to apply to people of the more remote past. All this is also inevitably speculative, considering the limitations of the material. There are many other possibilities and I do not discount any of them.
Beyond the social impact of the ergi complex, an aspect of sorcery relatively under-studied in the preceding chapters is the material world of its male practitioners (an interesting exception being Tulinius’ 2008 collection; see also Gardeła’s work referenced above). The problem of bias and assumption in the interpretation of Viking-Age burials has recently come under the spotlight with the case of chamber grave Bj. 581 on Birka, assumed ever since its excavation in 1878 to be the interment of a high-status warrior male. The new genomic study that chromosomally determined the sex of the dead person as female has already been mentioned above in chapter 6 (Hedenstierna-Jonson et al. 2017). The online furore that greeted this publication has been addressed in a subsequent paper (Price et al. 2019), but served as a stark reminder of how charged these debates can be, and what is really at stake.
With Bj. 581 in mind, coupled with the ambiguous clothing signals on new finds such as the seated figure from Lejre, I looked again at Þórhallur Þráinsson’s reconstructions of the Birka ‘sorceress’ graves Bj. 660, 845 and their kind, and began to wonder if I might in fact be looking at the ‘missing’ male sorcerers. It is an intriguing thought.
Concerning the saga descriptions of male sorcerers, often described pejoratively and coming to a bad end, Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson (2001) has proposed an interesting alternative reading, in a paper that was published almost simultaneously with the first edition of this book. In Jón’s view, given the medieval religious context of the saga texts themselves, it is possible that the sorcerers were actually Christians persecuted for their spiritual difference. He argues that the sagas may have remembered them as pagans due to the outcome of later, contextualised legal or political disputes, which would have suited ascribing ‘bad character’ to the people of particular places or lineages. (As an aside, Jón also suggests that this may explain why Guðríðr, the only person to know the varðlokkur chants for the rituals in Eiríks saga rauða, was described as a Christian.)
The male users of magic also appear in the context of the gold foils mentioned above, whose iconography has been one of the prime sources for supposedly diagnostic sex and gender markers in late Iron Age art (e.g. Watt 2002; Simek 2002; papers in Adamsen et al. 2009; though remembering Back Danielsson’s scepticism noted above). As Lotte Hedeager has observed (2015: 136f), a staff is actually the most common material attribute of the supposedly male figures on gold foils. If we accept this sex determination, then the conclusion is supported by Ulla Mannering’s review of dress-based sexing and “paraphernalia” on 309 foils, mostly from Sorte Muld on Bornholm, of which fully 107 include a staff (Mannering 2006: 50–60, Tables 4.7– 4.12; see also Mannering 2017: ch. 2). As a counterpart to the obvious etymology of the female staff-bearing volur, Hedeager wonders (2015: 137) if the male staff-bearers are referencing the phallic connotations of the objects as discussed above, which in turn might have contributed to the negative associations of ergi for male sorcerers. The complex language of gestures seen on the foils is hard to interpret, but clearly had precise meanings (e.g. Ratke & Simek 2006).
I predict that in coming decades, the study of sex and gender in the late Iron Age, in all their variation, will develop into perhaps the key area of Viking research.
Archaeological studies of warfare have also expanded dramatically since 2002, with a strong flavour of anthropological theory, not least in the shift of emphasis from the material culture of combat to the social dimensions of conflict (T. Williams 2016: 42ff summarises the new work in this field). This is particularly relevant for the tensions between ‘materialist’ and ‘ritualist’ schools of thought on the nature of war, again with a strong emphasis on the sociology of fighting in the context of militaristic ideologies (ibid: 46–53). Following on from classics such as Haas’ Anthropology of War (1990), new archaeological studies include collections on prehistoric conflict by Arkush & Allen (2006) and Otto et al. (2006), though with surprisingly little content on the early medieval period. In the vein of Keegan’s work, new meditations on the experiential aspects of combat can be found in Hedges (2002) and, in archaeology, by Carman & Carman (2006); all of this work is relevant for the discussions above in chapter 6.
In Viking studies, a new popular synthesis has appeared (Hjardar & Vike 2011), which though it must still be treated with care (especially regarding the written sources) nonetheless proves a useful resource. Over the last decade, however, there has been little academic work on specifically late Iron Age warfare, beyond focussed and site-based studies (such as the work on Birka’s martial environment, including its ideology, e.g. Olausson 2001; Hedenstierna-Jonson 2006, 2015b; Holmquist Olausson & Olausson 2009).
Following my earlier discussion of the ritual war as a feature of Viking-Age Scandinavian mind-set, Tom Williams has made great inroads in exploring something similar in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (Williams 2016: 58– 60 and references therein, especially the lists of sources on pp. 120–3). This clearly included the provision of magical assistance on the battlefield through supernatural agency (ibid: 195f). He sees the role of militant sorcery, the ‘magical-religious sphere’, as “a repository of power and legitimising ideology and as a locus of communal myth and cosmological orientation” (ibid: 60), and I think he is right.
This finds support from some unexpected sources, showing that even the most familiar texts can still yield new information when seen in a fresh light. Since the first edition appeared, a remarkable passage in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been drawn to my attention by Michael Wood, which seems to suggest that a Viking army operating in early tenth-century England may have included a male ritual specialist in its ranks. Worth quoting in full for context, the Worcester Chronicle (D) includes the following entry for 910, to which the Abingdon Chronicle (B & C) adds the parenthesised names at the end:
Her bræc se here þone friþ on Norðhymbrum 7 forsawan ælc riht þe Eadweard cing 7 his witan him budan, 7 hergodan ofer Myrcna land, 7 ce cing hæfde gegadrod sum hund scipa, 7 wæs þa on Cent, 7 þa scipu foran be suþan east ondlang sæ togeanes him. Ða wende se here þæt his fultumes se mæsta dæl on ðam scipum, 7 þæt hie mihtan faran unbefohtone þær þær hie woldan. Þa geahsode se cing þæt þæt hie on heregað foron, þa sende he his fyrde ægþer ge of Westsexum ge of Myrcum, 7 hie offoran þone here hindan, þa he hamweard wæs, 7 him wiþ gefuhton 7 þone here geflymdon 7 his feala þusenda ofslogan. 7 þær wæa Eowils cing ofslegen 7 Healfden cing 7 Ohter eorl 7 Scurfa eorl 7 Oþulf hold [7 Benesing hold 7 Anlaf se swearta 7 Þurferð hold 7 Osferð Hlytte 7 Guðferð hold 7 Agmund hold 7 Guðferð].
Ed. Taylor 1983
911 [910]. Here the raiding-army in Northumbria broke the peace, and scorned every privilege which King Edward and his councillors offered them, and raided across the land of Mercia. And the king had gathered some hundred ships, and was then in Kent; and the ships went east along the south coast towards him. Then the raiding-army imagined that the most part of the reinforcement was on these ships, and that they might go unfought wherever they wanted. Then when the king learned that they had gone on a raid, he sent his army both from Wessex and from Mercia, and they got in front of the raiding-army from behind when it was on its way home, and then fought with them and put the raiding-army to flight, and killed many of it. And there was killed King Eowils and King Halfdan, and Jarl Ohtor and Jarl Scurfa, and Hold Athulf [and Hold Benesing, and Olaf the Black, and Hold Thunferth, and Osferth Hlytte, and Hold Guthferth, and Hold Agmund, and Guthferth].
Tr. Swanton 1998: 97
The key person here is Osferð hlytte, whose name can perhaps be translated ‘the seer’ (OE hlyta, a diviner; related to the ON divinity name Lýtir, ‘he who gets the offerings’). It appears as an Old English name in a casualty list largely comprised of Danish and Norwegian names, but this is not unusual in context. We can know no more about this man, but it is intriguing to speculate whether this is a brief record of something equivalent to the ‘regimental chaplain’ (in Michael Wood’s phrase), similar to the wartime offices postulated above for people like the woman in Grave 4 at Fyrkat.
The study of the Viking Age is a curiously personal thing. It reflects the (un)conscious biases of the student and also the prevailing sensibilities of the times, and there is always a risk that the past will be subtly moulded to fit the changing preoccupations of scholarly fashion. The same can be said of the many public faces of the period, reimagined or re-enacted according to taste. Today the Vikings are as popular as they have ever been, perhaps even more so in terms of the growing audience for both accessible recreations and academic mediations of their vanished world.
In 2002, the first sentence of this work proclaimed that it mattered to me what a person was in the Viking Age. Writing this new, concluding chapter sixteen years later, I have not changed my mind.
If one were to try to sum up in a sound-bite the long theoretical convulsions of archaeology during the 1980s and 90s, the years of postprocessualism that were reviewed in chapter 1 above, it might be to say that never again have we been able to maintain the illusion of objectivity in our interactions with the past. We are in no way neutral observers, omnipotent sorters (or generators) of data that somehow gives of itself. More than a decade ago I found my own views on this unexpectedly reflected in an obituary for the Classical historian Keith Hopkins, with a useful summary of what I see as our condition:
History is a conversation with the dead. We have several advantages over our informants. We think we know what happened subsequently; we can take a longer view; we can do all the talking; and with all our prejudices, we are alive. We should not throw away these advantages by pretending to be just collators or interpreters of our sources. We can do more than that. Although, almost inevitably, whatever our ambitions, we finish up by foisting simplifying fictions on the complexities of the past which is largely lost.
Kelly 2004
For Hopkins, in ground-breaking works such as A World Full of Gods (1999), any order that might be discerned in the patterns of prehistory could only be arrived at through a process of negotiation with multi-vocal strands of evidence, obtained from wherever it could be found. This is also the principle on which I tried to follow the tangled path of The Viking Way.
One of the early reviews of the first edition, quoted above, argued that a better title might have been ‘The Viking Mind’ (Carver 2004: 163). I can see why. A core argument in both editions is that we should try to understand, and learn from, these ancient Northerners for who and what they were: people like us, radically different in their outlooks perhaps, but still trying to be themselves in all their marvellous variety, for better or worse. Part of this, uncomfortably for us today, involves a clear-eyed acknowledgement of the unusually prominent role that ritualised violence apparently played in their society, something that their contemporaries clearly recognised and recoiled from. Theirs was a violent culture in a violent age, certainly, but still there was something deeper in the lengths to which they went.
The role of ‘religion’ (or ‘custom’, or whatever we settle on calling it), was central – but as we have seen, in ways fundamentally different to the operations of the world faiths with which we are more familiar. One might note that no Viking ever launched a Crusade for the pre-Christian beliefs of the North, and in general it seems unlikely that their spiritual world included much notion of moral imperative at all (cf. Raffield et al. 2017). The ‘classic’ raiders of the Viking Age were possessed of an extraordinarily vital material culture, building on an intricate and sophisticated mental world that resonates with us still today. It must also be stressed that this landscape of the mind encompassed not just literal Vikings but everyone in the society around them. However, we should never forget that in a different light these same people were ruthless, single-minded and horribly effective murderers, and that the social structures we have studied above also served to support and promote their elevated view of themselves. I would suggest that this view too was shared, albeit competitively, across all members of society irrespective of sex or gender, blending a utilitarian view of ‘religion’ with the self-interested pursuit of power. When Vikings raided and pillaged (yes, the old stereotypes, but real and brutal enough) they did so because they wanted what other people had, and they did not feel any need to invent loftier motives to salve their consciences.
I choose this example not only to get to grips with cliché, but also to raise an aspect of Viking behaviour that no reasonable person could possibly find sympathetic.
Fig. 8.4. Birka meditations: the Viking dead watch their living descendants in Björkö village. A pencil sketch by Gunnar Hallström entitled Julnatt, ‘Yule night’, drawn c.1915–1920 (after Hallström 1997: 103)
This is important, here at the last, because I always find it puzzling how anyone could possibly find the Vikings ‘heroic’. The same thought seems to have occurred to one of The Viking Way’s reviewers who noted that “anyone reading Price’s book will never again be able to romanticise the Vikings and their time … here the terror and madness of the Viking-Age Odin cult and its war-fixation emerge unvarnished” (Steinsland 2004: 143; my translation from Norwegian). In this vein, we need only look again at Ibn Fadlan and consider what one really thinks of the lethal slavers and rapists he met, with their blood-drenched rituals on the Volga; and these seem to have been only merchants, not primarily a fighting group at all. Vikings of this kind were sometimes heroes in their own minds, and perhaps occasionally in the eyes of people they tried hard to impress – but not in mine.
At the same time, we should not forget that beyond this violence, distributed all across their far-flung diaspora, was also a whole world of other Viking lives. Some feel familiar, others disconcertingly alien; many of them (in my mediation, of course) are actors in the book you have just read. We should pay these Viking-Age people the compliment of permitting them to live forever in their own vibrant present, rather than merely in our distant past. They are all still there, waiting for us.
Here’s to them.