Book description
Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of
witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people
believed to be able-and who in some instances thought themselves
able-to manipulate the world around them through magical practices,
and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and
popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the
Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the
nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes,
ecclesiastical records, and runic spells.
Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time
Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout
Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs
persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the
coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern
Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the
Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors,
the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the
important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with
their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the
insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland.
By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature,
lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love,
prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both
the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With
an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs
(not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such
powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing
witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to
Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy
demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in
conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of
exercising social control.
Stephen A. Mitchell is Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at
Harvard University and author of Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Listen to a
podcast interview with Stephen A. Mitchell on the Penn Press Podcast
page.
