Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

by Stephen A. Mitchell

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Witchcraft, Medieval, Paganism, Religion

384 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2010

About the author

Stephen Arthur Mitchell is Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University, and a curator of its Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.

Reviews

[Cinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate the meticulous research that went into this book. The most interesting element to me was the intersection, comingling and progression from pagan magic to Catholicism into the Reformation. But it was so very difficult to slog through. This is one of those books where I keep flipping forward to see how long to the end of the chapter, how long to the end of the book.
I am hoping it will turn out to be a reference I can return to needed.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's a respectable but curiously bloodless foray that feels more like a symposium transcript than a book with a coherent vision or much of a thesis.

"Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages" deals with that moment where Norse/Scandinavian pre-Christian customs didn't so much give way to the spread of Christianity, but rather incorporated and subsumed the new dispensation into the old. It was syncretic, inconsistent, and mostly a top-down phenomenon, forced more by the practical exigencies of new alliances than by conviction, but it was also interesting, much like a kind of "Scandinavian Santeria."

Some sections are more well-developed than others, and some chapters more interesting, others less, but the main problem I had with the book is that there is no basic taxonomy or pantheon provided at the outset of the book to describe the gods/demigods/immanent forces that moved these people prior to the arrival of Christianity. In order to make the reader appreciate how and where the perceptions of witchcraft and magic changed in the Middle Ages (and where and why certain practices went underground) it would have been helpful to have more "pre-Lapse" background, to know what was there so that we could better appreciate what was lost or changed.

One could assume basic familiarity with the subject when setting out to write such a book, but a lot of that is by way of pop culture and it probably constitutes a mis-education. It's hard, ultimately, to offer a corrective, when your thinking is disorganized and your style opaque to the point of turgidity. Yes, I'm a philistine, but I'm one who's willing to meet the academic halfway. The problem is Dr. Mitchell didn't budge an inch from his lectern to meet me, the layman (at least when it comes to this subject).

There are a small number low quality reproductions of photos the author took himself of paintings done in churches showing all manner of demons in congress with various licentious women. Strangely enough, they seem to spend most of their time churning butter together. Is this some kind of old Norse idiom for making love? Who knows? Moreover, who cares?

[Chathol-Linn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I respect the research and scholarship that Dr. Mitchell put into this work. I am interested in Middle Ages scholarship, Nordic sociology and history, and witchcraft and magic. So I was predisposed to give this work a five-star rating.

The prose is dense with parenthetical expressions, dependent clauses within dependent clauses, passive voice constructions, and tons of adverbs, adverb phrases, and elliptical phrases. It is simply bad writing. Can't the author get rid of the adverbs and wordy sentences and use some short declarative sentences in the active voice? I thought writers were supposed to use the 10% rule: the final draft should have at least 10% fewer words than the first draft.

Dr. Mitchell has the syrup but he pours it like concrete. "Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages" did not come alive for me. It was too unnecessarily dense to evoke the excitement and interest I hoped for. I recommend the subject matter and am glad someone wrote about it. Be prepared for some slogging through the text. I'd love to see the author re-issue the book,written in accordance with Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Your thoughts?

[Stephen Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent source of spells and a wide variety of other information!

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was really hard to get through. In his attempts to be Historically accurate and credible, Stephen A. Michell has lost all readability. Otherwise very interesting stuff in this book.

[Ely · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know how to rate this because I was using it for research for my novel. A lot of it wasn't relevant to what I needed, but I got some interesting notes from it.

[Linnea · Rating 1 out of 5]

I refuse to accept that even a single editor read this and signed off on it.

Make no mistake, there is a lot of information presented here, and I'm grateful for it, but this was the most difficult book I've read in years. It wasn't difficult in terms of vocabulary or prerequisite cultural knowledge, but it was due to the complete lack of writing ability of Mitchell.

Concepts that could be explained in fifteen words take up entire paragraphs that usually consist of a single sentence, and his reliance on incredibly contrived language is eye-rollingly excruciating: interpreting bygone cultures clearly requires us to have access to "data", the information-laden detritus that history capriciously bequeaths to us.

Mate. Are you serious? It's as if someone gave Morrissey a backyard lobotomy and told him he was an academic.

A favourite of mine: given the monolithic stereotype of Scandinavia, it is important to underscore the rich diversity of the medieval Nordic world, an area that spanned much of Northern Europe, including Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroes, of course, but also Shetland and parts of insular and coastal Scotland; it also included modern-day Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and Gotland to be sure, but also parts of coastal Finland and other areas around the Baltic littoral, and extended south into modern Germany.

Has your interest been piqued? No? Well, if you found that geographic description of what normal human beings would call "Northern Europe and Greenland" a slog, then just wait until he finally, actually, to be sure, of course, gets to the actual meat of the information he's presenting. Just wait until you come across him listing items for a thought experiment that involve such exhilarating things as: a dollar bill, an Easter egg and papal bulls.

The best part? All of the examples above are within the first three pages of the very first chapter.

You have been warned.

Stephen, fire your editor.

[Vidar Herjanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

So…I’m an idiot, this book is for people with EXTENSIVE knowledge on the ENTIRE history of Western Europe BEFORE even reading the book. What an amazing level of knowledge and hard work he must’ve poured into this book…in that regard it’s a 5 star. On accessibility for a reader though it’s honestly less than a 1 star book. I literally had to read most of this with a map pulled up of Europe from the Middle Ages. I had to look up on average the definitions of 2 words per page. It’s a VERY difficult book to read. And at its core pretty much asserts that this “field of study” is all guess work compiled from scraps. I cannot stand what “abrahamic religions” have done to the world. They erased EVERYTHING and were hypocrites. We will never know the truth of history, just the lies tyrants tell us and the scraps elitist intellectuals scrape together for papers in college and books they write after graduating to make money. Everything is a lie, history is lost. It makes you want to scream. Use this book as a reference book, DO NOT try to read it cover to cover for entertainment. Magic/religion/science, they’re all the same thing. It’s people trying to explain the world they live in. The magician uses unproven mechanisms to try and effect his world. The religious man surrenders to superstitions. And the scientist is a refined magician that uses testable and proven methods to either verify or debunk his superstitions. It’s all b.s. go get drunk or high.

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough and scholarly (if dry) study of, as per the title, witchcraft and magic in the Nordic middle ages. Lots of attention is devoted to the social development of witchcraft, from small-scale accusations of the use of charms or the practice of 'folk magic' type actions to the later witch-hunting frenzy in which the alleged actions were far more diabolical. He also explores the differences in gender, and how men and women differed both in the allegations they were accused of and in the punishment for the alleged crimes. I do wish it was less dry; I did not have issues but I'd estimate it might be harder for a casual reader to access, which is a shame.

[Magister · Rating 5 out of 5]

This important work offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. It is a strength of the work that Mitchell uses critical apparati drawn from folkloristics and comparative literature to understand the spiritual conflicts that shaped the theological and mythic worldview of late medieval Nordic peoples.

Sidenote:
Reading through these reviews, it is clear that people often expected a work of popular history. It does one well to think about the rhetorical audience of a work before reading, so you can situate yourself in terms of both recpetion and evaluation. That said, this is work aimed at shcolarly audiences. Though I found it clear and readable, it is not a work of popular history. Additionally, you won't find spells to animate some longed for neo-pagan belief system.

[medievalfantasyqueen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given how there is a recent surge of interest in Old Norse society, and anything Viking, I feel that Stephen A. Mitchell's disciplined yet ambitious approach to provide an examination of magic and witchcraft as historically observed during the Nordic Middle Ages is one deserving of praise. Perfect for scholars working in the field, I would highly reccomend this.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a solid source of information on the topic of what we know/can know about the pagan practices in Scandinavia around the time of Chistianization. This is one of the only scholarly books on the topic I have seen. It is exceptionally well cited. I would recommend it if you're interested in the topic.

Unfortunately, Mitchell isn't much of a writer. I knew that this book would be dry going into it. I was not expecting thrilling tales of witchcraft and pagan magic. Even so this book was a slog. Mitchell prefers sentences so long that they stretch the limits of proper grammar. Reading this is a constant battle to sift the actual information from the rambling professor speak. There's no need for serious academic writing to be this dense. I've read books on literal rocket science that were more accessible.

[Loree Iverson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sections on 'law/trials' were very interesting.