The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia

Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this may really have meant to the men and women of the time. This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with which these were underpinned.

Combining strong elements of eroticism and aggression, sorcery appears as a fundamental domain of women's power, linking them with the gods, the dead and the future. Their battle spells and combat rituals complement the men's physical acts of fighting, in a supernatural empowerment of the Viking way of life. What emerges is a fundamentally new image of the world in which the Vikings understood themselves to move, in which magic and its implications permeated every aspect of a society permanently geared for war.

In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Neil Price takes us with him on a tour through the sights and sounds of this undiscovered country, meeting its human and otherworldly inhabitants, including the Sámi with whom the Norse partly shared this mental landscape. On the way we explore Viking notions of the mind and soul, the fluidity of the boundaries that they drew between humans and animals, and the immense variety of their spiritual beliefs. We find magic in the Vikings' bedrooms and on their battlefields, and we meet the sorcerers themselves through their remarkable burials and the tools of their trade. Combining archaeology, history and literary scholarship with extensive studies of Germanic and circumpolar religion, this multi-award-winning book shows us the Vikings as we have never seen them before.

Table of Contents

List of figures and tables
Abbreviations
Preface and acknowledgements to the first edition
Preface and acknowledgements to the second edition
A note on language
A note on seid

1. Different Vikings? Towards a cognitive archaeology of the later Iron Age
A beginning at Birka
Textual archaeology and the Iron Age
The Vikings in (pre)history
The materiality of text
Annaliste archaeology and a historical anthropology of the Vikings
The Other and the Odd?
Conflict in the archaeology of cognition
Others without Othering
Indigenous archaeologies and the Vikings
An archaeology of the Viking mind?
2. Problems and paradigms in the study of Old Norse sorcery
Entering the mythology
Research perspectives on Scandinavian pre-Christian religion
Philology and comparative theology
Gods and monsters, worship and superstition
Religion and belief
The invisible population
The shape of Old Norse religion
The double world: seiðr and the problem of Old Norse ‘magic’
The other magics: galdr, gandr and ‘Óðinnic sorcery’
Seiðr in the sources
Skaldic poetry
Eddic poetry
The sagas of the kings
The sagas of Icelanders (the ‘family sagas’)
The fornaldarsögur (‘sagas of ancient times’, ‘heroic sagas’)
The Bishop’s sagas (Biskupasögur)
The early medieval Scandinavian law codes
Non-Scandinavian sources
Seiðr in research
3. Seiðr
Óðinn
Óðinn the sorcerer
Óðinn’s names
Freyja and the magic of the Vanir
Seiðr and Old Norse cosmology
The performers
Witches, seeresses and wise women
Women and the witch-ride
Men and magic
The assistants
Towards a terminology of Nordic sorcerers
The performers in death?
The performance
Ritual architecture and space
The clothing of sorcery
Masks, veils and head-coverings
Drums, tub-lids and shields
Staffs and wands
Staffs from archaeological contexts
Narcotics and intoxicants
Charms
Songs and chants
The problem of trance and ecstasy
Engendering seiðr
Ergi, níð and witchcraft
Sexual performance and eroticism in seiðr
Seiðr and the concept of the soul
Helping sp