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 womens power linking them with the gods the dead and the future. Their battle spells and combat rituals complement the mens 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 Smi 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: seir and the problem of Old Norse magic The other magics: galdr gandr and innic sorcery Seir in the sources Skaldic poetry Eddic poetry The sagas of the kings The sagas of Icelanders (the family sagas) The fornaldarsgur (sagas of ancient times heroic sagas) The Bishops sagas (Biskupasgur) The early medieval Scandinavian law codes Non-Scandinavian sources Seir in research 3. Seir inn inn the sorcerer inns names Freyja and the magic of the Vanir Seir 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 seir Ergi n and witchcraft Sexual performance and eroticism in seir Seir and the concept of the soul Helping spir