Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages by Stephen A. Mitchell

Reviewed by: Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages by Stephen A. Mitchell Richard Kieckhefer Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages By Stephen A. Mitchell. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2011. Pp. xiv, 368. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4290-4.) Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen’s collection of essays Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1990) attempted to expand the boundaries of our knowledge and explore the ways in which previously neglected regions were or were not distinctive in their conception of witchcraft. Not long afterward, Stephen Mitchell was providing seminal work on magic and witchcraft across Scandinavia in the high and late-medieval periods. What Mitchell has now given us is a magisterial overview that allows us to see how the history of witchcraft and magic in northern Europe fits into broader European patterns. The first crucial decision Mitchell makes is that of chronology. His period is 1100–1525: the post-Viking, postconversion, pre-Reformation era. In response to those who see this as a time when little of interest was happening, he argues that it was an era of considerable change, intermingling elite and popular, indigenous and imported notions. He insists that the sagas be read as reflections not of the era in which they are set but of the later period that produced them. In effect, his decision about chronology serves well to integrate Scandinavian with other European developments: intensification of concern about witchcraft occurs in Nordic regions and elsewhere very much in tandem. The second key decision is to deal with the material neither chronologically nor geographically but thematically. The book deals with magic in daily life (chapter 2), in various forms of literature (chapter 3), in late-medieval “mythologies” (chapter 4), and in legal and judicial sources (chapter 5) before turning to questions about gender (chapter 6). The four centuries under examination might easily have been subdivided, and the differences between Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark might have seemed to invite separate treatment. Either of these more obvious modes of inquiry would surely have resulted in a less interesting book, less effective at integrating Scandinavia into broader European history. This integration took various forms and proceeded by several channels. Mitchell tells of a Norwegian bishop who, in his youth, had studied in Paris, where he had dared to read a book of magic that his master had left out; the raging storm that ensued alerted the master to his student’s mischief. Whatever historical value we choose to find in this late-medieval tale of a sorcerer’s would-be apprentice, it does testify to the transmission of magical knowledge among clerics who traveled and experienced the world outside Scandinavia. If Scandinavians knew about pacts with the devil, this was partly because they had access to the same classical sources available to other Europeans: the notion occurs around 1300 in a Nordic telling of the life of St. Basil. It is not surprising, then, to find evidence of anaphrodisiac magic, and casting of circles to conjure demons, and saints who can counter witchcraft with their miraculous power (expelling, in one case, a worm and fourteen toads from an afflicted woman), all echoing traditions of magic and countermagic familiar from other regions. [End Page 358] What, if anything, was distinctive to Scandinavia? We might expect shamanic practices to occupy a more prominent role, but Mitchell adduces little evidence of that. The magical use of runes seems to have been commonplace: the runic inscriptions on wooden sticks found at Bergen and Ribe were sometimes meant for magical effect, and an amber amulet could just as well bear runic inscriptions; a sermon praises a woman who does not turn to a “rune-man” when her daughter is possessed by an evil spirit. This is not to say, of course, that runes were inherently magical or used specifically for magic; they could just as well be used for practical records and even for inscriptions on church walls. Still, there is record of lingering adherence to Óðinn, not in an organized and official mode, but among the marginalized malefactors who might have been punished for other conduct even if they were not...