Tag: sagas

Sorcery and Magic Part Two

The Saga of Erik the Red is probably the most comprehensive information today about Norse seeresses.

There was in the settlement the woman whose name was Thorbjorg. She was a prophetess (spae-queen), and was called Litilvolva (little sybil). She had had nine sisters, and they were all spae-queens, and she was the only one now living.

It was written in a time when Christianity had come to Iceland and the old gods were becoming only a memory. Thorbjorg is obviously a very well respected woman. Like many of her ilk, she travels from farmstead to farmstead and is very lavishly received. We are told in great detail what she wears and this is obviously very important as one of the items is a cat-skin cloak. The cat was the sacred animal of Freyja, the originator of seiðr. We are not told what the talismans were, but perhaps they were rune staves.seeress

Now, when she came in the evening, accompanied by the man who had been sent to meet her, she was dressed in such wise that she had a blue mantle over her, with strings for the neck, and it was inlaid with gems quite down to the skirt. On her neck she had glass beads. On her head she had a black hood of lambskin, lined with ermine. A staff she had in her hand, with a knob thereon; it was ornamented with brass, and inlaid with gems round about the knob. Around her she wore a girdle of soft hair, and therein was a large skin-bag, in which she kept the talismans needful to her in her wisdom. She wore hairy calf-skin shoes on her feet, with long and strong-looking thongs to them, and great knobs of latten at the ends. On her hands she had gloves of ermine-skin, and they were white and hairy within.

In Erik the Red’s Saga the writer describes in detail the lavish preparation for the arrival of the spae-queen, Thorbjorg:

It was a custom of Thorbjorg, in the winter time, to make a circuit, and people invited her to their houses, especially those who had any curiosity about the season, or desired to know their fate… He invited, therefore, the spae-queen to his house, and prepared for her a hearty welcome, as was the custom wherever a reception was accorded a woman of this kind. A high seat was prepared for her, and a cushion laid thereon in which were poultry-feathers.

During the evening the tables were set; and now I must tell you what food was made ready for the spae-queen. There was prepared for her porridge of kid’s milk, and hearts of all kinds of living creatures there found were cooked for her. She had a brazen spoon, and a knife with a handle of walrus-tusk, which was mounted with two rings of brass, and the point of it was broken off.

One thing that was very important were the women who were able to chant the “wyrd” songs or fate songs. “Wyrd” was an archaic term referring to fate. We see it in Shakespeare’s “weird sisters”, in his tragic play, Macbeth, the three witches take on the persona of the three Norns of Norse myth. Wyrd became corrupted as “weird” in modern English, to mean something strange and unknown, which when you think about it, is fitting as our fates are pretty strange and unknown to us.

And when the (next) day was far spent, the preparations were made for her which she required for the exercise of her enchantments. She begged them to bring to her those women who were acquainted with the lore needed for the exercise of the enchantments, and which is known by the name of Weird-songs, but no such women came forward. Then was search made throughout the homestead if any woman were so learned.

We see that in Erik the Red’s Saga, that the old ways and the old songs are already becoming lost as Christianity takes hold in Iceland. Gudrid may well be the last generation to know how to chant the spells necessary for spae-magic to take place.

Then answered Gudrid, “I am not skilled in deep learning, nor am I a wise-woman, although Halldis, my foster-mother, taught me, in Iceland, the lore which she called Weird-songs.”

“Then art thou wise in good season,” answered Thorbjorg; but Gudrid replied, “That lore and the ceremony are of such a kind, that I purpose to be of no assistance therein, because I am a Christian woman.”

Then answered Thorbjorg, “Thou mightest perchance afford thy help to the men in this company, and yet be none the worse woman than thou wast before…”

Thorkell thereupon urged Gudrid to consent, and she yielded to his wishes. The women formed a ring round about, and Thorbjorg ascended the scaffold and the seat prepared for her enchantments. Then sang Gudrid the weird-song in so beautiful and excellent a manner, that to no one there did it seem that he had ever before heard the song in voice so beautiful as now.

In The Serpentine Key, Freydis is a seiðkona. Seiðkona means literally “woman of seething”. Freydis walks the nine worlds, speaking to the spirits and sometimes bringing back messages from the gods. In my writing, I leave the experience up to the interpretation of the reader. Did she have a real transcendental experience? Did she become high from the henbane and hempr (old Germanic word for cannabis) seeds thrown on the fire?

She settled the distaff between her thighs as if to begin spinning. But instead of wool, the end of the staff instead carried upon it a carved, whorled head. Instead of spinning, Freydis settled herself on the high platform, the catskin cloak warm over her shoulders. The ends of her fingers tingled and something deep in the pit of her stomach stirred, like a restless animal just beginning to awaken. The beat of the drum thrummed within her. The animal inside was coiled now. Watchful. Waiting. She was ready.

In The Bone Goddess, Freydis’ granddaughter Sigga learns seiðr under the tutelage of the same volva as Freydis did. Málfríðr is by this time, very old. The real Málfríðr was the mother of Vladimir Prince of Kiev and the Russian Primary Chronicle records that she lived to be over a hundred years old and even after the introduction of Christianity, was brought out from her cave (where she was presumably exiled) and called upon to prophesy. Was old Málfríðr (Malusha in the Slavic) actually a seiðkona? We may never know. The Russian Primary Chronicle tells us that she was a bondwoman and it seems unlikely that as powerful and important a woman as a seiðkona would be in bondage.

Seeresses were sometimes viewed with something more like fear. It is important to remember that there was sometimes a differentiation between seiðr and Spa. The spakona was more often likely to do good with her magic; the seiðr seeress was sometimes looked on with suspicion, perhaps because her practice involved sexual elements, though this attitude may have come about more recently with the advent of Christianity. Sometimes they were looked upon as evil, faring forth in the form of a fylgia, most often an animal or bird, intent on doing harm. The Voluspa from the Poetic Edda tells of one such sorceress:

Heid, they named her, who sought their home

The wide-seeing witch, in magic wise;

Minds she bewitched that were moved by magic

To evil women, a joy she was.

Since anything we have about seiðr today is written from a Christian perspective, after the arrival of the religion to Scandinavia, we may never know.

Resources:

Seidr: The Door is Open: Working with Trance Prophesy, the High Seat and Norse Magic by Katie Gerard

Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in North European Paganism by Jenny Blain

Seed of Yggdrasil by Maria Kvilhaug See also the author’s excellent web site: http://freya.theladyofthelabyrinth.com/

Sorcery and Magic Part One

The Sagas and Eddas speak at length on magic and no one is so central to that role as the seiðkona or volva. Seidr is a shamanistic approach to magic that differs from galdr, which involved singing or chanting the runes. Despite that numerous references to these practitioners of magic, we know little of what actually went on and can only guess at some aspects.

In the Ynglinga Saga, Freyja is the one who brings the magic art to the Aesir:

Njord’s daughter Freya was priestess of the sacrifices,

and first taught the Asaland people the magic art,

as it was in use and fashion among the Vanaland people.

Odin learns magic from Freyja, though in the Lokasenna, Loki accuses him of learning it from the Sami people thus:

 

“They say that with spells in Samsey once

Like witches with charms didst thou work;

And in witch’s guise among men didst thou go;

Unmanly thy soul must seem.”

Ardre_Odin_Sleipnir
Odin and Sleipnir

For a man to practice seiðr was considered especially shameful and unmanly. He was thenceforth known as ergi. It is likely though, given the shamanistic way seiðr was practiced, that is was brought learned from the Sami people.

Some hints as to the nature of the magic they used might come from accounts of later medieval witches who were supposed to have rubbed a strange ointment of herbs upon their broomsticks upon which they rode naked. Francis Bacon listed the ingredients of the witches ointment as “the fat of children digged out of their graves, of juices of smallage, wolfe-bane and cinque foil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat.” Other recipes listed nightshade and henbane among other poisonous plants with toxic alkaloids. Not surprisingly, nightshade is notorious for producing a sensation of flight. Henbane also produces a hallucinogenic reaction.

250px-Finds_from_a_priestess'_grave
Grave goods of a Norse seeress including the mysterious wand

When archaeologists unearthed a rich grave of a woman at Fyrkat, Denmark from the tenth century, they found among many other grave goods, a pouch containing the seeds of henbane and cannabis both with mind-altering properties. Even henbane petals rubbed against the skin have been reported to have caused an experience akin to floating or flying. How much more so when combined with nightshade and mandrake, plants with high levels of toxic alkaloids such as scopolamine, hyoscyamine, and atropine. Such plants were placed in a fatty substance by medieval witches and applied to a distaff or broomstick and ridden upon. These herbs can take very quick effect on the skin and more so against the mucous membranes of a woman’s vagina. This would explain the sexual element darkly hinted at by later Christian writers, but never properly alluded to. In any case, asmale practitioners of seiðr were looked on with scorn by their contemporaries, it is possible that seiðr required one to be sexually passive, or perhaps there were actions associated with the anointed distaff that disagreed strongly with medieval Scandinavian sensibilities of gender roles, including that of fiber arts as we shall explore in part three of this study.

Any thoughts on this subject? I would love to hear from you. Comment below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Berserkers, Men or Myth? Part Two

But really, who were the berserkers? They were not merely stories made up to frighten children, because there were laws passed in medieval Christianized Iceland against them. You don’t enact laws against men who are only the stuff of stories.

“His men went without mailcoats or shields and were as frantic as dogs or wolves; they bit their shields and were as strong as bears or boars; they slew men but neither fire nor iron hurt them. This is known as ‘running berserk’” Ynglinga Saga

Theories abound, including the abuse of alcohol and Amanita muscaria or fly agaric mushroom. Alcohol has a very weak connection. First off, a man who is drunk enough to fly into a blind rage would be almost worse than useless in battle. His efforts would be uncoordinated and he certainly would not be unaffected by fire or iron as the saga suggests. Alcohol thins the blood. They are far more likely to bleed out from the horrific wounds inflicted in medieval battle.

A case has been made for the fly agaric mushroom. Despite the fact that this red fungus, speckled with white shows up in almost every European fairy tale picture book you ever read as a child, it grew in Europe in only isolated areas. It certainly does not grow in Iceland where there is much mention of the berserkers. Furthermore, the effects of the mushroom, unless used very carefully, are more likely to produce real illness than the desired level of hallucination in those who ingest it. The potency of the mushroom is affected by many things: the time of the year it is harvested, where it has been harvested and how it is collected. There is not enough uniformity to produce the desired outcome.

Some have suggested the use of the bog myrtle, a plant frequently used in place of hops for ale in Scandinavia. However there is little evidence to support this being the medium by which certain Norsemen went berserk. Many more men would have gone berserk, women as well and that does not seem to be the case from what we read in the sagas.

Men such as Kvedulf (Evening Wolf) who left to be alone in the evening away from his family to deal with his berserker tendencies, may have found it difficult to live in organized society and often found themselves exiled from it.

One of the things that set the berserkers apart is that though they had an incredible ability to fight during the gangr or berserker rage which lasted at best only thirty to forty minutes. After that, they became weak and unable to fight. This fits with IED in which shares much with those who self identify as berserkers. The altered awareness, hearing voices and echos, increased strength, duration of outbursts, tingling sensation, tension and mood changed prior to an outburst, violent reactions to stressors and a dissociative state are some of the symptoms of IED. Much of this sounds like Dr. Shay’s list comparing the berserker behavior to that of Vietnam vets with PTSD.

Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist makes the case for the hyperarousal of post traumatic stress disorder in his book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. It is true that as long as soldiers have gone into battle and witnessed the horrors of war, there have been those affected with PTSD, but this is not a strong enough connection to apply to all those who were affected with the berserker rage. He does make a convincing argument in his list of berserker-like characteristics: “…beastlike; godlike; socially disconnected; crazy, mad, insane; enraged; cruel without restraint or discrimination; insatiable, devoid of fear, inattentive to own safety; distractable, indiscriminate; reckless, feeling invulnerable; exalted, intoxicated, frenzied; cold, indifferent; insensible to pain; and suspicious of friends.”

It sounds like a laundry list for the berserker distinguishing features if I ever heard one. But it does not take into consideration that the sagas mentioned that the berserkers run in families, which would indicate a genetic component, something that PTSD would not be a result of. It is possible however that PTSD aggravates an already present condition. I reference the berserker Egil Skallagrimson of the

Icelandic Egil’s Saga whose father Skallagrim was a berserker and the son of Kveldulf Bjalfson or Evening Wolf, also a berserker. This very much indicates the condition was genetic and places some weight on its being something like IED which we have today.

The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs estimates that 11% to 20% of military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are afflicted with the condition. How much this percentage would change for those who had experienced medieval combat can only remain speculation.

The most convincing argument I have yet seen is that it was a genetic condition that we still have today: Intermittent Militant Disorder or Intermittent Explosive Disorder, otherwise IED. However, far from being viewed as mentally ill, these men would have been perceived as being gifted by the god Odin. They were considered sons of Odin and both feared and respected. As elite warriors, they were both at the top of society and also cast out of it. There is evidence that such a “disorder” far from being seen as debilitating, opened up neural pathways in the mind not available to others not born to it. And while these natural abilities may have been enhanced by such psychoactive substances such as henbane or hempr (cannabis), much of what they did was probably innate.

The subject of the berserker is an extensive one and more than can not be covered in the scope of a blog post.

Sources:

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character by Jonathan Shay M.D. Ph.D

There is little written scientifically on the modern berserker. There is however an excellent book written by Wayland Skallagrimson Putting on the Wolf Skin: The Berserker and Other Forms of Somafera.

See also his website:  http://www.uppsalaonline.com/uppsala/somafera/

 

 

Berserkers — Men or Myth? Part One

“There was a man named Ulf, son of Bjalf… Ulf was a man so tall and strong that none could match him and in his youth he roved the seas as a freebooter….he was a berserker.”    Egil’s Saga.

In The Serpentine Key, and the two books following, the Norse mercenary, Sven Thorvaldson and his son struggle with being ulfhednar, wolf berserkers, something they were born to and that have shaped who they are.

Most people have at one point in their lives used the word berserk. But what does it mean? In our culture it is someone who flies off the handle, becomes irrationally angry. The berserk shows up in the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons as a playable class alongside Runemasters and Skalds. They have magic abilities and special roles. In European legends, the werewolf has much in common with the ulfhedinn, the berserk who identifies with the wolf, including his tremendous strength. In Russia, colonized in the ninth century by the Norse, the werewolf is called the oberot or bodark which translates into “one transformed”.

Nor are such accounts isolated to Norse society. The Celtic Cuchulain’s Riastradh of Irish myth shared many of the same characteristics as berserkers. Both berserkers and members of the Riastradh were known to go into a battle frenzy seemingly unaffected by injury and take sometimes days to come down from it, during which time they would be weak and defenseless. Perhaps this was even what was described for the Irish warriors of Ulster who are cursed by the goddess Macha when they refused to help her as she went into labor. She cursed them to be as weak as a woman upon whom labor pains have come when they would be in their greatest hour of need. Those who fought Norse berserkers regularly knew about this “Kryptonite” of theirs and knew to engage the berserkers just long enough until the gangr would wear off and then they would be weak, diminished and unable to fight. For this reason, their use was as shock troops, often to break through shield walls. A berserker was reputed to be the one who, single-handed, held off a portion of the Saxon army at Stanford Bridge in 1066 until reinforcements could arrive.

From Egil’s Saga: “So it is said of those men who were shape-strong or on any of them on whom was the berserk-gang that for so long as they held, they were so strong there was no holding against the, but forthwith when that was passed over, then they were unmighter than of wont. And so it was with Kveldulf that as soon as the berserk rage was gone from him, then he knew he his weariness of those onslaughts he had made and he was altogether without might, so that he laid down in his bed.”

Romans spoke of crazed Celtic warriors who went into battle naked, unafraid of death. They called them Furor Celticus. The triple goddess Morrigan was said the be the one who inspired this battle frenzy, possibly brought about by deep mediation. She had much in common with Freyja, both being deities of death and transformation as well as the battle frenzy. There are also stories of the Maylasian warriors who “ran amok” and the African “leopard men” with similar proclivities.

The etymology of the word berserker differs depending on who you talk to. Some say it means “bare of shirt” for the practice of these men fighting without the protection of either leather armor of ring-mail shirts. Others insist that it referred to to the “bear nature” of some berserkers or perhaps wearing the skin of the bear. Those who embraced the spirit of the wolf in the almost shamanic practice of their warrior tradition were known as ulfhednar. In The Serpentine Key, Sven Thorvaldson is ulfhedninn, as is his son. For him, it is a curse as much as it is a gift of Odin. Like many modern day sufferers of IED, he has a tendency to alcoholism. Suicidal tendencies also seem to be a mark of a man afflicted this way. Egil Skallgrimson tended to deep depressions. Prone to volatile emotions, he keeps himself so tightly restrained as to appear withdrawn and devoid of emotion. Years have training have taught Sven to school and control the gangr. With training, the berserk can deliberately induce the state, as well as hold it off when necessary. Most weren’t so disciplined. In the sagas, it was said to be brought on at unexpected times, including even by hard labor. Yet the berserker state cannot be chalked up to only an explosion of rage, or even excess of adrenalin, though the latter two do seem to factor in the wiring and neural impulses of these men. The berserker was and is perhaps the man who takes the IED to another level due to the spiritual mechanics of meditation and shamanic trance. He becomes one with Odin or perhaps with the wolf or bear with which he identifies himself. The greater strength with which the berserker seems to be granted, is only one side affect. Perhaps it is the unitary state into which he enters that also grants him an almost sixth sense. In The Serpentine Key, Sven is able to sense an enemy’s next move before he makes it. His movements are sure and coordinated, hardly the result of a man drunk on alcohol or slowed by hallucinogens.

Next time we will examine a medical angle on the berserks. If so, do they still exist today? Share your thoughts below.

Sources:

Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s Column to Icelandic Sagas by Michael P. Speidel

Egil’s Saga

Ynglinga Saga