Old Norse Folklore: Magic, Witchcraft, and Charms in Medieval Scandinavia

The second volume of Old Norse Folklore explores medieval and early modern Nordic magic and witchcraft, covering syncretism, continuity, survival, and the reconstruction of pagan beliefs and cultic practices in this last area of western Europe to be Christianized. This volume not only considers these issues but also pulls back the curtain on more obscure, yet important, corners of Nordic magico-religious tradition.

In these chapters, Stephen A. Mitchell draws on materials from many different periods of the vast Nordic world, stretching from Greenland to the Baltic, and examines such diverse witnesses as sagas, judicial records, ballads, synodal statutes, runes, proverbs, church murals, leechbooks, and the language used to discuss magic and its actors. Old Norse Folklore addresses how theology helped to shape the Nordic magical world and how language can reveal this world, how magic was used as a practical matter in (and what it meant philosophically to) the medieval Nordic world, and how inherited traditions between and among the historically connected societies of northern Europe impacted cultural developments in late medieval Scandinavia.

Stephen A. Mitchell is the Robert S. and Ilse Friend Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University. His research centers on the Nordic world in the medieval and early modern periods, and employs a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, including performance theory, memory studies, anthropological linguistics, and other folklore-centered perspectives. He is author of Heroic Sagas and Ballads and Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages.