Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages (review)

Stephen A. Mitchell is a professor at Harvard University and author of Heroic Sagas and Ballads (1991) and the medieval section of A History of Swedish Literature (1996). His Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages is an impressive work, complete with extensive notes, a lengthy bibliography, index, and twelve black-and-white illustrations. It addresses witchcraft and magic in the middle period of Scandinavian history from c. 1100 to 1525, a far less popular period of study than the preceding era dominated by studies of the Vikings and later centuries dominated by interest in the Reformation and its effects. The earlier half of this timeframe is marked by changes in both legal and Christian interpretations of witchcraft and magic and the end of it by the formation of the Scandinavian geopolitical boundaries that lasted for the next several centuries. The Scandinavia of this volume—the medieval "Nordic" world— included "much ofNorthern Europe, includingGreenland, Iceland, and the Faroes, . . . Shetland and parts of insular and coastal Scotland; it also included modern-day Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and Gotland [and] parts of coastal Finland and other areas around the Baltic littoral, and extended south into modern Germany" (17). Of special significance to scholars, in addition to this particular time and place is Mitchell's intelligent use of a wide range of sources for information: his book is a developed analysis of witchcraft and magic in medieval Nordic society, not a textual analysis of a few literary works.

The preface and introduction establish the parameters of the study, identify some of the common and erroneous assumptions about the period, and introduce a number of previous monographs relevant to the present one. Readers attentive to the history of approaches to the study of witchcraft and magic will appreciate Mitchell's brief survey of scholars who eschewed reliance on such suspect sources as confessions made by those accused of witchcraft in favour of broader emphases on popular culture. Such studies range from Margaret Murray's representation of medieval witches as part of a tradition that includes far more ancient fertility cults in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) through to Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), as well as the work of Victor Turner, Bronislaw Malinowski, and others.

Chapter one, "Witchcraft and the Past," identifies the range of materials that may be called upon as evidence in the study of witchcraft and magic in Nordic medieval popular culture— paintings, talismans, and amulets—and documents, such as church statutes, laws, court records, runic inscriptions, literature, sermons, letters, poems, prayers, and so forth. Mitchell considers the problematic nature of using such "data middens" to reconstruct a worldview, and of interpreting these materials relative to an overly simplistic model of an elite clerical culture in opposition to a peasant-oriented popular culture. As he notes, "Although not without its advantages, this view of the Middle Ages tends to assume, for example, that a medieval fisherman believed in and practiced magic, whereas a monk did not. In all likelihood, both of them did" (19). Another ongoing problem is that of perception, both perceptions then and perceptions now, of what magic is, as well as the manner in which perceptions of magic were defined and changed as Christianity confronted the "Pagan" practices associated with a dominant rural society. The accounts of competitions between Pagan and Christian magic intended to establish which was more efficacious are particularly enlightening.

Chapter two, "Magic and Witchcraft in Daily Life," is attentive to the differences between Pagan and Christian magic and to the range of approaches to romance, fortune, health, weather, and malediction taken in different parts of medieval society, ranging from the village-level witchcraft associated with superstitions, charms, love magic, potions, and the like, through to the "'high' magic of elite and often clerical culture" (45). Chapter three, "Narrating Magic, Sorcery, and Witchcraft," is about the...