Stephen Mitchell’s Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages: An Assessment and Appreciation

During the past three decades, Stephen Mitchell has established himself as the principal expert on late medieval Scandinavian witchcraft and magic in the English-speaking world. This book draws together the fruits of all that work between two covers, providing a comprehensive overview of the subject. His chronology spans the period between the appearance of a significant number of contemporary written sources, in the twelfth century, and the coming of the Reformation in the early sixteenth, which ushered in the celebrated sequence of early modern witch trials. His geographical label of “Nordic” is intended to recognize the contributions of lands and cultures outside those of mainstream medieval Scandinavia, including Atlantic islands settled by Scandinavians such as Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroes, and indigenous peoples such as the Greenland Inuit and the Sámi into whose territories Scandinavians expanded. On the whole, however, the latter make few appearances, and it is with Scandinavian culture, whether in the home-land or in the new lands into which it spread, that the book is concerned. As Professor Mitchell recognizes, the geographical area covered is still vast, being equivalent to the width of the North American continent. He has two ambitions for the work: to provide the first comprehensive evaluation of witchcraft beliefs in this zone during the high and late Middle Ages, and to show that those beliefs evolved considerably and significantly during that period. He succeeds fully in both, and so provides a landmark volume in Scandinavian witchcraft studies, effectively putting the later medieval period into the picture as a major element for the first time.

This service is especially valuable to readers outside Scandinavia itself, for whom his work acts not merely as a substantial contribution to new knowledge, but also an introduction to a large range of existing research and sources in the languages of the region, of which Professor Mitchell has obtained mastery. His style is modest and his mode of argument thorough and cautious: he needs to consider a lot of evidence, viewed from most or all possible angles, before he draws any conclusions from it. As a result, his suggestions are so well founded and carefully made that it is difficult to argue with them, and this review will be devoted to summarizing the most important and then asking what implications they have for the wider study of witchcraft. The book proceeds not chronologically but thematically, examining the evidence for the subject in different contexts and kinds of material, and this appreciation of it shall accordingly follow the same pattern.

The book starts with the most direct indication of prevailing popular views of magic of all kinds, that of law codes, and finds that a very wide range of practices are forbidden in them, some of which can be corroborated by other sources such as runic inscriptions. Here it first tackles the question, often raised by studies of medieval Scandinavian culture, of how far the magic described in the period was a vestige of pre-Christian religion, and enters a series of caveats against easy answers. First, the presence of such activities in law codes does not guarantee in itself either that they were ancient or that they were currently practiced. Second, the process of conversion was a long and slow one, extending over three centuries in Sweden, and probably took different forms at different times; the actual evidence suggests that individual aspects of the old religion ended up accommodated to the new, but whole segments and ideologies may have been transferred between them before records begin. Finally, the evidence itself provides very uneven and conflicting portraits of both paganism and the conversion experience: deities important in literature are rare in place names, and vice versa, and kings who appear as devout Christians in one text have doubtful religious loyalties in another.

Proceeding to the place of magic in daily life, Professor Mitchell opens with the suggestion that a practice regarded as effective before Christianity would probably not have been...