Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism

Abstract

Abstract lCELAND is situated on the geographical margins of Europe, and the links of communication across the North Atlantic were not always intensive. Yet historically Iceland was always embedded in the wider Nordic and European context, a fact which is reflected also in the seventeenth-century witch-trials. The present paper is concerned with these trials under the double perspective of the witch-craze in Early Modern Europe, in relation to which Iceland is but a peripheral instance, and the local cultural categories of witchcraft, defined from the core of a distinctive Icelandic culture. As elsewhere, the local shaping of the witch-hunt owed as much to pre-existing notions of supernatural powers as to the new ideas of satanic influence. Since the Viking Age and the first settlements on Iceland, a whole range of popular notions of magic intervention in nature and history had been central to the world-view of the Icelanders, and even the conversion to Christianity in AD 1000 had not estranged these notions.1 In many ways the Catholic times represented a continuation of the heathen traditions, at least in practice, if not in theological doctrine.