<i>Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages</i> (review)

Abstract

Stephen A. Mitchell. and in Nordic Middle Ages. Philadelphia: u Pennsylvania p, 2011. Pp. 384. This excellent book aims to rectify a lacuna in study of Nordic witchcraft beliefs. As author notes, periods before and after Middle Ages (c. 1100-1525) have received ample scholarly attention, but this is first comprehensive examination of the responses in legal, literary and popular cultures of Nordic Middle Ages to belief that there existed people capable of manipulating world through magical (ix). This is no small undertaking. The Nordic region was and is extraordinarily varied with a wide range of cultures and subcultures. Moreover, medieval cultures in region were highly dynamic, and although this point has often been missed, period was one of enormous cultural development and change. Not least, topic of magic and witchcraft could touch every sphere of life, from religion to law, politics to food production, to warfare, and every social class. To do subject matter justice requires both a deep understanding of history and social structures of region and period and an ability to work with a huge and complex corpus of source materials. Mitchell is exceptionally well suited to task. The book is structured into six main chapters. The first, Witchcraft and Past, provides a good example of care with which Mitchell approaches his source materials through wonderful concept of midden: Interpreting bygone cultures clearly requires access to data, information-laden detrirus that history capriciously bequeaths. Having collected it, scholars grandly organize these materials into what we trust are sensible taxonomies and refer to results with all-too-obvious high hopes as databases and like. In seeking meaningful patterns in what are more realistically called middens, mounds of serendipitously preserved intelligence, what images of witchcraft and magic precipitate out? (16) The chapter also includes a brief but pithy survey of medieval Nordic political history and a discussion of issue of syncretism, which inevitably surfaces in any treatment of medieval beliefs or practices not obviously traceable to normative Christian texts. Here and throughout, Mitchell avoids reductionist thought and reminds reader of necessity of looking at surviving materials in context, of incompleteness of data available, and, nonetheless, of great interest of those materials that do survive. The second chapter, Magic and in Daily Life, draws on sources including law codes, famous rune staves from medieval Bergen, a wide range of Icelandic sagas and poetry, miracle narratives collected as part of promotion of cult of St. Katarina of Vadstena (d. 1381), and Revelaciones of St. Birgitta (mother of above), to discuss use of magic in various aspects of daily life. These include healing of people and livestock, promotion or prevention of love in its various aspects, curses of various kinds, prophecy, and control of weather. Although source materials are largely textual, Mitchell underscores importance of actual performance in production of magic (73). Chapter 3, Narrating Magic, Sorcery, and Witchcraft, contains--easily--enough material for several book-length studies. This detailed survey of depictions of witchcraft, sorcery, and related practices in medieval Nordic written narrative begins with a discussion of how such narratives ought to be regarded. Are they statements of what medieval Scandinavians thought about these subjects? Or were they intended to shape how their audiences thought? Or are they some kind of mediating alternative (75)? Mitchell agrees with Pernille Hermann's view that medieval Icelandic literature should be regarded both as preservation of past and creation of a past and also with Jenny Jochens's position that Icelandic sagas comprise mainly thirteenth- and fourteenth-century uses of past to express contemporary perspectives. …