Finnwitching
Viking religion shares, at a basic level, assumptions about the natural and supernatural world cognate with beliefs all across Eurasia, as far afield as Japan. It is only in the last decade that scholarly opinion has truly begun to accept the implications of this – that Asian shamanism may have as much to teach us about Viking religion as European paganism. This is particularly notable in the case of the Vikings, when we appreciate that many of the Vikings’ shamans were not Indo-Europeans at all, but Finno-Ugric tribespeople of Lapland.
Norse sagas are riddled with reference to Lappish sorcery, and particularly to the mysterious spell-casting abilities of Finnish women. Old Norse even has a verb, finnvitka, which means ‘to practise magic in a distinctly Finnish manner.’
It would appear, from Norse sources, that when the Vikings wanted magic, they would ‘pay a visit to the Finns’, a term that survives in modern Swedish as a euphemism for visiting a fortune-teller. Hints of such sorcerous capabilities survive in several sections of Snorri’s sagas, a Christian writing much later who wished to disassociate his true religion from the witchcraft of another race. Gunnhild Kingsmother, later to become the wife of Erik Bloodaxe, was supposedly sent among the people of Lapland to learn the ways of sorcery. As a mark of how she was hated by certain skalds, she was accused of seducing her teachers, using sexual favours to gain additional, secret magical knowledge from them.
Much like witches or gipsies in other European traditions, Finnish women are rolled out by poets and skalds as the prophetic instigators of quests and missions. There are references in two sagas to a fateful party in Norway, visited by a sorceress who predicts that the host will soon leave his fatherland to settle in Iceland. Unwilling to leave his old life behind, the protagonist Ingjaldr instead hires three more Finnish seers (men, this time) to undertake a spirit-journey and verify the witch’s prophecy. This they do, voyaging from their bodies in a locked house (a drug-induced trance, perhaps?), waking after three days to give a detailed account of the area that would become known as Vatnsdale in Iceland. Another settler in Iceland, so say the sagas, refused to leave Norway until he had sent a Finnish sorcerer to scout the coast, transformed into a whale to make the journey easier.
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Read Excerpt 1: The Valkyries
Read Excerpt 3: The Irish in Iceland
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