Iceland

Witchcraft and the Occult, 1400-1700
Iceland

Iceland is famous among historians of witchcraft as a country with a very high male to female ratio among witchcraft suspects. In order to understand why this should be the case, it is necessary to consider the cultural context of magic in Iceland. An essay and a book chapter by the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup are the essential introductions to this topic. What follows here does not attempt to duplicate her persuasive analysis.

Christianity came relatively late to Iceland, but to trace the magic and witchcraft beliefs of early modern Iceland back to the pagan world of the sagas seems a little farfetched, however attractive it may be to modern neo-pagans. We know little of the actual practices of pre-Christian Iceland, as opposed to what is in the literary texts, but what we do know seems very different from what was happening in the early modern period. What we find is not an appeal to the Norse gods, but rather a synthesis of shamanism, learned magic, and medieval Christianity. If there are elements surviving from pre-Christian Norse beliefs, it is hard to identify them.

If we examine the Icelandic witchcraft cases, in the context of widespread contemporary magical practices, it becomes evident that the situation in Iceland resembles that in Russia and some of the Baltic countries, before the impact of European demonology was fully felt. The stereotype of a secret doer of evil was a corrupt shaman or a literate man, such as a clergyman, who used the power of symbols or writing for evil purposes. It was not a woman who had made a pact with the Devil.

Magical practices in early modern Iceland

For centuries, both before and after the Reformation, the only schools in Iceland were at the two cathedrals, Hólar in the north and Skálholt in the south. At least four cases of witchcraft were associated with the latter in the second half of the 17th century. None were referred to the secular courts and the punishments were never harsh. Twice students were found in possession of magical books and were expelled, though some of them were later readmitted. One case concerned a priest who was accused by a student of having caused a sickness which he felt in the presence of a girl whom both of them were courting. The leniency shown to the students who were dabbling in magic is generally connected with the humanism and sensibility of the bishop, Brynjólfur Sveinsson, who was highly regarded as a scholar in Denmark. At Hólar, no records have been found of cases of magic in the 17th century, but there are numerous accounts of students experimenting with sorcery in the 18th century. From these examples, and from some of the cases below, it is clear that literacy was strongly associated with the quest for occult power, so that the Lutheran clergy might easily fall under suspicion.

Some of the magical practices illustrated below seem unlikely to have been employed by the clergy, but the manuscripts in which they are recorded may well have been written by clerics. Some practices in the manuscripts resemble the blackest necromancy, others are more like village charms. However, it is clear that they were woven into every aspect of the lives of Icelanders, exposed to the perils of the sea, of magic, and of their overlords.

Corpsebreeches and Nábrókarstafur

These were made with the intact skin of the lower part of the human body, dug up from a church yard. When worn, they were believed to become indistinguishable from the wearer's own skin. The stave should be kept in the scrotum along with a coin stolen from a poor widow. Money would then constantly be drawn into the scrotum.

(The breeches shown were exhibited in a museum in Iceland recently.)

A Stave to Raise the Dead: Stafur til að vekja upp draug

This sign can be used to wake from the dead, to exterminate a ghost, and it also has the power to drive away evil spirits. It must be carved on the skin of a horse's head with a mixture of blood from a seal, a fox, and a man. This verse must be recited with it:

Þykkt blóð, þreytast rekkar.
Þjóð mörg vos öld bjóða,
grand heitt, gummar andast,
glatast auður, firrast snauðir.
Hætt grand hræðast dróttir
hríð mörg, vesöld kvíða,
angur vænt, ærnar skærur.
Illur sveimur nú er í heimi.

To find a thief: Þjófastafur

If you want to know who has stolen from you, carve this stave on the bottom of a wooden bowl, fill it with clean water and sprinkle yarrow over it. Recite: I invoke the nature of the grass and the power of the sign to reveal who has stolen from me and others. In nomine domini amen. The thief's face will appear in the bowl.

(From an Icelandic medical text in a 17th century manuscript in Reykjavík).

Staves for Sharpening: Brýnslustafir

The sign at the top is to be laid over a sharpening stone and the bottom one under it. Then cover for a while with a piece of turf. The next time you sharpen your scythe turn it away from the sun and never look straight at the edge.

A Fishing Stave: Veiðistafur

This stave should be drawn in wren's blood on a caul with a pen made of a raven's feather. Then put it in a gimlet hole under the prow of your ship and you will always have a good catch.

Wrestling Staves: Gapaldur og Ginfaxi

These two staves were kept in the shoes, Gapaldur under the heel of the right foot and Ginfaxi under the toes of the left foot, to ensure victory in bouts of Icelandic wrestling (glíma).

A Killing Rune: Dreprún

This stave is to be written on a piece of paper and if a man has insulted you without reason, throw it where his horse has trodden and cover it. Some of his livestock will then die.

(From an Icelandic magical book from the 17th century, in Stockholm.)

The Helm of Awe: Ægishjálmur

This sign exists in various forms though all are a variation of crosses with three-forked ends. It is mentioned in the Eddic heroic poetry and was a fear inducer and protection against the abuse of power. It was to be carved in lead and pressed on one's forehead.

To Get a Girl: Að fá stúlku

This sign should be written in the palm of your right hand with blood from the tip of the thumb on the left hand. Take the girl's hand and recite: My hand I lay in yours, my will in yours. May your bones burn lest you love me as much as I love you. These words shall be as passionate and powerful as eternity. All magic and sorcery turn your mind towards love of me and may all those who inhabit subterranean abodes assist me in this.

A Lesser Circle of Protection: Rosahringur minni

Rosahringur must be carved on the flesh side of the skin of a brown bitch. Then colour the carving with the blood of a black tomcat which has been killed under a full moon. This is a powerful protection against ghosts and witchcraft. It helps to recite: I crave help from the earth, victory from the sun, happiness from the moon, assistance from the stars, and strength from the angels of God. If the sign is to be used against a lightning ghost or a demon, you should spit, throw urine and wave the skin reciting the following verse:

Undan vindi vondan sendi,
óskir ferskar raski þrjóskum,
galdurs eldur gildur holdið
grenni, kenni og innan brenni.
Eyrun dára örin særi,
eitrið ljóta, bíti hann skeytið,
allur fyllist illum sullum
eyði kauða bráður dauði.

To Win in Court: Máladeilan

Carve this on lignite and paint it with blood from the septum of your nose and keep it on your breast. If you fear losing your case in court, have another one on your back and you will win, regardless of the truth.

(From a 19th century manuscript, in Reykjavík.)

Valdemar's Protection Stave: Varnarstafur Valdemars

The sign increases favour and happiness if it is treated correctly. If somebody intends evil against you, lay it out with the gut of a plaice on the membrane inside a hen's egg and then place it inside your hat.

Against Witchcraft: Stafur gegn galdri

These four signs are a protection against witchcraft from all four corners of the earth. Carry them on your body.

(From a 17th century manuscript, in Reykjavík.)

Witchcraft cases in early modern Iceland

There are few surviving references to pre-Reformation accusations of sorcery among the Northern Scandinavians. The annals record that, in 1343, a Norwegian bishop had a nun burnt for blasphemy and communicating with the devil, and in 1407 a man was burnt in the Nordic community in Greenland for using sorcery to seduce a married woman.

Even in the sixteenth century, Icelandic cases are rare. In 1554, a priest in Eyjafjörður was charged with raping his sister-in-law, a minor, with the aid of magical books found in his possession. He was outlawed from the region and sentenced to lose one arm and both ears, and to pay his father-in-law vast sums in compensation. The authorities later allowed him to keep his arm and ears, and he then became a parish priest in the Strandir region. [Canon law had long forbidden mutilated men from being priests.]

Between 1625 and 1683, twenty-one Icelanders were burnt alive for practicing magic. The Icelandic witch-craze was imported from Europe by members of a ruling class of semi-nobles who were mainly educated in Denmark and northern Germany. One extended family of landowners, primarily in the north-west of the country, supplied the majority of the sheriffs presiding over the court cases for witchcraft and a large portion of the clergy, among them priests who wrote treatises against magic, heavily influenced by European works such as the Malleus Maleficarum.

The learned European influence is not as obvious in the actual case material. Contemporary sources, mainly annals and court records, reveal that a third of the charges were for causing sickness in persons and livestock, and another third for possessing magical books or pages with galdrastafir, that is, magical signs or staves. Heresy and satanism are hardly mentioned at all. Another striking difference between the European and Icelandic witch-hunts is that only one woman was among those burnt at the stake. This latter feature is what needs most to be explained, and incorporated into a general theory of witch-hunting.

Around 130 cases of witchcraft or sorcery are found in court records, both from the high court at Þingvellir and in fragments of county court records. Of approximately 170 persons accused, around 10% were women. The rest were males, mostly of the lower classes, although some sheriffs and clergymen were also accused. None of the latter suffered physical punishments. The total population of Iceland was only around fifty thousand.

Apart from the charges mentioned above, people were accused of waking the dead, using magic to heal, and about a tenth of cases mention blasphemy, though seldom as the only charge. A quarter of cases ended with a sentence of whipping which could involve from a half a dozen lashes to three consecutive whippings, all of them as heavy as a man could endure and still stay alive. A quarter of those accused were acquitted, at least 15% managed to escape the law, and the outcome of another 15% of cases is unknown. There is no evidence that physical torture was ever used in Iceland to secure confessions.

In 1617, the Danish authorities sent a royal order, defining punishments for witchcraft but it was probably never ratified by the general assembly at Þingvellir. In the following years, references to sorcery become more numerous in the records, especially after the trials in the 1630s of Jón the Learned of Strandir. Jón had previously fled the Westfjords because of his criticism of the powerful sheriff, Ari in Ögur, who had ordered the killing of over 40 shipwrecked Basque whalers in 1615. Jón did not deny having practiced healing, as found in a book of charms and cures presented to the lawcourt - the table of contents is copied in the court records - but he staunchly denied practicing magic or sorcery. Jón was outlawed from the country, but after a hearing before the university court in Copenhagen and a second trial where the first verdict was confirmed, he was allowed to live out his days in the east of Iceland where he wrote a number of works, most of them for the bishop in Skálholt, Brynjólfur Sveinsson.

Even after the extension of King Christian IV of Denmark's 1617 decree, which expanded the definition of witchcraft to include "white magic", to cover Icelandic cases, it seems clear that the Icelanders continued to define witchcraft primarily in terms of maleficium, doing harm, and to apply traditional Icelandic legal procedures for handling cases of alleged witchcraft. This has been stressed in a recent study of the case of the Jon Jonssons, father and son, of Kirkjubol farm, accused by their parish priest Jon Magnusson.

The local clergyman in Skutulsfjörður (the present town of Ísafjörður in the Westfjords), Jón Magnússon, fell ill in 1654 and remained bedridden for weeks at a time, sweating and shaking and experiencing vivid hallucinations. He became convinced that two of his neighbours, a father and son, both named Jón Jónsson, had sent him the illness with the aid of magic. The local sheriffs reluctantly took up the case, but under considerable pressure from the Reverend Jón they tried the culprits and in 1656 both of them were burnt. The priest was awarded a large part of their property as compensation but a little later he had a relapse. He then accused a female member of the family, but this time the authorities declined the case. The Reverend Jón wrote a book, Píslarsaga to justify his claims. There he describes the illness and the strange hallucinations he suffered.

From 1654, when three men were executed in Trékyllisvík in Strandir, only one or two court cases are mentioned in the sources until the 1670s, when the witch-hunt seems to have been at its zenith. After the last execution in 1683, and especially after 1690, when a royal decree ordered that all capital offenses must be referred to the authorities in Copenhagen, the cases became fewer. In 1719 the assembly at Þingvellir scolded a sheriff for wasting the court's time with an accusation for magic.

There has yet to be produced a fully convincing modern account of the events at Trékyllisvík, the northernmost community of Strandir, but the strange occurrances seem to have started in 1652 and continued throughout the 17th century. It is very tempting to see a local cultural tradition of what we might call hysteria at the root of the matter. The cases appear similar to European ones of bewitchment or possession. According to one annal:

"That autumn [1652] an evil spirit or a ghost caused disturbances in Trékyllisvík. Often during the same day and especially in the church, the spirit would suddenly go down people's throats causing belching and a feeling of overfill, but afterwards they felt nothing. Virgins were more prone to this sickness than others."

When the two county sheriffs arrived it was soon revealed that the community suspected a certain Þórður Guðbrandsson. After repeated hearings, he admitted that he had met the devil in the form of a fox and had sent it to Trékyllisvík. During the proceedings, the sheriffs heard that two other men, Egill Bjarnason and Grímur Jónsson, were rumoured to be sorcerers. After some time in custody, they both admitted having practiced forbidden magic. All three were burnt in September 1656.

In spite of the executions, the belching and fainting fits in and around the church continued, and in 1670 two inhabitants of the community were whipped harshly, first at the general assembly at Þingvellir and again in Trékyllisvík, though no charges against them could be proved and they denied all knowledge of magic. Reports continued of the same disturbances until the last decade of the 17th century when harsh weather and a famine became the community's pressing concerns.

The two cases of the 1650s, at Trékyllisvík and Ísafjörður, were presided over by the same sheriff, Þorleifur Kortsson, who lived in Hrútafjörður in Strandir. He later became head sheriff (lögmaður) in the north and west and most of the cases of witchcraft that emerged during the following two decades were referred to him.

Trékyllisvík execution site

One of the persons who referred cases to Þorleifur Kortsson was Páll Björnsson, a clergyman at Selárdalur in the southwest of the Westfjords. Páll had studied abroad and was generally thought to be among the foremost theologians in Iceland. He was also known for his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. An essay of his on Icelandic natural history was published in 1674, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and in French in the Journal des Savants in 1675. He was also the first man to measure the exact geographical position of Iceland's westernmost point. His most famous essay, however, was Character Bestiæ (1674), a tract against magic. It quotes the Malleus Maleficarum but bears little resemblance to the sorcery described in Icelandic sources.

In 1669, Páll's wife Helga fell ill and for a time their farm had to be evacuated because of evil spirits that made it uninhabitable. Finally, it was decided that Helga's illness had been caused by a farmhand who had wanted to marry one of her maids. Páll had him burnt with the help of his brother Eggert Björnsson, the county sheriff, along with a second man who they claimed had taught the farm hand sorcery. Helga, who seems to have been somewhat unstable, had relapses again and again, until 6 people had been burnt as a result of her illness and those of her children. The last man burnt in Iceland was condemned for causing a similar illness in a daughter of Páll and Helga. Among those who suffered in connection with the family in Selárdalur was the only woman burnt during the witch-craze in Iceland. Little is known of this case except that Þuríður Ólafsdóttir had recently moved to the area, and her dim-witted son, who was burnt with her, had boasted that his mother knew how to cross rivers and streams without their getting their feet wet. The case was one of several where the death sentence was confirmed by the general assembly after the culprits had been executed.

At a meeting with the local sheriff in Bjarnarfjörður in central Strandir, a woman named Guðrún Magnúsdóttir described in 1660 a malady which she had suffered from for three years. She was afflicted with fits which made her shake all over and caused pains in her chest. She suspected three men of having caused the illness. The men were ordered to attend a further investigation, but no records survive which tell us the outcome of the case. Numerous cases of this kind are known from most parts of Iceland. Throughout this period, when an unexplained illness struck, Icelanders looked to unpopular neighbours, citing a harsh word uttered long before.

Sixteen years later, after another court hearing in the same place, a man named Jón Pálsson was whipped for possessing a nine page magical book with strange drawings and two invocations against foxes, an understandable concern of sheep farmers. Jón was whipped and the books burnt under his nose to discourage him from such practices. Jón escaped with his life mainly because his neighbours had a good opinion of him and could not believe that he would ever harm anybody with his magic. Maleficium was the central issue, rather than magic per se.

A list of those executed
Borderline cases of blasphemy, and cases where the outcome is not entirely certain, have been omitted.

Jón Rögnvaldsson - 1625: burnt in Eyjafjörður, north Iceland, for raising a ghost and possessing papers with runic characters. Denied all accusations.

Þórður Guðbrandsson - 1654: burnt in Trékyllisvík, Strandir, for causing strange occurences in the community. After imprisonment he confessed that he had met the Devil in the guise of a fox and sent it to Trékyllisvík.

Egill Bjarnason - 1654: burnt in Trékyllisvík, Strandir, after confessing that he had killed a sheep with magic and made a contract with the devil.

Grímur Jónsson - 1654: burnt in Trékyllisvík, Strandir, after confessing that he knew magic runes and had killed a sheep with a magic character.

Jón Jónsson sen. - 1656: burnt in Ísafjörður, admitted in custody that he owned magical books and that he had used them against the Rev. Jón Magnússon.

Jón Jónsson jun. - 1656: burnt in Ísafjörður. Admitted having used magical signs and, among other things, having used farting-runes (Fretrúnir) against a girl and having caused the sickness of the Rev. Jón Magnússon.

Þórarinn Halldórsson - 1667: from Ísafjarðarsýsla, the Westfjords. Burnt at the general assembly at Þingvellir. Admitted that he had carved helms of awe (Ægishjálmur) on oak and practiced healing with the aid of magical signs.

Jón Leifsson - 1669: burnt in Barðastrandarsýsla in the Westfjords for having caused the illness of Helga, wife of the Rev. Páll Björnsson in Selárdalur. Admitted that he had tried to gain some knowledge of the occult.

Erlendur Eyjólfsson - 1669: burnt in Húnavatnssýsla county in north Iceland for having taught Jón Leifsson magic. Admitted that he had handed Jón a stave named Ausukross.

Sigurður Jónsson - 1671: burnt in Þingvellir after a trial in Ísafjarðarsýsla county. Admitted, among other things, that he had fought a ghost and frightened it off with the help of herbs and his own semen.

Páll Oddsson - 1674: from Húnavatnssýsla county, burnt at Þingvellir. Denied all knowledge of magic but was convicted because of rumours against him.

Böðvar Þorsteinsson - 1674: burnt at Þingvellir after having admitted that he had prevented a ship in Snæfellsnes from fishing.

Magnús Bjarnason - 1675: admitted that he had caused the sickness of Helga, Páll Björnsson's wife, in Selárdalur, Westfjords.

Lassi Diðriksson - 1675: condemned in connection with the sickness of Helga in Selárdalur, denied all charges and was generally thought innocent. Burnt at Þingvellir.

Bjarni Bjarnason - 1677: supposed to have caused a woman's illness in the Westfjords. Denied all charges but was burnt at Þingvellir.

Þorbjörn Sveinsson - 1677: a branded thief who was found in possession of magical signs. Admitted that he had used sorcery to try to find out who had stolen from him and to make sheep easier to handle. From Mýrasýsla county in the West, burnt at Þingvellir.

Stefán Grímsson - 1678: confessed freely after a death sentence was passed, though none of the things he was accused of. Burnt in Húnavatnssýsla county.

Jón Helgason - 1678: burnt in Barðastrandarsýsla county in the Westfjords for having caused the sickness of Helga in Selárdalur.

Þuríður Ólafsdóttir - 1678: mother of Jón Helgason, burnt for the same offence, on the accusation of the Rev. Páll Björnsson.

Ari Pálsson - 1681: from Barðastrandarsýsla, where he was rumoured to have practiced magic, burnt at Þingvellir after failing to get his peers to swear his innocence. After conviction, he admitted to knowing how to find out if a woman was a virgin.

Sveinn Árnason - 1683: burnt in Arngerðareyri in the Westfjords for having caused the illness of the daughter of Páll and Helga in Selárdalur.