The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia

Description

Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes  of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic  yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for  the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the  consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological  or historical research has been done to explore what this may  really have meant to the men and women of the time. This book  examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its  meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the  complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with  which these were underpinned. Combining strong elements of  eroticism and aggression, sorcery appears as a fundamental domain  of women’s power, linking them with the gods, the dead and the  future. Their battle spells and combat rituals complement the  men’s physical acts of fighting, in a supernatural empowerment of  the Viking way of life. What emerges is a fundamentally new image  of the world in which the Vikings understood themselves to move,  in which magic and its implications permeated every aspect of a  society permanently geared for war. In this fully-revised and  expanded second edition, Neil Price takes us with him on a tour  through the sights and sounds of this undiscovered country,  meeting its human and otherworldly inhabitants, including the Sámi with whom the Norse partly shared this mental landscape. On the way we explore Viking notions of the mind and soul, the  fluidity of the boundaries that they drew between humans and  animals, and the immense variety of their spiritual beliefs. We find magic in the Vikings’ bedrooms and on their battlefields,  and we meet the sorcerers themselves through their remarkable  burials and the tools of their trade. Combining archaeology,  history and literary scholarship with extensive studies of  Germanic and circumpolar religion, this multi-award-winning book  shows us the Vikings as we have never seen them before.