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

"The first thing to say is that everybody’s been waiting with bated breath for the second edition to appear, because for about ten years it was one of the most sought-after books on secondhand book sites. And it’s been revised, too. Why I’m glued to it is because I think Neil Price does a fantastic job of explaining to a modern, post-Enlightenment person what is a very strange series of cultures. He particularly focuses on the Viking idea of magic and its relation to the Viking idea of the person. Today, we tend to think in broadly Cartesian terms: we think of the human being as a thinking being. Even when people talk about the AI singularity, what they nearly always mean is the AI’s thinking capability. Will they be self-aware? Will they be able to play Go better than Go masters? That kind of version of the self. “Behind the obvious and the everyday is a world that you can’t see, but which in some sense corresponds with your emotions” But what I think Price understands (as Garner does) is that actually, a person is often a walking bag of complex relations to a body and to emotions—all of which won’t really be reproduced by uploading yourself to a giant computer somewhere. Particularly, Price’s take on the incredibly strange practices of what he calls ‘circumpolar shamanism’, is just endlessly fascinating. He retells dozens of stories, but the one that I’d really like to draw attention to is called ‘The Invisible Battlefield’. The story begins with “the nornir , or the terrible women of Darraðarljóð , [who] are spinning the web of war that will decide the outcome of battle”: On looms of power, perhaps made from human bodies, the grey cloth is slowly taking shape, dyed with blood. Each thread is a man’s life, weaving in and out of those around him. In Valholl and Sessrumnir, benches are being cleared and a reception prepared for those who will shortly be taking their places in the halls of the gods. “Those who will shortly be taking their places in the halls of the gods”—in other words, the dead. And then he depicts the valkyrjur arriving on the battlefield to collect them, with “their swan-wings spreading white behind them”. We see the increasingly visible presence of the supernatural on the battlefield to the magicians that accompanied every fighting force from Scandinavania, and tried to boost its supernatural capabilities by changing form, fighting in bird-form in the sky, often against these incredibly powerful deity entities: The sorcerers change form, their spirits fighting in the sky in constantly shifting animal shapes, sometimes even transforming into weapons or sharpened objects to pierce their opponents’ toughened hides. They try to overcome each new choice of form, thinking ahead to gain an advantage. Some try to block the route home between body and spirit, forcing the free souls of their enemies to drift to shapeless destruction. Increasingly, you’re seeing the visible battlefield, but also the invisible battlefield occupied by the dead, by armies of the dead, and by the armies of those who seek dead bodies and want to collect them and take them back to Valholl, or want to use them to make looms or to tell the future or to do magic. “The Angels of Mons was based on a short story about Agincourt bowmen written by the fantasy writer Arthur Machen. But people took it for a real report, and then started saying they’d seen it, too” It’s the idea that behind the obvious and the everyday is a world that you can’t see, but which in some sense corresponds with your emotions. It’s the fear you feel of death . If you visit any battlefield—even battlefields that are now quite old, like those of the First World War —there’s a haunting sense that here the dead still are, and they’re not going away. For instance, there’s this vast ossuary at Verdun, which has the bones of 55,000 unidentified men in it. There are still trenches where men were buried alive and they haven’t been reburied yet. That kind of haunting of the landscape means that a narrative where the landscape is always haunted, by supernatural entities that transcend death, makes a lot of sense. Nor is it insignificant that World War One was a war in which people were heavily invested in the idea that those entities were present in battles. The very famous instance of that was the idea of the Angels of Mons; really, that was based on a short story about Agincourt bowmen written by the fantasy writer Arthur Machen. But people took it for a real report. And then they all started saying they’d seen it, too, because it fitted with the way the war felt to them—the explosive power of war to destroy people’s sense of who they were. And particularly taboo, in war, because you’re not actually supposed to acknowledge that you’re terrified. You’re not actually supposed to announce to your friends and relations that you really don’t want to go back, and that you’d rather hide under the sofa for the duration. There’s some sense in which the fear and horror evoked by battle itself is often the thing that people can’t bring themselves to talk about. And when they do talk about it, it’s often with a sense of guilt, because it induces survivor guilt in people who didn’t, for instance, get taken after Valholl—the lucky ones. Yes. He talks about the feminization of sorcery and the extent to which sorcery effeminizes some of the shaman figures. I think all of us have a post-Victorian, romanticized view of sorcery. “It’s a famous urban myth that there are now so many people on the planet that they outnumber the dead. They really don’t. The dead outnumber us twenty to forty times” What Price is trying to do is push that aside in favor of something that’s much more about telling the truth than saying what we think we ought to say. Part of the power of these figures of sorcery is their willingness to acknowledge the perpetual presence of the dead in the landscape. The dead still outnumber the living. People often get this wrong—it’s a famous urban myth that there are now so many people on the planet that they outnumber the dead. They really don’t. The dead outnumber us twenty to forty times. It’s part of the reason that London’s so much higher up now, geologically and archeologically, than it was. But we’re nothing like as terrified as we once were. That, in a way, is what all of these books are about. What these writers are trying to do is encourage people to face truthfully the fact that mortality is still a problem the human race has not solved. We mostly now manage our feelings about death by pretending it’s not happening. And that’s not really managing your feelings—that’s actually just burying your head in the sand. I think it could be a recognition of what our society doesn’t provide to us. And there’s not really a lot of point in a society—or a religion—that’s so delicate in its sensibilities that it doesn’t provide anyone with any emotional equipment to deal with challenges that they will end up facing. Challenges like bereavement. I think one of the reasons that we find elderly women so horrifying is that they are literally a kind of dead end. We’ve now created a culture—good old us!—that is far, far more rigorously ageist than any culture previously on Earth. Girls at fifteen are having Botox before they even get any facial lines. On the other hand, you have to argue, what is it that terrifies us so much about the spectacle of age? I think it’s actually a sign that we’re no longer managing our feelings about death in any way. Nor is it insignificant that the witch trials begin at pretty much the same moment as the European Reformation in religion, which radically resets relations with the dead by deleting purgatory and the cult of the saints. Whereas previously you could be useful to the dead by praying for them. That’s useful if you were rude to Aunt Maud the day before she died; it helps alleviate guilt. Or, alternatively, the dead could be useful to you, because you could ask them to act on your behalf in front of God, just as you’d ask a local rich person to act. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But the Reformation nixes both of those relations with the dead. And sometimes it makes things really, really violent and dramatic. My favorite story concerns the ossuary at St. Paul’s Cathedral—old St. Paul’s, before the Wren cathedral was built. In the middle of the night, this huge group of carts pulled up outside of the cathedral, and they took all the bones in the ossuary, loaded them into the carts, took them down to the local marsh, threw them into the marsh, and threw dung on top of them. It’s this obviation of the dead, because they decided they want to stamp out any Catholic tendency to pray for the dead. That’s right! Absolutely that. It’s so gobsmackingly insensitive. How would you feel, if your relatives were buried in a graveyard, and you got up one morning and realized the graveyard had been turned into a theme park? And that all the bones had vanished from the cemetery and been replaced by swing sets? It’s that. Most people would feel a very personal sense of violation. But that’s simply one of the kinds of events that people had to face. “In Norse myth, old age is an old woman” The consequence was that in deleting good relations with the dead, people were inspired to a greater level of fear than before about the passing of time. The visible figures of the poor, elderly, disabled trundling around, looking as though they weren’t long for this world, came to represent old age and death for them. Let’s not forget that in Norse myth, old age is an old woman. And she beats Thor at wrestling because even Thor can’t top old age! Arguably. Additionally, one of the effects of the Reformation is that over time it tends to delete the grey areas of folklore. Everything is black or white. You’re either going to the hot place or you’re going to heaven—there’s no in-between. There’s no purgatory; there’s no limbo. Similarly, every supernatural entity has to come from either heaven or hell. All those middling beings like fairies and ghosts also get dropped. Anything that does bad stuff is, therefore, a demon. Previously, it’s quite likely that some of what witches describe in the trial literature as ‘familiars’ were originally household fairies, brownies and hobs. Some of the practices that witches describe in their confessions are very like the practices associated with such entities: the notable one is leaving out a bowl of cream or milk for them, which again is a trans-national custom. (Scandinavians also do it for trolls and elves.) There are a lot of descriptions of people doing it for their demon, and the demons often sound quite a lot like fairies or elves—bearing in mind that fairies and elves are hobs. If they’re household brownies, they’ve got hair all over their bodies. The word ‘hobbit’ in Tolkien derives from the term ‘hob’, so they’re hairy and small. Interestingly, the reformed Church won’t have a bean of this. From its point of view, all these entities must be demons—because they’re not angels, so what else could they be? They can only either be delusions of strange old women or demons. I think so. Certainly, prior to the Reformation, they’re much more flexible and overlapping compared to after the Reformation. The Reformation really happens at different times in different places, and even happens differently to different individuals. If you look at the Lancashire witch trial of 1612, the two older women in their nineties accused in that trial are, according to their own children, using charms that we would probably think of as Catholic prayers. They’re getting people to invoke the five wounds of Jesus Christ, and to say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria afterwards, in those terminologies, in Latin. For a very theologically up-to-the-minute Protestant, those prayers are themselves kind of diabolical, because by that stage, they’ve decided in their own minds that the Catholic church is all about Satan. “One of the effects of the Reformation is that over time it tends to delete the grey areas of folklore. Everything is black or white” Again, if you’re doing stuff that Protestants think is bad, there’s no grey area. There’s no room for tolerance. You’re either right or wrong. In that sense, it’s quite terrifying. It’s a terrifying worldview. And it persists to this day—it’s very similar to what we saw when the Harry Potter books were published in America. It’s horrifying, isn’t it? But alternatively, there are also all those people who believe stories of how their children were possessed by Satan after reading those books, which is the flipside of that, the other kind of crazy. This is where I should probably shut up, but I find the determinism of the sorting hat quite troubling. The idea that you are a Slytherin, you are a Gryffindor. Especially when you’re eleven years old, for God’s sakes. Adults, too. Don’t you find it a bit worrying? It reminds me of Calvinist pre-destination, where from the beginning of time you’re destined to go to the hot place or not. You’re right about less sophisticated. As though you can’t be cunning and brave, as though you can’t be both scholarly and intelligent and loyal. The absolutism of the categories does my head in."