Magic and Witchcraft Historicized, Localized, and Ethnicized: A Response to Stephen Mitchell’s Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

Magic and Witchcraft Historicized, Localized, and EthnicizedA Response to Stephen Mitchell's Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages Thomas A. Dubois Keywords Scandanavia, Witchcraft, Middle Ages, Early Modern Europe, Inuit, Sámi, Christianity, Indigenous Religion, Syncretism, Myth, Sagas, Ethnicity Important works deserve serious discussion. The book that stands at the focus of this symposium is a welcome addition to a long and copious body of scholarship concerning the topics of magic and supernatural aggression in medieval Scandinavia. Stephen A. Mitchell's Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages is a solid and useful work, full of valuable insights and well suited to both scholarly study and the classroom. It is my pleasure to respond here to Mitchell's work, providing below both a summary of what I regard as some of the work's strongest contributions and suggesting a few areas of further research that might proceed from the foundation created by this work. Mitchell presents and explores the Nordic region as an area defined by both the continuity of pre-Christian traditions and the doctrines and lore of imported European Christendom. Both the idea of practitioners skilled in communicating with the supernatural and that of supernatural aggression instigated by people bearing ill will toward rivals were accepted elements of both pre-Christian and Christian worldviews in the Nordic region during the medieval period. Thus, one of the tasks for the modern scholar—as for writers of the medieval sagas, vitae, and other documents surveyed in Mitchell's study—was to differentiate between "old" and "new" lore, native and foreign. In many cases, fusion between the two sets of beliefs was so complete and normalized that it is difficult and misleading to try to separate the sources out. In other cases, the sources' stance on supernatural occurrences depends not so much on the acts themselves as on the practitioner: supernatural acts by a witch lead to castigation and suppression, while similar acts by saints are treated as valued miracles. Belief in the existence of miracles necessitated [End Page 82] belief in the existence of demonic aggression, and the medieval Christian had little doubt regarding either. Mitchell focuses on textual evidence from a philological-folkloristic perspective. He examines sagas, law codes, and various products of Christian institutions in detail for what they tell us about imagined or actual concepts of witchcraft and magic. This textual focus, of course, brings with it a set of thorny methodological questions, particularly related to the fact that most of the written materials left to us (apart from some runic inscriptions and arguably, some of the skaldic and mythological poetry) were produced not in a pre-Christian environment but within a consciously Christian institutional setting. Questions of textual accuracy or, more pointedly, of textual agenda come to the fore, particularly in any discussion of avowedly pre-Christian or conversion-era traditions. The scholar is obligated to make careful (ultimately conjectural) judgments regarding the reasons why a given writer chose to include a description of a magic practice or ritual in a given text, despite the writer's own often emphatically Christian identity. As Mitchell shows, drawing on a century of research along these lines, no hard-and-fast rules obtain for making such judgments. Rather, the task of the analyst is to arrive at the most probable explanation for each specific textual instance within its context of production and reception. Mitchell's study contributes admirably to this piecemeal process, reconciling at various points the more strident and disputed positions of earlier or contemporary scholars. Added to the issue of Christian agenda is the fact that the materials left to us—be they textual or material—often evince a startling blending of native pre-Christian and imported continental materials, arriving in the region through the rich medium of Latin learning and representing centuries of evolving understandings of nature and the supernatural. A single thirteenth-century text such as Snorri's Prose Edda or Heimskringla can combine descriptions of the pre-Christian god Óðinn, medieval accounts of saints' miracles, and details of Virgil's Aeneid into a single, seemingly unified understanding that nonetheless bristles with internal contradictions and ambiguities. The scholar's work is...

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