Folklore and Mythology; Germanic Langs. and Lits.

See: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14800.html

“impressively interdisciplinary”—Edward Bever, Jrnl of Interdisciplinary History

“comprehensive and enlightening”—Thomas DuBois, JEGP

"an impressive book”—Jenny Jochens, Speculum

“deft use of the full array of sources”—Michael Bailey, American Historical Review

“challenges established views”—Rune Blix Hagen, Historisk tidsskrift

“excellent study of ‘religious’ change”—Nicolas Meylan, Jrnl of Religion

“excellent overview”—Lars Lönnroth, Svenska Dagbladet

“how other shelves in the library of cultural history can be reorganized”—John Ødemark, Arv

“of great value not only to scholars of Scandinavia but to anyone interested in the complex history of European witch-beliefs”—Jacqueline Simpson, Folklore

---
Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells.

Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland.

By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.

Stephen A. Mitchell is Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University and author of Heroic Sagas and Ballads."

From the Preface: "In the modern world artistic creativity necessarily implies originality; as a rule, we have great difficulty assessing the works of an age in which such notions were for the most part still quite distant. The heroic sagas taken up in the present volume, the so-called fornaldarsögur (literally, 'sagas of antiquity'; singular fornaldarsaga), reflect a different kind of literary artifice, a kind of creativity practiced in medieval Iceland which drew heavily on commonly known and widely used narrative traditions. It should not be assumed, however, that genius and artistic excellence do not enter into a discussion of the legendary fiction of thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century Iceland -- they do, but the value modern readers place on the originality and uniqueness of a character or an episode makes a very poor standard for evaluating the literary merits of such texts as those taken up in the chapters that follow. One consequence has been that these tales are often relegated to the status of "poor cousins" within the family of Icelandic literature; another is that they are more likely to yield results to extraliterary consideration than to conventional literary criticism."

From the Introduction: "Almost all scholarly treatments of the sagas can be characterized as gravitating toward one of two poles, namely, belief in either oral or written sagas. Of course, such terms as the 'oral saga' or the 'written saga' connote much more than the simple equation of the medieval texts with the acts of speaking or writing. The question might be phrased as follows: is the background to the sagas' art to be conceived of as native and essentially spoken (or verbal, or performed, or recited), or is the background based on foreign models in which the key aspects of composition have been shaped by literacy? Neither of these positions is absolute: proponents of the oral saga readily concede that the available works have come down to us in a written medium that cannot have failed to impart something to the text, and even the most strident advocates of the written saga will agree that the texts are frequently informed by oral traditions. In general, these orientations reflect preoccupations with "the folk" and "the court." In the history of the field, these two views have been called many things, but while the labels change, the positions shift, and the interpretations their adherents place on the evidence vary, the divisions (if not their centers of gravity) are not much different now from what they were at the turn of the century…"

Sammanfattning

Till de märkligaste litterära produkterna från Stormaktstiden hör Agneta Horns självbiografi. Antagligen skriven mitt på 1650-talet, kort efter hennes mans död, beskriver sin författarinnas "wandringestidh," en fras Agneta Horn (AH) använder både bokstavligen och metaforiskt. Föreliggande studie an Agneta Horns leverne tar upp en hittills obeaktad aspekt av AH:s författarskap, bibelcitaten som följer den berättande texten i handskriften, UUB X240 (Horn). Trots den svenska litteraturens mycket introspektiva karaktär under flera århundraden, har ganska litet skrivits om självbiografin som genre i ett nordiskt sammanhang. En följd av detta är, att Agneta Horns leverne uppfattas enbart som biografiskt dokument. Man förbiser därvid, att texten även förtjänar att läsas som ett obestridligen högt personligt, men ändå litterärt verk, styrt av speciella genre-regler. Kanske är det därför som hela handskriften av Agneta Horns leverne aldrig har publicerats, d.v.s., de 548 raderna med bibelcitat på de sju sista bladen av UUB X240 (Horn) saknas i alla tidigare utgåvor av självbiografin.

Efter en diskussion av citatens ursprungliga ordningsföljd (de är nu felaktigt sammanbundna), följer själva citaten från handskriften samt den motsvarande texten from Karl X:s Bibel, som var förebilden till AH:s projekt. Genom framställningen av citaten kan det visas, att sista delen av Agneta Horns leverne är avsevärt mer an anteckningar skrivna av en uttråkad och from änka—deras ordningsföljd tyder på att AH vill beskriva sitt liv en gång till, men nu med samma ord som används i Job och Psaltaren för att uttrycka Jobs och Israels lidande. Med hjälp av bibelcitaten från Karl X:s Bibel som terminus a quo för handskriften, kan det påvisas att Agneta Horns leverne i UUB X240 (Horn) inte kan vara äldre än från år 1655 och förmodligen härstammar från år 1657. Samma år skrev AH i Kerstin Posses stambok en liten dikt vars ordalag återklingar i självbiografin (det skall dock anmärkas att AH säkerligen utnyttjade gamla dagböcker och liknande dokument under utarbetandet av texten, en möjlighet redan Magnus von Platen framkastade 1959).

Monografin tar också upp AH:s berättarstil, som får anses vara relativt modern. För att underlätta denna diskussion, jämförs Agneta Horns leverne med drottning Kristinas memoarer. Det påvisas att AH:s användning av dialog, karakterisering, o.s.v. är nästan utan parallell före 1700-talet. Slutligen diskuteras Agneta Horns leverne som helhet, d.v.s. både den berättande texten och bibelcitaten, och dess anknytning till svensk andaktslitteratur, Carl Carlsson Gyllenhielms Nosce te ipsum i synnerhet.

How should we moderns "read" a medieval text? 1 Thanks to the work of many scholars, not least the pioneering studies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, we are today able to understand the nature and implications of a preserved medieval work's background as an oral text much better than did the early and brilliant (but narrowly gauged) generations that included such giants within Old Norse as

The written residue of oral tradition from the medieval Nordic world encompasses a wide variety of pan-national genres, including charms, legends, and genealogical lore, but modern scholarly attention has generally focused on two areas: (1) the prose (and often prosimetrical) Icelandic sagas and (2) traditional poetry in its two dominant forms, eddic and scaldic.