NORSE MAGIC · LESSON 1 OF 7 · 14 MIN · FREE
What we really know about Norse magic, where it comes from, and the two great arts of galdr and seiðr.
The magic of the Viking Age has been reimagined so often — by Romantic poets, by Wagner, by twentieth-century occultists, by films and games — that it is worth starting with a plain question: how do we know anything about it at all?
The magic of the Viking Age has been reimagined so often — by Romantic poets, by Wagner, by twentieth-century occultists, by films and games — that it is worth starting with a plain question: how do we know anything about it at all?
Almost everything we read about Norse magic was written down after Scandinavia became Christian, mostly in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries.
So treat the stories with care. They tell us how medieval Icelanders imagined their pagan past — which is often the best we have.
The sources distinguish two kinds of magic.
| Galdr | Seiðr | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Spoken or chanted spells, often with runes | Trance-work: seeing, prophecy, and the turning of minds and luck |
| Patron | Odin, master of runes and charms | Freyja, who taught it to the gods |
| Who practised it | Men and women | Above all women; for men it carried shame (ergi) |
| Learn more | Galdr | Seiðr |
In Ynglinga saga Snorri says that Freyja first taught seiðr to the Æsir, and that Odin mastered it too — but that it brought such ergi, unmanliness, that men were ashamed to practise it and it was taught to the priestesses. Galdr, by contrast, was the art of the poet and the rune-master.
Archaeology adds what the texts leave out. At Fyrkat in Denmark a woman was buried in the late 10th century with an iron staff, a pouch holding the seeds of henbane — a powerful and poisonous plant — and other unusual goods. Many archaeologists read her as a völva, a seeress, of the kind the sagas describe. Several such graves are known across Scandinavia.
Today the old religion has been revived as Heathenry (Ásatrú); in Iceland, Ásatrúarfélagið was recognised as a religion in 1973. Most Heathens are welcoming and reject racism outright. But runes and Norse symbols have also been stolen by extremists. Learn the real history, and refuse any version of it built on hatred.
Read Hávamál stanzas 138–141 (Bellows' translation is free online), where Odin hangs on the tree and takes up the runes. Write in your journal what you think the story says about the price of wisdom.
4 questions — choose an answer to check it.
1.Who wrote the Prose Edda, around 1220?
2.According to Ynglinga saga, who first taught seiðr to the gods?
3.Which art of magic is chiefly chanted spells?
4.What was found in the grave of a woman at Fyrkat in Denmark, often taken to be a seeress?
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