Seeresses and cunning-women
The semi-fictional seeress who encountered Gudrid in Greenland has real, physical counterparts. The grave of a female excavated in the 1950s at the Viking period fortress of Fyrkat, near Hobro in eastern Jutland, appears to mark her out as a shaman, seeress or volva.
She had been interred within the frame of a horse-drawn carriage – a hybrid, perhaps, between the bed burials of Anglo-Saxon England and the ship burials of contemporary Scandinavia. Entombed with her were a pair of shears and the spindle whorls that no woman would be without in life or death. Her tunic (dyed blue and red and trimmed with gold thread), her silver toe rings, a duck’s foot silver pendant and two bronze bowls, which might have come from as far away as Central Asia, show her to have been a woman of status and wealth. What makes her special are the contents of a metal-bound wooden box found at her feet: an owl pellet, small bird and animal bones and a little silver amulet shaped like a chair – the calling sign of the seeress, perhaps? Close by her head lay a unique box-brooch, which had held white lead. Seeds from the poisonous hallucinogen henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), contained in a wallet or purse at her waist, and the presence of a heavily corroded iron staff with bronze fittings, also buried with her, incline one to believe that she was a practitioner of magic, divination and prophecy. Smoke from burning henbane, inhaled while incanting verse or ritual songs, would help to induce a trance. The iron stick might be her wand (the Norse word volva means ‘wand-bearer’).One of the most important collections of Norse legendary verse, known as the Poetic Edda, begins with a ‘Seeress’s prophecy’, a poem of 62 stanzas in which the seeress looks back to the beginning of the world, forward to the last great battle of Ragnarok, and beyond even that. Odin the One-Eyed seeks her knowledge of what will come.
Her answers are always allusive; but her sayings are regarded by scholars as the most significant statement of the Norse myth of creation. She accounts for her own profession by describing the first seeress:Bright-one they called her, wherever she came to houses,
The seer with pleasing prophecies, she practised spirit-magic;
She knew seid, seid she performed as she liked,
She was always a wicked woman’s favourite.4
The ‘Bright-one’ alludes to Freja, the goddess of love, war, fertility and death, said to be skilled in seid, a sort of shape-shifting magical practice. A vivid description of the seeress called Thorbjorg (in whose story Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir plays a cameo role) survives in the Eirik the Red’s Saga. Its value as ethnography is suspect – the saga was written in the thirteenth century, long after the Christianisation of Scandinavia. But it is nothing if not evocative:
…Preparations were made to entertain her well, as was the custom… A high seat was set for her, complete with cushion. This was to be stuffed with chicken feathers.
When she arrived… she was wearing a black mantle, with a strap, which was adorned with precious stones set right down to the hem. About her neck she wore a string of glass beads and on her head a hood of black lambskin lined with white catskin. She bore a staff with a knob at the top, adorned with brass set with stones on top. About her waist she had a linked charm belt with a large purse. In it she kept the charms which she needed for her predictions. She wore calfskin boots lined with fur, with long, sturdy laces and large pewter knobs on the ends. On her hands she wore gloves of catskin, white and lined with fur…5
If the description is fanciful, the objects and trappings that accompany her bear a strong resemblance to the paraphernalia buried with the Fyrkat woman, as they do to a much earlier grave of the late fifth or sixth century from Anglo-Saxon England: the so-called cunning-woman from Bidford-on-Avon, in Warwickshire, excavated in 1971. She had been interred in more modest fashion, lying on her back in a plain earth-cut grave.
None of her possessions was especially valuable or exotic: two brooches of a sort found elsewhere in pre-Christian England and Wales; a knife with a bone handle of unusual form, which may have had a surgical function; two strings of beads, one of blue, red and yellow glass and the other of amber. These are common finds, although they bring to mind the beads of the seeress in Eirik’s saga. More telling were a triangular spangle and a disc-shaped pendant with twelve miniature bucket pendants which, analysis by Dr Tania Dickinson suggests, were contained in or sewn onto the outside of a purse tied with thongs whose ends were finished with lace tags. At her side, the Bidford woman wore another purse closed by a pair of copper-alloy rings, which seems to have contained a small metal stud and a cone of antler. Tania argues that the bucket pendants contained either fragments of textiles or other charms, and that they symbolise drinking rituals associated with the cunning-woman’s craft;‡ and the idea that a cunning-woman might also practise as a midwife makes considerable sense.Several charms for women healers survive in Anglo-Saxon texts, mostly concerned with obstetrics or gynaecology. Darker interventions, or the suspicion thereof, attracted notices in the Laws of King ?lfred and of his grandson ?thelstan: women thought to be guilty of causing death by cursing were likely to be sentenced to very unpleasant fates.
Elsewhere in southern England, women might be buried with crystal balls, cylindrical bronze boxes, pieces of broken glass, and objets trouves (something old, reminiscent of the talismanic bridal rhyme). Surviving Old English terms that could refer to women with special or supernatural powers include w?lcyrige (from which Valkyrie derives), wicce (perhaps simply ‘healer’ or ‘medium’) and h?gtesse – a fury – although their contextual nuances are obscure.
Women with special powers, echoing the charismatic healers and visionaries who appear in a more sanctified form in the lives of the early saints and as bogeymen and -women in tall tales of druids, performed important social and psychological functions in societies vulnerable to the multiple caprices of gods, poor harvests, plagues of insects, droughts, storms and floods – not to mention infant mortality, infertility, mental illness and genetic abnormality.
Men and women with the gift of prophecy, with training and knowledge of medicine and a talent for showmanship, played roles later fulfilled by priests, leeches and pretentious charlatans offering hocus-pocus remedies and the power of foresight. That cunning-women and -men were seen as a threat to the orthodoxy of prayer and fasting, of good behaviour, chastity, and submission to the authority of learned men – the stocks-in-trade of Christianity – is demonstrated by many attempts to demonise, ban and punish those who practised what would later be cast in a much more sinister light as witchcraft. The penitential of Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (from 668 to 690) spells it out:If a woman has performed incantations or diabolical divinations, let her do penance for one year. About which it says in the canon: those who observe auguries or auspices or dreams or any kind of divinations according to the customs of the heathens, or introduce men of this kind into their homes in investigating a device of the magicians – if these repent, if they are of the clergy let them be cast out, but if they are truly secular people let them do penance for five years.6
Professional cunning-women, or female shamans, might have been vilified by history. But the evidence of their burials and their appearances in sagas tell us that they were also valued, revered and, quite likely, feared.