“Thorbjǫrg was dressed in a blue cloak and was inlaid with gems almost to her skirt, and wore glass beads around her neck.
On her head he wore a lambskin hood lined with ermine.
In her hand he carried a scepter with a handle, it was covered with brass and adorned with gems around her handle.
She had a large leather bag where she kept the talismans necessary for her knowledge.
At her feet he wore calfskin shoes, on her hands he wore ermine gloves, white and lined inside her.
He begged them to bring those women who knew the spells known as Varðlokur to her. "
Erik the red saga
The vǫlva, the "stick bearer", the holder of the seiðr, was an important figure in the Viking world.
Seer, sorceress, priestess... it is difficult to find in modern language a term that is able to describe the essence of what was, then, a pivotal figure of Viking society and which is, today, a fascinating key to understanding that world.
In relating to the vǫlva it is of primary importance to understand that our modern concepts of "religion" and "magic" are not compatible with those of the Viking era, where the whole structure of witchcraft was intertwined with that of worship.
In 1986, when Régis Boyer published his own study on Nordic magic, he chose "the world of the double" as the title.
As he makes clear in the introduction, it is often a surprise to realize how fundamental the role played by the practice of magic in the Scandinavian mental universe is.
In his thesis, the "Double" is seen as a sort of parallel belief to the higher apparatus of the Viking "religion" proper.
At the time there were seiðr rituals for divination, for seeking the hidden both in the secrets of the mind and in physical places, for healing, for luck, for controlling the weather, for calling fish and game and, of course, there were also for the opposite of these things, to curse an individual or a company, to ruin the earth and make it sterile, to induce disease, to tell false futures and thus put their recipients on the road to disaster, to injure, mutilate and killing, in internal disputes and especially in battle.
It is important to point out that seiðr seems to have been an extension of the mind and its faculties.
Even in the context of his battlefield, rather than outright violence, it mainly involved the clouding of judgment, the freezing of the will, the fatal hesitation.
It was also closely related to the summoning of spirits and other beings of various kinds, who could be bound to the will of the sorcerer and then sent to carry out his orders.
In this regard, an interesting source is the Scandinavian law codes of the early Middle Ages.
In one of these, coming from a collection of acts of the royal and episcopal court of 1281, preserved in a manuscript of about 1480, in a passage it is stated that, "if it is discovered that a man or a woman has performed seiðr, or has raised a large troll to ride on people or animals... then they will be hunted beyond the parish boundaries, and will give up all their property in favor of the king and the bishop ”.
