Old Norse Folklore

The second volume of Old Norse Folklore explores medieval and early modern Nordic magic and witchcraft, covering syncretism, continuity, survival, and the reconstruction of pagan beliefs and cultic practices in this last area of western Europe to be Christianized. This volume not only considers these issues but also pulls back the curtain on more obscure, yet important, corners of Nordic magico-religious tradition. In these chapters, Stephen A. Mitchell draws on materials from many different periods of the vast Nordic world, stretching from Greenland to the Baltic, and examines such diverse witnesses as sagas, judicial records, ballads, synodal statutes, runes, proverbs, church murals, leechbooks, and the language used to discuss magic and its actors. Old Norse Folklore addresses how theology helped to shape the Nordic magical world and how language can reveal this world, how magic was used as a practical matter in (and what it meant philosophically to) the medieval Nordic world, and how inherited traditions between and among the historically connected societies of northern Europe impacted cultural developments in late medieval Scandinavia.

The medieval northern world consisted of a vast and culturally diverse region both geographically, from roughly Greenland to Novgorod and culturally, as one of the last areas of Europe to be converted to Christianity . Old Norse Folklore explores the complexities of this fascinating world in case studies and theoretical essays that connect orality and performance theory to memory studies, and myths relating to pre-Christian Nordic religion to innovations within late medieval pilgrimage song culture. Old Norse Folklore provides critical new perspectives on the Old Norse world, some of which appear in this volume for the first time in English. Stephen A. Mitchell presents emerging methodologies by analyzing Old Norse materials to offer a better understandings ofunderstanding of Old Norse materials. He examines, interprets, and re-interprets the medieval data bequeathed to us by posterity—myths, legends, riddles, charms, court culture, conversion narratives, landscapes, and mindscapes—targeting largely overlooked, yet important sources of cultural insights.