It is the most mysterious and most feared art of the North: seiðr, the magic with which one does not merely see fate but re-weaves it. Even Odin, the highest god, bowed to learn it – from a woman. A journey into the world of the seeresses, the staffs and the trance.
Seiðr (roughly „sayth-r") is the operative magic of the Viking Age – unlike mere fortune-telling, an act of intervention. The Norse imagined fate (örlög) as a weave, spun by the Norns. Whoever mastered seiðr could not only read the threads of this weave but re-knot them – weave a new event into being. Even the etymology fits: seiðr is probably related to „cord, fetter, snare".
Its purposes were as varied as life itself: to foresee the future and the weather, to secure the harvest or the catch, to heal sickness or send it, to compel love, to „bind" and cripple enemies in battle, to find hidden things – and to rob another person’s mind of its will. Seiðr could bless and curse. It was power in its purest, most dangerous form.
The sources distinguish several arts that often overlap. Spá is seeing, prophecy – the gift of gazing into fate and the future (our word „spy" is related). Seiðr is the active trance-magic that intervenes and changes. Galdr, by contrast, is chanted magic, incantation (from gala, „to crow, to sing") – often tied to runes and rather ascribed to men. Add to this útiseta, „sitting out": sitting alone outdoors at night to make contact with spirits and the dead.
The central figure of seiðr is the völva, the wandering seeress. Her very name says it all: it comes from vǫlr, „staff" – the völva is the „staff-bearer". Such women travelled from farm to farm, were honourably received and consulted for counsel in return for food and pay. Their standing was high, their power real.
The most famous description stands in the Saga of Erik the Red: in Greenland the seeress Þorbjörg comes to a farm to read the future in a time of famine. The saga describes her appearance in detail: a blue cloak set with stones, a hood of black lambskin lined with white catskin, gloves of catskin, a staff with a knob and brass fittings, a belt with a tinder-pouch. She is seated on a raised high-seat platform (seiðhjallr) and given a special meal of the hearts of every animal on the farm. Above all, though, she needs a song: the young Guðríðr sings the varðlokkur, the „spirit-luring" chant that summons the helping spirits – only then does the völva fall into trance and prophesy.
Where does this art come from? From the race of the Vanir. In the Ynglinga saga Snorri reports that Freyja mastered seiðr and was the first to bring it to the Æsir – indeed taught it to the gods at all. Freyja is thus the true mistress of seiðr, a goddess of love, wealth, death and magic in one.
The same direction is pointed by the enigmatic Gullveig of the Völuspá: a sorceress pierced by the Æsir with spears and burned three times – and three times reborn. Under the name Heiðr she then wanders as a völva. Many scholars (Rudolf Simek among them) see in Gullveig/Heiðr a figure of Freyja herself; her appearance triggers the Æsir–Vanir War – as if the Æsir first tried to destroy the foreign magic-power before they took it up.
“Heid they called me wherever I came, the well-versed seeress; / spells I knew, I bewitched the mind; / ever was I the delight of wicked women.”— Völuspá (Heiðr/Gullveig), after Karl Simrock (public domain)
And then there is Odin. According to the Ynglinga saga he mastered seiðr like no other – yet with this magic came „such weakness" that it was held shameful for men. That is the heart of it: seiðr was women’s work. For a man to practise it meant ergi – unmanliness, a deep social taboo. With exactly this Loki mocks the All-father in the Lokasenna: Odin, he says, worked magic like a völva on the isle of Samsey and went about „in unmanly fashion".
That the highest god took this shame upon himself is telling. Odin sacrifices everything for knowledge and power – his eye at Mímir’s well, himself upon the world-tree, and his manly honour too. He is the great boundary-crosser: with necromancy he wakes a dead völva from the grave (in Baldrs draumar), he has the seeress of the Völuspá prophesy the whole history of the world, he sends his spirit out in animal shape (hamför) and carries the speaking head of Mímir with him. Where Freyja is the born mistress, Odin is the obsessed pupil.
And the third great figure? Frigg, Odin’s wife, „knows all fates" – but she does not speak them. In the Lokasenna it is said that Frigg knows the lot of all yet tells it to no one. She thus stands for another side of the same power: the silent knowledge of örlög, without the völva’s open intervention. Some scholars suspect a once-shared goddess behind Frigg and Freyja anyway (more in our article Freya or Frigg?). Knowing, weaving and keeping silent – among the great female figures of the North they lie close together.
And then there is the object that makes the myth tangible: a real seiðr staff. In Viking graves lay iron rods matching exactly what the sagas describe. The archaeologist Neil Price gathered some 40 such graves across Scandinavia; the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm alone holds five of these ornate „völva staffs".
The most famous comes from Klinta on the island of Öland: an iron staff with bronze ornament and a tiny house as its crown – read as an emblem of Freyja’s hall, the world-tree or the thread of life. A second, 82 cm long, came from Köpingsvik (also Öland), accompanied by a jug from Central Asia and a cauldron from Western Europe – the buried woman was far-travelled and wealthy. At Fyrkat (Denmark) the seeress lay in a wagon-body, wrapped in blue-and-red clothes with gold thread, with silver toe-rings, a chair-shaped amulet (perhaps the emblem of the seiðhjallr) – and with seeds of henbane, a poisonous intoxicant. In the ship-burial of Oseberg (Norway) two women were found with a wooden staff and cannabis and henbane seeds. Such plants can deepen a trance.
Striking is the shape of many staffs: they resemble a distaff, the spinning tool. That fits the world-view exactly, for fate is spun and woven – the völva’s staff is the tool with which she reaches into that weave. Not for nothing is she called „the staff-bearer".
In honesty: not every one of these iron rods need have been a magic wand – some may be roasting spits. But the clustering of staff, exotic gifts, intoxicating plants and high rank precisely in women’s graves is too striking to be chance.
In the Icelandic sagas seiðr is rarely harmless. In Gísla saga an enemy has the sorcerer Þorgrímr nef work a seiðr so that no one will help the outlawed Gísli – a curse that slowly drives him to his death. In Laxdœla saga the sorcerer family around Kotkell raise a seiðr platform, sing their spell-songs upon it and call up a deadly storm that drowns a young man. Such seiðr-workers were feared – and not seldom stoned or slain when they were caught. Magic was power, and power was dangerous; those who held it stood at the edge of society: revered, needed and mistrusted all at once.
How close does seiðr stand to shamanism? The Swede Dag Strömbäck laid the foundation in 1935 with his work Sejd and stressed the closeness to the trance-techniques of the Sámi, their drum and their spirit-journeys. The Briton Neil Price in his influential book The Viking Way (2002/2019) has read seiðr comprehensively as a kind of Norse shamanism. Others, such as Clive Tolley (Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, 2009), urge caution with the label. What is certain: seiðr, trance, staff, high seat and spirit-sending form a coherent system – whether one calls it „shamanism" remains a scholarly dispute.
Freyja – mistress of seiðr · Odin · Freya or Frigg? · The Norns & fate · Runes & galdr · The Merseburg Charms.
Primary: Völuspá, Lokasenna, Vafþrúðnismál, Baldrs draumar, Hávamál (Poetic Edda), public domain Karl Simrock (1851); Snorri Sturluson, Ynglinga saga (Heimskringla); Eiríks saga rauða. Scholarship: Dag Strömbäck, Sejd (1935); Neil S. Price, The Viking Way (2nd ed. 2019); Clive Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic (2009); Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; Britt-Mari Näsström, Freyja – the Great Goddess of the North (1995); National Museum of Denmark (Fyrkat).