The Viking World (Routledge Worlds)

ingenuous and vulgar. There are good reasons to assume that these thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts mirror the genres and ...

In the Eddic poem Alvíssmál, the dwarf Alvíss (‘All Wise’ or ‘Omniscient’) is himself an active narrator. The lay is essentially ...

A multitude of conceptions describing human interrelations were invariably linked to the ideas of fate and destiny, and the desi ...

FYLGJA, FYLGJUR The fylgjur are guardian spirits or fetches connected to individual persons or families (Mundal 1993 a; Lindow 1 ...

luck than to success, and the literature is rife with story after story about destructive evil forces, personal ill-will and gre ...

THE HUMAN SOUL There are many Old Norse stories about gods and humans with the capacity to trans- form themselves into temporal ...

hamr, hamrammr. In eddic poetry there is mention of various night-riders, apparently women, who were seen flying through the air ...

Grágás = Laws of Early Iceland. Grágás. The Codex regions of Grágás with material from other manu- scripts, 2 vols, trans. by A. ...

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ( 1 ) SORCERY AND CIRCUMPOLAR TRADITIONS IN OLD NORSE BELIEF Neil Price O ver the past decade or so of researc ...

magic such as gandr, galdr, útiseta and so on – formed a kind of collective, a package of techniques and principles for contacti ...

THE USES OF SORCERY Seiðr and the other magics were evidently used for a wide range of purposes, varying from the solution of do ...

society), and for healing the sick. One of the most common circumstances in which we encounter seiðr is as a tool for divining t ...

of spiritual practices that bears a remarkable similarity to the Scandinavian seiðr and its related rituals. The possible shaman ...

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF OLD NORSE RELIGION Anne-Sofie Gräslund R eligion has always existed in the form of idea ...

sites, and burial customs, indicating ideas of what happened after death, revealed in the graves. Artefacts should also be menti ...

a lot of pig bones, mostly parts of the jaw. At the Viking Age site of Sanda a stone structure of about the same size as the cul ...

has been identified with burnt bones and burnt clay spread all over the area. This phase of the settlement seems to be dated to ...

Remains of an open-air cult site, probably a holy grove, similar to the one suggested at the hilltop of Lunda, have been found a ...

centre of the temple’, so the chair/throne has been stressed as an argument for this interpretation of the figurine. Similar sea ...

References to the god Freyr, the third of the gods mentioned by Adam, as the god of fertility, may also be found in the artefact ...