In mythology, Norse magic was inherently a woman's art,
however, the sagas do record men as well as women practicing magic. The woman of the
Viking Age often had a magic spindle and distaff, and she would weave special
clothing for her family. She would create thread laced with magic spells
and then use it to make her cloth. This inspired me to think of Grýla and wonder perhaps this is
where part of her power came from - the ability to terrorize generations and
have such an evil and terrifying reputation.
What if
instead of concealing the truth, she used her spindle and wove a magic spell
that made people just think they were seeing something
horrifying when in reality she was just an average ugly trollwife? How fun if she was a
A specific type of magic is used to affect the mind, called seiðr . Typical
symptoms include forgetfulness, delusion, illusion, or fear. In
mythology, a sudden mental or even a physical fog is a common attribute of this
type of magic. This type of magic is called sjónhverfing,
a delusion or "deceiving of the sight" where the victim cannot
see things as they truly are, but instead sees what the seið-witch
wants them to see. In Jón Árnason's writings of the
Icelandic folk stories, his description of Grýla is hideous: “Grýla has three heads and three eyes in each head ... Horribly
long, curved fingernails, icy blue eyes at the back of the head and horns like
a goat, her ears dangle down to her shoulders and are attached to the nose in
front. She has a beard on her chin that is like knotted yarn on a weave with
tangles hanging from it, while her teeth are like burnt rocks in a grate.”
The sagas have many stories where a seið-witch uses a magical illusion to conceal a person or confuse a pursuer. The Viking Answer
Lady (http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/seidhr.shtml)
has a wonderful account of such a story:
Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 20) uses this idea.
A woman called Katla, skilled in seiðr,
wished to save her son Odd from a band of men determined to kill him. As the
men approached the house, Katla told Odd to sit beside her without moving,
while she sat spinning yarn. Arnkell and his men searched the house, but saw
nothing beside Katla but a distaff. They returned a second time, to find Katla
in the porch; she was combing Odd's hair, but it seemed to them that she was
grooming her goat. The third time Odd was lying in a heap of ashes, and they
thought it was Katla's boar sleeping there.
Each time they left
the house they realized that a trick had been played on them, or ‘a goatskin
waved round our heads,' as Arnkell put it, so that Katla could not try the same
deception twice. Finally Geirríðr, another woman skilled in seiðr and a bitter enemy of
Katla came with the men to help them cut through the deceptions. When Katla saw
the rival seið-kona's
blue cloak through her window, she knew that sjónhverfing or illusion would no
longer work. She hid Odd inside the dais, but Geirríðr popped a sealskin bag
over Katla's head, negating her spell casting abilities, and both Odd and Katla
were taken and killed.
An essential portion
of this technique seems to have involved wrapping an enchanted goatskin around
the head of the victim (Reykdoela saga, ch. 14), or over
the witch's own head (Njáls saga, ch. 12). A related
magic was the magical technique called thehuliðshjálmr, the helmet of
hiding or invisibility. The method for invoking the huliðshjálmrvaried, from placing
hands atop the head of the person to be concealed, to throwing magical powders
over them or other means (Ellis-Davidson, 21-24). In another instance, the
special hood worn by the seið-witch
was used to render another person invisible while wearing it (Vatnsdoela saga, ch 44).
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