The woman with the staff
In the old North, when a community needed to know what was coming, it sent for a woman.
She was called a volva, which most likely means "staff-bearer," or a spakona, a woman who sees. She traveled from farm to farm, was received with honor, was seated above the household, and spoke of the season ahead, of sickness and health, and of the fates of those who asked. Her craft was called seidr.
She is the first voice in the greatest of the mythological poems. Voluspa, "The Prophecy of the Seeress," is spoken by a volva whom Odin himself has sought out, and it is from her that he, and we, learn how the world began and how it will end.
What the sources say about seidr
Seidr appears in the sagas and poems as a kind of magic concerned with seeing what is hidden and with affecting minds and fortunes. It could be used to foretell, to bless a season, to find what was lost, and also to harm: to confuse, to weaken, to bring ill luck. The sources do not pretend it was always benign.
They agree that it belonged to women. Snorri says that Freyja first taught it to the Aesir and that Odin became its master, but that for men the practice carried such a charge of unmanliness that it was left to the priestesses. Men who practiced it in the sagas were scorned and sometimes killed. Whatever seidr involved, it was powerful enough to be feared and female enough to be policed.
Related arts
- Spa is prophecy or foresight as such. Not every seer worked seidr.
- Galdr is sung or spoken magic: charms, often in verse.
- Utiseta, "sitting out," is keeping vigil outdoors at night, on a mound or at a crossroads, to gain knowledge from the dead or the spirits. Medieval Norwegian law forbade it by name.
The seeress in Greenland
The fullest description of a working seeress comes from the Saga of Erik the Red, written in the thirteenth century about events around the year 1000. In a time of famine, a Greenland farmer invites the seeress Thorbjorg, called the Little Volva, to his hall.
The saga dwells on her dress: a dark blue cloak set with stones to the hem, a string of glass beads, a hood of black lambskin lined with white catskin, catskin gloves, calfskin shoes, a belt with a pouch for her charms, and a staff with a knob bound in brass and set with stones. She is given a high seat with a cushion stuffed with hen feathers and a special meal.
The next day she asks for women who know the song called vardlokkur, needed to call the spirits. Only one is found: Gudrid, a young Christian woman, who learned it from her foster-mother in Iceland. She sings reluctantly and so beautifully that the seeress says many spirits have come who would otherwise have stayed away. Thorbjorg then foretells the end of the famine and a great future for Gudrid's descendants.
Reading this account
The saga was written by a Christian more than two centuries after the events. Some of its details may be literary. But the staff, the high seat, the song, the circle of women, and the honor shown to the seeress all match other evidence, and the passage remains the best single witness we have.
What archaeology adds
Since the nineteenth century, excavators have found iron and wooden staffs in the graves of women across Scandinavia. Many have a distinctive basket-shaped section near the top. They are too slender for cooking spits and too elaborate for walking sticks, and they come from graves that are often rich and unusual.
The best known is a woman buried around 980 at the ring fortress of Fyrkat in Denmark. She lay in the body of a wagon, dressed in fine blue and red cloth with gold thread, with silver toe rings, a staff, a small purse of henbane seeds, and amulets. On the Swedish island of Oland, another woman was buried with a long iron staff tipped with a small bronze house. One of the two women in the great Oseberg ship burial may also have been such a figure.
No grave comes with a label. But taken together with the texts, these finds make it very likely that the staff-bearing seeress was a real and honored office, held by women, across the Viking world.
Older than the Vikings
The seeress did not begin with the sagas. Roman writers describe prophetic women among the Germanic peoples a thousand years earlier, some of whom directed the policy of whole tribes. Their story is told in Seeresses of the Germanic World.
Seidr in modern Heathenry
From the 1980s onward, some Heathens have worked to rebuild a practice of seership from these fragments. The best-known form is often called oracular seidr or high-seat work: a seer, supported by singers, enters a trance and answers questions put by those present. It is a modern reconstruction, inspired by the Greenland account and filled out with techniques learned elsewhere. Those who do it well are candid about that.
It is also optional. Magic was never part of blot or symbel, and many devout Heathens have no interest in it at all. You do not need to practice seidr to be a Heathen, and practicing it does not make anyone more of one.
Our guidance
Heathen Women United does not train or certify seers. Where members take part in trance or oracular work, we ask that it be done with care:
- Be honest about what is reconstructed and what is attested.
- Take part only by free and informed consent, and make it easy for anyone to step out.
- Never use the authority of the seat to pressure, frighten, or control another person.
- Do not offer oracular answers in place of medical, legal, or mental health care.
- Have experienced people present who are not in trance and who are responsible for everyone's well-being.
The seeress of the sagas held her place because communities trusted her. That trust is the part of the tradition most worth reviving.