Nouvelles Nouvelles Podcast 16: Stephen Mitchell on Scandinavian Folklore and Memorial Landscapes
Interviewers: Nicholas Booker, Edwin "Ted" Nagasawa, and Di Wang
Audio edited by Nicholas Booker
Background music: Matthew Locke’s Suite, No. 6 (ca. 1660) performed by the Early Interval Ensemble (Thanks Early Interval Ensemble for permission to use this recording!)
Time: October 10, 2025
Di: Hello! My name is Di Wang. I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Graduate Research Associate for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies here at The Ohio State University. I'm here with Nick Booker, a PhD candidate in Musicology and Ethnomusicology and Graduate Research Associate for the Center for Folklore Studies and Humanities Institute, as well as Ted Nagasawa, an undergraduate student in Medieval and Renaissance studies.
We are joined today by Professor Stephen Mitchell, who holds a joint appointment at Harvard in Scandinavian and in Folklore and Mythology. Doctor Mitchell has written extensively on Nordic culture and literature, including the folklore of the late medieval and early modern periods, Icelandic sagas, Scandinavian ballads, witchcraft, magic, memory studies, performance and so much more. Thanks so much for joining us.
Dr. Mitchell: Pleasure is mine.
Nick: So, for those who are listening, who are unfamiliar with your work, would you tell us a little bit about your recent book, Old Norse Folklore: Magic, Witchcraft and Charms in Medieval Scandinavia?
Dr. Mitchell: So, it's a bit of a retrospective. There’re a number of articles that, in some ways, were the foundation that led to the 2011-book that's called Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages.
So these were the attempts to sort of get at what was going on with very specific sorts of studies, which led into this more general, kind of statement about the nature of witchcraft and magic—mostly in the later Middle Ages, I suppose you could say—but also, you know, looking back somewhat at the earlier period. Not as early as the late Iron Age, but the beginning, really, with Christianity.
It was this kind of missing in Old Norse Studies. There had been a lot of attention paid over there—very good and intelligent attention—both by literary and religious scholars, but also by archaeologists, at the nature of those topics in the Viking Age. And then, beginning with, especially a group of historians—let's say, maybe 30 or 40 years ago —very, very fine, detailed, often statistically based analyses of what was happening in the Renaissance and later years. A lot of highly localized studies. But there was this huge gap. It was really a sense, I think, in the field, that not much had happened, basically. With Christianity, all the pagan stuff dies away, and we don't really know much about what's going on until about the time of the Reformation. And then we begin to get different kinds of records.
So, it was really an attempt, and the essays in that volume are directed toward digging out what we could from a variety of sources—so everything from runic inscriptions and wall paintings and judicial records, provincial laws and so on from the Middle Ages. So, the contents are basically on that. I also put in, with some pains, to provide an overview of the historiography of the field for non-Scandinavian readers, so they get a sense for what kind of work had been done. Because I think there's really some early 20th-century works by Scandinavians that have never been translated which are worth knowing about. So, I tried to also give it some airtime.
Nick: Fascinating!
Ted: Yeah, it sounds fascinating! Can I ask what got you interested in Norse culture, in medieval Scandinavia? Did you know early on that those were topics you wanted to study in your academic career, or was it something you were drawn to later?
Dr. Mitchell: Serendipity completely. It was the great thing the great universities can do for you. I took a class that I didn't expect to take, and it was up by a wonderful scholar, ?, with whom I then began working more in subsequent quarters, as it was back then, at Cal [i.e. University of California-Berkeley]. And, quite honestly, he denies that this happened, but I remember very distinctly he said, Steve, you're not going to get anywhere unless you know one of the Scandinavian languages. By the way, my wife's teaching Swedish this summer. So, I started taking the languages, and that drew me into going abroad and studying and so on.
And up until that time, I think about the only things I knew about Scandinavia there were these: my parents were very avid antique hunters or junktique hunters. When I was a kid, we were often in these kinds of barns filled with implements, or farm implements and one thing or another. And they always had some corner that had, like, random books. And so, as a kid, I began to collect these, what used to be called “boys’ books,” usually, late 19th century - early 20th century books that were morally instructive: strive and succeed, the Boynton Pluck, you know, titles like that.
And amongst them, I realized there was something I really, really gotten on to. It was a kind of servant of the empire. It was a British writer named George Alfred Henty H-E-N-T-Y. And his trick was that he, as far as I could make out, every single volume was dedicated to some historical moment when it would be interesting if there had been young British lads, and the British lads were always there with their father, who was a businessman or something of that sort.
And because they happened to have grown up there, they spoke the local language, and they spoke English. And that was always the thing, the secret sauce, that allowed them to succeed. So, it didn't matter if it was a medieval Venice or the Boer War. He would place them wherever. And the only reason I bring that up is when you ask me, what did I know about Scandinavia before that? One of them was the 6th, the Thirty Years War. Well, it was with Gustav Adolphus, Lion of the North. The sum total of my knowledge of Scandinavia before going off to college. I'm sorry to say, sort of funny, given the fact that my entire life has been built on that this way.
Ted: What would you say is one of the biggest misconceptions people have about medieval Scandinavia?
Dr. Mitchell: Part of it certainly is the thing that most people know most about, which they think immediately of Vikings, right? And the Vikings, first of all, even within the so-called “Viking Age,” that period from, say, 750 to 1050, or 1000 to 1100, if you prefer, there certainly were Vikings, but not everybody was a Viking. There were plenty of people who never left their farm or hometown, and they were working at home, smithing, farming, doing all the things that people do, raising families.
But for those percentage, you do go away. Again, not all of them are necessarily engaged in what we think of as these barbaric Viking raids, where there's raping and murder and stuff going on. My dear friend Neil Price, with whom I've taught for years in this Viking Studies program, has a beautiful analogy that I think works quite well. If you think about the pirates of the Spanish Maine in the 17th century, they weren't always about plunder and destroying things. They're very much about getting the getting the loot, right? And if you could go to the next town and trade, then you would trade if you could get a good deal. If you didn't think you're getting a good deal, you might pull out a pistol or a sword. So sometimes people describe Vikings as being “well-armed businessmen,” trying to make the best deals that they could. And I don't know if that works perfectly. I think there’re probably different periods. And obviously, sometimes there's the national — the Great Heathen Army probably has conquest as much in mind when they’re roaming around in England as they do other kinds of things.
So, there are obviously differences amongst the Vikings themselves, but probably that image — the Viking — which began at least with some of the big international convocations where countries are on display. You know, think of the Columbian exhibition in Chicago in 1893, with that sort of putting your country on display. And there have been earlier ones as well. That begins, I think, this process where countries began to market themselves. And I think it was the one in 1930 or so — Sweden, which had largely been left out a little bit, because you mainly think of it as being a kind of Norwegian and Danish affair, especially since they were oriented toward the British Isles. And most of our sources, those early sources from the 19th century, are going to be primarily in English. The swedes felt a little bit left out, I think. In the 1930s, they promoted Sweden as the “Land of the Vikings,” and that became kind of a theme. You'll see even today, if you buy T-shirts and Sweden, they'll often say something like that. They too were Vikings. But as they would like to have you believe — very often speaking for the entire country, I realize — they would have you think of them as being traders, not raiders. That they were the ones who were going around the Baltic and down the river system — the Russian river system — to Constantinople, trading all the way. Yes, they might. They probably were doing more of that than perhaps they were doing in the West, but they were also doing their fair share of raiding as well. So it was always this kind of delicate balance. And I'm sure it must have depended entirely on what kind of reception they got, what the possibilities were. So, I think that's the biggest misconception.
And then the other thing that I see quite often is the assumption that because certain things were happening on the continent, that would have happened there. So, you sometimes see, I think, entirely erroneous references to feudalism in Scandinavia. As far as I know, Sweden at least certainly never had any form of feudalism. I don't think anywhere. Should be a little bit cautious about this, because what is Denmark in that period where it extends fairly far south, toward — not as far as, but down toward Humburg, right? I'm not sure what's happening in some of the duchies down there, but certainly Scandinavia itself doesn't have feudalism, which people tend to think anywhere in the Christian West would have had in that period. So, I think that's again, something that's slightly confusing sometimes.
Di: What were concepts of magic in medieval Scandinavia like?
Dr. Mitchell: It’s a great question, but a tough one. It doesn't have any easy answers. I think if we kind of work our way chronologically backwards, starting with the Middle Ages, I think there you see sometimes quite a few references, in fact, to the old gods, and indeed, even up into the modern period. There are charms that are collected in various parts of Scandinavia where they name some of the old gods, but I don't know that they're necessarily thinking of them as being the old gods. They may be names that that sound like devil names. Who knows what they are. But they do get incorporated as recently as the 19th century. You have folklorists who collect material with their naming Frigg and Freyr and Odin and Thor and various charms.
Now, I personally have made the argument often, and that's a large part what that second volume is about, that Odin in particular, seems to live on. And there are some attributes — let you be cautious — the name Odin, and certain of the attributes of the old Odin, seem to live on. As we know, amongst other things that are said about him in some of our earliest sources, is that Odin is a great one for protecting wealth. And if you lose things, he finds them. He's very keen on wealth in a variety of ways, and that tradition continues right on into the 19th century, in fact. I think there might be an argument to be made that it's a fairly specific legacy of the old Pagan traditions. I think, otherwise there can be just names. And it depends a lot also on what particular geographic we region you're talking about.
I think in Iceland, the situation is different because of the nature of Icelandic literary tradition, oral literary tradition, the use of rímur and other traditional poetic practices. I think some of these materials are much more vibrant there amongst the much larger sway of the populace than they are elsewhere in Scandinavia. And so, in Iceland, you'll see, even in the 16th century, charms that are very specific, with certain kinds of figures from the past being named, perhaps a little bit less so elsewhere. But then if we try to go back into the Pagan period, I think it's very, very difficult to know these kinds of questions of mentality and how it was meant to work.
And there I think archaeologist — I mentioned Neil Price earlier, he and ?, have done a lot of work on magic staffs and some of the material objects that are found in the graves of sorceresses, for example. And it suggests a world where amulets, maybe magic potions, certain kinds of magic objects and things that are imbued with power in the minds of the people play an outsized role.
So, I would guess, without knowing for sure, that these are things that might have comparable situations also around the world, in different cultures. Neil has so often pointed toward the possibility that things are being borrowed from the Sami, the so-called Lapps, for example. There’re exchanges going on, cultural as well as economic exchanges, that they may be playing a role in. Those seems to make real sense to me.
Nick: Well, not to ruin the surprise, but could you tell us a little bit about what you'll be speaking about in the Utley lecture later today?
Dr. Mitchell: Oh, sure! Well, this is a, I guess, pretty well trodden ground, in a way. There's a runic conscription that there's been a — I guess, now a 75-year — debate about exactly what the meaning of the last line is. It's metrical. It seems to be poetry. And it says that the woman who has erected this runestone, her husband, will be remembered. And then the question is, is it to be understood as in an elegy, in some kind of, a sorrow song, or is it with weeping, with tears? And the question is, is this, or are we to understand that there might have been an East Norse tradition of so-called grátr of elegy? And some people have picked up this idea and run with it pretty heavily.
So, in some of those kinds of early women's literary histories are being produced in decades ago, it's said as a fact: yes, it was a kind of elegy that only women sang. And it had a very definite sort of status. Other people have looked at it and don't think that's quite so likely, but it's still an open question. And the suggestion is that perhaps there should be more research done on it. So, what I'm trying to do is work on that.
Now, that entails a lot of different things. It has to do with certain kinds. It's a moment in the early 11th century, right around 1040. It's a moment when Pagan Viking Age Sweden is transitioning into Christian medieval Sweden. We're still a couple of decades away from the founding of the first Bishopric in Sweden in 1060. But what we can see is that there are clearly changes going on. The runestones are now, and for a while, but especially now, you see overwhelming use of, for example, crucifixes, crosses on them, clearly Christian. There are other signs about the ways in which things are changing.
And there's also a growing kind of entrepreneurial class. And so, what you're getting is a kind of, big farmer, I guess storbonde? And maybe you could say it's a class that's not a lower-class kind of peasant farmer, but it's also not aristocracy or nobility. It's kind of well-to-do. And they seem to be people who have often — and it probably has to do with the inclination toward trade — they seem very, very often to have been in what they would call Greece, that is, the Byzantine Empire. They've been in the East and in the Slavic world. They've been to the British Isles. They've been to Jutland and Germany. They seem to be traders who've amassed a fair amount of wealth.
And out of that, um, kind of class are going to be chosen, in the subsequent centuries, the so-called lawmen. So, the lawmen player a role in all of this. And the lawmen are — I know, when we think of lawmen, we think of Westerns and certain kind of Marshall Will Kane in High Noon or something. But it's not like that. They're actually the chief legal expert, I would say. So, they're, if anything, perhaps a bit more like the legendary, judge-ry being. They're sort of manipulators, and to some extent, crafty users of the law. But it's something that emerges, and in the context of this kind of lawman tradition, there are these important assembly sites where they often will hold court, kind of literally.
The assembly sides probably had all kinds of different uses. They were sometimes used for cultic activities, maybe connected even with the opening of these court sessions. They might have been used quite possibly for levying troops, for example. But it was a kind of town hall, an open-air town hall, but very definitely used for proclamations. We think, as we reconstruct from later textural sources, that you could bring court cases and have them heard and pass laws and that sort of thing. And then later on, the lawmen are going to begin codifying those.
So, by the time you get to the late 13th century, we have written laws from a lot of the so-called landscapes laws, the provincial laws. That plays a big role in all of this as well. And I’m trying to figure out how we interpret this Runic inscription. Because, as it happens, it's actually built —it’s one, it's dedicated — it's one of two runestones, and it's dedicated to the erection of a new assembly site. And I think part of what this assembly site is about is it's not the old one. The old one would have been associated with Pagan traditions. This one's pretty clearly going to be Christian in orientation. And I think that's part of its story. It's a fairly complicated story, but I'm trying to really answer this question of elegy. I guess all of this feeds into it in various ways.
So, the other thing you need to know about — I guess the other thing I I'll talk about — is this tradition, which we know existed in Old Icelandic, called erfikvæði. So, it's the question of inheritance, or it is elegy, but it also has to do with inheritance, in a way, and that'll play a role in it as well. So, you'll have to come and hear the entire spiel.
But the other thing that's that important element in it, I guess, is that it that I don't think it's ever been connected, that the discussions have always been about this one particular runic inscription.
What I want to add to that discussion is this question of what also happens right around 1040, which is that about 30 ships, we think, from one source, are led by somebody named Ingvar and they go off into the East. They're probably going down as far as modern-day Georgia, right? Supposedly there's some connections with the Georgian chronicles, where this Ingvar dies in a battle there in about 1041. And both it and the Nordic sources seem to agree on this 1041 date, which is why I'm so specific. Usually, based on language and art styles and so on, you wouldn't be that specific. But we have reasons for thinking 1040 is about the right date.
And so, you get quite a few, maybe as many as 24 to 30 runic inscriptions that that memorialize the deaths of all these people who took off and mostly died. Some of them came back to tell the tale but mostly ended up dying off in the East. And of those, there are about 14 that are metrical. And what I'm trying to say is, are they also in the same kind of character, that they might be this elegy type?
So, I hope that completes this. It's kind of a pretty hackneyed, sloppy way of doing it, but that's the kind of kit that I'm working with and trying to see if we can sift it in a way that we can come up with an answer. To be quite candid with you, I don't have an answer yet. I'm still playing with it and thinking, well, it seems possible, but I don't know I can prove it yet. So that's where that is.
Di: I'm Di Wang. I have been here with my fellow Ohio State University students, Nick Booker and Ted Nagasawa, interviewing Doctor Stephen Mitchell about his work in Nordic culture and medieval Scandinavia. Dr. Mitchell, I'm really looking forward to your Francis L. Utley lecture later today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Mitchell: Pleasure. It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you all for your wonderful questions.