Seiðr: Norse Magic, the Völva and the Shamanism Debate

Seiðr (usually written seidr in English, sometimes seidhr or seith) was a form of Old Norse sorcery used to learn what was hidden, above all the future, and to work on minds, luck and weather; its best-known practitioner is the völva, a traveling seeress with a staff, who sat on a raised platform while women stood in a ring and a helper sang a spirit-summoning song. The fullest account is a Greenland scene in Eiríks saga rauða (chapter 4), written in Iceland in the 13th century, and the same texts attach a stigma to it: Snorri says it brought so much ergi, “unmanliness”, that men could not practice it without shame.

Seiðr at a glance: quick facts

Question	Short answer
Old Norse	seiðr (masculine); verb síða, “to do seiðr”. English spellings: seidr, seiðr, seidhr, seith.
What it did	Revealed fate and hidden things; could also bring death, bad luck or illness, and take wit or strength from one person to give another (Ynglinga saga 7).
Who practiced it	Völva (plural völur), seiðkona (“seiðr-woman”), spákona (“prophecy-woman”); male seiðmaðr (plural seiðmenn).
Gods	Freyja brought it to the Æsir (Ynglinga saga 4); Odin practiced it (Ynglinga saga 7; Lokasenna 24).
Equipment in the texts	A staff, a raised platform (seiðhjallr), songs (varðlokkur), a skin pouch of charms.
Seiðr symbol?	None attested in the Viking-Age or medieval sources.

What is seidr magic? The word and the people

Cleasby and Vigfússon’s Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874) defines seiðr as “a spell, charm, enchantment, incantation”, worked for good or evil or as “a kind of oracle or fortune-telling”. Clive Tolley, who surveyed the Old Norse cases, sorts them the same way: most are divinatory, and of the spells, “more often it is for a sinister purpose such as murder” (Arkiv för nordisk filologi 110, 1995). Seiðr is not the only Old Norse word behind “Norse witchcraft”: Snorri calls it a kind of fjölkyngi, sorcery in general, which Laing (1844) renders “witchcraft”, and Cleasby and Vigfússon gloss trolldómr as “witchcraft” too. Older translators such as Laing and Bellows (1923) often call seiðr-workers “witches”.

Seidr meaning and etymology: the “cord” debate

The origin of the word is disputed. Related Old High German and Old English words mean “cord, string” and “snare, cord, halter”, and the skaldic poem Ragnarsdrápa uses seiðr for a cord or girth. But, as the Norwegian philologist Eldar Heide objects, “binding is not very characteristic of seiðr”. His answer (2006) is that a cord can also pull: in perhaps half the prose sources seiðr draws fish, people or goods to the sorcerer, and the mind sent out in trance was, he argues, imagined as something spun. It is a theory, not a settled etymology.

Völva, seiðkona, seiðmaðr, spákona: who practiced seiðr?

• Völva (plural völur): a seeress, usually explained from völr, “staff”, hence “staff-bearer”, as the Swedish History Museum translates it. Völuspá is “the prophecy of the völva”.
• Seiðkona: “seiðr-woman”. Huld, paid in Ynglinga saga 16 to draw a king back to Finland or kill him, is called both seiðkona and völva (chapters 16–17).
• Spákona: “prophecy-woman”. Þorbjörg in Eiríks saga is a spákona nicknamed lítilvölva, “little völva”.
• Seiðmaðr (plural seiðmenn): a male practitioner, usually cast in a bad light (see the section on gender).

Seiðr in the sources: what the texts actually say

No Viking-Age description of a seiðr ritual survives; Christian Icelanders wrote the scenes we read. Tolley warns that Eiríks saga cannot be taken as authentic “in all, or even many, of its details”, though its general outline may reflect real practice.

Source	Date of the text	What it says about seiðr
Kormákr, Sigurðardrápa	About 960	Oldest skaldic mention (Tolley 1995)
Völuspá 22, Lokasenna 24	Eddic poems; Codex Regius, second half of the 13th century	Heiðr the völva does seiðr; Loki accuses Odin of it
Snorri, Ynglinga saga 4, 7, 16–17	About 1230	Freyja brings seiðr to the Æsir; Odin’s seiðr and ergi; Huld the seiðkona
Haralds saga hárfagra 36	About 1230	A king’s son burned with 80 seiðmenn
Eiríks saga rauða 4	13th century	The fullest séance: Þorbjörg in Greenland
Laxdæla saga 35, 37, 76	13th century	Kotkell’s family kill by seiðr; a völva’s grave with a seiðr-staff
Vatnsdæla saga 10, 44	13th century	A Sámi seeress at a feast; Þórdís’s staff

The Greenland seeress: Eiríks saga rauða, chapter 4

The scene is set at Herjólfsnes, in Norse Greenland, around the year 1000, during a famine. Þorbjörg, the last of nine sisters who were all prophetesses, goes from feast to feast in winter, invited by people who want to know their fate or the coming season. The farmer Þorkell gives her a high seat with a cushion of hen feathers. She wears a blue cloak set with stones, glass beads, a black lambskin hood lined with white catskin and catskin gloves, with a skin pouch for her charms at her belt. Above all,

She eats a porridge of kid’s milk and the hearts of every kind of animal on the farm, and sleeps before answering. The next day she asks for women who know the song the seiðr requires, the varðlokkur. Only Guðríðr, a young Icelander, learned it from her foster-mother; she refuses at first, “because I am a Christian woman”, then gives in to her host. The women form a ring “while Thorbiorg sat up on the spell-dais” (trans. Reeves, 1890), and Guðríðr sings more beautifully than anyone there had ever heard.

Þorbjörg foretells the end of the famine and a great marriage and lineage for Guðríðr; then everyone brings questions, and “what she said proved true”.

Three details matter. The saga distinguishes the high seat (hásæti) of the first evening from the platform (hjallr) on which she sits for the seiðr; the word seiðhjallr, “seiðr-platform”, appears in the Skálholtsbók manuscript, while Hauksbók has simply hjallr. Tolley explains the obscure varðlokkur as “guardian spirit fastenings” or “guardian spirit enticements”, songs that bring the spirits who inform the seeress. And those spirits are náttúrur, from Latin natura: for Tolley, a Christian author’s name for spirits whose pagan name he no longer understood. Guðríðr’s later voyage to Vinland is told in our guide to the Vikings in America.

Freyja and Odin: Ynglinga saga 4 and 7

In his history of the gods as ancient kings, written around 1230, Snorri Sturluson explains where seiðr came from. After the war of the Æsir and the Vanir, the Vanir sent Njörðr and his son Freyr to the Æsir as hostages, and

The text does not say that Freyja gave Odin private lessons, as our guide to Freyja points out. In chapter 7 Odin has mastered “the art in which the greatest power is lodged” (Laing), which the Old Norse names: er seiðr heitir. Then comes the sentence on ergi:

The same chapter says Odin taught his other arts with runes and with songs called galdrar, so that the Æsir were known as galdrasmiðir, spell-smiths. Snorri puts galdr and seiðr side by side and treats only seiðr as shameful.

Lokasenna 24 and Völuspá 22: Odin on Samsey, Heiðr the völva

The Eddic poems survive above all in the Codex Regius, written in Iceland in the second half of the 13th century. In Lokasenna, Odin taunts Loki with having lived underground as a woman and borne children; Loki answers:

Bellows smooths over three things. The verb is síða, “to do seiðr”. Odin “beat on the vétt as völur do” (our translation), and what a vétt was is unclear: Tolley writes that “What the instrument was cannot be ascertained”, though in his view its function matched that of the Sámi shaman’s drum. And the last line makes it the mark of an argr, which Cleasby and Vigfússon gloss “emasculate, effeminate, an abusive term”.

In Völuspá, just after the gods have burned Gullveig three times, the seeress who tells Odin the history of the world describes Heiðr:

Two words are debated: gandr (here ganda) can mean a staff, a spirit or a magical emissary, and hug leikinn can be read as “entranced” (Tolley’s evidence for trance) or, with Bellows, as bewitching minds.

Kotkell’s family: seiðr as a weapon in Laxdæla saga

In Laxdæla saga, Kotkell, his wife Gríma and their sons, newcomers from the Hebrides, “were all very skilled in sorcery and the greatest seiðmenn” (chapter 35, our translation). When Þórðr Ingunnarson summons them for theft and sorcery and sails away,

A storm rises and Þórðr drowns. In chapter 37 the family work a great seiðr at night outside Hrútr’s farm; “sweet indeed was that singing they heard”, but Hrútr forbids anyone to look out, and his twelve-year-old son Kári, who goes toward the sound, falls dead. Kotkell and Gríma are stoned to death. In chapter 76, under a church floor, diggers find bones “blue and evil-looking” and seiðstafr mikill, “a great seiðr-staff”, and people conclude that a völva had been buried there (our translations). Leszek Gardeła notes that in the sagas “it is almost exclusively people who are accused of sorcery” who are stoned and buried under stones.

Other saga cases: a Sámi seeress, a staff that steals memory

• Vatnsdæla saga 10: at a feast in Norway “they held a seiðr in the old way, so that men could ask about their fates”, led by a Finna, a Sámi woman skilled in magic, seated high (our translation). Unasked, she foretells that Ingimundr will settle in Iceland.
• Vatnsdæla saga 44: Þórdís the spákona lends her staff Högnuðr; three taps on the left cheek make a man lose his memory and his lawsuit stalls, a touch on the right cheek restores it.

Seiðr vs galdr (and spá): what is the difference?

The modern shorthand says galdr is masculine rune-chanting and seiðr feminine trance. The sources support part of it: galdr is above all a sung or spoken charm, often linked with runes, and only seiðr carries the stigma of ergi. But the line is not sharp: in Laxdæla saga 35 a family of seiðmenn on a seiðr-platform chant galdrar. Spá, prophecy, is the purpose of most seiðr rather than a third kind of magic.

	Seiðr	Galdr	Spá
Meaning of the word	Uncertain; perhaps “cord, snare” (Heide)	A song or charm, from gala, to sing or crow (Cleasby–Vigfússon)	Prophecy; verb spá, to foretell
Purpose	Divination; also harm, storms, attraction (Ynglinga 7; Laxdæla 35, 37)	Charms of healing, protection, release, raising the dead (Hávamál 147–165, Bellows numbering)	Knowing the future
Practitioners	Mostly women (völur, seiðkonur), some men (seiðmenn)	Odin; men and women in the sagas	Spákona; the seeress of Völuspá
Setting	Platform, staff, helpers singing (Eiríks saga 4)	Spoken or sung words, sometimes carved runes (Hávamál 158)	Often the result of a seiðr session
Social stigma	Ergi for men (Ynglinga 7; Lokasenna 24)	None stated in Snorri	None stated

Odin’s list of charms in Hávamál is usually treated as the classic galdr text, though the poem calls them ljóð, “songs”: one blunts an enemy’s blade, another calms the sea, and the twelfth makes a hanged man talk: “So do I write and color the runes” (stanza 158 in Bellows, 157 in many editions). For the runes themselves, see our guide to the Elder Futhark.

Seiðr, gender and ergi: why was it shameful for men?

What the texts say. Snorri states the rule (Ynglinga saga 7) and Loki uses it as an insult (Lokasenna 24). Such words were dangerous: Cleasby and Vigfússon cite the Icelandic law that punished calling a man ragr, a synonym of argr, with full outlawry. Yet the sagas do show men practicing seiðr: Odin; Rögnvaldr réttilbeini, burned with eighty other seiðmenn by his brother Eiríkr Bloodaxe, a deed “much praised” (Haralds saga hárfagra 36, trans. Laing); Kotkell and his sons; and the seiðmenn at King Hugleikr’s court (Ynglinga saga 25). Outside myth they are usually cast as villains, and several are burned or stoned.

What scholars argue. Why seiðr counted as feminine is a matter of interpretation:

• Textile work: for Eldar Heide, seiðr was imagined as a kind of spinning, and he reads the metal staffs as cultic distaffs: “If seiðr was spinning, it would certainly be unmanly for men, because spinning was the most characteristic women’s work.” The Swedish History Museum also links the Klinta staff with distaffs and spinning, without discussing ergi.
• Sexual overtones: Tolley (1995) links ergi with sexual elements he finds around the staff and with “the unacceptable practices involved in seidr” hinted at in Völuspá 22.
• The graves: Neil Price, who assembled the possible graves of sorceresses, suggested in 2019 that some Birka “sorceress” graves might hold “the ‘missing’ male sorcerers”, after qualifying his statements on how the graves were sexed (as his reviewer Oren Falk reports).

Nor do the sources show Odin heroically breaking a taboo to gain “woman’s magic”: Snorri gives no motive, and Loki treats it as a disgrace.

The archaeology of seiðr: staffs, graves and the Fyrkat völva

Archaeology cannot find seiðr, only objects that resemble what the sagas describe, above all the staff. Iron rods with bronze fittings from Viking-Age graves were once read as roasting spits, measuring rods or scepters, the Swedish History Museum notes; since Neil Price’s work (2002) many archaeologists read them as sorceresses’ staffs, by comparison with Þorbjörg’s staff, and Else Roesdahl, who published the Fyrkat graves, calls that identification convincing (2022). Leszek Gardeła stresses that a grave shows how the living chose to remember the dead, not necessarily who the dead had been.

Fyrkat grave 4, Denmark

The find. In the cemetery of Fyrkat near Hobro, one of the ring fortresses Harald Bluetooth built between 970 and 980, excavators in 1954–1955 found among about 30 graves a woman buried in the body of a wagon (grave 4 in the literature, as in Peter Pentz’s chapter “The Fyrkat 4 Grave”, 2023); as few remains of the dead survived there, she is sexed by her grave goods. The grave held henbane seeds, a poisonous plant that can cause hallucinations, probably once kept in a leather pouch; a slender iron staff with copper-alloy mounts (Roesdahl), badly preserved and reconstructed in 2024; a wooden staff almost as long as a man, with a copper knob; silver toe rings; a tiny chair-shaped silver pendant; a Gotlandic box brooch containing lead white; and remains of a long blue dress worked with silver and gold thread (Torben Birk Sarauw, Nordjyske Museer, 2024).

The interpretation. Sarauw writes that “only one grave in Denmark can with great probability be called a völva’s grave” (our translation), reads the chair pendant as the seeress’s platform (Else Roesdahl notes that, as usual on such pendants, a seated figure is missing, which some have taken for Odin), and pictures her as King Harald’s adviser, while admitting that “we can only guess”. The parallels with Þorbjörg are striking, but the identification rests on them: nothing in the grave names her.

Klinta and Birka, Sweden

The Swedish History Museum holds five such staffs. The most magnificent, in the museum’s words, comes from a rich cremation grave at Klinta on the island of Öland: “just under a metre long”, its lower end broken, it has four iron rods forming a spool-shaped “basket” near the top, crowned by a little house once ringed by four animals. The museum suggests, tentatively, that the staff recalls a distaff with its flax-holder, linking it to spinning and to the Norns who spin fate.

At Birka, the Viking-Age town on Lake Mälaren, Hjalmar Stolpe excavated chamber grave Bj 834 in 1879. Its iron staff, 55.7 cm long as preserved, has bronze knobs and a basket-shaped handle of twisted rods. The museum’s catalog stays cautious: mått- eller völvestav, “measuring rod or völva staff”.

Even the Oseberg ship grave in Norway, the most elaborate Viking-Age burial known, has been read as a priestess’s or sorceress’s grave (Anne Stine Ingstad 1995 and Price 2002, as cited by Gardeła). These graves show high-status burials, most of them women’s, with unusual objects that match saga descriptions written centuries later; they do not show what the dead did in life.

Did Vikings have shamans? Norse shamanism and the Sámi

The honest answer: they had seers and sorcerers who did some of the things shamans do, and scholars disagree on whether “shaman” is the right word. The term comes from Siberia; no Old Norse text uses an equivalent. One text pictures something very like a shaman’s spirit journey: Snorri’s Odin, just before seiðr is named in Ynglinga saga 7: “his body would lie as if dead, or asleep; but then he would be in shape of a fish, or worm, or bird, or beast, and be off in a twinkling to distant lands” (Laing). Snorri does not call this seiðr.

• Dag Strömbäck (1935). His Swedish study Sejd, still “the most complete study of seidr” for Tolley in 1995, showed that seiðr bore “a striking resemblance to shamanistic practices among the Lapps in pre-Christian times”, with trance as its essential feature (as summarized by H. R. Ellis Davidson).
• Neil Price (2002; 2nd ed. 2019). The Viking Way sets seiðr among practices “reluctantly termed ‘shamanism’” across the circumpolar north, with whole chapters on Sámi religion (as his reviewer Oren Falk describes it). Eldar Heide (2006) likewise speaks of “broad agreement that seiðr was an ecstatic kind of sorcery”.
• Clive Tolley takes the more skeptical line. In 1995 he allowed that seiðr “may be counted a form of shamanism” because it summoned spirits during trance, but found that “the evidence does not suggest that soul journeys took place while the Norse seeress was in trance”. His two-volume study (2009) finds “little grounds for proposing the presence of shamanism in pre-Christian or later Scandinavia, if by that is meant the classic form of shamanism typical of much of Siberia”, while allowing “some ritual and belief of a broadly (but not classically) shamanic nature”. His reviewer Timothy Tangherlini faults him for underplaying contact with the Sámi, stressed by Thomas DuBois (1999).

The Sámi connection is visible in the texts themselves. The seeress of Vatnsdæla saga 10 is a Sámi woman, and the 12th-century Latin Historia Norwegie describes a Sámi séance in which the shaman collapses, “the oldest account of Lappish shamanism in existence” (Tolley). Whether seiðr borrowed from Sámi practice, shared a background with it, or was described in Sámi colors by Icelandic authors is what the scholars above disagree about.

Is there a seiðr symbol?

No. No saga, poem, runic inscription or grave associates a symbol with seiðr; the texts mention a staff, a platform, a pouch of charms and songs, never a sign. Designs sold as “seidr symbols” are modern attributions; several are Icelandic magical staves (galdrastafir) from manuscripts written centuries after the Viking Age: the vegvísir is known from Huld, a manuscript compiled in 1860, and the familiar radial “Helm of Awe” graphic belongs to the same post-medieval tradition, even if the name ægishjálmr is older. Our evidence index of Viking symbols sets out the evidence for each.

Modern seiðr

Seiðr is also a modern practice. By the 1990s, Heathen (Ásatrú) groups in North America and Britain were reconstructing an oracular seiðr drawn above all from the Greenland scene of Eiríks saga. The anthropologist Jenny Blain, herself a practitioner, studied these groups (The Pomegranate, 1998; Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic, 2002) and notes that they draw on the sagas, on scholarship and on other “shamanic” practices. These are modern reconstructions, not an unbroken tradition.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and editorial notes

Written in November 2026. Saga chapter numbers follow the Íslendingasögur texts on sagadb.org and, for Heimskringla, Laing’s translation (which agrees with the Old Norse chapters cited). Eddic stanza numbers follow Bellows (1923), which agrees with the Old Norse texts used for Völuspá 22 and Lokasenna 24; in Hávamál his numbers run one higher than in most modern editions. Translations marked “our translation” are ours from the Old Norse or Danish; other quotations follow the public-domain translations named.

• Texts: Eiríks saga rauða, trans. J. Sephton (1880) and Old Norse text (sagadb.org); A. M. Reeves, The Finding of Wineland the Good (1890), for the Hauksbók and Skálholtsbók texts; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. S. Laing (1844): Ynglinga saga and Haralds saga hárfagra, with the Old Norse text from heimskringla.no; Poetic Edda, trans. H. A. Bellows (1923), and Old Norse texts of Völuspá and Lokasenna (heimskringla.no); Laxdæla saga, trans. M. A. C. Press (1899) and Old Norse text; Vatnsdæla saga, Old Norse text (sagadb.org).
• Studies: R. Cleasby and G. Vigfússon, Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874); C. Tolley, “Vǫrðr and Gandr: Helping Spirits in Norse Magic”, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 110 (1995), 56–75; C. Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic (2009), through T. Tangherlini’s review (2011); E. Heide, “Spinning seiðr”, in Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives (Lund, 2006), 164–170; D. Strömbäck, Sejd (1935), through H. R. Ellis Davidson, “Hostile Magic in the Icelandic Sagas”, in The Witch Figure (1973), and Tolley; N. Price, The Viking Way (2002; 2nd ed. 2019), through O. Falk’s review, The Medieval Review 20.12.03; L. Gardeła, “Buried with Honour and Stoned to Death?”, Analecta Archaeologica Ressoviensia 4 (2009, published 2011), 339–375; T. B. Sarauw, “Vølven på Fyrkat”, Den Korte Historie 3 (Nordjyske Museer, 2024); E. Roesdahl, “Archaeology and Odin in Late Pagan Denmark – A Note”, RvT 74 (2022), 385–395; P. Pentz, “The Fyrkat 4 Grave”, in L. Gardeła, S. Bønding and P. Pentz (eds), The Norse Sorceress (Oxbow, 2023), 301–328 (cited for the grave number only); Store norske leksikon, “Den eldre Edda” (date of the Codex Regius); J. Blain, “Seidhr and Seidhrworkers”, The Pomegranate 6 (1998), and Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic (Routledge, 2002).
• Museums: Swedish History Museum, “The Klinta Staff”; Swedish History Museum, Birka Bj 834 staff.