65 years ago, Danish archaeologists made an extraordinary discovery. For three years they had excavated the Viking castle Fyrkat near Hobro. The circular fortress, which was apparently built by the eponymous king Harald Bluetooth around the year 980, had made headlines not only in Denmark, but throughout Scandinavia. The archaeologists were in the process of uncovering a number of Viking graves just outside the castle when it became clear that one of the graves was markedly different from all the others. In the grave lay a woman aged around 40, wearing a long, blue dress. Over her head she wore a veil with a gold woven border, while on her toes she had two silver toe rings.
The dress alone showed that the woman must have been an important person. However, it was the woman’s burial gifts that really made the archaeologists open their eyes. With him into eternity, the deceased had been given small, strange amulets, hallucinatory flower herb and a mysterious metal rod. The experts had no doubt: the woman in the grave had to be a volve – one of the Viking Age’s most powerful and legendary figures.
Even Odin asked the volve for advice
The volve, which means staff bearer, was for centuries the Vikings’ most important connection to the world of the gods and spirits. According to the sagas, volves could see the future and were so important that they were treated like queens. People both feared and admired the volve, which allegedly had power over life and death.
The Viking seer’s most important characteristic was the volve staff – a kind of magic wand. While digging for peat in 1949, farmers near the town of Hemdrup in Denmark found a half-metre-long rune stick stuck vertically into the bog.
The staff is considered by experts to be one of the oldest sure signs of the volves’ existence. A woman with braids and a long dress is engraved on the staff – possibly the volve herself. Below the figure is a spell with runes:
“The stormy one never overcame you, Åsa is lucky in battle”.
According to the historians, “the fykende” refers to a feverish illness that the volve helped the woman Åsa to cure – with the help of the staff. Among other things, the volves used the staff when they had to exercise what in Norse was called “seid” – magic. According to historians, legends of staff-carrying women can be traced all the way back to the peasant Stone Age in Scandinavia.
However, it is only in the Viking Age that concrete physical evidence appears. In the village of Kirk Michael on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, where the Vikings were active in the 8th century, archaeologists have found a pictorial tombstone that probably depicts a volve with a staff in hand. The archaeologists have also found volve staves in a number of graves in the Nordic region.
Iceland’s volve keeps predicting
For almost 50 years, the Icelandic magazine Vikan has annually published predictions from a local volve. The viewer has many times been right about the predictions. In several places in the Nordics, women have resumed the ancient traditions of the volve. Today’s best-known volve lives in Iceland, where every year at the beginning of December she makes predictions for the coming year.
The predictions are read by the Icelanders with a mixture of curiosity and seriousness, because several times the volve has been surprisingly close to the truth.
In 2004, for example, the volve predicted that the Palestinian leader, Yassir Arafat, was so ill that the Palestinians would get a new, more diplomatic leader. Only eleven months later, Arafat died, and the leadership post was taken over by the moderate Mahmoud Abbas. In the same way, the Icelandic seer predicted the year after that Pope John Paul II would pass away. It happened four months later. The volve has also often missed completely. In 2004, she predicted that the Faroe Islands would be independent from Denmark within a few years. The Faroe Islands are still waiting.
The volves were so important to the Vikings that they even formed part of their myths. For example, “The volves Prophecy” – the opening poem in the mythological work The Elder Edda – is recited by a volve whom Odin himself has summoned to learn the fate of the world. As thanks for the prophecy, in which the volve predicts, among other things, the end of the world, ragnarok, the powerful god gives her “necklace and rings”, according to the poem.
The volve traveled from farm to farm
Odin had good reason to reward the volve richly, for no one wanted to enrage a volve. Through the seid, the volves had great power, which could also be used to harm others, if the seeress were not satisfied with their pay.
In Egil Skallagrimsson’s saga, the Icelandic bard Egil battles with his Norwegian archenemies King Eirik Bloodaxe and Queen Gunhild. Egil had killed their son. The queen was excellent at seiding, so when the bard fled from Norway to Iceland, she used her magic to get revenge:
“It is said of Gunhild that she let it be known that Egil Skallagrimsson would never find peace in Iceland or elsewhere, until she saw him again”.
The seid obviously worked, for the following year the bard was filled with an insatiable urge to travel abroad. Along the way, Egil was shipwrecked off northern England, where Gunhild and Eirik were waiting for him in the Viking colony of York. Egil was sentenced to death, but on the day he was to be executed he recited a poem so beautiful that the king forgave him.
The typical volves were not married women like Gunhild, but rather recluses, who were detached from the family ties that usually defined a woman’s life in the Viking Age. Instead, the volves traveled from place to place with her remedies and practiced seeressing where there was a demand for it.
She would have liked to have colleagues whom she met regularly – for example, the volve Torbjørg in Eirik Raude’s saga had “nine sisters, all of whom were fortune tellers, but she was the only one still alive”.
It was also not unusual for the volve to travel with an entourage of younger, female assistants. In Orvar-Odd’s saga, Hild the volve arrives at a planned seid ceremony with as many as 15 girls and 15 boys in her cortege.
The volves worked for payment, possibly in the form of board and lodging. Therefore, their clients were primarily wealthy people, such as large farmers and earls, who sent a messenger for the nearest volve in case of crisis. Richly equipped volve graves indicate that the volves were particularly popular among society’s leading families.
The volve from the Viking castle
Over half a century after the discovery of a vault near the ring castle Fyrkat in Jutland, archaeologists have found new traces of the dead sorceress.
In 1954, archaeologists found a woman’s grave at Fyrkat in the north of Jutland, one of five ring towns in Denmark, built by King Harald Bluetooth in the latter half of the 9th century. A series of enigmatic amulets and objects in the tomb, which was located 150 meters north-east of the fortress, convinced the researchers that the 170-centimeter-tall woman before her death seemed like a volve.
Traces of rivets from a wagon revealed that she was buried in a wagon box – the upper part of a wagon. This form of burial was reserved for particularly important people. However, the wood had long since rotted away. Almost all the other grave goods can be linked to the woman’s special work.
In 2017, archaeologists found a small piece of precious metal during the excavation of the Viking castle Borgring south of Copenhagen. The decoration on the metal piece was identical to the decoration on a small case that was found in Fyrkat’s vault in 1954. According to the researchers, the metal piece may have broken off the case. If true, it suggests that the Fyrkat volve traveled between the various ring castles to offer her services.
By the woman’s left arm lay a small bronze goblet with a grass lid. The cup, which may have originated in Central Asia, contained a greasy substance of unknown origin. The contents may have been used for the volve’s trance ceremonies or other magic.
Bulbwort seeds
A quantity of seeds from the poisonous plant bulmeurt was found in the volves grave. According to researchers, the seeds were in a leather pouch, which has since rotted away. The volve probably ingested the euphoric seeds to induce a trance – either by mixing them with animal fat and applying them to the body as a cream, or by burning them and inhaling the smoke from the fire.
Jewelry
A chair-shaped piece of jewelery from the grave possibly represents a so-called seidhjell – the seat where the volve sat during the ceremonies. The other jewelry and amulets of the volve were also non-traditional. Among other things, she wore a pendant with small swimming-bird feet of silver tin and two silver toe rings.
At the volve’s head was a small case with a lid, which in Danish is called a can buckle. The decorated piece of jewelry, which was worn on the chest, may have contained drinks for the ceremonies. In 2017, archaeologists found a piece of metal near the Viking fortress Borgring on Zealand that may belong to the case. Among the volves many qualities were that she could see the hidden in the past and the future, heal disease, control the weather and bring good fortune. The Vikings believed that women were the best magicians, but there were also men who could see.
In The Saga of the Salmon Dwellers, it is told about the sorcerer man Kotkjell and his sons, who settled in Iceland, where they were a nuisance to the neighboring woman. Her son, Tord, therefore threatened the sorcerer. He shouldn’t have done that. When Tord sailed out soon after, Kotkjell conjured up a storm. “Suddenly near the shore, a storm surge arose in a place that had never been seen before, it easily rolled the ship around so that it lay with its keel in the air”. Tord and his fellow passengers drowned as a result of Kotkjell’s seid. Men like Kotkjell never enjoyed the same awe as the female wolves, because the Vikings considered seid a woman’s thing men should stay far away from.
The fortune teller smoked weed
The volves contact with higher powers by going into a trance. In this trance state – the Vikings believed – the volves soul could travel to other worlds and visit spirits and gods who could assist her with her errands.
One of the most important descriptions of a volves seid can be found in Eirik Raude’s saga, which was written down in the 13th century. According to the saga, the Vikings in Greenland had starved for months, because both hunting and fishing had been poor. If the accident continued, that Viking society would not survive until spring.
The great farmer Torkjel decided that it was best to ask higher powers for advice, and therefore invited the volve Torbjørg Lillevolven to the farm: “When she entered, everyone felt obliged to greet her properly”.
The awe-inspiring volve was smartly dressed and had a staff in her hand as well as a pouch at her belt where she kept her potions. Unlike the farm’s other guests, who had to sit on wooden benches, according to the saga, the volve was assigned a high seat with soft cushions, before she was served a magnificent meal.
When the session itself began, the volve sat down on a separate platform or chair, the “seidhjelle”. The women of the farm formed a ring around her, and one of them sang a special quatrain from ancient times.
The volve then addressed Torkjel: “Now I see many things clearly that were previously hidden from me. I can tell you – Torkjel – that this bad year will not last longer than winter, and times will improve when spring comes.” (from the saga of Eirik the Red).
Such quatrains that were sung in the saga were called galder (galdr in Norse). Like, for example, the song of Native American or Siberian shamans, galder probably consisted of a series of repetitions that had a suggestive effect on the volve and helped her enter a trance.
But song alone was not always enough when the volve had to travel between worlds in search of hidden knowledge. In the year 834, a distinguished woman and her female slave were laid in a ship’s grave in Oseberg in Vestfold – together with, among other things, a wooden volve staff and a bag of cannabis seeds. Some researchers believe that the woman was a volve, and that she smoked weed to more easily achieve the necessary trance state.
During the excavation of the vault near the ring castle Fyrkat in Denmark, the archaeologists found seeds from the plant bulmeurt, which also contains a euphoric substance. Apparently, the volve, who was buried at the end of the 9th century, ingested the seeds to induce hallucinations. However, the volve could also achieve contact with the world of gods through prolonged meditation. During a so-called outdoor session, the volve sat alone outside in nature on a large rock. In the course of the night, she came into contact with many of the beings who, according to folklore, resided in the dark.
Even in Christian times, this form of seid was so widespread in Iceland that in the laws from the 13th century it was forbidden to “sit outside and wake up trolls and promote paganism”.
When the song or the intoxication died down, the volve was constantly on a spiritual journey between different worlds, and people could now ask her questions which, according to the sagas, she answered with great clarity.
Unwanted volve was attacked
Although the volves enjoyed great respect in society, not everyone was equally enthusiastic about the powerful sorceresses. According to Orvar-Odd’s saga, the young man Odd lived for a time with the farmer Ingjald, when it was rumored that the volve Hild was in the area. Ingjald immediately summoned the volve to hear how the winter was going to be:
“The people of the farm went before the seid woman, and she told each of them their future. Then she told what the coming winter would be like, and a lot of other things that people didn’t know before.” When she tried to tell Odd, he refused to hear about his fate. He didn’t like magic. When she nevertheless made the prediction, Odd angrily stuck a stick in her nose so that the blood flowed. Terrified, Ingjald had to offer the enraged volve board and lodging for three days and a series of gifts to appease her. However, Odd was far from the only one who disliked volves.
Around the year 1000, large parts of the Nordic countries had been Christianized. In the new faith there was no room for volves who claimed to be able to perform miracles. The staff-carrying women did not disappear completely, however.
A new generation of sorceresses took the old traditions with them into the Middle Ages, when these women became known as witches. Just like the volves, the “witches” used, among other things, the plant bulmeurt to gain access to other worlds. But the old magic was fought by all means, and in the end the volves sorcery became nothing but a distant memory.