Trolldom: The Everyday Magic of Viking Age Scandinavia

Written by Simon Williams

Trolldom was the general Old Norse term for magical practice, covering everything from runic charms and protective spells to curses and love magic, performed not by trained seeresses but by ordinary people as part of daily life. Unlike seidr, which required trance and ceremony, trolldom was folk practice, and it was common enough that Norway's earliest surviving law codes banned it by name centuries before the later European witch trials began.

Key points

• Trolldom is the broad Old Norse term for magical practice, distinct from seidr, which referred specifically to the trance based prophetic tradition associated with the völur
• The Ljóðatal, a list of eighteen magic chants attributed to Odin in the Hávamál, gives the clearest surviving account of runic and vocal charm magic, or galdr, from Norse tradition
• Norway's earliest provincial law codes, the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law, explicitly prohibit consulting practitioners of trolldom, showing the practice was common enough to require legal attention well before Christian witch trial theology arrived
• The Nordic legal tradition kept using the word trolldom throughout the medieval and early modern period rather than adopting the newer word "witchcraft," even as the underlying accusations shifted toward the devil's pact model imported from continental Europe
• One of the earliest documented individual witchcraft cases in Scandinavia, the trial of Ragnhild Tregagås in Norway in the 1320s, shows trolldom accusations still being prosecuted under medieval Norwegian law generations before the continental witch hunts began

What trolldom actually covered

Where seidr was a specific, ceremonial practice tied to prophecy and fate, trolldom was the wider umbrella term Norse speakers used for magical activity generally. It covered protective charms recited over cattle or crops, love magic intended to influence another person's feelings, curses meant to bring illness or misfortune, and divination performed outside the formal seidr ceremony. Scholars researching the Nordic legal record note that this Nordic distinction between trolldom and the imported concept of witchcraft (hekseri in later usage) roughly parallels the English distinction between sorcery and witchcraft, and that the older term persisted in Nordic law and language well into the early modern period, even as the accusations themselves increasingly absorbed the continental idea of a pact with the devil.

This was not a practice confined to specialists. Trolldom was, by most surviving accounts, something an ordinary farmer, a jealous suitor, or an anxious parent might attempt directly, using known charms and formulas rather than commissioning a professional seeress.

Galdr: the chanted charm

The clearest surviving description of how this kind of everyday magic actually worked comes from the Ljóðatal, the final section of the eddic poem Hávamál, where Odin lists eighteen charms he knows. Odin's list, as rendered in Henry Adams Bellows' translation of the Poetic Edda, includes charms to heal sickness, to blunt an enemy's weapon in battle, to break the bonds holding a prisoner, to calm the sea, to douse fire, and to turn aside a spell cast by a hostile magician. Each charm is described as something spoken or sung, a practice generally referred to as galdr, closely related to the modern Scandinavian word for "to crow" or "to chant."

What makes the Ljóðatal valuable is that it presents magic as a learnable, listable skillset rather than a mysterious gift. Odin does not describe becoming a magician through initiation into a priesthood. He describes acquiring a set of specific, nameable techniques, several of which sound closer to practical crisis management, stopping bleeding, escaping bonds, surviving a storm at sea, than to grand prophecy. This is trolldom's real character: applied, situational, and aimed at solving an immediate problem rather than glimpsing the shape of fate itself.

The law took it seriously

If trolldom were a marginal curiosity, it would not have needed its own legal category. Norway's earliest surviving provincial law codes, the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law, both compiled from earlier oral custom and committed to writing during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, explicitly prohibit consulting practitioners of trolldom. Laurence M. Larson's 1935 English translation of these codes, published as The Earliest Norwegian Laws, remains the standard English language edition and shows these prohibitions sitting alongside other serious communal offences, evidence that trolldom was treated as a genuine legal and social problem rather than idle superstition.

That legal attention continued well after Norway's formal conversion to Christianity. King Magnus VI's Code of the Realm, issued in 1274, and the Younger Gulaþing Law of 1267 both name witchcraft explicitly among prohibited practices. One of the clearest individual cases to survive from this period involves a woman named Ragnhild Tregagås, tried in Norway in the 1320s, generations before the mass European witch trials of the early modern period, on charges connected to love magic and curses directed at a former partner. Her case, still being researched by Norwegian historians today, shows the machinery of trolldom prosecution already fully operational under medieval Norwegian law, using homegrown legal categories rather than imported continental demonology.

What survived the conversion

Trolldom's persistence after Christianisation follows the same pattern traced throughout this series. Formal, elite religious structures, first the Norse gods and their priesthood, then the Christian Church, condemned or absorbed competing ritual practice without managing to eliminate the underlying demand for it. The vocabulary that stuck was telling. Rather than replace trolldom with imported Latin or continental terms for witchcraft, Nordic law and everyday speech kept the old word in active use for centuries, a linguistic fossil showing that the underlying concept, ordinary people performing charm magic outside any sanctioned religious structure, never actually stopped needing a name.

Seidr required a specialist, a ceremony, and a community willing to prepare a high seat and gather to sing. Trolldom required none of that. It is, in a real sense, the more durable of the two Norse magical traditions precisely because it demanded so little infrastructure to survive.

People also ask

What is the difference between trolldom and seidr?

Seidr was a specific, ceremonial form of trance based prophetic magic associated with trained practitioners called völur. Trolldom was the broader term for magical practice generally, including everyday charms, curses, and love magic performed by ordinary people without ceremony.

What is galdr in Norse magic?

Galdr refers to chanted or sung magical charms. The clearest surviving list of such charms appears in the Ljóðatal section of the Hávamál, where the god Odin describes eighteen specific spells he knows.

Was trolldom illegal in Viking Age Scandinavia?

Yes. Norway's earliest provincial law codes, the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law, explicitly prohibited consulting practitioners of trolldom, showing the practice was treated as a serious legal matter well before the continental witch trial era.

Who was Ragnhild Tregagås?

Ragnhild Tregagås was a Norwegian woman tried in the 1320s on charges connected to love magic and cursing a former partner, making her case one of the earliest documented individual witchcraft prosecutions in Scandinavian history, well ahead of the early modern witch hunts.

Why did Scandinavian law keep using the word trolldom instead of witchcraft?

Nordic legal and everyday language retained the older native term trolldom throughout the medieval and early modern period rather than fully adopting continental vocabulary, even as the underlying accusations increasingly incorporated the imported idea of a pact with the devil.

Sources

• Laurence M. Larson (trans.), The Earliest Norwegian Laws: Being the Gulathing Law and the Frostathing Law (Columbia University Press, 1935), via HathiTrust. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb06010.0001.001
• The Poetic Edda: Hovamol, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1936), Internet Sacred Text Archive, the primary source for the Ljóðatal charm list. https://sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe04.htm
• ScienceNorway.no, A dramatic love affair sparked the first witch trial in Scandinavia, 250 years before the witch hunts started (on Ragnhild Tregagås and Norwegian medieval law). https://www.sciencenorway.no/law-magic-the-middle-ages/a-dramatic-love-affair-sparked-the-first-witch-trial-in-scandinavia-250-years-before-the-witch-hunts-started/2340955

Recommended further scholarship: Catharina Raudvere, "Trolldómr in Early Medieval Scandinavia," in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (University of Pennsylvania Press); Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (Boydell & Brewer).

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