1 Arv Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 2014 2 3 ARVARV Nordic Yearbook of Folklore Vol. 70 Editor ARNE BUGGE AMUNDSEN OSLO, NORWAY SPECIAL ISSUE: MAGIC AND TEXTS Guest Editors: Ane Ohrvik and Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir Published by THE ROYAL GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS ACADEMY UPPSALA, SWEDEN Distributed by SWEDISH SCIENCE PRESS UPPSALA, SWEDEN 4 © 2015 by The Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Uppsala ISSN 0066-8176 All rights reserved Editorial Board Anders Gustavsson, Oslo; Gustav Henningsen, Copenhagen Bengt af Klintberg, Lidingö; Ann Helene Bolstad Skjelbred, Oslo Ulrika Wolf-Knuts, Åbo (Turku) Articles appearing in this yearbook are abstracted and indexed in European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences ERIH PLUS 2011– Editorial address: Prof. Arne Bugge Amundsen Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages University of Oslo Box 1010 Blindern NO–0315 Oslo, Norway phone + 4792244774 e-mail: [email protected] http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/forskning/publikasjoner/tidsskrifter/arv/index.html Cover: Kirsten Berrum For index of earlier volumes, see http://www.kgaa.nu/tidskrift.php Distributor Swedish Science Press Box 118, SE–751 04 Uppsala, Sweden phone: +46(0)18365566 fax: +46(0)18365277 e-mail: [email protected] Printed in Sweden Textgruppen i Uppsala AB, Uppsala 2015 5 Contents Articles Ane Ohrvik & Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir: Magic and Texts: An Introduction . 7 Clive Tolley: The Peripheral at the Centre. The Subversive Intent of Norse Myth and Magic . 15 Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir: The Narrative Role of Magic in the Fornaldarsögur . 39 Stephen A. Mitchell: Leechbooks, Manuals, and Grimoires. On the Early History of Magical Texts in Scandinavia . 57 Fredrik Skott: Passing Through as Healing and Crime. An Example from Eighteenth-century Sweden . 75 Ane Ohrvik: A Hidden Magical Universe? Exploring the Secrets of Secrecy in Early Modern Manuscripts . 101 Laura Stark: Magic and Witchcraft in Their Everyday Context. Childhood Memories from the Nineteenth-century Finnish Countryside . 125 Catharina Raudvere: Meeting Hardship, Illness and Malice. Valter W. Forsblom and His Documentation of Healing Practices in Swedish-Speaking Finland 1913–1917 . 147 Obituary Bo Almquist . 167 Book Reviews Arvidson, Mats, Ursula Geisler & Kristofer Hansson (ed.): Kris och kultur (Sven-Erik Klinkmann) . 171 Asplund Ingemark, Camilla: Therapeutic Uses of Storytelling (Thomas A. DuBois) . 177 Atlantic Currents. Essays on Lore, Literatur and Language (Coppélie Cocq) . 179 Bäckström, Mattias: Hjärtats härdar (Arne Bugge Amundsen) . 181 6 Bringéus, Nils-Arvid: Örkelljungapåg och Lundaprofessor (Anders Gustavsson) . 185 Christiansen, Palle Ove: Dagligliv i 1800-tallets Jylland (Anders Gustavsson) . 186 Ekrem, Carola, Pamela Gustavsson, Petra Hakala & Mikael Korhonen: Arkiv, minne, glömska (Susanne Nylund Skog) . 188 Enefalk, Hanna: Skillingtryck! (Gunnar Ternhag) . 190 Eriksen, Anne, Mia Göran & Ragnhild Evang Reinton (eds.): Tingenes tilsynekomster (Gösta Arvastson) . 192 Fahlgren, Siv, Anders Johansson & Eva Söderberg (eds.): Millennium (Kerstin Bergman) . 195 Fjeldsøe, Michael: Kulturradikalismens musik (Alf Arvidsson) . 199 Fjell, Tove Ingebjørg: Den usynliggjorte volden (Inger Lövkrona) . 201 Frykman, Jonas: Berörd (Kyrre Kverndokk) . 205 Gustavsson, Anders: Resident Populace and Summer Holiday Visitors (Anne Leonora Blaakilde . 207 Hagelstam, Sonja: Röster från kriget (Florence Fröhlig) . 209 Hakamies, Pekka & Anneli Honko (eds.): Theoretical Milestones. Selected writings of Lauri Honko (Anders Gustavsson) . 212 Hammarström, Katarina (ed.): Register över visor och ramsor från norra Södermanland (Patrik Sandgren) . 213 Herjulfsdotter, Ritwa: Mariaväxter i folktron (Anders Gustavsson) . 214 Hirvi, Laura: Identities in Practice (Barbara Bertolani) . 215 Kværndrup, Sigurd & Tommy Olofsson: Medeltiden i ord och bild (Ulrika Wolf-Knuts) . 217 Leconteux, Claude: Phantom Armies of the Night (Bengt af Klint- berg) . 219 Lindberg, Boel (ed.): Gamla visor, ballader och rap (Dan Lundberg) 221 Lindtner, Synnøve Skarsbø: “Som en frisk vind gjennom stuen” (Susanne Nylund Skog) . 222 Marander-Eklund, Lena: Att vara hemma och fru (Kerstin Gunne- mark) . 224 Nikolić, Dragan: Tre städer, två broar och ett museum (Owe Ron- ström) . 226 Swensen, Grete (ed.): Å lage kulturminner (Anders Gustavsson) . 233 Books Received by the Editor . 259 Magic and Texts 7 Magic and Texts: An Introduction Ane Ohrvik and Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir Why dedicate a volume of ARV to the topic magic and text? Part of the answer is historically based. Magic became early one of the most central fields of investigation when folklore was established as a field of academic interest in the Nordic countries at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, uniting scholars across disciplinary and national borders (see, e.g., Troels-Lund 1879–1901; Bang 1901; Ohrt 1917; Forsblom 1927). Through the decades to follow, studies in magical beliefs and practices have generated numerous volumes of Nordic archive and fieldwork research (see, e.g., Ohrt 1927; Linderholm 1940; Reichborn- Kjennerud 1928–1947; Lid 1950; Solheim 1952; Rääf 1957; Tillhagen 1958; Klintberg 1965; Grambo 1979). Today these studies serve as import- ant reference works, as source materials, and as comparative entities to a still vibrant, productive, and central field of folklore research (see, e.g., Östling 2002; Stark 2006; Dillmann 2006; Alver 2008; Tolley 2009; Mitch- ell 2011). In this research, magic has mainly been studied in relation to folk medi- cine practices, witchcraft beliefs, practices and legislation, religion, and in connection with narrative studies of legends and beliefs. These topics also represent the basis for the studies of magic and texts in the present volume, where scholars from different fields of research focus on folk beliefs and healing practices in Scandinavian rural communities, perceptions of magic in different social groups, the production of magical texts, and prosecutions and legal trials concerning magical practices. What was the everyday con- text of magic and witchcraft in the medieval, early modern and modern pe- riod in the Nordic countries? How did people pass on their magical know- ledge? What was the dialectics between magical knowledge as beneficial on one hand and dangerous on the other within the different communities? In what way and by whom were traditional methods of folk healing practices considered to be a crime? And how does this relate to general ideas on magic in the communities? By asking these questions the intention of this volume is to provide studies communicating and discussing with as well as chal- lenging the long line of research on magic. 8 Ane Ohrvik & Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir Another intention of this volume is to explore and problematize texts as a source: How do we read texts? Whose voices do we interpret? What is the relationship between the magical beliefs and practices we are studying ‒ and the texts? In the study of magical beliefs and practices in Nordic cul- tural history, a great variety of textual sources are available. In this vol- ume, Fredrik Skott studies magic by making use of juridical laws and trials documents, Stephen Mitchell and Ane Ohrvik investigate individual manuscript writings, Catharina Raudvere uses ethnographic fieldwork notes and Laura Stark reads personal memoirs, while Clive Tolley and Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir study Old Norse literature. This diversity of textual sources represents official, “private”, academic, and artistic texts written by individuals and groups from different social and cultural back- grounds. By highlighting texts as a source we thereby give attention to how we use texts in our investigating process and thus explore and explain our methodological apparatus and the potential ideological and material properties in texts. The text-related questions and themes are discussed and described in various ways: How can we study texts pertaining to the diverse traditions of magic? What kind of information, for instance, do different kinds of ar- chive material provide? How does the attitude of former folklore collec- tors and their analytical framework affect the texts they produced and thus the archive material we use today? What about earlier texts, such as those characteristic of the galdrabók genre? Are they homogeneous, or do they change or develop over certain periods of time? How can we understand the systematic occurrences of encryption in early modern Black Book texts? Do such texts contain knowledge that was considered dangerous? In what way do literary texts from medieval times highlight or explain ear- lier ideas on magic and magical practices? Can we presume that they attest to actual folk beliefs, or were some of these ideas perhaps already fixed narrative motifs at the time they were written, and to some extent stock features of certain narrative genres? How can we refine our understanding of magic in a specific period by using later writings as the main sources? These questions are far from new in this field of research (see, e.g., Sweeney 2000; Raudvere 2002; Mitchell 2011). What this volume does provide, however, are new combinations of source materials and cultural contexts which offer new insights, new perspectives, and perhaps also contribute to challenging established ideas and notions on how we read and treat texts. Even though the study of magic, as we now have established, has been a core subject field within Nordic folklore research in the last century, this