Nordic Folk Magic

Trolldom - Spells and Methods of the Norse Folk MagicTradition by Johannes Gårdbäck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finally a book on Norse Folk magic! The book is mostly a collection of various spells used for a variety of reasons. The spells are based on pre Christian methods but in reality a variety of spiritual entities are called upon. Occasionally Thor and Odin will show up in a spell, on even more occasions the devil and his demons will be summoned, and finally most of all the Christian deities of Jesus, Mother Mary and the Holy Ghost are invoked. The reason the methods survived and not the belief in deity is that when Christianity took over, the Norse used the same spells and prayer but adopted them too different saints and other spiritual creatures in the Christian Pantheon. So the saints after a while get the prayers.

Trolldom is any sort of magic that falls outside the official purview of the Church. The spells include the usual gambit of blessing the field and cattle, protecting the cattle and farmstead from both magic and regular human assault. There are a variety of spells for revenge, hunting luck, getting Justice , so forth and so on. There is also extensive discussion on divination and talk of the different spiritual creatures that are still worked with.

While I am not too sure about how many people use this magic, I think the numbers are dwindling. The spells are relatively simple which would qualify this as low magic, or magic to obtain things. Some of them are impractical cause they ask you to take the parts of a dead man, or hair of an intended lover or put something in their food. No one is going to do that. There are other spells that can be used and they are simple to perform.

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