Inside the Icelandic Witch Trials

Picture a witch. Chances are, you're thinking of a woman. But in 17th century Iceland, over 90% of the people killed for being a witch, were men. Why were more men being accused than women for being a witch? And what happened inside their trials? Today we're revisiting an episode from 2024 to take you back inside the Icelandic Witch Trials. Kate is joined by Dr. Ólína Kjerulf Þorvarðardóttir, Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bifröst. You can also watch Kate explore Icelandic witch trials further, in a brand new documentary for History Hit. Watch Witchmen: Witch Trials in the Land of Fire and Ice https://access.historyhit.com/videos/witchman-icelandic-age-of-fire on HistoryHit.com, now. This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:19Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Bertwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Bertwixt the Sheets. Welcome back, welcome back, everyone. Let's make some space in the back for any newbies coming in. And for any newbies, well, we have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. We call that the Fair Dudes Warning, because after we've said that to you, you can't get offended, or at least if you do get offended, you can't be mad at us, because Fair Dudes, we did tell you. Right, on with the show.

• 2:10Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Shapes: The History of Sex, Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. Whilst we're all familiar with plastic pumpkins and the fake cauldrons of Halloween, and frankly, the less said about the costumes, the better. It does offer us a chance to explore the darker and more interesting themes at this time of year, doesn't it? I like it when things get a bit spooky. And of course, I always want to talk to you about witches. To coincide with a brand new documentary that I have made with History Hit, we are returning to an episode from last year about the 17th century Icelandic witch trials. A wild and remote place if there ever was one, where, against the stereotype that a

• 2:54Kate Lister?

  lot of us are familiar with, 93% of those killed as witches were men. And if that piques your interest, do check out the film I've made about exactly that. You get to see me in full technicolor in the extraordinary Icelandic landscape, where we are taking a deep dive into this troubling tale. The film is called Witchmen: Witch Trials in the Land of Fire and Ice, and it's out on October 30 on historyhit.com. Also, today's episode was part of a three-part mini-series we did last year on three different witch trials, so do scroll back and have a look at Pendle and Salem 2.

• 3:34Kate Lister?

  Without further ado, let's peer back through the mists of time to Iceland in the 17th century and go inside the Icelandic witch trials.

• 4:02Kate Lister?

  It's New Year's Day in the remote town of Selatal, 1669. Here in the west fjord region of Iceland, a thick mist descends onto the houses from the nearby mountains. In one of them lives Helga Halldor Dotia and her husband, the priest, Pal Bjornsson, whose influential book on witchcraft and the devil has caused a stir among the locals. Helga's fallen ill with a strange disease. She appears to be possessed by an evil spirit. Her fits are uncontrollable, the noises she makes seem unnatural, otherworldly. By summer, they haven't let up. If anything, they've intensified, and both her and Pal flee their house, believing it

• 4:47Kate Lister?

  to be haunted. Their minds turn to witches, and before long, men in the local community will burn at the stake. Why were over 90% of the people killed for witchcraft in Iceland men? And how did events get so out of hand in this remote town at the edge of Europe? Joining me today is Dr. Orlina Kerlu Thorvar Thar Dotia to take us back to this world and tell us what Iceland was like at this period.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  In the 17th century, we belonged to the Danish Kingdom. We were a part of the Danish Kingdom until 1918. Iceland was a rural society at the time. It had just recently reformed to Lutheran from Catholic beliefs. And we were a farming agricultural society, and people were not...

• 5:54Speaker 02

  How can we say, people were not educated at the time. Only fifty thousand people inhabited Iceland at the time. And there was no urbanisation, so to speak. And there was no general education besides from what people heard from the Bible. And also, of course, the oral tradition that people had, the old folk tales and the old rhymes and the old sagas. But there was no general education, no formal education. And the very few who got some forms of education at the time were officials and civil servants, such as priests, magistrates and lawmen who acquired education abroad,

• 6:38Speaker 02

  mostly in Denmark or elsewhere in North Europe. And those officials, they were influenced by the ideological currents on the mainland, bringing that impact with them to Iceland. So the conduct of those individuals determined how high the wave of witch persecutions rose in the individual areas of Iceland. And one must also bear in mind that geographically Iceland is not centrally located. So therefore, it took a while for the currents of ideas that were the reasons for the witch persecutions in Europe to reach Iceland.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  It's also remarkable that the witch trials bursted out much stronger in some areas than others. Most of the trials took place in the west fjords, whereas nobody was executed in the south and the east of Iceland.

• 7:41Kate Lister?

  While Christianity had a grip on Icelandic society at this time, the country had a deep and rich tradition of folk magic that predated the witch trials. Something we've seen throughout medieval Europe and something the Christian church in Iceland did not take kindly to. We explored this culture of folk magic in England in the first episode of this limited series. But what was the culture for magic like in Iceland leading up to this period?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Magic has been practised in Iceland since the beginning of roads. The oldest forms of magic are runic inscriptions.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  And the ancient sorcery ritual Seður, sometimes mentioned in the Icelandic sagas. And there is a prophecy ceremony performed by the Sípul Völva, by the assistance of those present. And we can read in old law books since the age of the Commonwealth. The age of the Commonwealth is from 930 to 1262. We can read from that time that there were penalties for witchcraft, even a death penalty for the darkest forms of witchcraft, which we called for Tæðuskaper, means black magic.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  And so magic is deeply rooted in religious practices since long before the year of 1000, when Icelanders reformed to Christianity. And that has to do, I think, with our connection to nature and pagan ideas of divine domination of the seasons of the year and the forces of nature. So people believed in magic. They believed in magical forces of nature and divinity. Everything in daily life was linked to the dominance of divine forces as well as forces of nature.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  So healing, for example, was very much associated with witchcraft. And then, of course, the Christianity in the year of 1000 in Iceland, that of course had its impact on this mindset. But folk beliefs and folk traditions lived on for quite a while. And as time passed, those folk rituals became a contradiction to the message of the church because the church tried to demonize old traditions and folk beliefs.

• 10:17Kate Lister?

  But the 17th century, there were significant conflicts inside the Christian church on how its own message should be delivered. Lutheranism and a wave of other Protestant reformations known as the Reformation was sweeping across Europe, in some cases clashing violently with Catholicism. The evils of witchcraft and how it should be dealt with were at the centre of it all, and Iceland felt the effects of it.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  In Europe, it all began with the persecution of heretics in the 12th and 13th centuries, we know that. And we have a trace of heretic persecutions in Iceland. In one case that came up in 1343, when a nun was burned for having made a pact with the devil, but not least for fornicating with several laymen, as it was stated. So that execution is a heretic one, but that is the only example of an execution by burning that we know of in Iceland from the Catholic time. That is, from the year of 1000 to the Reformation of 1550.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  But shortly after the Reformation, the persecutions of heretics start to develop into persecutions of witchcraft in Europe in the late 16th century, culminating in the 17th century. So it seems that the tradition, or should I say the culture of the Lutheran Church, has brought about some socio-psychological changes in Iceland. And the mass form of the Church was different, also the manner of preaching with great emphasis on the devil and the devil's work in the world.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  All magic and witchcraft was suddenly claimed to be rooted in the cunning of the devil. Priests preached about these threats of the devil, and they did so with such fervour that women fell into a daze during masses and were carried out of the churches, moaning and groaning and half unconscious, as happened, for example, in Kriekitlisvik, in Stramtir, the west side of Iceland, for example. So it's safe to say that in general, there was a great fear of witchcraft. You know, all of a sudden, the devil was all around and this caused a hysterical, common

• 12:53Speaker 02

  fear and atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion towards your fellow and your neighbour, resulting in a witch craze in certain areas such as the Westfords.

• 13:05Kate Lister?

  Leading the charge on this ideology of witchcraft and its threat of evil were two men, whose impact and influence in the region cannot be underestimated. As with Pendal, it's an ambitious man with an agenda at the heart of these witch trials.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  One as a spiritual leader, Reverend Pálsbíðson in Selartalur, and the other, a secular leader, Thorleivur Kortson, the magistrate and a lawman of North and West. Thorleivur Kortson, he was a man of German descent, who had spent his years of youth in Germany and presumably soaked up the currents of the magic fanatics in Europe. And as a magistrate and a lawman of North and West District of Iceland, he had great influence on the witch persecutions. And Reverend Pálsbíðson was considered to be the most educated man in Iceland at

• 14:03Speaker 02

  the time, besides from Bishop Brynulur Svendsson in the South. And when those two forces combined together, the spiritual one and the secular one, we have the fact that of those 23 people that were burnt at the stake in the 17th century, all were in the jurisdiction of those two men, either living or working in the North or West, and 16 from the Westfords in particular. And we can see, we can compare this to the south side of Iceland. Where the main influential figures of spiritual and secular authorities were peaceful

• 14:46Speaker 02

  men, Bishop Brynir Lurstein Sonnatskáurholt, and the magistrate of South Iceland, Gisli Magnusson, who was called Gisli the Wise. And those two men had little interest in the ideology of witchcraft. They were not keen on persecuting their neighbors as witches. So nobody was executed for witchcraft in their jurisdiction, and the number of witch trials in the south were much less than in the west worlds. So there we see how individuals can affect the world.

• 15:21Kate Lister?

  Yes. Why do you think that those two men were really crazy about the witch trials when nobody else was?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Well, it can be seen from the writings of Reverend Paul Pjøsson that he knew the witches' hammer, Maleus Maleficarum Maleficas.

• 15:39Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  A famous book that was written in the late 15th century by two monks, Springer and Kramer, where the giving the ideology of the devilish witchcraft and instructions about how to investigate witches. And this is a terrible book that was nevertheless in most universities and most parts of Europe. And our officials that took their education in Denmark or in North Europe, they knew this book and they had read it. And it is very obvious from the writings of Reverend Paul Pjøsson that he knew the content of the witches' hammer.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  And in his own writings, such as Charakter Bestie, which is one book he wrote, you can see long chapters, verbally the same as the witches' hammer. So he was obviously influenced by the ideology of mid-Europe. And Thorlevar Korsson, as I mentioned before, the magistrate, he had been staying in Germany for quite a while. So he was influenced as well. He obviously had read this book and understood it.

• 16:55Kate Lister?

  It's like fanfiction, but just mad fanfiction.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, they are said to, the witches are claimed to be child murderers.

• 17:06Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Murdering child, boiling them, melting their flesh into remedies and medicine. The fundamental idea behind this, of course, is the fear of women's knowledge, the folk knowledge of women. They took care of sick people, they practised healing, they had most likely some methods to prevent birthed child.

• 17:35Kate Lister?

  Contraception.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, contraceptions. All of this was a threat to the church. It contradicted the ideology of the church. And the purpose of the propaganda of the church was, of course, to get power over people's minds. This was a power conflict, you know, folk traditions versus the message of the church. So the the whole thing was rooted in ideological contradicts and a power game, so to speak.

• 18:06Kate Lister?

  What's strange is that the Malais Malafakarum hates women. It says women are going to be witches. And Beerson, if he was a big fan, I'm not sure if he hated women too. But the people that are accused of witchcraft in Iceland are mostly men. So who was the first person to be accused? Was that a man or a woman?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Well, the first person to be accused in the 17th century was a man. But we have oral tales about a woman being executed in the year of 1580 as a witch. But the first witch trial is in 1625, and that is a man that is being executed then. So we have three women being executed before the actual era of witch trials. After 1625, until it all was over in 1683, only one woman was burnt at the stake.

• 19:11Kate Lister?

  Fascinating.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  But, you know, why didn't the ideology of the female witch, the devilish female witch, why didn't that not get rooted in Icelandic witch trials? That has to do with the status of women, I think, in Icelandic society. They were bound to the household, they were taking care of children and the older ones, taking care of births and taking care of dying people, they were serving the fishermen when they came from sea, et cetera, cooking, making remedies for the whole household, mending clothes, et cetera, but they did not have a social status, so to speak, no formal social status,

• 19:57Speaker 02

  and they did not own properties. And many of the witch trials were raised around, you know, disputes about properties and influence, and women were not so much involved in that kind of thing in the 17th century, so that can be one reason as well.

• 20:18Kate Lister?

  Despite this being the case, there was, however, one woman who played a huge part in the Icelandic witch trials for all the wrong reasons. Enter Helga Halldorsdotia, wife of the Reverend Pal Bjornsson.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  She was a very paranoid woman. Reverend Pal seems to have been very much in love with her, though, and very keen on how she felt and how she was doing from one day to another. But Helga seems to have suffered from some mental illness and emotional disturbance, and her illness and complaints about suffering and distress, they obviously have impact on Reverend Pal's mental state as well. And, you know, we do not know what was bothering Helga.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  She struggled with a strange illness that began in the 1660s, but intensified in the decades that followed, and her distress seemed to come in fits, causing both her and the rest of the household troubles.

• 21:39Kate Lister?

  By the summer of 1669, Helga's illness hasn't shifted. Her condition is deteriorating as Paul's further for witchcraft is peaking. Looking for reason, Helga believes local man John Leifson has cursed her. She knows him because she was vehemently against him marrying one of her maids. Believing he's responsible, Helga's husband Reverend Paul Bjornson formally charges John with witchcraft and he's brought to trial soon after.

• 22:16Kate Lister?

  On the day of his trial, John Leifson stands before the district magistrate, a man called Egget Bjornson, who just so happens to be Paul's half-brother.

• 22:28Kate Lister?

  The two have spent time in Denmark and Germany and are well aware of the witch trials. After rigorous interrogation and solitary confinement, John Leifson confesses to the crime of sorcery. Egget doesn't hesitate and sentences him to be burnt for witchcraft, which will take place in the nearby valley just before the Assembly of Parliament. But the case isn't done. Before he's killed, John confesses that local man Ilender Ijolfson taught him everything he knew when it came to witchcraft, the master for all the evil he was capable of. This case was far from closed.

• 23:12Kate Lister?

  I'll be back after this short break.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  What started the civil war? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

• 23:31Speaker 03

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• 24:15Kate Lister?

  With John Leifson sentenced to be burned as a witch, he moved District Magistrate Eggers' attention to Erlender Ijolfson, the man who supposedly taught him everything he knew about sorcery, a master in the evil arts of witchcraft. Eggers and Paul are now compelled to snuff out this evil at its source. In a letter to two lawyers, Paul describes Erlender as "the devil's cesspool, from which everything evil that people might lust for flows." His influence is huge, and it's only a matter of time before Erlender, too, is tied to the stake and the fires are lit.

• 24:56Kate Lister?

  Before his death in 1669, Erlender admits to witchcraft and to teaching others. How far had this evil spread in such a small community? Paul's work to rid Selital of witches is far from over.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Now, things started to get wild, like a devilish march with strange phenomena and discomfort and illness and bad dreams of not only Helga but the whole household. So finally, Paul and his wife fled the place with their three children, and they did not return until all of the farmhouses had been burnt down to cleanse the place of evil spirits.

• 25:45Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this was quite a situation. However, this was only the beginning of the misfortune of the individuals who were eventually burnt at the stake for the charges of the people of Særlar Taldur.

• 26:02Kate Lister?

  What was the law around witchcraft at this time? How would you be accused? How did they prove a charge of witchcraft? What was it under the law at this time?

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Well, at this time, so-called oaths were the usual practice. The oaths were comparable to today's jury, such as in the United States. But the difference, however, was that in a small society like Iceland, it was impossible to choose neutral oath takers. But the arrangement was such that in witchcraft cases, twelve or seven people had to swear guilt or innocence of the defendant. And as a result, people were dependent on their neighbor's mercy.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Their case was obviously influenced by slander and rumours. And it seems that there has not been much burden of proof in witchcraft cases and rarely any use of actual evidence. However, there seems to have been a lot of pressure put on the defendants to confess. And so it often happened that people confessed to witchcraft. However, the confessions did not always match the charges and sometimes confessions came after the verdict had been made. That had to do with religious reasons, I think, because people thought they should show repentance before the death.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  But legal knowledge among Icelanders seems to have been limited at the time. They judged more often by the word of God than by the current law. And the word of God, that is to say, the word of God in the Old Testament, which they most often expounded. The provincial burnings, that is, the execution of people in the district where they lived, without being tried by the Althingi. Althingi was not only a legislative assembly at the time, but also a court. But executing people in the district without taking them to Althingi,

• 28:22Speaker 02

  that was in fact illegal for the entire time the executions for witchcraft took place. Because the Danish king, who was our king at the time, he had, in the early 17th century, issued a decree that no death sentences should be given in cases of life and honour by a lower court level, but only by the superior court. And this decree was not respected in Iceland for almost the entire 17th century. And people were sentenced and executed by provincial court, a lower court level,

• 29:02Speaker 02

  without any right of appeal until the year of 1683, when the last district burning took place.

• 29:10Kate Lister?

  Why were they doing that? Why were they not following the law? Or why did the king not intervene and say, excuse me, I do have a law about this that you are all ignoring?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Well, the king intervened as late as 1683. I suppose that the king was not, you know, he had many other things to do than to look, to take care of Icelanders somewhere in the north, you know, a nation of 50,000 people. I suspect also that the Icelandic lawmen and those that were making those sentences, their knowledge was not as it should have been in law. Their legal knowledge was not as good as it should have been.

• 29:55Kate Lister?

  These are small communities, small rural communities, and they're burning people to death. In Britain, they hanged witches, they let them hang, but in Iceland, they burnt them to death. I'm trying to imagine what that must have been like for a small community to go and watch your neighbour being burnt to death.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  You know, the common people were supposed to witness it. And we have descriptions of people kicking and moving from the fire, falling off the fire and being put on it again. And the writers of the annals, the old newsletters of old times, we call the annals, some of them describe their inner feelings while witnessing this, saying that it was a horrendous thing to watch, et cetera. We do not see any legal ground for this method of execution, that is, to burn up people to death. In some countries, people were executed

• 30:55Speaker 02

  before they were burnt. But in Iceland, they were burnt alive. But we have no legal phrase claiming that that is what you should do until the period of the witch trials was over. Then we first see it in some decree from the king, that the convicted are supposed to be burnt to death. So there was no legal ground for this. It was just some kind of a tradition rooted in the burning of the heretics in the 12th and 13th and 14th centuries in Europe.

• 31:30Kate Lister?

  How many people were burnt to death for witchcraft in Iceland in total?

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Well, in total, 25 people were burnt to death, but we can say that 23 of them were burnt as witches.

• 31:45Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 31:54Kate Lister?

  The embers from 1669's witch burnings have long died down. Helga's health has appeared to improve, but the threat of witchcraft hasn't gone away. Now in 1675, Helga's mysterious illness has returned, and with her husband pallet aside, thoughts once again quickly turn to witches. Who could be responsible? Who needs to pay the ultimate price? Heads turn to Magnus Bjorn Arson and Lasse Didrikson, who are accused of causing her and others in the household to fall ill. The court moved fast in their prosecutions, with Helga ensuring that they were hit with the full force of the law.

• 32:39Kate Lister?

  Lasse protested vehemently, but without the 12 men to vouch for his character, his fate was sealed.

• 32:59Kate Lister?

  When the moment came and the kindling was lit, and Lasse felt the first lick of flames, rain dampened the wood, and the fire went out. It was relit a further two times before the district magistrate's justice was delivered. Walking home from the court, he fell and broke his foot, a sign that many thought meant that Lasse was innocent.

• 33:31Kate Lister?

  Despite this, a further two men were killed in 1678 for using witchcraft to cause Helga's ill health. And of the 22 executed for witchcraft in Iceland, 20 were men.

• 33:44Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Alina for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we've got an episode on the truth about Mary Shelley and another one on husband poisoning in the Renaissance. If you want us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer with Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.