[books 2016] Witchraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages
I am so far behind on this, I can't even remember much about most of the books from the last six weeks.
28 Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages by Stephen A Mitchell
After a really unpromising introduction that led me to order a bunch of other non-fiction titles from the library, eventually I came back to this book to give it a chance.
Glad I did - the rest was actually quite good. It's got two basic parts - what we (might) know about the role of magic & the supernatural in Norse paganism, and in the Christian period, what practices made up what was perceived as witchcraft or devil worship. Good analysis of what we can know and not; lots of interesting factoids which I now can't remember.
You have to be my kind of nerd, but for what it is, it's pretty well written and interesting. (This is a book that Amazon pimped at me when I bought one of the Viking histories, so it came to me without any recommendations from a trusted source; it could have been complete bollocks).
28 Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages by Stephen A Mitchell
After a really unpromising introduction that led me to order a bunch of other non-fiction titles from the library, eventually I came back to this book to give it a chance.
Glad I did - the rest was actually quite good. It's got two basic parts - what we (might) know about the role of magic & the supernatural in Norse paganism, and in the Christian period, what practices made up what was perceived as witchcraft or devil worship. Good analysis of what we can know and not; lots of interesting factoids which I now can't remember.
You have to be my kind of nerd, but for what it is, it's pretty well written and interesting. (This is a book that Amazon pimped at me when I bought one of the Viking histories, so it came to me without any recommendations from a trusted source; it could have been complete bollocks).