October 19, 2024 • 23 mins
This 2016 episode cover the disproportionate number of executions for sorcery that happened in Vardø during Europe's witch trials, This small fishing community staged 140 trials, and sentenced 91 of the accused witches to death.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Recently, we had an episode about the trials
of non human animals that were carried out in parts
of medieval and early modern Europe, and we talked about
some parallels with the witch trials that were taking place
in some of the same places during some of the
same times. We thought we would have one of our
episodes on some of those witch trials as a Saturday
(00:23):
Classic today. This episode is about the witch trials that
took place in Varda in northern Norway in the seventeenth century.
It originally came out on October ninth, twenty sixteen. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
(00:49):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fryme and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson, and we are still in the Halloween season,
which makes me happy. In my dark little Heart and
I accident started a witch theme, but that's not going
to last. Just the two witch episodes this one and
the Bell Witch, and the Bell Witch really doesn't even
count in that regard. But today's episode is legitimately about
(01:12):
witch trials and actual accusations of witchcraft, and Europe's witchcraft
trials spanned three centuries from roughly fourteen fifty to seventeen fifty,
but it was really during the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries that the practice of trying people as witches was
most fervent, and from about fifteen seventy to sixteen eighty.
(01:34):
It's estimated, and this is a pretty wide gap of
where the estimate falls, that between forty thousand and sixty
thousand people across Europe were tried for sorcery of some form,
and most of them were found guilty and put to death.
I've seen the fraction of like approximately two thirds, but
it's hard because there wasn't great record keeping to identify
(01:56):
exactly how many lost their lives because of this and
one particular town. This is an episode heavy in Norwegian words,
which I have no doubt I will butcher. Yeah, even
even having looked at pronunciations for them, a lot of
the phonemes are not used in English, and so replicating them, yeah,
(02:21):
it's a stretch. So no upfront that we will probably
butcher it, and we mean no disrespect to the Norwegian language.
Our mouths just will not do it. So we're going
to talk about Varda, which is a fishing village. It
was known as Norway's witch capital, and it was the
site of a long series of quite brutal inquests, and
(02:43):
there were generally two different kinds of witchcraft trials in
Norway through this time period. There were isolated trials where
one person was brought before the court and tried for sorcery,
like just one person at a time would pop up
and seem suspicious, and then there were panics, groups of
people were tried in rapid succession in a very short
period of time. And whereas the isolated trials had more
(03:06):
to do with an individual person practicing witchcraft or some
sort of sorcery, these panics were driven by the idea
that demons were involved, usually and that groups of witches
were consorting with the devil. So today we're going to
talk about two of the panics that took place in Varda, Norway,
And first we're going to give you a little bit
of geographical context about the area. So Varda sits in
(03:31):
Finnmark County, is Norway's only town that's in the Arctic
climate zone and offers views of the Norwegian Russian Arctic.
It's a really small coastal village. There are fewer than
twenty five hundred inhabitants. It's Northern Norway's oldest town, with
settlements dating back as far as nine thousand years and
(03:52):
in the thirteen hundreds both a church and varda fortress
were built there and the town sort of grew up
around primarily the fortress. And despite the brutal weather, the
fishing along the coast of Finmark was plentiful and the
location offered really really lucrative trade opportunities even today. I mean,
this is remote. Its relative isolation is one of the
(04:15):
reasons that Finmark's witch trials were so expedient. Copenhagen, which
under Danish rule was Norway's capital, was far enough away
that the local authorities of Finmark basically got to act independently.
There was such a big geographical distance from any higher
authority that the decisions to execute witches were basically made
(04:36):
with total conviction, and then the sentences were carried out
without hesitation. There was no like Norwegian version of the
Department of Justice overseeing the witch trial situation in Finnmark correct,
(04:56):
but the directives to abecute witches came from very high
because during some of this time from fifteen eighty eight
to sixteen forty eight, the ruler of the Danish Norwegian
Kingdom was King Christian Force, and he had an agenda
when it came to witches. Yeah, I should say there
that like, even if there had been an equivalent of
the Justice department overseeing the witch trial situation, it would
(05:21):
not have had the effect of preventing the execution of witches.
And the officials of the crown at this time, who
served under Christian the Force, were basically charged with the
task of ridding the country of witches, and they were
very committed to this job. So it's not surprising that
there was a level of comfort in acting with this
complete authority. In cases of witchcraft at the local level.
(05:44):
From the late sixteenth century into the seventeenth century, Vardo,
which is a small village, as we said, stage one
hundred and forty different trials and in ninety one documented
cases the accused was found guilty and put to death
either by burning or by torture. Most of these happened
in clusters where many people were prosecuted over very short
periods of time, and the numbers here get really interesting
(06:08):
because during the time of these witch hunts, less than
one percent of Norway's population lived in the Finmark area
where these trials took place, but this remote fishing community
was home to thirty one percent of the witch executions
in Norway, so disproportionately large numbers of people were being
charged and punished by death for being witches. In Finmark,
(06:30):
there were one hundred eleven women and twenty four men
accused of sorcery. Of the ninety one put to death,
seventy seven where women and fourteen were men. And the
Sami people, which is an indigenous Scandinavian culture which still
exists today, were some of the first to be targeted
in this witch panic. They had been the first known
(06:51):
people to live in Finmark, but as that area colonized,
they became the minority. Approximately eighty percent of those accused
of which craft and Fenmark were in Norwegian, twenty percent
were Sami. When considering gender, though these numbers skew in
a totally different way. Of the twenty four men who
were accused of witchcraft in the area, sixteen were from
(07:13):
the Sami people. At least thirteen of those sixteen were
found guilty and executed, and that disparity in proportions is
likely due, according to historian live Helene Willielmson, who is
kind of an expert on this area of study, to
the fact that Sami men in particular had a reputation
for sorcery throughout Europe, and this is linked probably to
(07:36):
some of their cultural practices. For example, they used this
they would do this ritual where they used rune drums
where they were basically kind of doing chants, and people went, oh,
that must be evil. It wasn't, It's just part of
their culture. And in sixteen oh nine, King Christian the
Force wrote a letter to his district governors that they
(07:56):
should persecute Sami sorcerers without mercy, and that really catalyzed
fin Mark's witch hunting phase. So while the trials of
the seventeenth century might have primarily affected Norwegian women, it
does appear that bias against the Sami people really started things.
In the early sixteen hundreds, Sami were targeted more frequently,
(08:17):
and then the trials transitioned to focus on the women
of Fenmark. And part of the mindset that led to
this witch panic was the idea common in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries that the far north of the European continent,
including the coast of Norway, was sort of home to
the devil. This idea appears to have been born of
(08:37):
a tangle of ideologies and fears. For one, although Christianity
had spread throughout Europe, there were still people, including those
in the northern fringes, who didn't practice it, which drew
a lot of suspicion from the Church. Additionally, this was
and still is a place where the climate can be
incredibly punishing, and that stormy nature was attributed to sorcery.
(09:00):
The icy, cold winds from the north were believed to
originate at the devil's home and to be a conveyance
of the devil's will of sorcery and of evil spirits,
and these spirits, of course, specialized in nautical dark magic.
These were not just locally held ideas. Many areas of Europe,
including France, England, Sweden, Germany and Scotland, were homes of
(09:20):
people who believed that Norway was virtually riddled with witches,
and the Mountain of Dolmen, which sat between two fishing villages,
was believed to be the site of the entrance to
a tunnel that went directly to Hell, and a cave
within that mountain was reportedly the genesis point for various
demons who then spread from there throughout the European continent.
(09:43):
So we're about to get into these panics, but first
we're going to pause for a quick word from one
of our sponsors. So to Finnmark in the sixteen twenties,
(10:04):
As with any of history's witchcraft persecution episodes, sorcery was
often the scapegoat for difficult or tragic events that happened
in any community, and Finnmark experienced a really terrible storm
one Christmas early on in the seventeenth century. So the
unexpected sixteen seventeen Christmas Eve storm hit when sixteen boats
(10:25):
from Varda and seven boats from Kyburg. I'm sure I'm
saying that terribly wrong, so I apologize. We're all at
sea and ten of those boats capsized and forty fishermen
were drowned. Struggling to cope with the loss of so
many of the village's men, at one time, members of
the community started to point to witchcraft is the cause
of this tragedy. The population of both villages combined was
(10:49):
less than three hundred people, so forty deaths really did
have a massive impact on the community, and this incident
eventually catalyzed a piece of legist that allowed for mass prosecutions,
specifically in the charge of witchcraft. And it actually took
a long time to enact that law and get it
up and running. While it was first introduced in October
(11:11):
sixteen seventeen, it really wasn't enforced until sixteen twenty. This
ability meant that there was one of those instances where
a lot of people, both men and women, faced charges
of witchcraft and were found guilty. So in January of
sixteen twenty one, during the anti sorcery proceedings, a woman
appeared at the trials and claimed that witches had indeed
(11:32):
tied knots in the fishing nets and cast spells on them.
Her name was Elson Knute's daughter, and she detailed how
a group of witches had tied three knots in a
piece of string, They had cursed the knots and then
spit on them, and then as those knots were untied,
that curse was activated and the sea consequently claimed the
lives of those fishermen. She herself was accused of witchcraft
(11:55):
and was thrown into the sea to see if she floated.
This is all too common and pretty foolish practice. The
thinking was that the water, which was believed to be
a sacred element, would repel evil, which was why witches floated.
Elsa floated, dooming herself to a guilty verdict, and then
she was put to death. In February of sixteen twenty one,
(12:17):
another woman, on Lar's daughter testified before the court, and
initially she refused to speak, and she was, like Elsa,
thrown into the sea for the water test. But after
this test began, she readily confessed, and this was framed
at the time as the water test having released her
from the devil's spell. She claimed that when she had
(12:38):
been questioned earlier, the devil had silenced her tongue, and
when she did speak, she said that she had met
with the devil on Christmas Eve of sixteen seventeen. She
went on to say that she had that evening flown
through the air alongside the devil, and that he had
taken her from one village to another where a total
of forty witches had gathered to celebrate the Sabbath. After
(12:59):
these events, she went back to her home. Mari Jorgan's
daughter also testified, and she said that the devil had
visited her on Christmas Eve and asked if she would
serve him, and then took her to the home of
Kirsty Soren's daughter. Kirsty, according to Mary's testimony, cast a
spell on her that transformed her into a raven, enabling
(13:20):
her to quickly make the journey to the gathering where
the not curse was performed. Marie gave added information that
a similar Christmas Eve sabbath had happened in the time
between the sixteen seventeen tragedy and the sixteen twenty one trials.
On Christmas Eve, sixteen twenty and Kirsty Soren's daughter figured
prominently in a lot of the testimony. She was characterized
(13:42):
by others on trial as the leader of the group,
and she was also one of the last women who
testified in the sixteen twenty one trials, and she had
witnessed how things had played out for those that had
faced the court before her. Under threat of torture, she
confirmed what the other women had said about their rituals,
dooming herself to be burned at the stake. During her
(14:03):
court appearance, Kirsty named two men who had also participated
in the rituals while men were tried for witchcraft in
Norway during all this time, neither of the men that
she named were formally accused. But if legal records of
later trials are taken at face value, because there are
records of all of these proceedings that are apparently pretty
(14:26):
well maintained, they're in pretty good shape. But they are
they're literally like on file there in Norway, so they're
not online or anything, but they basically lay out as
though this is a legal document. These are legal proceedings
all of these things that we're talking about today. So
there is a record of all of these trials, and
(14:47):
if they are taken at face value, there were still
practicing witches in Finnmark for decades after the many deaths
of the sixteen twenty one trials, and while more than
ten women were put to death in sixteen twenty one,
a series of trials and sixteen sixties would claim even
more lives. In late sixteen sixty two, more than thirty
were accused of sorcery in a series of trials that
(15:08):
played out into sixteen sixty three. Among the accused were
not just adult women, but also young girls under the
age of twelve, and most of the testimonies in this
case were confessions that were tortured out of women and
threatened out of children who said that they had met
and celebrated with the devil at Domen, which we mentioned earlier.
(15:30):
During the trials, several of the accused said that they
had traveled Doman's pathway to Hell and that it was
a long black valley with a boiling lake at the bottom.
And one of the children victimized in these trials was
Ingeborg Iver's daughter, who was found guilty of sorcery because
of her association with two women and another girl. And
there Christmas Eve sixteen sixty two activities, so that day
(15:54):
Iver's daughter and a woman named Solvi, Nil's daughter were
actually in custody for suspected witchcraft. They were in prison
at Vardahu's fortress, but according to testimony given before the court,
they turned into cats, escaped the fortress and met with
the devil outside the gates, and then the devil took
them to one of these witch meetings, and it's there
(16:15):
that they met the other woman and girl that were
involved in this particular accusation in the testimony, and after
much carousing and celebrating, the devil then returned them to
the fortress. Ingeborg had the unhappy distinction of being the
first child accused of witchcraft and fenmark when she appeared
at her trial on January twenty sixth, sixteen sixty three.
Her exact age is unknown, but she was described in
(16:37):
court records as a little girl. Her mother had already
been burned for witchcraft, and she had said that her
mother taught her witchcraft by giving her a tainted bowl
of milk. There was this perception at the time that
witchcraft was conveyed often through tainted food or drink, and
that's how you passed it on from one generation to
(16:58):
the next. And then the devil, after she had had
this tainted milk, the devil was conjured by her mother
in the form of a black dog, and that dog
bit her repeatedly. And this same sort of narrative was
described by the other five girls as well, being given
like a tainted usually milk, and then this black dog
(17:19):
devil coming and sort of attacking them as a form
of trial. And while to the court at the time
this may have indicated truthfulness, each girl's testimony validated what
had come before because they were pretty consistent, but it
also suggests that perhaps they had simply heard the same
tail over and over from somewhere, and we're going to
get to a possible source of that tale in just
(17:40):
a moment. We're also going to go into a bit
more detail about the Vardajas Fortress than some of the
people who were held there as captives. But before we do,
we are going to stop one more time for a
very brief sponsor break. So that holding situation that we
(18:04):
mentioned before, the break in Vardahus Fortress, which you will
also sometimes see translated as Vardajus Castle, was where most
of the torture used to illicit confessions took place, and
there was this single room called the Witch's Hole where
sort of these torturous events happened. And while the use
of torture was technically illegal before a sentence was passed
(18:25):
on a prisoner, it was still used both before the
sentence to gain confessions and then after sentencing there would
be more torture to produce names of accomplices. One of
the interesting factors in this panic is the influence of
two people, a husband and a wife, on the confessions
of the accused. This pair, Ambrosius Rhodius and Frieder's daughter Rosius,
(18:48):
had been imprisoned near modern day Oslo before being moved
to Vardajus Fortress. Ambrosius was an astrologer and a physician
who was considered politically dangerous after having made some accurate
predictions about military conflicts, and his wife Anne, who was
the granddaughter of King Frederick the second, had some sort
of serious argument with political figures in their hometown. So yeah,
(19:12):
they were moved to Vardijas because they were considered basically
enemies of the state at that point, and because the
fortress was kind of crowded in the sixteen sixties panic.
At least one of the children imprisoned there shared quarters
with the Rodeus couple, and additionally, Anne had a key
to the witch's whole, and it's documented that Anne spoke
with both the women and girls who were being held
(19:34):
in the fortress awaiting trial, and that she talked at
length with them about demonology and that she encouraged their confessions.
On the up side, all six of the little girls
involved in the sixteen sixty two to sixteen sixty three
panic were acquitted on the grounds that they were too
young to be held accountable. For their actions and that
they had undoubtedly been influenced by the adult witches around them.
(19:57):
And over the course of the sixteen sixty series of
accusation and trials, we mentioned that thirty people had been accused,
two women died while being tortured for information before they
could be sentenced, and twenty others were sentenced, found guilty
and burned at the stake. In twenty eleven, the country
of Norway made a significant gesture of apology and recognition
(20:18):
of the ninety one people known to have been executed
for witchcraft. Peter Zumthor, an architect from Switzerland, and Louis Bourgeois,
a French American artist, works together to design a memorial
for the lives that were lost. So this stunesset memorial
sits on a piece of remote coastline on the Barren Sea,
believed to be the site of many of the executions
(20:39):
and the architect's contribution to the work, which is titled
Memory Hall, looks like one hundred and fifty eight yard
or one hundred and forty five meter long corridors built
at the edge of the sea, but instead of exterior walls,
it has an open crosshatched frame. That frame, which is
made of pine, supports a tunnel like silk cocoon, and
within the fabric tunnel is a hallway with oak floors.
(21:02):
Within the interior are ninety one lamps, and each of
them illuminates a window that represents one of the executed
and an engraving dedicated to one of the people killed
for witchcraft, including the testimony that was used against them.
The second part of the memorial, which can be entered
by visitors once they have passed through that long type
memorial corridor, is Bourgeoise creation, and it's entitled The Damn,
(21:24):
the Possessed and the Beloved. And this element is a
black glass room and inside there is a chair in
the center that burns continuously and there are three mirrors
mounted above it to create the illusion of the space
being consumed in fire. So it's kind of a unique thing.
I don't know of many other countries that have done
anything like this. It's quite beautiful. There's some really good
(21:47):
pictures online and we'll have links to those in the
show notes. But it's an interesting testament to how things
have changed in their efforts to kind of they obviously
cannot fix what has gone before. But to at least
acknowledge the wrongs that were done and how misguided the
attempts to rid the country of evil through witchcraft trials were.
(22:10):
So that's the Varta witch trials. Oh, which trials. Like
people have such a fascination with witch trials, but they're depressing.
They're so depressing they are It breaks my heart if
you read about you know, these little girls, Yeah, children
that were being forced to testify, sometimes alongside their mothers
(22:33):
and sometimes after their mothers had already been killed. And
there's such brutality to it and it's rough. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like
to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the
(22:56):
show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday. Recently, we had an episode about the trials
of non human animals that were carried out in parts
of medieval and early modern Europe, and we talked about
some parallels with the witch trials that were taking place
in some of the same places during some of the
same times. We thought we would have one of our
episodes on some of those witch trials as a Saturday
(00:23):
Classic today. This episode is about the witch trials that
took place in Varda in northern Norway in the seventeenth century.
It originally came out on October ninth, twenty sixteen. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
(00:49):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fryme and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson, and we are still in the Halloween season,
which makes me happy. In my dark little Heart and
I accident started a witch theme, but that's not going
to last. Just the two witch episodes this one and
the Bell Witch, and the Bell Witch really doesn't even
count in that regard. But today's episode is legitimately about
(01:12):
witch trials and actual accusations of witchcraft, and Europe's witchcraft
trials spanned three centuries from roughly fourteen fifty to seventeen fifty,
but it was really during the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries that the practice of trying people as witches was
most fervent, and from about fifteen seventy to sixteen eighty.
(01:34):
It's estimated, and this is a pretty wide gap of
where the estimate falls, that between forty thousand and sixty
thousand people across Europe were tried for sorcery of some form,
and most of them were found guilty and put to death.
I've seen the fraction of like approximately two thirds, but
it's hard because there wasn't great record keeping to identify
(01:56):
exactly how many lost their lives because of this and
one particular town. This is an episode heavy in Norwegian words,
which I have no doubt I will butcher. Yeah, even
even having looked at pronunciations for them, a lot of
the phonemes are not used in English, and so replicating them, yeah,
(02:21):
it's a stretch. So no upfront that we will probably
butcher it, and we mean no disrespect to the Norwegian language.
Our mouths just will not do it. So we're going
to talk about Varda, which is a fishing village. It
was known as Norway's witch capital, and it was the
site of a long series of quite brutal inquests, and
(02:43):
there were generally two different kinds of witchcraft trials in
Norway through this time period. There were isolated trials where
one person was brought before the court and tried for sorcery,
like just one person at a time would pop up
and seem suspicious, and then there were panics, groups of
people were tried in rapid succession in a very short
period of time. And whereas the isolated trials had more
(03:06):
to do with an individual person practicing witchcraft or some
sort of sorcery, these panics were driven by the idea
that demons were involved, usually and that groups of witches
were consorting with the devil. So today we're going to
talk about two of the panics that took place in Varda, Norway,
And first we're going to give you a little bit
of geographical context about the area. So Varda sits in
(03:31):
Finnmark County, is Norway's only town that's in the Arctic
climate zone and offers views of the Norwegian Russian Arctic.
It's a really small coastal village. There are fewer than
twenty five hundred inhabitants. It's Northern Norway's oldest town, with
settlements dating back as far as nine thousand years and
(03:52):
in the thirteen hundreds both a church and varda fortress
were built there and the town sort of grew up
around primarily the fortress. And despite the brutal weather, the
fishing along the coast of Finmark was plentiful and the
location offered really really lucrative trade opportunities even today. I mean,
this is remote. Its relative isolation is one of the
(04:15):
reasons that Finmark's witch trials were so expedient. Copenhagen, which
under Danish rule was Norway's capital, was far enough away
that the local authorities of Finmark basically got to act independently.
There was such a big geographical distance from any higher
authority that the decisions to execute witches were basically made
(04:36):
with total conviction, and then the sentences were carried out
without hesitation. There was no like Norwegian version of the
Department of Justice overseeing the witch trial situation in Finnmark correct,
(04:56):
but the directives to abecute witches came from very high
because during some of this time from fifteen eighty eight
to sixteen forty eight, the ruler of the Danish Norwegian
Kingdom was King Christian Force, and he had an agenda
when it came to witches. Yeah, I should say there
that like, even if there had been an equivalent of
the Justice department overseeing the witch trial situation, it would
(05:21):
not have had the effect of preventing the execution of witches.
And the officials of the crown at this time, who
served under Christian the Force, were basically charged with the
task of ridding the country of witches, and they were
very committed to this job. So it's not surprising that
there was a level of comfort in acting with this
complete authority. In cases of witchcraft at the local level.
(05:44):
From the late sixteenth century into the seventeenth century, Vardo,
which is a small village, as we said, stage one
hundred and forty different trials and in ninety one documented
cases the accused was found guilty and put to death
either by burning or by torture. Most of these happened
in clusters where many people were prosecuted over very short
periods of time, and the numbers here get really interesting
(06:08):
because during the time of these witch hunts, less than
one percent of Norway's population lived in the Finmark area
where these trials took place, but this remote fishing community
was home to thirty one percent of the witch executions
in Norway, so disproportionately large numbers of people were being
charged and punished by death for being witches. In Finmark,
(06:30):
there were one hundred eleven women and twenty four men
accused of sorcery. Of the ninety one put to death,
seventy seven where women and fourteen were men. And the
Sami people, which is an indigenous Scandinavian culture which still
exists today, were some of the first to be targeted
in this witch panic. They had been the first known
(06:51):
people to live in Finmark, but as that area colonized,
they became the minority. Approximately eighty percent of those accused
of which craft and Fenmark were in Norwegian, twenty percent
were Sami. When considering gender, though these numbers skew in
a totally different way. Of the twenty four men who
were accused of witchcraft in the area, sixteen were from
(07:13):
the Sami people. At least thirteen of those sixteen were
found guilty and executed, and that disparity in proportions is
likely due, according to historian live Helene Willielmson, who is
kind of an expert on this area of study, to
the fact that Sami men in particular had a reputation
for sorcery throughout Europe, and this is linked probably to
(07:36):
some of their cultural practices. For example, they used this
they would do this ritual where they used rune drums
where they were basically kind of doing chants, and people went, oh,
that must be evil. It wasn't, It's just part of
their culture. And in sixteen oh nine, King Christian the
Force wrote a letter to his district governors that they
(07:56):
should persecute Sami sorcerers without mercy, and that really catalyzed
fin Mark's witch hunting phase. So while the trials of
the seventeenth century might have primarily affected Norwegian women, it
does appear that bias against the Sami people really started things.
In the early sixteen hundreds, Sami were targeted more frequently,
(08:17):
and then the trials transitioned to focus on the women
of Fenmark. And part of the mindset that led to
this witch panic was the idea common in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries that the far north of the European continent,
including the coast of Norway, was sort of home to
the devil. This idea appears to have been born of
(08:37):
a tangle of ideologies and fears. For one, although Christianity
had spread throughout Europe, there were still people, including those
in the northern fringes, who didn't practice it, which drew
a lot of suspicion from the Church. Additionally, this was
and still is a place where the climate can be
incredibly punishing, and that stormy nature was attributed to sorcery.
(09:00):
The icy, cold winds from the north were believed to
originate at the devil's home and to be a conveyance
of the devil's will of sorcery and of evil spirits,
and these spirits, of course, specialized in nautical dark magic.
These were not just locally held ideas. Many areas of Europe,
including France, England, Sweden, Germany and Scotland, were homes of
(09:20):
people who believed that Norway was virtually riddled with witches,
and the Mountain of Dolmen, which sat between two fishing villages,
was believed to be the site of the entrance to
a tunnel that went directly to Hell, and a cave
within that mountain was reportedly the genesis point for various
demons who then spread from there throughout the European continent.
(09:43):
So we're about to get into these panics, but first
we're going to pause for a quick word from one
of our sponsors. So to Finnmark in the sixteen twenties,
(10:04):
As with any of history's witchcraft persecution episodes, sorcery was
often the scapegoat for difficult or tragic events that happened
in any community, and Finnmark experienced a really terrible storm
one Christmas early on in the seventeenth century. So the
unexpected sixteen seventeen Christmas Eve storm hit when sixteen boats
(10:25):
from Varda and seven boats from Kyburg. I'm sure I'm
saying that terribly wrong, so I apologize. We're all at
sea and ten of those boats capsized and forty fishermen
were drowned. Struggling to cope with the loss of so
many of the village's men, at one time, members of
the community started to point to witchcraft is the cause
of this tragedy. The population of both villages combined was
(10:49):
less than three hundred people, so forty deaths really did
have a massive impact on the community, and this incident
eventually catalyzed a piece of legist that allowed for mass prosecutions,
specifically in the charge of witchcraft. And it actually took
a long time to enact that law and get it
up and running. While it was first introduced in October
(11:11):
sixteen seventeen, it really wasn't enforced until sixteen twenty. This
ability meant that there was one of those instances where
a lot of people, both men and women, faced charges
of witchcraft and were found guilty. So in January of
sixteen twenty one, during the anti sorcery proceedings, a woman
appeared at the trials and claimed that witches had indeed
(11:32):
tied knots in the fishing nets and cast spells on them.
Her name was Elson Knute's daughter, and she detailed how
a group of witches had tied three knots in a
piece of string, They had cursed the knots and then
spit on them, and then as those knots were untied,
that curse was activated and the sea consequently claimed the
lives of those fishermen. She herself was accused of witchcraft
(11:55):
and was thrown into the sea to see if she floated.
This is all too common and pretty foolish practice. The
thinking was that the water, which was believed to be
a sacred element, would repel evil, which was why witches floated.
Elsa floated, dooming herself to a guilty verdict, and then
she was put to death. In February of sixteen twenty one,
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another woman, on Lar's daughter testified before the court, and
initially she refused to speak, and she was, like Elsa,
thrown into the sea for the water test. But after
this test began, she readily confessed, and this was framed
at the time as the water test having released her
from the devil's spell. She claimed that when she had
(12:38):
been questioned earlier, the devil had silenced her tongue, and
when she did speak, she said that she had met
with the devil on Christmas Eve of sixteen seventeen. She
went on to say that she had that evening flown
through the air alongside the devil, and that he had
taken her from one village to another where a total
of forty witches had gathered to celebrate the Sabbath. After
(12:59):
these events, she went back to her home. Mari Jorgan's
daughter also testified, and she said that the devil had
visited her on Christmas Eve and asked if she would
serve him, and then took her to the home of
Kirsty Soren's daughter. Kirsty, according to Mary's testimony, cast a
spell on her that transformed her into a raven, enabling
(13:20):
her to quickly make the journey to the gathering where
the not curse was performed. Marie gave added information that
a similar Christmas Eve sabbath had happened in the time
between the sixteen seventeen tragedy and the sixteen twenty one trials.
On Christmas Eve, sixteen twenty and Kirsty Soren's daughter figured
prominently in a lot of the testimony. She was characterized
(13:42):
by others on trial as the leader of the group,
and she was also one of the last women who
testified in the sixteen twenty one trials, and she had
witnessed how things had played out for those that had
faced the court before her. Under threat of torture, she
confirmed what the other women had said about their rituals,
dooming herself to be burned at the stake. During her
(14:03):
court appearance, Kirsty named two men who had also participated
in the rituals while men were tried for witchcraft in
Norway during all this time, neither of the men that
she named were formally accused. But if legal records of
later trials are taken at face value, because there are
records of all of these proceedings that are apparently pretty
(14:26):
well maintained, they're in pretty good shape. But they are
they're literally like on file there in Norway, so they're
not online or anything, but they basically lay out as
though this is a legal document. These are legal proceedings
all of these things that we're talking about today. So
there is a record of all of these trials, and
(14:47):
if they are taken at face value, there were still
practicing witches in Finnmark for decades after the many deaths
of the sixteen twenty one trials, and while more than
ten women were put to death in sixteen twenty one,
a series of trials and sixteen sixties would claim even
more lives. In late sixteen sixty two, more than thirty
were accused of sorcery in a series of trials that
(15:08):
played out into sixteen sixty three. Among the accused were
not just adult women, but also young girls under the
age of twelve, and most of the testimonies in this
case were confessions that were tortured out of women and
threatened out of children who said that they had met
and celebrated with the devil at Domen, which we mentioned earlier.
(15:30):
During the trials, several of the accused said that they
had traveled Doman's pathway to Hell and that it was
a long black valley with a boiling lake at the bottom.
And one of the children victimized in these trials was
Ingeborg Iver's daughter, who was found guilty of sorcery because
of her association with two women and another girl. And
there Christmas Eve sixteen sixty two activities, so that day
(15:54):
Iver's daughter and a woman named Solvi, Nil's daughter were
actually in custody for suspected witchcraft. They were in prison
at Vardahu's fortress, but according to testimony given before the court,
they turned into cats, escaped the fortress and met with
the devil outside the gates, and then the devil took
them to one of these witch meetings, and it's there
(16:15):
that they met the other woman and girl that were
involved in this particular accusation in the testimony, and after
much carousing and celebrating, the devil then returned them to
the fortress. Ingeborg had the unhappy distinction of being the
first child accused of witchcraft and fenmark when she appeared
at her trial on January twenty sixth, sixteen sixty three.
Her exact age is unknown, but she was described in
(16:37):
court records as a little girl. Her mother had already
been burned for witchcraft, and she had said that her
mother taught her witchcraft by giving her a tainted bowl
of milk. There was this perception at the time that
witchcraft was conveyed often through tainted food or drink, and
that's how you passed it on from one generation to
(16:58):
the next. And then the devil, after she had had
this tainted milk, the devil was conjured by her mother
in the form of a black dog, and that dog
bit her repeatedly. And this same sort of narrative was
described by the other five girls as well, being given
like a tainted usually milk, and then this black dog
(17:19):
devil coming and sort of attacking them as a form
of trial. And while to the court at the time
this may have indicated truthfulness, each girl's testimony validated what
had come before because they were pretty consistent, but it
also suggests that perhaps they had simply heard the same
tail over and over from somewhere, and we're going to
get to a possible source of that tale in just
(17:40):
a moment. We're also going to go into a bit
more detail about the Vardajas Fortress than some of the
people who were held there as captives. But before we do,
we are going to stop one more time for a
very brief sponsor break. So that holding situation that we
(18:04):
mentioned before, the break in Vardahus Fortress, which you will
also sometimes see translated as Vardajus Castle, was where most
of the torture used to illicit confessions took place, and
there was this single room called the Witch's Hole where
sort of these torturous events happened. And while the use
of torture was technically illegal before a sentence was passed
(18:25):
on a prisoner, it was still used both before the
sentence to gain confessions and then after sentencing there would
be more torture to produce names of accomplices. One of
the interesting factors in this panic is the influence of
two people, a husband and a wife, on the confessions
of the accused. This pair, Ambrosius Rhodius and Frieder's daughter Rosius,
(18:48):
had been imprisoned near modern day Oslo before being moved
to Vardajus Fortress. Ambrosius was an astrologer and a physician
who was considered politically dangerous after having made some accurate
predictions about military conflicts, and his wife Anne, who was
the granddaughter of King Frederick the second, had some sort
of serious argument with political figures in their hometown. So yeah,
(19:12):
they were moved to Vardijas because they were considered basically
enemies of the state at that point, and because the
fortress was kind of crowded in the sixteen sixties panic.
At least one of the children imprisoned there shared quarters
with the Rodeus couple, and additionally, Anne had a key
to the witch's whole, and it's documented that Anne spoke
with both the women and girls who were being held
(19:34):
in the fortress awaiting trial, and that she talked at
length with them about demonology and that she encouraged their confessions.
On the up side, all six of the little girls
involved in the sixteen sixty two to sixteen sixty three
panic were acquitted on the grounds that they were too
young to be held accountable. For their actions and that
they had undoubtedly been influenced by the adult witches around them.
(19:57):
And over the course of the sixteen sixty series of
accusation and trials, we mentioned that thirty people had been accused,
two women died while being tortured for information before they
could be sentenced, and twenty others were sentenced, found guilty
and burned at the stake. In twenty eleven, the country
of Norway made a significant gesture of apology and recognition
(20:18):
of the ninety one people known to have been executed
for witchcraft. Peter Zumthor, an architect from Switzerland, and Louis Bourgeois,
a French American artist, works together to design a memorial
for the lives that were lost. So this stunesset memorial
sits on a piece of remote coastline on the Barren Sea,
believed to be the site of many of the executions
(20:39):
and the architect's contribution to the work, which is titled
Memory Hall, looks like one hundred and fifty eight yard
or one hundred and forty five meter long corridors built
at the edge of the sea, but instead of exterior walls,
it has an open crosshatched frame. That frame, which is
made of pine, supports a tunnel like silk cocoon, and
within the fabric tunnel is a hallway with oak floors.
(21:02):
Within the interior are ninety one lamps, and each of
them illuminates a window that represents one of the executed
and an engraving dedicated to one of the people killed
for witchcraft, including the testimony that was used against them.
The second part of the memorial, which can be entered
by visitors once they have passed through that long type
memorial corridor, is Bourgeoise creation, and it's entitled The Damn,
(21:24):
the Possessed and the Beloved. And this element is a
black glass room and inside there is a chair in
the center that burns continuously and there are three mirrors
mounted above it to create the illusion of the space
being consumed in fire. So it's kind of a unique thing.
I don't know of many other countries that have done
anything like this. It's quite beautiful. There's some really good
(21:47):
pictures online and we'll have links to those in the
show notes. But it's an interesting testament to how things
have changed in their efforts to kind of they obviously
cannot fix what has gone before. But to at least
acknowledge the wrongs that were done and how misguided the
attempts to rid the country of evil through witchcraft trials were.
(22:10):
So that's the Varta witch trials. Oh, which trials. Like
people have such a fascination with witch trials, but they're depressing.
They're so depressing they are It breaks my heart if
you read about you know, these little girls, Yeah, children
that were being forced to testify, sometimes alongside their mothers
(22:33):
and sometimes after their mothers had already been killed. And
there's such brutality to it and it's rough. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like
to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the
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show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
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