October 10, 2016 • 28 mins
At the height of Europe's witch trials, the northern coast of Norway had a disproportionate number of executions for sorcery. The small fishing community in the Arctic circle staged 140 trials, and sentenced 91 of the accused witches to death.
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you get your podcasts. Welcome to Steph you missed in
history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly from and I'm tra
and we are still in the Halloween season, which makes
(01:04):
me happy in my dark little heart, and I accidentally
started a witch theme, but that's not gonna last. Just
the two witch episodes of 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 which trials uh and
actual accusations of witchcraft and Europe's witchcraft trials spanned three centuries,
(01:30):
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. It's estimated, and
this is a pretty wide uh gap of where the
estimate falls, that between forty thousand and sixty thousand people
(01:51):
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
exactly how many lost their lives because of this in
one particular town. Uh. This is an episode heavy in
(02:14):
Norwegian words, which I have no doubt I will butcher. Uh. Yeah,
even even having looked at pronunciations for them, a lot
of the phonemes are not used in English, and so
replicating them, yeah, it's a stretch. So no upfront that
we will probably butcher it, and we mean no disrespect
(02:35):
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 there were generally two different kinds of
witchcraft trials in Norway through this time period. There were
(02:57):
isolated trials where one person was brought before the court
and tried for sorcery, uh, like, just one person at
a time would pop up and seem suspicious. And then
there were panics where groups of people were tried in
rapid succession in a very short period of time. And
whereas the isolated trials had more to do with an
individual person practicing witchcraft or some sort of sorcery, these
(03:20):
panics were driven by the idea that demons were involved
usually and that groups of which is we're consorting with
the devil. So today we're going to talk about two
of the panics that took place in Varda, Norway. Uh.
And first we're going to give you a little bit
of geographical context about the area. So Varda sits in
Finnmark County, is Norway's only town that's in the Arctic
(03:44):
climate zone and offers views of the Norwegian Russian Arctic.
It's a really small coastal village. There are fewer than
d inhabitants. It's Northern Norway's oldest town, with settlements dating
back as far as nine thousand years and in the
hundreds both a church and Varta fortress were built there
(04:06):
and the town sort of grew up around primarily the fortress.
And despite the brutal weather, the fishing along the coast
of finn Mark was plentiful and the location offered really
really um lucrative trade opportunities even today. I mean, this
is remote. Its relative isolation is one of the reasons
that finn Mark's witch trials were so expedient. Copenhagen, which
(04:29):
under Danish rule was Norway's capital, was far enough away
that the local authorities of finn Mark 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 with total conviction, and then the sentences were
carried out without hesitation. There was no like Norwegian h
(04:55):
version of of like the Department of Justice over seeing
the witch trial situation in Finnmark correct, But the directives
to to prosecute, which is came from very high because
during some of this time from sixty the ruler of
(05:15):
the Danish Norwegian Kingdom was King Christian the fourth, and
he had an agenda when it came to witches. Yeah,
I should say they're that like even if there had
been an equivalent of the Justice department overseeing the witch
trial situation, it would 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 fourth,
(05:38):
we're 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. From the late sixteenth century
into the seventeenth century, Varda, which is a small village,
as we said, stage a hundred and four different trials
(06:01):
and in nine 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 because during the time of these
witch hunts, less than one percent of Norway's population lived
(06:22):
in the Finnmark area where these trials took place, but
this remote fishing community was home to thirty one of
the witch executions in Norway, so disproportionately large numbers of
people were being charged and punished by death for being witches.
In finn Mark there were one d eleven women and
twenty four men accused of sorcery. Of thee put to
(06:45):
death seventy seven where women in 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 for
known people to live in Finnmark, but as that area colonized,
they became the minority. Approximately eighty percent of those accused
(07:08):
of witchcraft and finn Mark were Norwegian 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 the Sami people. At
least thirteen of those, sixteen were found guilty and executed,
(07:28):
and that disparity in proportions is likely do according to
historian live Helene Williamson, 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 some of their cultural practices.
For example, uh, they used this, uh they would do
(07:51):
this ritual where they used run drums where they were
basically kind of doing chance and people went, oh, that
must be evil. It wasn't. It's just part of their culture.
And in sixteen o nine, King Christian the fourth wrote
a letter to his district governors that they should persecute
Sami sorcerers without mercy, and that really catalyzed finn Mark's
witch hunting phase. So while the trials of the seventeenth
(08:14):
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, and
then the trials transitioned to focus on the women of
finn Mark, and part of the mindset that led to
this witch panic was the idea common in the sixteenth
(08:36):
and seventeen 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
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
(08:57):
a lot of suspicion from the Church did sationally. This
was and still is a place where the climate can
be incredibly punishing, and that stormy nature was attributed to sorcery.
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.
(09:18):
And these spirits, of course, specialized in nautical dark magic.
And these were not just locally held ideas. Many areas
of Europe, including France, England, Sweden, Germany and Scotland, were
homes of 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
(09:40):
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. So we're about to get into these panics,
but first we're going to pause for a quick word
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the sixteen twenties. 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 finn Mark experienced a
really terrible storm one Christmas early on in the seventeenth century.
So the unexpected sixteen seventeen Christmas Eve storm hit when
(11:56):
sixteen boats from Varda and seven boats from uh Kaiberg.
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 villages men, at one time,
members of the community started to point to witchcraft is
(12:17):
the cause of this tragedy. The population of both villages
combined was 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 legislation that allowed
for mass prosecution, specifically in the charge of witchcraft. And
(12:37):
it actually took a long time to enact that law
and get it up and running. While it was first
introduced in October 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 sixty one, during the anti sorcery proceed dings,
(13:00):
a woman appeared at the trials and claimed that witches
had indeed tied knots in the fishing nets and cast
spells on them. Her name was Elsa Knutes 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
(13:22):
consequently claimed the lives of those fishermen. She herself was
accused of witchcraft 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 which is floated. Elsa floated, dooming herself
(13:43):
to a guilty verdict, and then she was put to death.
In February of one 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
(14:05):
test having released her from the devil's spell. She claimed
that when she had 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
(14:25):
another where a total of forty witches had gathered to
celebrate the Sabbath. After 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
(14:47):
Marie's testimony, cast a spell on her that transformed her
into a raven, enabling 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 in
the sixty one trials on Christmas Eve sixteen twenty and
(15:08):
Kirsty Soren's daughter figured prominently in a lot of the testimony.
She was characters characterized by others on trial as the
leader of the group, and she was also one of
the last women who testified in the sixty 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
(15:30):
about their rituals, dooming herself to be burned at the stake.
During her court appearance, Kristie names 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
(15:50):
records of later trials are taken at face value, because
there there are records of all of these proceedings that
are apparently pretty well um maintained, they're in pretty good shape.
But they are they're literally like on file. Uh they're
in Norway, so they're not online or anything, but they
basically like lay out as though this this is a
(16:12):
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 uh and if they are
taking at face value, there were still practicing, which is
in finn Mark for decades after the many deaths of
the sixty one trials, and while more than ten women
were put to death in sixteen twenty one, a series
of trials in the sixteen sixties would claim even more lives.
(16:35):
In late sixteen sixty two, more than thirty were accused
of sorcery in a series of trials that 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 uh and threatened out
(16:55):
of children who said that they had met and celebrated
with the devil at Domain, which we mentioned earlier. During
the trial, several of the accused of 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
(17:18):
of her association with two women and another girl and
their Christmas Eve sixteen sixty two activities. So that day
Iver's daughter and a woman named Solvinil's daughter were actually
in custody for suspected witchcraft. They were imprisoned at Vardahoo's fortress,
but according to testimony given before the court, they turned
into cats, escaped the fortress and met with the devil
(17:40):
outside the gates, and then the devil took them to
one of these witch meetings, and it's there 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 distinct and of being the first
(18:00):
child accused of witchcraft and fin mark when she appeared
at her trial on January sixty three. Her exact age
is unknown, but she was described in court records as
quote 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
(18:23):
conveyed often through tainted food or drink, and that's how
you you passed it on from one generation to 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
(18:47):
usually milk and then this black dog devil coming and
and sort of attacking them as a form of trial.
And while to the court at the time, uh this
may have indicated truthfulness, each earl's testimony validated what had
come before because they were pretty consistent, but it also
suggests that perhaps they had simply heard the same tale
over and over from somewhere, And we're going to get
(19:09):
to a possible source of that tale in just a moment.
We're also going to go into a bit more detail
about the Vardas Fortress and 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 responsor break. Trips to the post office never convenient,
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(20:47):
that holding situation that we mentioned before, the break in
Varde Hoo's fortress, which you will also sometimes see translated
as vardehs varde host Castle was where most of the
torture used to illicit confessions took place. And there was
this single room called the witches Hole uh where sort
of these torturous events happened. And while the use of
(21:07):
torture was technically illegal before a sentence was passed 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.
(21:29):
This pair, Ambrosius Rhodius and and Frieder's daughter Rosas, had
been imprisoned near modern day Oslo before being moved to
vardahos Flortress. 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
(21:51):
serious argument with political figures in their hometown. So yeah,
they were moved to Vardejus because they were considered basically
enemies of the state at that point. Because the fortress
was kind of crowded in the sixteen sixties panic, at
least one of the children imprisoned there shared quarters with
the Rhodeus couple, and additionally, Anne had a key to
(22:13):
the witch's whole, and it's documented that Anne spoke with
both the women and girls who were being held 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
(22:34):
young to be held accountable for their actions and that
they had undoubtedly been influenced by the adult which is
around them. And over the course of the sixteen sixties
series of accusations 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,
(22:55):
found guilty and burned at the stake. In twenty eleven,
the country of Norway made a significant gesture of apology
and recognition of the people known to have been executed
for witchcraft. Peter Zumthor, an architect from Switzerland, and Louise Bourgeois,
a French American artist, worked together to design a memorial
for the lives that were lost. So this student set
(23:18):
memorial sits on a piece of remote coastline on the
Barren Sea, believed to be the site of many of
the executions and the architect's contribution to the work, which
is titled Memory Hall, looks like a hundred and fifty
eight yard or a hundred and forty five meter long
corridor built at the edge of the sea, but instead
of exterior walls, it has an open, cross hatched frame.
(23:40):
That frame, which is made of pines, supports a tunnel
like silk cocoon, and then within the fabric tunnel is
a hallway with oak floors. 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,
(24:02):
which can be entered by visitors once they have passed
through that long type memorial corridor, is Bourgeoise Creation, and
it's entitled The Damned, 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
(24:25):
kind of a unique thing. I can't I don't know
of many other countries that have done anything like this.
It's quite beautiful. There's some really good pictures online and
we will have links to those in the show notes.
But it's an interesting testament to uh, how things have
changed in their their efforts to kind of they obviously
cannot fix what has gone before, but to at least
(24:46):
acknowledge the wrongs that were done and and how misguided
the attempts to rid the country of evil through witchcraft
trials were. So that's the the varnto witch trials, Oh,
which tis like people have such a fascination with which
trials but they're depressing. They're so depressing they are. It
(25:08):
breaks my heart if you if you read about you know,
these little girls, children that were being forced to testify,
sometimes alongside their mothers and sometimes after their mothers had
already been killed, and it's there's such brutality to it,
and it's rough. Do you have some listener mail that's less?
(25:30):
I do. It's actually fantastic. Yeah, it's very upbeaten, peppy
if you're me especially. It is from our listener Janet,
and it is two postcards. I have a one of
two and a two of two. She says, Hi again,
Holly and Tracy. I sent you ladies a card from
Venice recently. But when I got to London and saw
what the special exhibition at the Victorian Albert was undressed
(25:52):
a history of underwear, I knew I had to send
you postcards about it or two. As it turns out,
I have a nagging feeling you may have already gotten
list mail about this, but just in case, I'm sending
uh some myself. This Krineline definitely made me realize afresh
why they talk about making designing underwear in terms of engineering.
And it's a lovely photograph of a cage bustle like
(26:14):
a cage krinoline. UM. And then the second one she says,
hello again, ladies. I couldn't decide between this postcard and
the one with the cage crinoline, so I'm sending them both.
I knew a lot about the content covered in the
Undressed exhibission thanks to my own dabbling in the history
of fashion and costume design, as well as Holly's Bloomers
and Beyond podcast, so it was really cool to see
(26:35):
some examples of the underwear itself, especially of course it's
etcetera for pregnant women. No postcards of those. Thank you
again for all your great work. So the second one
that she sent is UM a photograph of men's underwear
from UH. It's believed Britain in the nineteen fifties, and
it's just so sort of structured and uncasual in comparison
to modern underwear, but you see the seeds of what
(26:58):
modern underwear is like. So they you, thank you, Thank you, Uh, Janet.
These are just lovely and I will say um. A
friend of the show, Brian Young, went to see this
exhibit and very sweetly brought me back an exhibition catalog,
so I'm pretty much in heaven. I'm bummed that I'm
not going to get to see it in person, but
I'm very delighted and fortunate, and that many people have
sent me materials from it. I feel very yeah yeah, yeah,
(27:22):
I mean, who doesn't want to look at pregnancy course?
It's I know, I do. I love all of this
stuff anyway, So if you would like to write to us,
you can do so at history podcast at how still
works dot com. You can also find us pretty much
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(27:43):
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(28:04):
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you get your podcasts. Welcome to Steph you missed in
history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly from and I'm tra
and we are still in the Halloween season, which makes
(01:04):
me happy in my dark little heart, and I accidentally
started a witch theme, but that's not gonna last. Just
the two witch episodes of 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 which trials uh and
actual accusations of witchcraft and Europe's witchcraft trials spanned three centuries,
(01:30):
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. It's estimated, and
this is a pretty wide uh gap of where the
estimate falls, that between forty thousand and sixty thousand people
(01:51):
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
exactly how many lost their lives because of this in
one particular town. Uh. This is an episode heavy in
(02:14):
Norwegian words, which I have no doubt I will butcher. Uh. Yeah,
even even having looked at pronunciations for them, a lot
of the phonemes are not used in English, and so
replicating them, yeah, it's a stretch. So no upfront that
we will probably butcher it, and we mean no disrespect
(02:35):
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 there were generally two different kinds of
witchcraft trials in Norway through this time period. There were
(02:57):
isolated trials where one person was brought before the court
and tried for sorcery, uh, like, just one person at
a time would pop up and seem suspicious. And then
there were panics where groups of people were tried in
rapid succession in a very short period of time. And
whereas the isolated trials had more to do with an
individual person practicing witchcraft or some sort of sorcery, these
(03:20):
panics were driven by the idea that demons were involved
usually and that groups of which is we're consorting with
the devil. So today we're going to talk about two
of the panics that took place in Varda, Norway. Uh.
And first we're going to give you a little bit
of geographical context about the area. So Varda sits in
Finnmark County, is Norway's only town that's in the Arctic
(03:44):
climate zone and offers views of the Norwegian Russian Arctic.
It's a really small coastal village. There are fewer than
d inhabitants. It's Northern Norway's oldest town, with settlements dating
back as far as nine thousand years and in the
hundreds both a church and Varta fortress were built there
(04:06):
and the town sort of grew up around primarily the fortress.
And despite the brutal weather, the fishing along the coast
of finn Mark was plentiful and the location offered really
really um lucrative trade opportunities even today. I mean, this
is remote. Its relative isolation is one of the reasons
that finn Mark's witch trials were so expedient. Copenhagen, which
(04:29):
under Danish rule was Norway's capital, was far enough away
that the local authorities of finn Mark 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 with total conviction, and then the sentences were
carried out without hesitation. There was no like Norwegian h
(04:55):
version of of like the Department of Justice over seeing
the witch trial situation in Finnmark correct, But the directives
to to prosecute, which is came from very high because
during some of this time from sixty the ruler of
(05:15):
the Danish Norwegian Kingdom was King Christian the fourth, and
he had an agenda when it came to witches. Yeah,
I should say they're that like even if there had
been an equivalent of the Justice department overseeing the witch
trial situation, it would 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 fourth,
(05:38):
we're 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. From the late sixteenth century
into the seventeenth century, Varda, which is a small village,
as we said, stage a hundred and four different trials
(06:01):
and in nine 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 because during the time of these
witch hunts, less than one percent of Norway's population lived
(06:22):
in the Finnmark area where these trials took place, but
this remote fishing community was home to thirty one of
the witch executions in Norway, so disproportionately large numbers of
people were being charged and punished by death for being witches.
In finn Mark there were one d eleven women and
twenty four men accused of sorcery. Of thee put to
(06:45):
death seventy seven where women in 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 for
known people to live in Finnmark, but as that area colonized,
they became the minority. Approximately eighty percent of those accused
(07:08):
of witchcraft and finn Mark were Norwegian 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 the Sami people. At
least thirteen of those, sixteen were found guilty and executed,
(07:28):
and that disparity in proportions is likely do according to
historian live Helene Williamson, 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 some of their cultural practices.
For example, uh, they used this, uh they would do
(07:51):
this ritual where they used run drums where they were
basically kind of doing chance and people went, oh, that
must be evil. It wasn't. It's just part of their culture.
And in sixteen o nine, King Christian the fourth wrote
a letter to his district governors that they should persecute
Sami sorcerers without mercy, and that really catalyzed finn Mark's
witch hunting phase. So while the trials of the seventeenth
(08:14):
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, and
then the trials transitioned to focus on the women of
finn Mark, and part of the mindset that led to
this witch panic was the idea common in the sixteenth
(08:36):
and seventeen 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
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
(08:57):
a lot of suspicion from the Church did sationally. This
was and still is a place where the climate can
be incredibly punishing, and that stormy nature was attributed to sorcery.
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.
(09:18):
And these spirits, of course, specialized in nautical dark magic.
And these were not just locally held ideas. Many areas
of Europe, including France, England, Sweden, Germany and Scotland, were
homes of 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
(09:40):
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. So we're about to get into these panics,
but first we're going to pause for a quick word
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the sixteen twenties. 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 finn Mark experienced a
really terrible storm one Christmas early on in the seventeenth century.
So the unexpected sixteen seventeen Christmas Eve storm hit when
(11:56):
sixteen boats from Varda and seven boats from uh Kaiberg.
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 villages men, at one time,
members of the community started to point to witchcraft is
(12:17):
the cause of this tragedy. The population of both villages
combined was 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 legislation that allowed
for mass prosecution, specifically in the charge of witchcraft. And
(12:37):
it actually took a long time to enact that law
and get it up and running. While it was first
introduced in October 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 sixty one, during the anti sorcery proceed dings,
(13:00):
a woman appeared at the trials and claimed that witches
had indeed tied knots in the fishing nets and cast
spells on them. Her name was Elsa Knutes 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
(13:22):
consequently claimed the lives of those fishermen. She herself was
accused of witchcraft 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 which is floated. Elsa floated, dooming herself
(13:43):
to a guilty verdict, and then she was put to death.
In February of one 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
(14:05):
test having released her from the devil's spell. She claimed
that when she had 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
(14:25):
another where a total of forty witches had gathered to
celebrate the Sabbath. After 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
(14:47):
Marie's testimony, cast a spell on her that transformed her
into a raven, enabling 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 in
the sixty one trials on Christmas Eve sixteen twenty and
(15:08):
Kirsty Soren's daughter figured prominently in a lot of the testimony.
She was characters characterized by others on trial as the
leader of the group, and she was also one of
the last women who testified in the sixty 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
(15:30):
about their rituals, dooming herself to be burned at the stake.
During her court appearance, Kristie names 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
(15:50):
records of later trials are taken at face value, because
there there are records of all of these proceedings that
are apparently pretty well um maintained, they're in pretty good shape.
But they are they're literally like on file. Uh they're
in Norway, so they're not online or anything, but they
basically like lay out as though this this is a
(16:12):
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 uh and if they are
taking at face value, there were still practicing, which is
in finn Mark for decades after the many deaths of
the sixty one trials, and while more than ten women
were put to death in sixteen twenty one, a series
of trials in the sixteen sixties would claim even more lives.
(16:35):
In late sixteen sixty two, more than thirty were accused
of sorcery in a series of trials that 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 uh and threatened out
(16:55):
of children who said that they had met and celebrated
with the devil at Domain, which we mentioned earlier. During
the trial, several of the accused of 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
(17:18):
of her association with two women and another girl and
their Christmas Eve sixteen sixty two activities. So that day
Iver's daughter and a woman named Solvinil's daughter were actually
in custody for suspected witchcraft. They were imprisoned at Vardahoo's fortress,
but according to testimony given before the court, they turned
into cats, escaped the fortress and met with the devil
(17:40):
outside the gates, and then the devil took them to
one of these witch meetings, and it's there 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 distinct and of being the first
(18:00):
child accused of witchcraft and fin mark when she appeared
at her trial on January sixty three. Her exact age
is unknown, but she was described in court records as
quote 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
(18:23):
conveyed often through tainted food or drink, and that's how
you you passed it on from one generation to 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
(18:47):
usually milk and then this black dog devil coming and
and sort of attacking them as a form of trial.
And while to the court at the time, uh this
may have indicated truthfulness, each earl's testimony validated what had
come before because they were pretty consistent, but it also
suggests that perhaps they had simply heard the same tale
over and over from somewhere, And we're going to get
(19:09):
to a possible source of that tale in just a moment.
We're also going to go into a bit more detail
about the Vardas Fortress and 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 responsor break. Trips to the post office never convenient,
(19:31):
no and I even have one close, but it's still
a pain in the took us well, and I genuinely
enjoy the walk down to the local post office from
where I live. It's a nice little whack, but I mean,
I just don't have time. So fortunately, you can get
postage right from your desk with stamps dot Com. Stamps
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in stuff that's stamps dot com and enter stuff. So
(20:47):
that holding situation that we mentioned before, the break in
Varde Hoo's fortress, which you will also sometimes see translated
as vardehs varde host Castle was where most of the
torture used to illicit confessions took place. And there was
this single room called the witches Hole uh where sort
of these torturous events happened. And while the use of
(21:07):
torture was technically illegal before a sentence was passed 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.
(21:29):
This pair, Ambrosius Rhodius and and Frieder's daughter Rosas, had
been imprisoned near modern day Oslo before being moved to
vardahos Flortress. 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
(21:51):
serious argument with political figures in their hometown. So yeah,
they were moved to Vardejus because they were considered basically
enemies of the state at that point. Because the fortress
was kind of crowded in the sixteen sixties panic, at
least one of the children imprisoned there shared quarters with
the Rhodeus couple, and additionally, Anne had a key to
(22:13):
the witch's whole, and it's documented that Anne spoke with
both the women and girls who were being held 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
(22:34):
young to be held accountable for their actions and that
they had undoubtedly been influenced by the adult which is
around them. And over the course of the sixteen sixties
series of accusations 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,
(22:55):
found guilty and burned at the stake. In twenty eleven,
the country of Norway made a significant gesture of apology
and recognition of the people known to have been executed
for witchcraft. Peter Zumthor, an architect from Switzerland, and Louise Bourgeois,
a French American artist, worked together to design a memorial
for the lives that were lost. So this student set
(23:18):
memorial sits on a piece of remote coastline on the
Barren Sea, believed to be the site of many of
the executions and the architect's contribution to the work, which
is titled Memory Hall, looks like a hundred and fifty
eight yard or a hundred and forty five meter long
corridor built at the edge of the sea, but instead
of exterior walls, it has an open, cross hatched frame.
(23:40):
That frame, which is made of pines, supports a tunnel
like silk cocoon, and then within the fabric tunnel is
a hallway with oak floors. 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,
(24:02):
which can be entered by visitors once they have passed
through that long type memorial corridor, is Bourgeoise Creation, and
it's entitled The Damned, 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
(24:25):
kind of a unique thing. I can't I don't know
of many other countries that have done anything like this.
It's quite beautiful. There's some really good pictures online and
we will have links to those in the show notes.
But it's an interesting testament to uh, how things have
changed in their their efforts to kind of they obviously
cannot fix what has gone before, but to at least
(24:46):
acknowledge the wrongs that were done and and how misguided
the attempts to rid the country of evil through witchcraft
trials were. So that's the the varnto witch trials, Oh,
which tis like people have such a fascination with which
trials but they're depressing. They're so depressing they are. It
(25:08):
breaks my heart if you if you read about you know,
these little girls, children that were being forced to testify,
sometimes alongside their mothers and sometimes after their mothers had
already been killed, and it's there's such brutality to it,
and it's rough. Do you have some listener mail that's less?
(25:30):
I do. It's actually fantastic. Yeah, it's very upbeaten, peppy
if you're me especially. It is from our listener Janet,
and it is two postcards. I have a one of
two and a two of two. She says, Hi again,
Holly and Tracy. I sent you ladies a card from
Venice recently. But when I got to London and saw
what the special exhibition at the Victorian Albert was undressed
(25:52):
a history of underwear, I knew I had to send
you postcards about it or two. As it turns out,
I have a nagging feeling you may have already gotten
list mail about this, but just in case, I'm sending
uh some myself. This Krineline definitely made me realize afresh
why they talk about making designing underwear in terms of engineering.
And it's a lovely photograph of a cage bustle like
(26:14):
a cage krinoline. UM. And then the second one she says,
hello again, ladies. I couldn't decide between this postcard and
the one with the cage crinoline, so I'm sending them both.
I knew a lot about the content covered in the
Undressed exhibission thanks to my own dabbling in the history
of fashion and costume design, as well as Holly's Bloomers
and Beyond podcast, so it was really cool to see
(26:35):
some examples of the underwear itself, especially of course it's
etcetera for pregnant women. No postcards of those. Thank you
again for all your great work. So the second one
that she sent is UM a photograph of men's underwear
from UH. It's believed Britain in the nineteen fifties, and
it's just so sort of structured and uncasual in comparison
to modern underwear, but you see the seeds of what
(26:58):
modern underwear is like. So they you, thank you, Thank you, Uh, Janet.
These are just lovely and I will say um. A
friend of the show, Brian Young, went to see this
exhibit and very sweetly brought me back an exhibition catalog,
so I'm pretty much in heaven. I'm bummed that I'm
not going to get to see it in person, but
I'm very delighted and fortunate, and that many people have
sent me materials from it. I feel very yeah yeah, yeah,
(27:22):
I mean, who doesn't want to look at pregnancy course?
It's I know, I do. I love all of this
stuff anyway, So if you would like to write to us,
you can do so at history podcast at how still
works dot com. You can also find us pretty much
across the spectrum of social media as at miss in History.
That's Twitter at msst in History, Instagram at ms in history,
(27:43):
Facebook dot com, slash missed in History, missed in History
dot tumbler dot com, and on pinterest as missed in History.
Basically missed in History will find us on the internet
if you would like to do some research because you
are a curious person, you can go to our parents site,
how stuff Works, type in almost anything you can think
of in the search bar, and you will churn up
(28:04):
a delightful assortment of links and content that you can
explore and keep yourself very very busy and informed. And
you can visit us at missed in History, dot com,
where we have show notes for every episode since Tracy
and I have been working on the podcast together, as
well as an archive of every episode ever of all
time of stuff You missed an history class, so please
visit us on the internet at how stuff works dot
(28:26):
com and missed industry dot com for more on this
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