All day all night

I return to Finnmark in July. Now the snow has thawed, revealing rock and bog, pools of deep blue water, and clear skies.

It is the time of year when the sun does not set. At midnight I set out for a walk along the ragged coast of the Varanger Peninsula near the small village of Ekkerøy. Little has changed since the seventeenth century. I follow the same path as my characters until I have a view of traditional wooden racks used for drying fish. The very same as the racks used by the fishermen's wives of my novel. Beyond are cliffs, spattered white, the air thick with screeching gulls.

Melancholy and Witchcraft

(Lucas Cranach The Elder, Melancholy 1532)

The melancholic condition was associated with the dark forces of the human psyche, and melancholy was most often depicted as a woman as in Cranach's painting. Through the open window we can see The Furious Horde, wild and naked riders, cavalcades of demonic spirits and souls, especially those who died before their time and enjoy no peace: soldiers killed in battle, young children, victims of violent acts. The Furious Horde was believed to bring wide spread devastation to the countryside. The melancholic nature, as expressed by The Furious Horde, was seen to be manifested in a woman of immoral nature, sexually deviant, bent on destruction and disorder. The accused women of Finnmark were viewed as such. Although not overtly expressed, this attitude is discernible in the subtext of much of the court testimony recorded.

Midday in Vardø December 2014

It looks like night but it is the middle of the day on the island of Vardø in mid-December. I shan't forget that howling, brutal wind from the Arctic. Ice and snow biting our faces, slipping on the road as we walked. In the seventeenth century witches were blamed for such bad weather. One way of surviving such bleak, relentless conditions was to give it a reason. Part of the battle between Good and Evil. Its not surprising to learn that the witch trials peaked in the winter months.

Dorette Lauridtzdatter

On 26th and 27th September 1662 Dorette Lauridzdatter was accused of causing the deaths of two hired hands who worked for the Bergen merchant Lauridtz Bras. Due to adverse weather conditions among other things, the local fishermen of Vadsø and Vardø were struggling to make ends meet and often in debt to the Bergen merchants. There must have been some tension between them. We know that Dorette's husband and Bras did not have good relations. Dorette had previously been accused of killing two of Bras' cows in 1657 but at that time she had been acquitted. However she was a prime target once the new Governor Orning instigated his purge of sorcery and witchcraft in 1662.
From the court records of the time Dorette refused to confess to witchcraft, this is what she says:
'As for her being guilty of their (the hired hands) deaths, and the like, as she has been accused of, she declares before the court, under the most solemn of oaths, upon whatever part, allotment or share she may expect to enjoy in the Kingdom of the Lord, that she never was the cause of the late persons' deaths. She is utterly and completely devoid of guilt, she is innocent. As far as she is concerned she has nothing more to state.'
However the court in Vadsø was not satisfied and Dorette was brought to Vardøhus where she was imprisoned in the Witches' Hole. Over a month later on 6th November she is brought before the court again. Without doubt she would have been subjected to threats of torture, if not torture itself, during this time, being personally 'interrogated' by the Governor himself. When asked in court if she is willing to confess the full truth, Dorette replies that she will willingly oblige him. She goes on to tell how she learnt of her craft from an old beggar woman who taught her to blow into a pipe to bring about what ever evil she wished.
'She admitted to casting a spell on Lauridtz Bras' two hired hands, when she blew into the pipe in the Devil's name that he should enter them...'
Dorette goes on to denounce three other women for witchcraft, and she says that together they attempted to cast a spell on Captain Jens Ottesen's ship. The women were in the likeness of birds, an eagle, a swan and a crow, sitting atop an overturned barrel.

A witch performing weather magic from Olaus Magnus' Description of the Northern Peoples 1555

Dorette's fate was sealed. Once you admitted a pact with the devil there was no going back. Although torture was illegal under Danish law until a witch had confessed (after which she could be tortured to get the names of other witches) it is probable that all the accused women who confessed were subjected to torture beforehand. The paranoia that a woman you know might denounce you for witchcraft must have been intense. Anyone who was a little different, or an outsider such as a maid who came from a different region of Norway, was particularly vulnerable. It was not a good time to be a woman in Vardø.
Along with two of the women that she had denounced, on the same day that she had finally confessed, the three received the following verdict:
'....we have no other course, in view of the seriousness of the matter, than to decide and to judge that for such committed misdeeds they shall be punished in fire at the stake.'
Dorette Lauridsdatter was one of the 20 persecuted women who was burnt at that stake during the witch panic of winter of 1662 in Vardø.

(Court transcripts are taken from the book, The Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark Northern Norway by Liv Helene Willumsen and they are translated by Katjana Edwardsen)

Discovering the witch trials of Finnmark

Map of Scandinavia 1656 by Anders Bureus

About three years ago I remember reading about the witch trials that took place in Finnmark in Northern Norway throughout the seventeenth century. I was shocked by their intensity. Out of a population of 3000, 135 persons were tried, and 91 executed. 77 of those executed were women, 14 men. This was much higher than the European average and matched other hotspots such as Scotland and  Germany. I tried to imagine the fear and paranoia that must have raged through such a small population. What really horrified me was that six girls were also accused, one as young as eight years old. I was drawn to discovering more about these girls, and the women accused in the trials of 1662 and 1663. Last year a story began to emerge. I started to research in earnest not just the trials in Finnmark but also the witch hunts in the whole of Europe. How was it that these extreme persecutions had taken place over a period of over three hundred years? I was determined to understand how it could have happened, what people thought and believed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the witch hunters were not fanatical clerics but the authorities themselves. In both Scotland and Denmark the King himself instigated witchcraft legislation. King James VI of Scotland, who later became James I, and Denmark's Christian IV were both obsessed with witches. James wrote his 'Demonology' and, after his trip to Finnmark and Kola in 1599, Christian IV expressed a personal fear of Sami Sorcerers. He was determined to purge the North of witchcraft, reflected in the Witchcraft Decree of 1617. What began to emerge was that witches were so feared not just because of the harm they could cause to individuals, and the evil power they derived through their pacts with the devil, but also because they represented chaos, and disorder. Not always, but often the witches were viewed as terrorists and social deviants.

Finnmark 1662 published by Joan Blaeu

In December 2014 I travelled to Northern Norway, visiting Tromsø, Kirkenes and Vardø, an island in North Eastern Finnmark where the majority of the  trials took place, and where the women were imprisoned in the witches hole in Vardøhus fortress. I decided to go to the North during the period of the polar night for this was the time of year when the trials and executions peaked. This trip represented the turning point of my journey to write my new novel. 

The first night we stayed at the Snow Hotel in Kirkenes in a 'gamme' cabin. We watched the creation of the snow hotel for the coming season. This image is of blocks of ice cut from the fjord nearby and used for sculptures inside the main 'igloo' of the ice hotel. This photograph is taken at around 1 p.m. in early December. 

Spinning witch of the North

This woodcut is from Olaus Magnus' Description of the Northern Peoples first published in Rome in 1555. An example of a common held belief in medieval and early modern Europe that witches originally came from the North.

Coming soon

*** Where The Ice Burns - the upcoming novel by Kim Seeberg ***