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.