Spirits That Could Be Courted, or Turned Against an Enemy

Belief in the landvaettir carried real practical consequences beyond a single legendary invasion story. Icelandic legal tradition, attributed to the lawspeaker Ulfljot in framing the island's earliest laws, required ships to remove fearsome carved dragon or monster figureheads from their prows before land was sighted, explicitly to avoid frightening the landvaettir and turning their favor against the new arrivals, a rule that treated the spirits' goodwill as directly relevant to a voyage's safe and successful conclusion.

Egils Saga preserves the deliberate inversion of this same courtesy: the exiled Egil Skallagrimsson, seeking revenge on King Eirik Blood-axe, raised a horse's head on a pole facing toward Norway, a nith pole, and spoke a formal curse invoking the landvaettir's hostility against the king and queen until they were driven from the land, treating the spirits as a force that could be weaponized against a specific enemy rather than only courted for general protection. Read together, the shipboard courtesy and Egil's curse show landvaettir belief functioning as a genuinely practical part of Norse religious life, invoked in both directions, welcome and hostile, depending on what a person needed from the land's own resident powers.