Disciplines
Seidr
Magical Disciplines
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Seidr was a Norse magical practice associated above all with prophecy, seeing and shaping the course of fate, and altering luck, weather or health for good or ill. Its most detailed surviving description, in Eirik the Red's Saga, depicts a volva, a traveling seeress, seated on a raised platform to chant while a chorus of women sang a summoning song called vardlokkur to draw spirits able to answer questions about the future. The practice was strongly associated with women and with the god Odin, who Snorri Sturluson says learned it from the goddess Freyja along with an implication, voiced in the Lokasenna, that a man practicing it took on a shameful, feminized status called ergi. Seidr overlapped with but was not identical to spa, prophetic seeing narrower in scope, and its practitioners, seidkonur most often but occasionally seidmenn, appear across the sagas as figures simultaneously valued for their insight and viewed with unease.
Facts
Disputed
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseGendered stigma attached to male practitioners 2 Whether a male practitioner of seidr genuinely incurred the social stigma of ergi described in Lokasenna, or whether that passage is poetic insult rather than a description of settled social fact, is discussed rather than resolved among scholars of Old Norse religion. Origins
Place of Origin Status
Status TodayRevived or reconstructed in the modern era 2 The historical Norse practice is not continuous. It has been revived since the late twentieth century within modern Heathenry and Asatru. Practice
Who Performs ItVolva (seeress); occasionally male seidmenn, at social cost to their standing 2 Position Profile
Key TextEirik the Red's Saga, chapter 4; the Voluspa; Lokasenna; Ynglinga Saga 2 Learn More
A Platform, a Chorus and a Question About the Future
The fullest surviving eyewitness style account of seidr comes from Eirik the Red's Saga, describing a volva named Thorbjorg visiting a Greenland farmstead during a famine to foretell when conditions would improve. She was seated on a high platform built specifically for the purpose, wore distinctive ritual clothing and carried a staff, and required a chorus of women to sing a summoning song called vardlokkur, a chant one woman present reluctantly agreed to perform after initially refusing on religious grounds, in order to draw the spirits whose answers the seeress needed. Once the song succeeded in calling the necessary spirits, Thorbjorg answered questions from the assembled household about the coming season and about individuals' personal futures.
Scholars treat this account cautiously since it was written down centuries after conversion by a Christian author working from oral tradition, but its wealth of specific procedural detail, the platform, the special seat, the chorus, the staff, is widely regarded as preserving genuine pre-Christian practice more concretely than almost any other single passage in the saga corpus. The saga notes the household's initial difficulty finding anyone still willing to sing the old summoning song at all, a detail read by scholars as reflecting genuine anxiety within a Christianizing community about performing what was already becoming regarded as suspect practice.
Odin's Shameful Craft, and What That Shame Might Mean
Snorri Sturluson's Ynglinga Saga states that Odin himself, chief of the gods, knew and practiced seidr, having learned it from the Vanir goddess Freyja, which placed the highest god in Norse myth squarely within a craft the same tradition elsewhere treated as strange and potentially disreputable for a man to perform. The poem Lokasenna has the trickster god Loki taunt Odin directly for practicing seidr, using language associated with ergi, a term carrying connotations of passive or unmanly sexual conduct in Old Norse moral vocabulary, implying that a man who performed this magic took on an unacceptably feminized role regardless of his other standing.
Modern scholars of Old Norse religion, including Rudolf Simek, read this tension as evidence that seidr was understood as fundamentally gendered practice, associated with women's power over fate and household fortune, so that a male practitioner crossed a genuinely significant social boundary rather than merely picking up an unusual hobby. Whether Loki's taunt reflects a real, consistently applied social penalty or is better read as a specific poetic insult within a flyting contest remains an open question in current scholarship, one this entry states rather than resolves.
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