What happens when a woman is forced to eat the enchanted flesh of the man she loves? Hrólfs saga kraka turns this horrific act into a window on medieval Icelandic magic, belief, and the strange logic of sympathetic cannibalism.
By Andrea Maraschi
A few exceptions aside, fornaldarsögur (that is, the “sagas of the ancient times”, also known as legendary sagas) have not drawn the attention of scholars in the past due to their supposed uselessness as sources for the study of Iceland’s pre-Christian past. After the first attempts in the 1930s to reverse this trend, legendary sagas have increasingly gained in importance in recent times. Today, they are generally considered as expressions of their authors’ worldview, rather than of their characters’, and thus worthy of being studied by scholars interested in investigating late medieval Icelandic culture.
Fornaldarsögur were written down between the second half of the twelfth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, and Hrólfs saga kraka – in particular – was very likely composed no later than the fourteenth or the early fifteenth century. The story was probably written by a single anonymous author, who drew upon traditional material and older poetry. It also shows affinities with the Old English verse epic Beowulf.
The story is indeed about fornöld, the “ancient times,” for it is set in fifth- and sixth-century Denmark. The scene we will be focusing on is set in Norway and Lapland and tells the story of the Norwegian man-bear Björn. In this tale, magic serves an essential narratological function, helping to make the story entertaining and appealing for the author’s audience. The question is: is it just that? In other words, is magic a mere narrative tool?
Magic has always represented, in historical terms, “the religion of the other,” and it is fair to assume that the magic practices featured in fornaldarsögur were not mere rhetorical devices but may have reflected actual ancient beliefs. These beliefs certainly became marginalized in a now Christian world, but there is no doubt that specific principles – such as the existence of links of sympathy and antipathy between all things – continued to flourish even outside the fictional world, in Scandinavia and elsewhere.
The core of magical knowledge emerging from legendary sagas then belongs to a pre-Christian past, crowded with pagan gods and supernatural beings, and cannibalism is an important gear in such a “magical machine” as the ancient times represented. There is a specific focus on sympathetic cannibalism, that is, the act performed by a human being of eating part of another person’s body (or of drinking their blood) in order to gain and absorb the said person’s physical and/or moral attributes.
The protagonist of our story is a woman by the name of Bera. Bera was the daughter of a wealthy freeman who had a farm near King Hringr’s estate, in Uppdalir (north Norway). Hringr’s son was named Björn; he had been friends with Bera since when they were children. Bjorn grew up to become a great champion. However, after his mother, the queen, died, Björn’s father married the young Hvít, daughter of the king of the Lapps. Soon Hvít started to lay eyes on her stepson Björn, rather than on her husband.
Then, when one day King Hringr set out from home with a large force, Hvít took advantage of his absence to make advances on Björn. The latter reacted by giving her a slap and rejecting the proposal. In response, she cast a curse on him by striking him with her wolfskin gloves and by telling him that from that moment onward he would turn into a bear. “You will never be released from the spell,” she added. As a result, Björn was a beast by day and a man at night. One day, however, Bera saw the bear and recognized Björn’s eyes, and they started to meet at the beast’s cave and spend the night together.
When Hringr returned from the wars, Hvít told him that his livestock were being killed by a grey bear and urged him to kill it. The night before his death, Björn told Bera what Hvít was planning:
The queen […] will be suspicious of you […]. She will try to make you eat some of the bear’s meat, but you must not eat it, because, as you well know, you are pregnant and will give birth to three boys. They are ours, and it will be obvious from their appearance if you have eaten any of the bear’s meat.
Björn also adds that the queen is mesta troll (“a great troll”). With the term tröll, Icelandic sagamen did not only refer to “giants,” but more generally to dangerous individuals who may either be monsters, vampires, ghosts, demons, or even – as in this case – witches.
His prophecy proved true: he was killed the following day, while Bera tried to hide her real identity from King Hringr and the queen. Hvít forced her to stay inside her own room and to eat a piece of the bear meat. Bera swallowed just a little morsel and spat out the rest, but some months later she gave birth to three boys with animal-like characteristics: the first was named Elg-Fróði, for he was half-man and half-elk; the second was Þórir hundsfótr, who had dog’s feet from his insteps down; the third one was Böðvarr, who had no deformity in the saga version of the story. However, later in the saga he would be called Böðvarr Bjarki, that is, Böðvarr “little bear”, and he would prove able to shape-shift into the form of a bear.
Sympathetic Cannibalism and Enchantment
Boðvarr Bjarki fights in bear form in his last battle. Painted in 1898 by Louis Moe (1857–1945).
Many studies have addressed the possible literary and even anthropological precedents of Böðvarr Bjarki’s bear-like characteristics, as well as its similarities with the hero Beowulf. Two elements are of key importance: firstly, the witch Hvít has Bera eat her lover’s body and, to be specific, part of his slain body in bear form; secondly, her lover is a man-bear, and thus one may argue that it is an act of quasi-cannibalism in all regards. As a matter of fact, not all of Bera’s sons would inherit bear-like attributes, but simply animal features; however, this could be due to the fact that she ate such a little portion of Björn’s meat, which Hvít said would be just enough to have the enchantment take effect.
It is clear that both Björn and Bera knew and believed that, by eating meat over which a spell had been cast, the eater would gain the victim’s attributes or would be able to transfer them to her children. This idea was no novelty in the fictional world of the saga, nor in the real world of its author, past and present.
Despite the meal’s tragic context of vengeance, which is also nothing new in Old Norse literature, the magical significance of the scene is evident. Cultural cannibalism, that is, the act of consuming parts of human bodies to acquire special qualities from the eaten, was based on the principles of sympathetic magic, according to which “like produces like.” Famously associated with the works of Edward B. Tylor and James G. Frazer, the concept of sympathetic absorption of powers (in this case via ingestion) was as old as civilization itself. Many pagan (and later Christian) philosophers and intellectuals believed that all of the elements in the world and in the universe were tied to each other by links of concordia and discordia, while several grimoires and leechbooks for centuries perpetuated remedies, cures, and charms that were based on just the same principles.
Absorption of powers via eating special foods or drinking philtres (a love potion) was one of the more popular techniques in both medical and magical practice. Cannibalism was part of this conceptual mindset, even though – for obvious taboo-related reasons – it mainly surfaces in legendary tales such as fornaldarsögur.
The (quasi-)cannibal act performed by Bera is then part of the magical worldview according to which powers could be absorbed and “metabolized”. Unlike natural cannibalism, that is, the consumption of human flesh for survival’s sake, cultural cannibalism is not represented as a taboo in the magical world of the sagas. On the contrary, it is practiced by the human protagonists (often belonging to the élite) and is often depicted as a respectable solution pertaining to an old prestigious knowledge. So, even though Bera is the victim of a dangerous spell, similar acts of anthropophagy are not usually associated with “black” magic, but with a positive and noble form of magic that Christianity would eventually try to erase.
What happens when a woman is forced to eat the enchanted flesh of the man she loves? Hrólfs saga kraka turns this horrific act into a window on medieval Icelandic magic, belief, and the strange logic of sympathetic cannibalism.
By Andrea Maraschi
A few exceptions aside, fornaldarsögur (that is, the “sagas of the ancient times”, also known as legendary sagas) have not drawn the attention of scholars in the past due to their supposed uselessness as sources for the study of Iceland’s pre-Christian past. After the first attempts in the 1930s to reverse this trend, legendary sagas have increasingly gained in importance in recent times. Today, they are generally considered as expressions of their authors’ worldview, rather than of their characters’, and thus worthy of being studied by scholars interested in investigating late medieval Icelandic culture.
Fornaldarsögur were written down between the second half of the twelfth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, and Hrólfs saga kraka – in particular – was very likely composed no later than the fourteenth or the early fifteenth century. The story was probably written by a single anonymous author, who drew upon traditional material and older poetry. It also shows affinities with the Old English verse epic Beowulf.
The story is indeed about fornöld, the “ancient times,” for it is set in fifth- and sixth-century Denmark. The scene we will be focusing on is set in Norway and Lapland and tells the story of the Norwegian man-bear Björn. In this tale, magic serves an essential narratological function, helping to make the story entertaining and appealing for the author’s audience. The question is: is it just that? In other words, is magic a mere narrative tool?
Magic has always represented, in historical terms, “the religion of the other,” and it is fair to assume that the magic practices featured in fornaldarsögur were not mere rhetorical devices but may have reflected actual ancient beliefs. These beliefs certainly became marginalized in a now Christian world, but there is no doubt that specific principles – such as the existence of links of sympathy and antipathy between all things – continued to flourish even outside the fictional world, in Scandinavia and elsewhere.
The core of magical knowledge emerging from legendary sagas then belongs to a pre-Christian past, crowded with pagan gods and supernatural beings, and cannibalism is an important gear in such a “magical machine” as the ancient times represented. There is a specific focus on sympathetic cannibalism, that is, the act performed by a human being of eating part of another person’s body (or of drinking their blood) in order to gain and absorb the said person’s physical and/or moral attributes.
The Story of Björn the Man-Bear
The protagonist of our story is a woman by the name of Bera. Bera was the daughter of a wealthy freeman who had a farm near King Hringr’s estate, in Uppdalir (north Norway). Hringr’s son was named Björn; he had been friends with Bera since when they were children. Bjorn grew up to become a great champion. However, after his mother, the queen, died, Björn’s father married the young Hvít, daughter of the king of the Lapps. Soon Hvít started to lay eyes on her stepson Björn, rather than on her husband.
Then, when one day King Hringr set out from home with a large force, Hvít took advantage of his absence to make advances on Björn. The latter reacted by giving her a slap and rejecting the proposal. In response, she cast a curse on him by striking him with her wolfskin gloves and by telling him that from that moment onward he would turn into a bear. “You will never be released from the spell,” she added. As a result, Björn was a beast by day and a man at night. One day, however, Bera saw the bear and recognized Björn’s eyes, and they started to meet at the beast’s cave and spend the night together.
When Hringr returned from the wars, Hvít told him that his livestock were being killed by a grey bear and urged him to kill it. The night before his death, Björn told Bera what Hvít was planning:
The queen […] will be suspicious of you […]. She will try to make you eat some of the bear’s meat, but you must not eat it, because, as you well know, you are pregnant and will give birth to three boys. They are ours, and it will be obvious from their appearance if you have eaten any of the bear’s meat.
Björn also adds that the queen is mesta troll (“a great troll”). With the term tröll, Icelandic sagamen did not only refer to “giants,” but more generally to dangerous individuals who may either be monsters, vampires, ghosts, demons, or even – as in this case – witches.
His prophecy proved true: he was killed the following day, while Bera tried to hide her real identity from King Hringr and the queen. Hvít forced her to stay inside her own room and to eat a piece of the bear meat. Bera swallowed just a little morsel and spat out the rest, but some months later she gave birth to three boys with animal-like characteristics: the first was named Elg-Fróði, for he was half-man and half-elk; the second was Þórir hundsfótr, who had dog’s feet from his insteps down; the third one was Böðvarr, who had no deformity in the saga version of the story. However, later in the saga he would be called Böðvarr Bjarki, that is, Böðvarr “little bear”, and he would prove able to shape-shift into the form of a bear.
Sympathetic Cannibalism and Enchantment
Many studies have addressed the possible literary and even anthropological precedents of Böðvarr Bjarki’s bear-like characteristics, as well as its similarities with the hero Beowulf. Two elements are of key importance: firstly, the witch Hvít has Bera eat her lover’s body and, to be specific, part of his slain body in bear form; secondly, her lover is a man-bear, and thus one may argue that it is an act of quasi-cannibalism in all regards. As a matter of fact, not all of Bera’s sons would inherit bear-like attributes, but simply animal features; however, this could be due to the fact that she ate such a little portion of Björn’s meat, which Hvít said would be just enough to have the enchantment take effect.
It is clear that both Björn and Bera knew and believed that, by eating meat over which a spell had been cast, the eater would gain the victim’s attributes or would be able to transfer them to her children. This idea was no novelty in the fictional world of the saga, nor in the real world of its author, past and present.
Despite the meal’s tragic context of vengeance, which is also nothing new in Old Norse literature, the magical significance of the scene is evident. Cultural cannibalism, that is, the act of consuming parts of human bodies to acquire special qualities from the eaten, was based on the principles of sympathetic magic, according to which “like produces like.” Famously associated with the works of Edward B. Tylor and James G. Frazer, the concept of sympathetic absorption of powers (in this case via ingestion) was as old as civilization itself. Many pagan (and later Christian) philosophers and intellectuals believed that all of the elements in the world and in the universe were tied to each other by links of concordia and discordia, while several grimoires and leechbooks for centuries perpetuated remedies, cures, and charms that were based on just the same principles.
Absorption of powers via eating special foods or drinking philtres (a love potion) was one of the more popular techniques in both medical and magical practice. Cannibalism was part of this conceptual mindset, even though – for obvious taboo-related reasons – it mainly surfaces in legendary tales such as fornaldarsögur.
The (quasi-)cannibal act performed by Bera is then part of the magical worldview according to which powers could be absorbed and “metabolized”. Unlike natural cannibalism, that is, the consumption of human flesh for survival’s sake, cultural cannibalism is not represented as a taboo in the magical world of the sagas. On the contrary, it is practiced by the human protagonists (often belonging to the élite) and is often depicted as a respectable solution pertaining to an old prestigious knowledge. So, even though Bera is the victim of a dangerous spell, similar acts of anthropophagy are not usually associated with “black” magic, but with a positive and noble form of magic that Christianity would eventually try to erase.
Andrea Maraschi teaches Anthropology of Food at the University of Bologna and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bari. He also teaches the online course “The Magical World of the Early and High Middle Ages.”
Top Image: A bear depicted in British Library MS Yates Thompson 13, fol. 183v
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