The Witch of Vatnsdalur — The Cheese and the Enslaved Men

Vatnsdalur, North Iceland

Þóra of Vatnsdalur was said to have used a binding stave hidden inside a piece of cheese to enslave the will of three farmhands, who then worked themselves to death without complaint. No one knew until they died three days apart.

Vatnsdalur — the Valley of the Lake — is a long, green valley in north central Iceland, known in the saga tradition as the setting of Vatnsdæla Saga and in the folklore tradition for a cluster of witchcraft accusations that persisted from the 17th into the 19th century. The story of Þóra has the particular texture of Icelandic folk magic accounts: specific, practical, focused not on spectacle but on outcome. Þóra was a farmer's wife who required labour she could not pay for. The three farmhands she employed were willing enough — initially — but two of them had shown signs of wanting to leave for better-paying situations. She fed them cheese. The binding stave used was the kind inscribed on a piece of vellum small enough to be folded inside a food offering. Once consumed — once the stave had passed through the person's body — the intention embedded in the stave would hold. The men remained. They worked without complaint, without rest, without any expressed desire to be elsewhere. They died three days apart, the first found collapsed in the hayfield, the others following with no visible cause. A local man who examined the farmhouse after Þóra's subsequent disappearance from the district found, in the cellar, three small vellum scraps with inscriptions that the local minister refused to transcribe. This account was repeated in the Vatnsdalur district for generations and was considered neither remarkable nor implausible. The binding of will through food was a known technique. The mistake, in the tradition's accounting, was using a dose intended to last a lifetime rather than a season. The staves did not know when to stop.