The Witch Trials of Þingeyri

Þingeyri, Westfjords, Iceland

Between 1654 and 1720, twenty-one people were burned for witchcraft in the Westfjords — seventeen of them men. The Þingeyri trial of 1675 was the largest, involving ten accused connected by a shared magical stave found carved into a farm door.

Iceland's witch trials have an unusual demographic character that distinguishes them from the rest of Europe: approximately 80 percent of those executed were men. This inversion of the continental pattern has been attributed to various causes — the Icelandic concept of magic (seiðr) was associated with femininity in the mythology, but actual practitioners in the legal records were predominantly male. The Westfjords — the most remote region of Iceland — had the highest concentration of witch trials. The Þingeyri area was the epicentre of the 1675 trial cluster, which remains the most comprehensively documented group witchcraft prosecution in Icelandic history. The trigger was the discovery of a magical stave — a complex runic symbol from the Galdrabók tradition — carved into the door of a farm near Þingeyri. The farmer's son, examined by the district magistrate, produced a second stave from his clothing. Under examination, he named nine others who had been involved in producing magical staves for various purposes. The charges ranged from using staves to cause illness in neighbours' livestock to causing impotence, disrupting weather, and attempting to kill a specific individual through a stave carved on a fish bone placed in the victim's shoe. Seven of the ten were executed. The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft in Hólmavík, a short distance from Þingeyri, commemorates the trial with the most complete exhibition of Icelandic magical history in existence.