SYMHC Classics: Vardø Witch Trials

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Recently, we had an episode about the trials of non human animals that were carried out in parts of medieval and early modern Europe, and we talked about some parallels with the witch trials that were taking place in some of the same places during some of the same times. We thought we would have one of our episodes on some of those witch trials as a Saturday Classic today. This episode is about the witch trials that took place in Varda in northern Norway in the seventeenth century. It originally came out on October ninth, twenty sixteen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fryme and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and we are still in the Halloween season, which makes me happy. In my dark little Heart and I accident started a witch theme, but that's not going to last. Just the two witch episodes this one and the Bell Witch, and the Bell Witch really doesn't even count in that regard. But today's episode is legitimately about witch trials and actual accusations of witchcraft, and Europe's witchcraft trials spanned three centuries from roughly fourteen fifty to seventeen fifty, but it was really during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the practice of trying people as witches was most fervent, and from about fifteen seventy to sixteen eighty. It's estimated, and this is a pretty wide gap of where the estimate falls, that between forty thousand and sixty thousand people across Europe were tried for sorcery of some form, and most of them were found guilty and put to death. I've seen the fraction of like approximately two thirds, but it's hard because there wasn't great record keeping to identify exactly how many lost their lives because of this and one particular town. This is an episode heavy in Norwegian words, which I have no doubt I will butcher. Yeah, even even having looked at pronunciations for them, a lot of the phonemes are not used in English, and so replicating them, yeah, it's a stretch. So no upfront that we will probably butcher it, and we mean no disrespect to the Norwegian language. Our mouths just will not do it. So we're going to talk about Varda, which is a fishing village. It was known as Norway's witch capital, and it was the site of a long series of quite brutal inquests, and there were generally two different kinds of witchcraft trials in Norway through this time period. There were isolated trials where one person was brought before the court and tried for sorcery, like just one person at a time would pop up and seem suspicious, and then there were panics, groups of people were tried in rapid succession in a very short period of time. And whereas the isolated trials had more to do with an individual person practicing witchcraft or some sort of sorcery, these panics were driven by the idea that demons were involved, usually and that groups of witches were consorting with the devil. So today we're going to talk about two of the panics that took place in Varda, Norway, And first we're going to give you a little bit of geographical context about the area. So Varda sits in Finnmark County, is Norway's only town that's in the Arctic climate zone and offers views of the Norwegian Russian Arctic. It's a really small coastal village. There are fewer than twenty five hundred inhabitants. It's Northern Norway's oldest town, with settlements dating back as far as nine thousand years and in the thirteen hundreds both a church and varda fortress were built there and the town sort of grew up around primarily the fortress. And despite the brutal weather, the fishing along the coast of Finmark was plentiful and the location offered really really lucrative trade opportunities even today. I mean, this is remote. Its relative isolation is one of the reasons that Finmark's witch trials were so expedient. Copenhagen, which under Danish rule was Norway's capital, was far enough away that the local authorities of Finmark basically got to act independently. There was such a big geographical distance from any higher authority that the decisions to execute witches were basically made with total conviction, and then the sentences were carried out without hesitation. There was no like Norwegian version of the Department of Justice overseeing the witch trial situation in Finnmark correct, but the directives to abecute witches came from very high because during some of this time from fifteen eighty eight to sixteen forty eight, the ruler of the Danish Norwegian Kingdom was King Christian Force, and he had an agenda when it came to witches. Yeah, I should say there that like, even if there had been an equivalent of the Justice department overseeing the witch trial situation, it would not have had the effect of preventing the execution of witches. And the officials of the crown at this time, who served under Christian the Force, were basically charged with the task of ridding the country of witches, and they were very committed to this job. So it's not surprising that there was a level of comfort in acting with this complete authority. In cases of witchcraft at the local level. From the late sixteenth century into the seventeenth century, Vardo, which is a small village, as we said, stage one hundred and forty different trials and in ninety one documented cases the accused was found guilty and put to death either by burning or by torture. Most of these happened in clusters where many people were prosecuted over very short periods of time, and the numbers here get really interesting because during the time of these witch hunts, less than one percent of Norway's population lived in the Finmark area where these trials took place, but this remote fishing community was home to thirty one percent of the witch executions in Norway, so disproportionately large numbers of people were being charged and punished by death for being witches. In Finmark, there were one hundred eleven women and twenty four men accused of sorcery. Of the ninety one put to death, seventy seven where women and fourteen were men. And the Sami people, which is an indigenous Scandinavian culture which still exists today, were some of the first to be targeted in this witch panic. They had been the first known people to live in Finmark, but as that area colonized, they became the minority. Approximately eighty percent of those accused of which craft and Fenmark were in Norwegian, twenty percent were Sami. When considering gender, though these numbers skew in a totally different way. Of the twenty four men who were accused of witchcraft in the area, sixteen were from the Sami people. At least thirteen of those sixteen were found guilty and executed, and that disparity in proportions is likely due, according to historian live Helene Willielmson, who is kind of an expert on this area of study, to the fact that Sami men in particular had a reputation for sorcery throughout Europe, and this is linked probably to some of their cultural practices. For example, they used this they would do this ritual where they used rune drums where they were basically kind of doing chants, and people went, oh, that must be evil. It wasn't, It's just part of their culture. And in sixteen oh nine, King Christian the Force wrote a letter to his district governors that they should persecute Sami sorcerers without mercy, and that really catalyzed fin Mark's witch hunting phase. So while the trials of the seventeenth century might have primarily affected Norwegian women, it does appear that bias against the Sami people really started things. In the early sixteen hundreds, Sami were targeted more frequently, and then the trials transitioned to focus on the women of Fenmark. And part of the mindset that led to this witch panic was the idea common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the far north of the European continent, including the coast of Norway, was sort of home to the devil. This idea appears to have been born of a tangle of ideologies and fears. For one, although Christianity had spread throughout Europe, there were still people, including those in the northern fringes, who didn't practice it, which drew a lot of suspicion from the Church. Additionally, this was and still is a place where the climate can be incredibly punishing, and that stormy nature was attributed to sorcery. The icy, cold winds from the north were believed to originate at the devil's home and to be a conveyance of the devil's will of sorcery and of evil spirits, and these spirits, of course, specialized in nautical dark magic. These were not just locally held ideas. Many areas of Europe, including France, England, Sweden, Germany and Scotland, were homes of people who believed that Norway was virtually riddled with witches, and the Mountain of Dolmen, which sat between two fishing villages, was believed to be the site of the entrance to a tunnel that went directly to Hell, and a cave within that mountain was reportedly the genesis point for various demons who then spread from there throughout the European continent. So we're about to get into these panics, but first we're going to pause for a quick word from one of our sponsors. So to Finnmark in the sixteen twenties, As with any of history's witchcraft persecution episodes, sorcery was often the scapegoat for difficult or tragic events that happened in any community, and Finnmark experienced a really terrible storm one Christmas early on in the seventeenth century. So the unexpected sixteen seventeen Christmas Eve storm hit when sixteen boats from Varda and seven boats from Kyburg. I'm sure I'm saying that terribly wrong, so I apologize. We're all at sea and ten of those boats capsized and forty fishermen were drowned. Struggling to cope with the loss of so many of the village's men, at one time, members of the community started to point to witchcraft is the cause of this tragedy. The population of both villages combined was less than three hundred people, so forty deaths really did have a massive impact on the community, and this incident eventually catalyzed a piece of legist that allowed for mass prosecutions, specifically in the charge of witchcraft. And it actually took a long time to enact that law and get it up and running. While it was first introduced in October sixteen seventeen, it really wasn't enforced until sixteen twenty. This ability meant that there was one of those instances where a lot of people, both men and women, faced charges of witchcraft and were found guilty. So in January of sixteen twenty one, during the anti sorcery proceedings, a woman appeared at the trials and claimed that witches had indeed tied knots in the fishing nets and cast spells on them. Her name was Elson Knute's daughter, and she detailed how a group of witches had tied three knots in a piece of string, They had cursed the knots and then spit on them, and then as those knots were untied, that curse was activated and the sea consequently claimed the lives of those fishermen. She herself was accused of witchcraft and was thrown into the sea to see if she floated. This is all too common and pretty foolish practice. The thinking was that the water, which was believed to be a sacred element, would repel evil, which was why witches floated. Elsa floated, dooming herself to a guilty verdict, and then she was put to death. In February of sixteen twenty one, another woman, on Lar's daughter testified before the court, and initially she refused to speak, and she was, like Elsa, thrown into the sea for the water test. But after this test began, she readily confessed, and this was framed at the time as the water test having released her from the devil's spell. She claimed that when she had been questioned earlier, the devil had silenced her tongue, and when she did speak, she said that she had met with the devil on Christmas Eve of sixteen seventeen. She went on to say that she had that evening flown through the air alongside the devil, and that he had taken her from one village to another where a total of forty witches had gathered to celebrate the Sabbath. After these events, she went back to her home. Mari Jorgan's daughter also testified, and she said that the devil had visited her on Christmas Eve and asked if she would serve him, and then took her to the home of Kirsty Soren's daughter. Kirsty, according to Mary's testimony, cast a spell on her that transformed her into a raven, enabling her to quickly make the journey to the gathering where the not curse was performed. Marie gave added information that a similar Christmas Eve sabbath had happened in the time between the sixteen seventeen tragedy and the sixteen twenty one trials. On Christmas Eve, sixteen twenty and Kirsty Soren's daughter figured prominently in a lot of the testimony. She was characterized by others on trial as the leader of the group, and she was also one of the last women who testified in the sixteen twenty one trials, and she had witnessed how things had played out for those that had faced the court before her. Under threat of torture, she confirmed what the other women had said about their rituals, dooming herself to be burned at the stake. During her court appearance, Kirsty named two men who had also participated in the rituals while men were tried for witchcraft in Norway during all this time, neither of the men that she named were formally accused. But if legal records of later trials are taken at face value, because there are records of all of these proceedings that are apparently pretty well maintained, they're in pretty good shape. But they are they're literally like on file there in Norway, so they're not online or anything, but they basically lay out as though this is a legal document. These are legal proceedings all of these things that we're talking about today. So there is a record of all of these trials, and if they are taken at face value, there were still practicing witches in Finnmark for decades after the many deaths of the sixteen twenty one trials, and while more than ten women were put to death in sixteen twenty one, a series of trials and sixteen sixties would claim even more lives. In late sixteen sixty two, more than thirty were accused of sorcery in a series of trials that played out into sixteen sixty three. Among the accused were not just adult women, but also young girls under the age of twelve, and most of the testimonies in this case were confessions that were tortured out of women and threatened out of children who said that they had met and celebrated with the devil at Domen, which we mentioned earlier. During the trials, several of the accused said that they had traveled Doman's pathway to Hell and that it was a long black valley with a boiling lake at the bottom. And one of the children victimized in these trials was Ingeborg Iver's daughter, who was found guilty of sorcery because of her association with two women and another girl. And there Christmas Eve sixteen sixty two activities, so that day Iver's daughter and a woman named Solvi, Nil's daughter were actually in custody for suspected witchcraft. They were in prison at Vardahu's fortress, but according to testimony given before the court, they turned into cats, escaped the fortress and met with the devil outside the gates, and then the devil took them to one of these witch meetings, and it's there that they met the other woman and girl that were involved in this particular accusation in the testimony, and after much carousing and celebrating, the devil then returned them to the fortress. Ingeborg had the unhappy distinction of being the first child accused of witchcraft and fenmark when she appeared at her trial on January twenty sixth, sixteen sixty three. Her exact age is unknown, but she was described in court records as a little girl. Her mother had already been burned for witchcraft, and she had said that her mother taught her witchcraft by giving her a tainted bowl of milk. There was this perception at the time that witchcraft was conveyed often through tainted food or drink, and that's how you passed it on from one generation to the next. And then the devil, after she had had this tainted milk, the devil was conjured by her mother in the form of a black dog, and that dog bit her repeatedly. And this same sort of narrative was described by the other five girls as well, being given like a tainted usually milk, and then this black dog devil coming and sort of attacking them as a form of trial. And while to the court at the time this may have indicated truthfulness, each girl's testimony validated what had come before because they were pretty consistent, but it also suggests that perhaps they had simply heard the same tail over and over from somewhere, and we're going to get to a possible source of that tale in just a moment. We're also going to go into a bit more detail about the Vardajas Fortress than some of the people who were held there as captives. But before we do, we are going to stop one more time for a very brief sponsor break. So that holding situation that we mentioned before, the break in Vardahus Fortress, which you will also sometimes see translated as Vardajus Castle, was where most of the torture used to illicit confessions took place, and there was this single room called the Witch's Hole where sort of these torturous events happened. And while the use of torture was technically illegal before a sentence was passed on a prisoner, it was still used both before the sentence to gain confessions and then after sentencing there would be more torture to produce names of accomplices. One of the interesting factors in this panic is the influence of two people, a husband and a wife, on the confessions of the accused. This pair, Ambrosius Rhodius and Frieder's daughter Rosius, had been imprisoned near modern day Oslo before being moved to Vardajus Fortress. Ambrosius was an astrologer and a physician who was considered politically dangerous after having made some accurate predictions about military conflicts, and his wife Anne, who was the granddaughter of King Frederick the second, had some sort of serious argument with political figures in their hometown. So yeah, they were moved to Vardijas because they were considered basically enemies of the state at that point, and because the fortress was kind of crowded in the sixteen sixties panic. At least one of the children imprisoned there shared quarters with the Rodeus couple, and additionally, Anne had a key to the witch's whole, and it's documented that Anne spoke with both the women and girls who were being held in the fortress awaiting trial, and that she talked at length with them about demonology and that she encouraged their confessions. On the up side, all six of the little girls involved in the sixteen sixty two to sixteen sixty three panic were acquitted on the grounds that they were too young to be held accountable. For their actions and that they had undoubtedly been influenced by the adult witches around them. And over the course of the sixteen sixty series of accusation and trials, we mentioned that thirty people had been accused, two women died while being tortured for information before they could be sentenced, and twenty others were sentenced, found guilty and burned at the stake. In twenty eleven, the country of Norway made a significant gesture of apology and recognition of the ninety one people known to have been executed for witchcraft. Peter Zumthor, an architect from Switzerland, and Louis Bourgeois, a French American artist, works together to design a memorial for the lives that were lost. So this stunesset memorial sits on a piece of remote coastline on the Barren Sea, believed to be the site of many of the executions and the architect's contribution to the work, which is titled Memory Hall, looks like one hundred and fifty eight yard or one hundred and forty five meter long corridors built at the edge of the sea, but instead of exterior walls, it has an open crosshatched frame. That frame, which is made of pine, supports a tunnel like silk cocoon, and within the fabric tunnel is a hallway with oak floors. Within the interior are ninety one lamps, and each of them illuminates a window that represents one of the executed and an engraving dedicated to one of the people killed for witchcraft, including the testimony that was used against them. The second part of the memorial, which can be entered by visitors once they have passed through that long type memorial corridor, is Bourgeoise creation, and it's entitled The Damn, the Possessed and the Beloved. And this element is a black glass room and inside there is a chair in the center that burns continuously and there are three mirrors mounted above it to create the illusion of the space being consumed in fire. So it's kind of a unique thing. I don't know of many other countries that have done anything like this. It's quite beautiful. There's some really good pictures online and we'll have links to those in the show notes. But it's an interesting testament to how things have changed in their efforts to kind of they obviously cannot fix what has gone before. But to at least acknowledge the wrongs that were done and how misguided the attempts to rid the country of evil through witchcraft trials were. So that's the Varta witch trials. Oh, which trials. Like people have such a fascination with witch trials, but they're depressing. They're so depressing they are It breaks my heart if you read about you know, these little girls, Yeah, children that were being forced to testify, sometimes alongside their mothers and sometimes after their mothers had already been killed. And there's such brutality to it and it's rough. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H