For a long time, the volva, the Norse seeress who traveled between communities offering prophecy and magical services, was treated by scholars as primarily a literary figure. Then the archaeologists caught up with the mythology, and the picture changed completely.
Neil Price, one of the leading archaeologists of Viking Age religion, identified approximately 40 graves across Scandinavia that contained items matching the literary descriptions of the volva: iron staffs, hallucinogenic plant material, unusual exotic goods, and high-status burial contexts. The mythology said these women existed as a distinct and powerful social category. The archaeology confirmed it. This post covers both what the sources say about the volva and what the material evidence tells us.
Who the Volva Was
The word volva comes from Old Norse volr, meaning staff or wand. The staff-carrier. Her identity was literally organized around the tool she carried, which suggests that the staff was not an accessory but a mark of her role, something like a badge of office that identified her social and ritual function.
The sagas describe the volva as a traveling specialist: a woman who moved between communities offering divination, prophecy, and magical services in exchange for hospitality and payment. She was not attached to a specific temple or household. She was mobile, which made her both socially liminal, outside normal domestic structures, and enormously socially powerful, because her services were valuable and she could go where they were needed.
The Saga of Eirik the Red contains one of the most detailed surviving accounts of a volva’s visit. A seeress named Thorbjorg arrives at a Norse settlement in Greenland during a time of famine and difficulty. She is received with elaborate ceremony: a high seat is prepared for her with a cushion stuffed with hen feathers, she is given a special meal of specific foods, she wears specific ritual clothing including a cloak with cat fur trim and a staff topped with brass. The following evening, the community gathers, the correct songs are sung, and Thorbjorg enters a trance state from which she answers questions about the future.
This is a detailed, specific account. It reads as the description of an actual practice, not a mythological episode. And the archaeological evidence from sites like Oseberg, Birka, and Fyrkat provides a material counterpart to what the sagas describe.
The Oseberg Burial
The Oseberg ship burial in Norway, dated to approximately 834 CE, is one of the richest Viking Age burials ever excavated. It contained two women, one elderly and one younger. Among the grave goods were a carved wooden staff, a small leather pouch containing cannabis seeds, and a separate container of henbane seeds, both known hallucinogens. The burial also contained an extraordinary range of exotic goods from across the Viking world, consistent with a high-status individual who had access to networks of trade and exchange far beyond the local community.
The elderly woman’s positioning and specific grave goods, including the staff and the plant material, match the literary descriptions of a volva closely enough that Price identifies her as a probable ritual specialist. The match between the textual descriptions, the staff, the specialized plant material associated with altered states, the high-status burial context, and the same pattern appearing independently at multiple sites across Scandinavia, is too consistent to be coincidental.
The Birka grave 844 in Sweden and the Fyrkat burial in Denmark add further examples. At Fyrkat, a woman was buried in a wheeled cart with an iron staff, owl pellets, a silver amulet shaped like a chair (possibly the high seat described in the sagas), and a duck-footed pendant often found in probable volva burials. These are not random grave goods. They are a consistent assemblage pointing to a specific social and ritual role.
Seidr: The Magic
The practice associated with the volva is called seidr. It is described in the sources as a form of magic that operates on fate itself, the ability to see, influence, and manipulate the threads of destiny that the Norns weave. The volva’s primary function was divination, reading the shape of what was coming and communicating it to those who needed to know. But the sources also describe seidr practitioners influencing events, protecting or harming individuals, and working with the dead.
Seidr was gendered in a specific and interesting way. It was considered a form of women’s magic. Freya is its mythological originator, and she taught it to Odin. That Odin practiced seidr was considered transgressive, a point Loki makes explicitly in the Lokasenna, accusing Odin of practicing ergi, unmanliness or sexual transgression, by taking on a woman’s role in the ritual. The gender politics embedded in seidr are complex, and they tell us something important about how the tradition understood the relationship between gender, social role, and magical practice.
The practical mechanics of seidr, as the sagas describe them, involved a specific physical posture (seated on the high seat), specific songs sung by attendants to create the conditions for the trance, and a trance state during which the seer accessed knowledge beyond ordinary waking experience. The plant material found in volva graves, henbane and cannabis, is consistent with the use of psychoactive substances to facilitate or deepen that trance state, though the sources do not describe this explicitly.
The Social Position of the Volva
The volva occupied a genuinely unusual social position. She was powerful, in the sense that her services were valued and she was received with ceremony and respect. She was also liminal, outside the normal social structures of household and community. She traveled alone or with a small group of assistants. She was not a wife or a daughter in the normal sense. Her role gave her both independence and social standing that most Norse women, embedded in household structures, did not have.
The sagas treat the volva with a kind of cautious respect. You bring her in when you need her. You honor her correctly. You pay attention to what she says. But she is not domesticated. She is not comfortable. The power she carries is specifically associated with her liminality, with the fact that she moves between worlds in a way that ordinary social members do not.
Modern Engagement
Modern seidr practice exists in the Heathen community and takes a range of forms. Some practitioners work with oracular seidr in community contexts, following the broad structure described in the sagas: a seer enters an altered state while attendants hold the space, and questions are addressed. Some work with seidr as a personal practice of deepening perception and relationship with non-ordinary reality.
What the volva’s example offers modern practitioners, regardless of gender, is a model of serious, costly, skilled spiritual work. The volva was not a hobbyist. She trained, she developed specific abilities, she served a social function that her community depended on and compensated. Taking the tradition seriously means treating the work as work.
