GULLVEIG
Gullveig being speared and burned in an 1895 illustration by Lorenz Frølich
Gullveig being speared and burned in an 1895 illustration by Lorenz Frølich
Gullveig (pronounced “GULL-vayg”) is a female figure mentioned only in two stanzas in the Völuspá, one of the poems in the Poetic Edda. The stanzas describe the events leading up to the Aesir-Vanir War, the war between the two main tribes of deities in Norse mythology, the Aesir and the Vanir.

The two stanzas read:

Now she [the seeress recounting the events of the poem] remembers the war,
The first in the world,
When Gullveig
Was studded with spears,
And in the hall of the High One [Odin]
She was burned;
Thrice burned,
Thrice reborn,
Often, many times,
And yet she lives.

She [Gullveig] was called Heiðr
When she came to a house,
The witch who saw many things,
She enchanted wands;
She enchanted and divined what she could,
In a trance she practiced seidr,
And brought delight
To evil women.[1]

The following stanzas describe failed peace talks between the two tribes of gods and the beginning of the war.

These stanzas tell us that Gullveig was a practitioner of magic, often called “seidr” (seiðr) in Old Norse. As in most ancient societies, magic was seen as highly ambivalent amongst the Norse. Its practitioners often provided valuable services, but their art inherently increased their personal power in ways that others often felt to be underhanded and antisocial.

The second verse’s last lines, “And [she] brought delight / To evil women,” underscore this point. The Old Norse phrase illrar brúðar, “evil women,” is not the least bit ambiguous; brúðar literally means “brides,” but here it clearly means “women” in a more general sense, and illr (here illrar for grammatical reasons) means “ill, bad, evil, malevolent, injurious.” (I’ve seen a few attempts to translate these lines in a way that renders them morally neutral or positive, but these are utterly spurious and are based on nothing more than wishful thinking by people who would do well to come to terms with the fact that historical pagan religions typically had a highly ambivalent view of magic and the people who practiced it.)