After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Deadly Arctic Witch Trials

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

It all started when a huge storm drowned 40 men on Christmas Eve, 1617.The people of Vardø, northern Norway, needed someone to blame.What followed were devastating witch trials which featured one of the highest execution rates in Europe, and implicated the town's women and the surrounding indigenous population.Joining Anthony and Maddy to delve into this icy world is author and historian Marion Gibson.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Christmas Eve 1617. In the Arctic settlement of Varda, the wind isn't just cold. It's a killer. Tonight, the sea claims 40 fathers, sons and husbands in one catastrophic, icy storm. The local economy is annihilated. Every third family is plunged into sudden, hopeless poverty. In the chaos of grief and ruin, there's a vacuum. Into that vacuum pours the terror of early modern Europe, the wave of persecution that has consumed Germany and Scotland is finally breaching the shores of the far north. The officials and judges, far from home,

arrive with one terrible instruction. Find the witches responsible for the wind. The victims of the storm are gone. But the widows they left behind, their trial is only just beginning. And what's more, it will set the small island of Varda ablaze with burning. To take us on this story today, we have none of them, Professor Marion Gibson, who is a historian and author of books, including witchcraft, history and 13 trials, and the witches St. Ozeth. Marion, welcome to After Dark. Thank you for inviting me.

We are going to be talking about a witch trial that takes place in Norway. And it's known as, and we... Where does it take place, Maddie? Well, luckily, we have someone on our production team who is in a position to advise on the pronunciation. And I'm extremely nervous to do it in front of her and not making eye contact with her in the studio. Varda. Is that correct? Sounds good to me.

She's cheering. She's cheering. I've did it correctly. So, Marion, this is a very different setting. You know, often when we talk about witch trials, we talk about the sort of the big, famous hitters of the Pendle witch trials, you know, Matthew Hopkins in Eastern England, and even the Salem Witch Trials, which we've covered quite extensively on the show before. This is a very different setting. This is a very different context. Can you tell us when and where in history we are in this

moment? So we're in the 1620s, the early 1620s, and we're in the very far north of what is now modern Norway. So right up in the Arctic Circle, you know, the kind of place where it gets done, all day at certain times of the year and is very light at other times where you would see the northern lights a lot, a place where there's permafrost and great big open plains and everything is a very, very long way away, a wonderful place, very far from every type of human settlement you could imagine, except that it has nomadic people moving through it and they'll become important in the story. These are the Sami, the indigenous people in this region. Dare I say it, it's a quite magical landscape, just in terms of, I suppose, for us from our perspective, the sort of

alienness of it, the grandeur of the landscape, the brutality of it as well? I think so. It's a very, it's very beautiful indeed, but it is also very hostile because it would be easy for you to get into terrible trouble out there, particularly when it's, you know, under deep snow, or there has a storm coming in, or the permafrost is melting and it turns essentially to marshes. So it's a very hostile landscape for people going into it from outside. And Norway in this moment is this one kingdom at this stage? Is this a series of different kingdoms and territories? How is this organised?

It's a series of different kingdoms. So Norway and Denmark are one united kingdom. And the king of all of this is Christian IV, who has his capital in Denmark, but also rules over what we'd now consider to be Norway as well. Let's think about witchcraft then, more specifically, in terms of the early part of the 17th century in Norway. Is there something distinct about Norwegian witchcraft that we're about to discover? Is it very similar to what we find in England or in Salem towards the end of the century? How does this type of witchcraft differ, or is it similar to those things?

There's a sort of international agreement by this point about the basics of witchcraft. So people think of it as a nasty practice that harms your neighbours, a practice which is related to the devil. So you're imagined to be some kind of devil worshipper or in contact with the devil if you become a witch. But they're also kind of local features. So you do find Scandinavian witches have a strong association with weather magic, for example, which will come up in the story later on. And they are seen also as having this relationship with, as you were saying, the Sami people who are out there in the wider landscape beyond the settlements of Norwegian people coming up from the south. There are also these other people in landscape, indigenous people. And they're thought to be very magical. So we'll find during the course of this trial story that the relationship between the Norwegian people and the Sami people is important.

there's thought to be a kind of powerful and I'm afraid demonic magic coming out of the Sami, you know, pagan religion, basically, which other people thought to be tapping into. So there are international features, but there are also local features as well in what people think witches are and what they do. It sort of strikes me that it's on a bigger scale and that this is set across this great landscape and this empire that's being settled by the Norwegians coming up from the south, as you say, and this kind of struggle. for power and legitimacy and land between the indigenous peoples and these settlers. But then you have this very human intimate story as well. Let's start on Christmas Eve in 1617 when there is a storm. And this is the sort of the beginning spark, I suppose, isn't it, of the trials that are going to take place? So what happens? Who is involved?

So across the whole of Northern Norway, there is a massive storm. As you're saying, 1617, in what we now think of as the holiday season. of course people are still going out to fish to provision their communities in this season. However, on this day there is a terrible storm which seems to come up out of nowhere. And people who saw it describe it as like the sea rising up like ashes, they said. So it's almost like the sea has turned to smoke. And suddenly there's this cloud of hail and wind and rain rushing across the seascape. And unfortunately, all the fishers, mostly fish and men, are out in their boats from the communities.

And the entire fishing fleet is caught in the storm. Many of the boats capsized. They're any little shallow boats. You know, this is the 17th century. So they're really small. And if they're burdened with fish, you know, if you've got nets over the side, if you've got your sails up and something comes up out of nowhere in the weather, there is very little you can do.

And I'm sorry to say that 40, at least 40 of the men from all the local communities around the bays in this part of northern Norway die in the storm. They're drowned. You can imagine how terrible that would have been for the communities. You know, not only they bereaved of their husbands and sons, but also they're left completely without a means of survival. The fishing industry is everything to these people. That's devastating.

And why do I feel like someone's about to get blamed for this? Of course, it's very easy to blame someone, isn't it? Particularly if you live in a culture where you tend to blame witches for bad weather. I mean, it's giving Anne of Denmark, which is interesting right in terms of terms of that stormy weather, James 6 and 1st, and she's not able to get across the sea. And it's so interesting that you say that there are certain places that associate weather witchcraft and we're back up in that region again and that same thing. So as Maddie said, we have, someone needs to be blamed for this.

Where is the finger of blame going to land? Well, unsurprisingly, the finger of blame is going to land on local women. And it's also going to land in particular on a Sami woman who is part of this wider community. who is thought to be particularly threatening, not only because she's female, because she's indigenous woman as well. So people start pointing the finger at her, and then they start pointing the finger at other women from the community, you know, Norwegian women, settler women.

And soon a wide group of people are being blamed for killing all the men in the local communities. Who's making the accusations? Really interesting. There is a link back to that earlier case you talked about, where King James, the first of Scotland, as he is then in the 50s. in the 90s, Marys, Anne of Denmark, the Danish princess, and they're interrupted in the course of their wedding journey across the North Sea by Big Storm. Somebody he would have known about that.

It was a guy called John Cunningham, who is a Scottish man who's associated with James I. And it's him who presides over the trial of these witches in northern Norway. Why is he there? He's there as a settler. So you imagine this is a bit like the American frontie, and people from all over the world are coming here to open up the kind of, as they see it, Norway. Weegean wastes, because it's only got nomadic people in it, hasn't it? So of course they can go and take it for themselves. And John Cunningham is one of those. So he ends up presiding over

this trial. He is one of the people pointing fingers. And he's looking back to earlier cases that he knows about weather witchcraft and thinking, yeah, the same thing is happening again. So in terms of the people who are accused, and we know that some of them are actually the widows of the fishermen, aren't they? And I mean, I can't imagine losing your partner and the loss to your community as well as your domestic arrangement and then being accused of witchcraft. But this storm and this moment really catches fire, doesn't it? Let's talk about the first wave of confessions that come from this then

because women do start to confess to this. And we see this so much in witch trials, don't we, that for whatever reason, whether it's torture or they're being lied to or manipulated in some way or just terrified, that often they will say things that aren't necessarily true. So who's the first to confess? The first to confess is this Sami woman who is called Kari Edis Data. So obviously the second part of her name is a Norwegian name that's being given to her.

But Edis is a Sami name. So she probably is the daughter of this guy called Edis. And Kari is her first name. And she's thought of as a Finn or a Sami woman. She's sometimes called Kari the Finn. So this is the person who is initially accused of being involved in causing this storm and attacking other people in the community in different ways. She's said to have killed somebody called Abraham Nielsen,

who had fallen overboard, not during the Great Storm, but at another time. Again, this is a really maritime community, and she's being accused of a maritime crime, and he had fallen out with her partner about various things, and she was said to have taken her revenge on him. So she's hauled in, she questioned by the local magistrates, people like John Cunningham,

And she ends up confessing, as far as we know she is not put to formal torture, although that was something that they could do in this area. Torture was absolutely legal, people would be put on the rack. You know, the most horrible things will be done to them. But as far as we know, she confesses primarily because they threatened to throw her into the sea. This, of course, you know, being winter, very low chance of survival coming out as the sea. but they're doing that witch test that people might know about. So if you throw a supposed witch into the sea or or Mill Pond or whatever body of water you've got presents. Small puddle.

Exactly. And she doesn't sink. She floats. Then she is thought to be a witch because the water is, you know, the water of baptism is rejecting her. So they threatened to do this to her and she breaks down under this threat and I suspect other threats as well. You know, she's in a really vulnerable position. She's a woman. She's an indigenous woman.

and she doesn't really have any role in this society that she can call her own. She doesn't really have authority in the community. She's being questioned by these powerful men. And she starts to confess. And she starts to say, yes, I am a witch. Yes, I met the devil years ago. He offered me some pretty ribbon. He said if I served him and gave him my soul and my body that I'd be powerful.

And she starts to tell stories of prophecies and sort of see her type activities that she she's been involved with. So she starts to say, yes, I do have some magical ability. You know, that man, Abraham Nielsen, I knew he was going to drown before it even happened. And you can see, therefore, why she might have been accused of killing him. If she had said, oh, you know, this is an ill-fated voyage, I wish they wouldn't go, but they do go and Abraham drowns. And later, Karie starts confessing, yes, I did bewitch him, I did kill him. There's so many things to say here. I'm really interested in this idea that she is confessing to more than she needs to, really, under torture. And again, you know, we always talk about this idea of belief and disbelief and

what someone like this particular individual might believe her role had been, or whether, in fact, she is just being forced to admit to all of this and she actually has done none of it, or whether she believes that she does have some magical ability. And I suppose that's something we can't quite access. But also thinking about the fact that she's accused as well, isn't she, of transforming into different animals to like foxes, cats and also sea monsters, which again just speaks to the sort proximity to the sea, I suppose, and the importance of it in these people's lives. But I'm interested in that, and I wonder, is that because she is an outsider in terms of she is a Sami person who is living within this subtler community and therefore is seen as

someone who is intrinsically magical? You know, we come across familiar so much in which Charles and this idea of having a familiar, having an animal to do your bidding. But it's quite another thing to transform yourself into a creature. Is that because she's othered and therefore thought of in that way? Or is this a pervasive belief of transformation across? I think a bit of both, actually. I mean, you do find, for example, in English cases that sometimes people are accused of transforming themselves into cats or greyhounds or whatever. It does happen, but it's much rarer. And I do think you're absolutely right that Carrey has all this stuff projected onto her because she is seen as an outsider and part of a kind of magical

grouping. You know, it's that absolutely classic thing of the magical other. Oh, those people over there, you know, they might not have material. power, but they've got some kind of magical power that makes up for that. I know they're pagans, therefore they must be devil worshippers. She has all of that stuff projected onto her. But I've also thought, Sami beliefs include kind of shamanic beliefs about transformation and important animals and the relationship with the shaman with the animals and the way in which the whole cosmology is much more unified than the Christian cosmology. So the kind of human an animal continuum, he's much more of a continuum, much less of a divide for Sami people. So I do

wonder if she also brings to this confession, something of her own beliefs or her people's beliefs as well. It's really hard to say, as it is with so many of these stories, it's really hard to say where the impetus for the story is coming from and who owns the story. Is it the confessing woman, or is it people like John Cunningham who are questioning her and forcing her to say things? I suppose as a historian looking at this, that what the most exciting thing is, is that you can go off in these different directions and consider the Sami beliefs. You can consider how Christianity might be interacting with that. And that's the delicious thing that there are these gaps in the things that we can't fill. But actually, you can look from so many different perspectives at this kind of 360 event that's unfolding and that it gives you access to all these different questions and some of the answers, but not all of them, I suppose.

You never know the full story. And that means you can bring something yourself to the story and see what you see in it. Let's talk about women particularly. We talk about the types of women that are accused of witchcraft in the 17th century. And so often it falls into this modern, in terms of the TikTok historian, let's say, it falls into this idea of what we call on the podcast the girl bossification of history. And that is, oh, well, actually, they were accused. of this because they were powerful and they shouldn't have had power. And actually what that sometimes

does is distort the actual historical archive because what we see so often is this marginalization. It's the disenfranchisement that's drawing attention in many ways. However, on the flip side of that, we also have somebody called Kirsten Sorensdatter, who is a leader in the community, and she also is accused of witchcraft. So really, there's no way for women to be safe in this environment. Tell us a little bit about Kristen. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. She's a settler woman. She's come up from Denmark. So she also is an outsider in her way. But she's come from the centre of power, which is, you know, the southern bit of the country, the empire, you know, where the power is. She worked as a servant woman and she's been in various settings in different

people's houses where she's worked with animals. She's worked in the house. She's worked in the house. She's worked with textile. She's, I think, probably quite a skilled woman, and she's an older woman, too. So she's been around for quite some time. She's got married on the course of her long journey up from Denmark to Norway, where she's worked her way north in, if you like, stages. And she's finally come to this place in the Arctic Circle. And she seems by the time she gets there to have been quite a substantial woman,

you know, to have had some resources of her own, to have had some position within the community, to have been somebody who the community looked to, as you say, for leadership and for a sense of, also I think, magical empowerment in various ways. She too starts to confess that she has been involved in magical practices when she's questioned. So I do see her as something of an authoritative woman as against Kari, who is a completely disempowered woman in so many different ways. But at the same time, I think it's interesting that what's projected onto both of these women is a kind of power. This is always the problem. Even if somebody looks incredibly marginal,

then you realize, you know, they have very few material resources. They're constantly being othered by the community around them. They're seen as racially different. They're seen as sexually different, transgressive in some way. You know, Carrier said to have a lover, for example. You see all of those things. I think the relationship between disempowerment and empowerment is really complicated. And yeah, somebody can be seen as being, too powerful, too noisy, too authoritative. But at the same time, even if they're none of those things, somebody is going to think, yeah, yeah, but they have a secret source of power. Sure. So, of course, that overrides all of the disadvantages that they have, and they must be,

you know, involved in this terribly threatening conspiracy, and therefore I can persecute them. What happens to these women in this first instance? Because it's going to, again, snowball more, but they've confessed to certain magical crimes, I suppose it's fair to say, and crimes that, you know, threaten the men of the community, the life force, which is the fishing, what is their punishment going to be? I'm afraid it's going to be burning at the stake. So this is a particularly horrible case. You know, they would be tied to a stake and logs would be piled around them or turf would be piled around them, whatever would catch fire and you had in the locality. And they would be burned to death. It's just this incredibly hideous punishment. So they're questioned by the

magistrate. They're put through a trial. they're imprisoned. They are tortured after their trial quite often to see if they'll name any other people. So, you know, can we spread it a bit further? Can we find out more about this alleged witch conspiracy? And then they're taken out onto a headland near the place where they've been imprisoned in a fort and burned to death. And that must have been such a spectacle in this sort of frozen, so-called wasteland as well, this fire happening. I'm so struck Marion by the the landscape itself and the role that geography plays, we have the sea and we have the storms coming in on the sea and the threat, but also the livelihood that it represents for people.

And then you have, you know, people being burned on the headland. It's so cinematic. I can really see it in my mind's eye. How important is the geography, is the landscape in terms of this particular case and what happens around it? It's really important. It's marginal. It's liminal. It's liminal. all sorts of ways. So if you're a settler person coming from the south, it must have looked like a very strange landscape. And there were things like the northern lights, which really, even to us, still seems like a magical thing, doesn't it? You know, you journey far north into the dark and then the sky lights up in all these amazing colours and it doesn't do elsewhere.

So I think people would have seen it as a very magical space. But it's also politically on the margins. So that's the very extreme edge of Norway. And about 10 miles east is Russia. You know, on the other side of the bay, you have Russian people who are probably speaking different languages, who have different cultural practices, and are also intermittently at war with the people of Norway, Denmark. You've also got the Swedes involved. So the fact that they've built a fortress there in this locality is, I think, really important. They see threat all around them from different peoples. And is the prosecution of which then an attempt at that consolidation of power, you know, you spoke about Norway as these different

territories, but ultimately it's being ruled by the king from Denmark, is what happens here so harsh because there's an attempt to extend that power where it's centralised to the very perimeters of this kingdom. Yes, I'm afraid that is what I think. I think this is an attempt at dominance. It's part of colonialism, really. It's part of that long discourse of extending your power as far as you possibly can, even if you have to take power and land from other people at the margins of your community. And Christian is really, really interested in witchcraft. He's involved in this earlier case with James I. He's passionately keen to find witches right across his big united, I mean, really disunited, but united kingdom. And he introduces a decree against

witchcraft in 1617, the year of the Great Storm. And by 1620, there's this big witch trial right at the edge of his kingdom. It doesn't seem like a coincidence, does it? Can I just ask one question before? I think we should give some space to the Sami perspective here because it's very unique in these conversations around witchcraft. But before we get on to that, I'd love to know if we know why they thought these women caused this storm.

What did they think the women were hoping to achieve by doing that? That's a great question, actually. Yeah, because it would impact them as well, wouldn't it? If there are no fish coming in, then that hurts everybody. It just seems to be the idea of pure malice that the devil wants to harm human beings. And he wants to harm large numbers of them and he wants to impoverish them and take away their resources. So I think it's probably that. But I think if you do look at it logically like that, it seems an utterly pointless act, doesn't it?

You know, taking revenge on your neighbour is one thing. but actually wiping out a great section of your community in a terrible storm is a completely different order of activity, isn't it? And really makes no sense. It does speak very strongly to that sense of people wanting to find an enemy, people wanting to blame the excesses of the natural world and the climate on some other human being who they can then punish, and so it won't happen again, right? And it's interesting that there's a sort of agenda aspect here in terms of it's the men who die,

and it's the women who are blamed. How do you see that playing into this? I mean, obviously we see predominantly, certainly in British cases, it's women more than men who are accused of witchcraft. Is that the same in Norway, though? I mean, how usual is it for women to be the target of this? Yes, it is, I'm afraid. It's the same kind of culture, you know.

Women tend to get blamed for things, and particularly for magical things. It's particularly ironic that Kari is blamed as a Sami woman because the Sami shamans are men. So it's quite all. that she's putting this position where she's either forced or decides to reveal that she, too, as a woman, has certain magical powers. And it feels like she's sort of a bit of a standing for the Sami men that maybe the community

are more keen to get at. Certainly some of them are put on trial in the 1690s. So we know that that was a big concern. Do you think at this stage there's just a complete lack of understanding about Sami culture by the settlers? And so they think, well, it's the women in the social culture. Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Yes, I do. I think that they are deeply suspicious of these new people that they've encountered and projects onto them all the misogyny of their own society. We have an image here, Marion, which I'm going to share with you because usually Maddie and I will describe these images, but I think it's better if we have the experts, do it today. And this is a Sami shaman drum. And it is decorated, if that feels like a very flippant description,

but it is inscribed with imagery. And I'm just wondering if I give you this, I'm sure you're familiar with it anyway, but if I give you the image, and if you can just talk us through what we're seeing there. Yeah, so run drums, they're run drums. Aren't they marvelous? They're really potent symbols of Sami religion,

and they would have been owned by the shamans. There's no idea, I don't know if I'm saying that right, but that was what these men were called, who did the ritual and religious, activity for their communities. And they were used for divination. So the Sami man would sit with a drum on his knee or in front of him. They usually have a kind of strap to fasten it to the body. And he would beat upon it in a particular rhythm and he would go into a trance and he would say that he was divining from what was happening on the drum. And the little thing that you can see

next to it is a pointer which would be sat on top of the drum. So as the drum skin bounces, the little point to moves across the surface. And as it does, it will point to particular symbols that are painted on the surface of the drum. So the kind of symbols that we can see would actually divine the fate of the person who was asking to have their, if you like, their fortune told, or the community that was asking a question about what would happen to it in the future. And they're fascinating. They're all different, but there are a number of symbols that recur. So you will get things like, you can see these roundels here. You would get things like the sun. and the moon. You would get human figures doing various things, you know, entering into conflict

with each other. Some of them seem to be representations of deities or sort of animist figures from the Sami mythos from their cosmology. So you would get some of them named either specific names that the Sami people called their religious figures or you would sometimes get them described by Christian names. So obviously the whole thing is in the process of being Christianized and explained to Christian people. So they might say, this figure from our mythology represents this and the Christian person looking at it would say, oh yeah, that's kind of like St Christopher or that's kind of like Jesus, isn't it? So sometimes you get them described as God or Messiah or the Virgin Mary. So as the pointer moves across these people, so the person doing the

reading from it would be able to tell what's going to happen in the future of that community or to that person. And they're these really powerful artifacts. I think they tell us a lot about the kind of magical world of the Sami, which to them is a religious world, but to people looking in, of course, looks magical, looks deeply threatening, looks like it might in fact be witchcraft. Yeah, so talk to us a little bit more about the relationship in terms of belief between the settlers and the Sami. Obviously, there was mistrust there. There was a sense that this particular cosmology, this religious practice, is sort of in line with, according to Christian values, the devil, it's paganism, all of that.

Is there animosity between these two groups in terms of their belief? And are the Sami therefore targeted in which trials because of this inherent mistrust in the magical practice that they do? Or is there more curiosity and sort of sharing going on there? What is the relationship? I think something of both. I mean, certainly if you're a Christian clergyman, you're probably going to see devil worship here. So there's a whole layer of society where people are likely to be very suspicious. And that's the upper layer. You know, that's the men who are in charge of the settler communities and trying to build this new nation as they see it. So they are quite likely to have been suspicious of the Sami. But at the everyday level, people just live together, really. They cooperate quite often.

You know, they fish together. They work together in textile production. You know, they work on preparing skins for things like the drums. So it's kind of a normal community in many ways. It's a multicultural community. But of course, when you have a circumstance where that community is put under tremendous pressure, there is pressure from the people at the top of that society to push people apart, to divide and rule, if you like. And out of that comes this witch trial and this belief that the Sami are those who are bringing the devil into the community. People like Kari are the first accused. So we know that this particular drum is owned by a man whose

Norwegian settler name is given as Anders Paulson, but who is a Sami man. What happens to him? How unusual is the process that he's put through in terms of accusations? So yeah, fast forward to the 1690s and the same time as the Salem trials actually. And Anders Paulson, whose name is now entirely

Norwegianised, isn't it? Interestingly, even though he's a Sami man, He is one of the shaman figures and he's put on trial for witchcraft and he has a drum and his Sami drum is still preserved in a museum so we can actually see it and he's put in prison

and he's going to be tried for this crime but one of his fellow prisoners actually is so afraid of him or so hostile to him or believes he's some kind of horrible witch conspirator that he attacks him and kills him in prison. In prison. So he's actually murdered before he can be convicted of witchcraft because somebody is so convinced that he is a witch that he feels the need to do away with him. And that just speaks so much to, you know, often

when we think about witch witch trials, we think about the sort of the performance of them, the spectacle, and often it's about the usually men in charge, the magistrates, the judges, whoever and the sort of performance of that authority and that belief system over something more marginal or, you know, seen as kind of other. But, but. But here there is such true intrinsic belief and fear that someone in prison has actually murdered him. Before he can even go to trial, does he have his trial first? No, he doesn't. He's murdered in prison.

Wow, okay. So he never gets anything even remotely resembling a fair trial or, you know, sort of due process then. What were the consequences for that prisoner who kills him? Yeah, well, you know, he has murdered somebody and he's in jail himself. So I'm afraid he gets punished for that. He is punished, okay. He is punished for that, yeah. But I don't think they take it terribly seriously.

You know, the fact that he has attacked and killed a fellow prisoner, an indigenous person, somebody who is supposed to be innocent and still proven guilty, is not really taken into account. He's just seen as being a dangerous person in a wider variety of ways. And I think it's a particularly tragic story because, as you say, it does demonstrate the depth of suspicion, doesn't it? The legal process isn't even allowed to complete itself. It is assumed that the suspect is guilty

and that they are part of this witch conspiracy and that they can be disposed of without further discussion. I think of some of this, I mean, you can apply to so many contemporary positions, but if some of this is not ringing alarm bells in listeners' ears in the ways in which certain people are treated currently in our own times. And you're talking about this divide and rule thing

and that there's essentially politicians of whatever persuasion purposefully driving wedges between groups of people. I'm always saying this, and there's a broken record in a certain extent, but we always see, well, we're so far removed from this.

We're so civilized now. We would never believe in witchcraft. We could never find ourselves in this situation. Like, take two steps back. We are in very similar situations. on, you know, it's not directly comparable, but it's something there. Marion, talk to me as a way of rounding this up in terms of what's happening in what is present-day Norway and the wider witchcraft trials of the 17th century.

What are the stats around how impactful this is in terms of trials, executions, people that are killed? Is this, I don't want to be flippant about it, but is this a big deal or is this a very contained matter? although it's going over years, right? So it's spread over quite a long time. Yeah, there are hundreds of people, I'm afraid, accused and executed by burning for witchcraft in this locality. There's a really big memorial in northern Norway to all of these people. And it commemorates about 120 people, I think, who were executed.

You know, those are just the people who have found guilty. It was possible to be acquitted as well. So we're dealing with a phenomenon that involves hundreds and hundreds of people over the course the entire 17th century, 20 to 16, 19, and then a bit further on as well as that. So Norway is a country like Britain with a big history of which persecution, which it's remembered in really interesting ways. I would urge people to go online and look at the memorial. It's the most amazing modern art installation that you can actually walk through it

and you can read the stories of the individual people. And it has this amazing symbolic end to it, which is a chair, a flaming chair. So you get that idea of, as you were saying, fire in this northern landscape as being the way in which the witches were disposed of. I think you're right, there are lots of modern resonances too. You know, this is a story of scapegoating, of persecution, of people being set against each other for political purposes. And I do think it's important to reflect on that. This isn't just something that happened in the 17th century. We're absolutely capable of this today.

We're still the same people. And we still express our hatreds and fears of each other in ways that that are deeply damaging. They may not be witch trials, but around the world there are still people who are being put through witch trials. And it's important to remember that. Marian, I wonder if you could talk to us about the idea of skepticism in not just this witch trial, but witch trials generally and in society, 17th century society more generally, because we do often come up against this idea that everyone's going around every corner, believing that witches are

there. that's misleading to a certain extent. I think it leads us down a path about broader 17th century society that maybe isn't the most archivally robust interpretation of that time period. So within the context of these witchcraft conversations, talk to us a little bit about skepticism, because we know it's there. We know it's there because ultimately they stop happening, don't they? In the, you know, the polities that we're talking about anyway. Skepticism is really important. But I think also asking questions about what belief means is really quite important. You know, if you have empirical evidence of something that it's definitely true, you don't need to believe in it. So the element of doubt is

always there in belief. You have to make that sort of faith commitment to decide to believe that people might be witches in your community. So I think there was always doubt and people would always go through quite a long process of discussing and trying out and trying different tests before they accuse somebody of witchcraft, often they would get a doctor in, you know, they would get a priest involved, they would ask questions about it, and then ultimately they would decide, yeah, this is witchcraft, you know, we do believe in this. But out of that, ultimately does come skepticism, because of course it is not possible ever to prove that somebody has done witchcraft. It is not possible to see it in process. It's very little physical evidence

of it can be produced. And when you've executed, you've executed, somebody you've executed them and eventually people start asking very good questions about whether there is enough evidence to take away people's lives and out of that comes the skepticism of the late 17th early 18th century so that ultimately you know acts against witchcraft parliamentary acts are repealed and a wider group of people are allowed to express their skepticism if you like but it's always lurk there it's always this this kind of other side of witchcraft belief what if you're wrong? What if you've got the wrong person? What if you've got the wrong process? What if this is God's punishment of you rather than something horrible your neighbour has done to you? Skepticism is

always really important in witch trials. And just in really logical terms, this idea that the acts that come in in in the 18th century that get rid of these types of accusations, they come in relatively early in some parts of the 18th century. So it's not like, oh, suddenly it's 1700 and now we're enlightened and now we don't believe in this anymore. So I think it's really important to see that journey that actually you just described really well of going, hold on, we do believe in this, but do we believe in that really? And then that gathers pace, gathers pace, gathers pace, and I think whenever we're talking about this, that needs to be part of the conversation as well, because it excludes part of the thought process that's going on and the legal processes that are going on.

So I just always find that just really fascinating that there is not a black and white approach to which in this period. It's always a decision. Yeah, it's always a decision to prosecute somebody and believe that they're a witch. And the more you ask questions about that and individual cases, as the 17th century goes on, the more skeptical people become.

Marion, if people want to find out more about the trials at Varder, well done me, can they go and read about this in your books? Where can they find out more about this? They can. So Winchcraft of History in 13 Trials has a chapter about this case and also talks you through a whole range of other cases across Europe and then into modern North America, modern Africa. So a wide-ranging history of witchcraft, if you like.

There's also a scholar called Liv Elaine Willemson who has written about this case and other Norwegian witchcraft trials if people want to pursue that further. There are even a couple of novels about it as well. So if you have a look at the Norwegian witches online, you'll find all sorts of really interesting material about them. Thank you very much, Brian.

there you have it. After Dark listeners, there's plenty of reading homework to do there. I'm going to get stuck right in. If you've enjoyed this episode, you want to hear more about different witch trials. You can get in touch with us at After Dark at HistoryHit.com. Don't forget to leave us a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts.