What Were Witches Accused Of? The Witch Trials of Denmark and Scandinavia

One night in 1637, a tailor in Ribe named Didrik woke to find three women in his room. Two of them held him down. The third, Maren Spliid, the wife of his rival in trade, leaned over him and blew into his mouth.

That, at least, is what he told the court. He fell ill afterwards and coughed up a lump of something, which he kept as proof. The court in Ribe was not convinced, and Maren went home. Didrik would not let it go. He took his story to King Christian IV, who had the case reopened. Maren was told to find fifteen people who would swear to her innocence, and could not. She was held and questioned in the Blue Tower in Copenhagen until she confessed, and then brought back to Ribe. On 9 November 1641 she was tied to a ladder on the gallows hill outside the town and tipped into the fire.

Her crime, in the end, was a breath.

The Danish witch trials are full of stories like hers, and they are both stranger and more ordinary than most people expect. Hardly anyone in them flies on a broom. The charges are about sick cattle, sour milk, a curse spoken over a fence, a storm at sea. This is what the people burned in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia were actually accused of, taken from the records.

Witch trials in Denmark: when and how many

Denmark burned its first officially recorded witch at Stege in 1540 and its last in 1693. In between, historians reckon that around 1,000 people were executed for witchcraft. Between 85 and 90 percent of them were women, most of them middle-aged or older.

The burning was not spread evenly. It came in a wave, and the wave had a cause.

The 1617 ordinance is the key. Before it, the law punished only harmful magic. Christian IV, who believed in witches as fiercely as his brother-in-law James VI of Scotland, made it a crime to heal by charms, to find stolen goods by magic, or even to visit someone who did. He also made it everyone's duty to report witches. The courts filled almost at once.

What were witches accused of in Denmark?

Most Danish witches were accused of causing harm by magic. The commonest charges were making people ill or killing them, sickening or killing livestock, spoiling milk and butter, and bringing fire, failed harvests and storms. After 1617, healing by charms and finding thieves by magic became crimes too. The Devil, as we will see, mostly arrived later.

Making people sick, or killing them

This was the heart of most cases. A sudden illness, a child that wasted away, a man who died after a quarrel. Maren Spliid's breath belongs here. So does the case of Anne Pers, condemned at the landsting in Viborg in 1620 together with her mother and stepfather, for a long list of misdeeds that included bringing sickness and committing murder by witchcraft.

On a farm, the animals were the family's wealth. A cow that fell sick the week after a row with a neighbour was not bad luck. It was evidence. Sickness and death among livestock appear again and again in the Danish records.

Milk was money, and butter was the proof that the milk was good. Anne Pers was also accused of spoiling milk. The fear was old enough to be painted on church walls: late medieval Danish frescoes show a small devil on the rim of a butter churn, and the witch standing over him with a switch and a whip, ready to make him work.

A barn fire, a ruined crop, a ship lost. In 1589 a storm nearly sank the fleet carrying Christian IV's sister Anne to her wedding with James VI of Scotland. The following summer a woman called Ane Koldings, known in Copenhagen as the Devil's Mother, confessed under torture that a group of women had gathered in a house in the city and sent small devils to climb up the keels of the ships. She was burned in July 1590, and a dozen other women were executed in the same affair. When James got home, he started trials of his own. Those became the North Berwick trials in Scotland.

Healing, finding thieves and reading the future

After 1617, the kind of magic that had always been tolerated became a crime too. Charming away an illness, signe and mane in the old Danish words, measuring a sick person, or vise igen, showing where stolen goods had gone and who took them. Healers faced banishment and the loss of everything they owned. Their clients had to confess in church and pay a fine. In 1692 a cunning woman on Falster, questioned by six priests, named not only other women as witches but 96 of her own clients.

Many cases began with a sentence spoken in anger. Anne Palles, the last woman executed in Denmark, was accused of bewitching the bailiff who had taken over a farm that had once belonged to her and her husband. She was also said to have promised another woman an accident, after that woman had danced and flirted with Anne's husband. In a village, a curse did not need to work. It only needed to be remembered when something went wrong.

The Devil arrives late

Here is the detail that surprises most people. In Danish witch trials, the pact with the Devil almost never came up before the verdict.

The neighbours who testified talked about harm: the cow, the child, the milk, the words over the fence. The court decided whether harm had been done by witchcraft. Only after a person had been found guilty did the questioning turn to the Devil, often under torture, because Danish law forbade torture before sentence. Now the condemned were asked where, when and with whom they had given themselves to him, and above all who else had been there. That is how one case turned into ten.

So the Devil of the Danish trials was largely a creature of the interrogation room. When he does appear in confessions, he often comes as a lesser helper devil rather than Satan himself. And unlike the sabbaths described further south, the Danish ones rarely involve worshipping him at all.

Where did Danish witches fly?

Today every Danish child knows that the witch on the midsummer bonfire is sent to Bloksbjerg, the Brocken in the Harz mountains. The trials tell a different story. Danish confessions and legends send witches north, riding on cats, to midsummer feasts at churches in Norway and to the mountains of Troms. Hekkenfjeld, the volcano Hekla in Iceland, turns up as well. Bloksbjerg seems to be a latecomer: the first Danish trial to mention it may be as late as 1708.

An old Danish rhyme kept both destinations: on midsummer night they ride to Bloksbjerg, and fly to the top of Hekkenfjeld on a broomstick.

Who was accused, and how it began

The typical accused Dane was not a young beauty or a hermit in the woods. She was a middle-aged or older woman, with a reputation, a sharp tongue and neighbours who remembered things.

An accusation usually grew slowly. First there was a name in the village, often for years. Then a quarrel: over a debt, a boundary, a farm changing hands, a husband at a dance. Then a misfortune soon after. Then someone remembered the quarrel. By the time a case reached the court, the village had often been building it for years.

Some of the accused really did practise magic. They were the kloge folk, the cunning women and men who charmed away sickness, found lost things and read what was coming. Before 1617 they were the people you went to when witchcraft struck you. After 1617 they could be prosecuted alongside the witches they had been fighting. Others had never charmed anything in their lives. Maren Spliid was a prosperous innkeeper and a tailor's wife. Her real offence, as far as anyone can tell, was having a husband who did better business than Didrik.

How a Danish witch trial worked

A case began at the local court, the herredsting in the countryside or the town court in a market town like Ribe. Neighbours testified to the harm. The accused could defend herself the old way, by finding a group of people willing to swear to her innocence. That is why Maren Spliid needed fifteen.

If she was found guilty, the case went automatically to the landsting, the regional high court. This mattered. Of the 494 witchcraft cases heard at the landsting in Viborg during the 1600s, about half ended with the verdict confirmed. The other half were acquitted. Denmark, for all its fires, had more brakes on the process than many parts of Europe.

Once the verdict stood, the condemned was questioned again, often under torture, to name her accomplices and describe her dealings with the Devil.

How did they die?

In Denmark, a condemned witch was usually burned on a pyre. Maren Spliid was given a pitcher of mead to steady her, tied to a ladder and tipped into the flames alive. Some were spared the worst: Anne Palles was beheaded first, in April 1693, and her body thrown on the fire. Another woman condemned with her had already died in prison. They burned her corpse anyway.

Witch trials elsewhere in Scandinavia

Norway and Iceland were ruled from Copenhagen and lived under the same 1617 ordinance. Sweden had its own law and its own terror. Each country feared something a little different.

Norway: the storm at Vardø

On Christmas Eve 1617 a storm came out of nowhere off the coast of Finnmark and drowned around forty men in ten boats. Four years later the women of Vardø were taken to the fortress, questioned and burned for raising it. One confession describes a midsummer feast where Satan played a red fiddle for the dancing and poured beer from a silver bowl. Over the following decades 91 people were executed in Finnmark. The men among them were Sámi. Today 91 lights burn behind 91 windows in Peter Zumthor's memorial on the shore at Steilneset, beside an installation by Louise Bourgeois.

Sweden: the children of Blåkulla

Sweden's great witch panic, Det stora oväsendet, the Great Noise, ran from 1668 to 1676 and was driven by children. They told of being carried off at night to Blåkulla, where the Devil held his feasts, and they named the women who had taken them. In the parish of Torsåker in 1675, 71 people, 65 women and six men, were beheaded and burned in a single day. Swedish witches were usually beheaded before burning. During the Great Noise only one, Malin Matsdotter in Stockholm in 1676, is known to have gone into the fire alive.

Iceland: the men who owned books

Iceland turned the pattern upside down. Of the 21 or 22 people burned there, almost all were men, and a third of the charges concerned owning grimoires or pages of galdrastafir, the magical staves. Icelandic magic was a literate craft, and literacy was a man's business. The first man burned, Jón Rögnvaldsson in 1625, was said to have raised a dead man against a neighbour's horses. There is no evidence that torture was used in Iceland. The accused were burned alive.

What the trial records really tell us

For anyone who cares about the old craft, the witch trials are a terrible gift. Nobody in 17th-century Denmark wrote down what the village healer did with her thread and her words. The court clerks did. In the middle of all that suffering, the records preserve real charms, real remedies and real fears, in the words of the people who used them.

Read enough of them and the old world of magic comes into focus. It was not about the Devil, whatever the priests insisted. It was about the farm: the milk, the cattle, the harvest, the weather, the health of a child. It was about boundaries and thresholds, about who had cursed whom over which fence. And it was about the difference everyone in the village understood perfectly well, between the woman who could heal you and the woman who could harm you. Christian IV erased that difference in law. The villagers never really did.

That is why I keep these records beside the black books when I work. The black books tell you what people did. The trials tell you what they feared, and what it cost them. But both are only the uppermost layers. Beneath them lie thousands of years of offerings, burials and charms that left no writing at all, and the same logic turns up again and again in other lands and other centuries. I read all of it together. The black books and the trials matter because they are where, at last, people speak in their own words.

If you want the workings themselves, the old curses and countercurses that sit behind these accusations, The Forbidden Rites gathers hexes, bindings and silencings drawn from black book fragments, legal curses and witness accounts from the old trials. For the everyday side of the same tradition, the black book charms for love, luck, protection and getting back what was stolen, start with Sortebog No. 1.

Where to go from here

The same centuries, another room. How the Danish household guarded itself when death came in, in Why Were Mirrors Covered When Someone Died?

When the straw witch goes onto the bonfire this midsummer, spare a thought for Maren.

~ Hazel