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2) Only a few of the motifs found in the previous group are also
found in the legends about Smundr the Wise collected around 1700
for rni Magnsson.2 Smundr attends the Black School, and there is
an account of his departure from it rather like the ancient one in Jóns
saga helga. He is also said to have promised some hag in Saxony
marriage and when, like bishop lafur, he retracted his offer, she is
supposed to have sent him a gilded casket with something nasty in it
which Smundr took up into the mountains. This started an eruption
on Hekla. Finally, as a parallel to the story about the harbour Tónavr
we may mention the various odd jobs which Smundr makes the Devil
do, such as carrying water in a gridded container, cutting and trans-
porting timber and shovelling muck out of a cowshed. I think some of
these stories must be derived from early European legends of saints
and magicians, but this will not be pursued here. Contracts with the
Devil are fairly prominent (sometimes by implication), but the tone is
of unfailing optimism; there is never any doubt that Smundr will
escape the Devil s clutches. He is sharp in argument, quick-witted and
cunning, while the Devil is credulous, literal-minded and slow-thinking.3
3) There are countless witnesses to seventeenth-century belief in
magic and it is easy to set out its main characteristics. The Church had
from early on disseminated the doctrine that magicians had contracts
with the Devil and that they entered his service already in this life. In
the seventeenth century a mass of writings on magic that presented
this view became available to the general public, and though magi-
cians themselves may have seen the matter in a different light, the
perception that magic was a diabolical art and that magicians had some
relationship with the Devil must have become widespread.
1
According to Blefken, Icelanders used to make devils serve them as work-
men and so on (lafur Dav: sson, sland og slendingar, eptir flv sem segir
gmlum bókum, tlendum , Tmarit hins slenzka bókmenntaflags VIII 140;
Lfrs. I 183). This is not significant.
2
See J I 485 90; BE Munnmlasgur 39 48 and xcvi cxix.
3
Smundur s name comes first in the account of sorcerers in the interpola-
tion in Bjrn of Skar: s s book on runes, but does not otherwise appear in
seventeenth-century writings on magic. The explanation for this is probably
that they originated in the west and north of Iceland.
200 THE FOLK-STORIES OF ICELAND
Jón lr: i lived in the first half of the century, before burnings for
witchcraft reached their height, and he was always accusing his en-
emies of attacking him by magic and of directing sendings at him. In
Fjlmó: ur, for instance, he tells of the troubles he suffered at the hands
of the magician Br: ur (if this was a man and not an evil spirit). Jón
appears to regard him as responsible for his father s death, and for
many of the sendings he himself received. Many strange things hap-
pened to Jón when he fled to the protection of the sheriff Steindór
Gslason of Stapi, and while he was there many sendings afflicted him
when the wind blew towards Stapi from the Western Fjords. Shortly
afterwards he was assailed by the magic of Ormur the Evil (Ormur
Illugason), who killed Svartur of Hella by magic.1 After this the so-
called priest (the Rev. Jón B: varsson) took over; he had made a
contract with the Devil and promised him his soul if he made Jón s
house sink into the earth. Flashes of light came three times above the
cottage. Jón accuses Night-Wolf (lafur Ptursson of Bessasta: ir)
of black magic (ford: a) and giving him poison to drink, and when
Jón was at Ytri-Hólmur (near Akranes) fearful sendings and magic
flies assailed him. On his flight through northern Iceland a magical
shot (kyngjaskeyti) entered his calf. On his journey to Iceland his
enemies played tricks on him, placing magic shackles on the ship so
that it could move neither backwards nor forwards.
The affair of Jón Rgnvaldsson is also from the first half of the
seventeenth century (1625). Bjrn Jónsson records it as follows about
ten years after the event: Jón Rgnvaldsson from Svarfa: ardalur
burned to death after trial in Eyjafjr: ur for the practice of witchcraft.
He had waked one from the dead, who then attacked a boy at Ur: ir,
killed some horses there and did other mischief (Annlar 1400 1800
I 221).
The writings of the fanatical persecutors of magic, the Rev. Jón
Magnsson (1610 96) and the Rev. Pll Bjrnsson (1620 1706), are
from the middle and the latter part of the seventeenth century. The
disease which the Rev. Jón caught and attributed to the activities of a
father and son is powerfully depicted in his Pslarsaga, Story of
martyrdom (JM Pslarsaga3, 2001), and the affair ended tragically
1
Cf. also Um ttir og slekti, Safn III 714; Alflingisbkur slands V 120
(1625).
FOLK-BELIEF AND FOLK-LEGENDS 201
with both father and son being burnt at the stake. The witchcraft-
burnings reached their height in this period, and they must have made
a deep impression on the people s minds. People began to take for
granted that magicians were in league with the Devil and unscrupu-
lousness, spite and malice became the main characteristics of the stories.
The methods were now simpler to the extent that some particular magic
procedures become predominant; these are the sendings themselves
very varied in character and wakened dead. Moreover a single human
lifetime can no longer contain the hatred it lives on and the sending
persecutes the family, generation after generation, and these attend-
ant spirits start walking in broad daylight.
That is how it is in eighteenth-century sources. The Rev. Jón Steingrms-
son speaks of revenants and those awakened from the dead, and he is
our earliest authority for a skotta (Jón Steingrmsson, fisaga3 36,
67). Jón lafsson of Grunnavk also tells of injuries caused by spells
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