Bet you didn’t know that you’ve been haunted by an evil survived from Viking days, did you? Everyone’s had nasty, cold sweat run ins with her, and prayed that she’d never return. And it’s useless, because she always comes back and usually when you least expect her.
Today our criminal codes generally deal with crimes against Person and Property. Defamation and libel in America are civil matters for monetary damages in Court. You can’t be put to death for insulting someone. Under Viking Law however, a person’s Reputation was every bit as valuable as their person & property. Someone who attacked, robbed or slandered you gave you the right at law to kill them as self defense on the spot.
One of the vilest slanders going was to call another man ‘unmanly’ & it hit every stop from cowardice to cross dressing, homosexuality and sorcery, which was unclean and therefore unmanly. And right along with it was calling another man a female animal capable of bearing young, like a nanny goat or a brood mare. Here’s Alison Finlay on the subject.
Monstrous Accusations, An Exchange of Yki In Bjarnar Saga HitdaelakappaViking Blood Feuds sometimes went on for generations, and you could be working on another man’s farm without even knowing a feud existed, and someone might show up at any time and kill you just for being a valuable asset to the farm’s owner as a part of that ongoing feud. Or maybe 3 or 4 guys would show up and just ride you down.
So you can imagine what kind of unpleasant dreams haunted people back then. They sometimes became so violent that men were thrown right out of bed by them or cracked their heads on the bedposts, or even died of heart attacks. And to be just ridden down by a horse without being given a chance to make a fight of it, a female horse, was adding insult to injury.
The 13th Century Icelandic Chieftain Snorre Sturlason tells us in the 1st chapter of his Heimskringla: the Lives of the Norse Kings. (
1990 Dover reprint of the 1932 W. Heffer and Sons, Ltd, Cambridge England translation: ISBN 0-486-26366-5);
King Vanlandi in Sweden’s Uppsala District went to Finland where he married a girl named Driva, and then deserted her. After 10 years of waiting for him she hired a witch named Huld to either bring him back to Finland or to kill him. Huld conjured up a longing in him to return to Finland but Vanlandi’s men suspected Sorcery and told him not to go.
Both men and women got involved in Sorcery but it was considered a worse sin in men, and it harkened back to a much earlier time when they thought and behaved more like animals.
Viking Sorcerers were referred to as “Shape Shifters” because they were believed to have the ability to turn themselves into animals. (The word berserk in the original is “bersark” which means bear shirt, as in wrapping themselves in either the hide of a bear or the spirit & ferocity of an enraged bear.)
Snorre says;
‘Then he (Vanlandi) became sleepy and said that she (the Mare) was treading on him. His men sprang up and would help him but when they came to his head she trod on his feet, so that they were nigh broken; then they resorted to the feet, but then she smothered the head, so that he died there.
And the translator/editor’s footnote follows:
6: Mare (O.S. mara) is thought to be an old woman who disturbs people in their sleep by sitting on them. In O.S. martröð, in English nightmare, in French couchmar.
Martröð translates as Mare Trod, as in Trod upon by the Mare.
Snorre includes a short verse made by the poet Tjodolv to remember the event.
But on the way
To Vili’s brother
Evil wights bore Vanlandi;
Then there trod the troll-wise
Sorceress
On the warrior Lord.
And there was burned
On the Skuta bank
That generous man
Whom the Mare killed.
And the belief persisted at least into Shakespeare’s day as he mentions her in Part II of Henry IV in Act 2 Scene 1 where the Hostess threatens the Lord Chief Justice that if he doesn’t arrest John Falstaff that she will “ride thee o’nights like the mare”. (line 800)
You’ve all been visited by the Mare who comes in the night to trod upon you, or sit on you and steal your breath.
In Old West Norse she’s the Nátt Mára, which in modern English means Nightmare.
This is a Viking Horseshoe. Imagine going to bed with the thought somewhere in the back of your mind of being run down and stomped to death by 8 or 12 of these?
Or just to be crushed and smothered under a horse even if you managed to kill it?
Sorcery? Shape Shifter?
