Favorite Danish Folklore I Grew Up With

A nocturnal magic beast. The valravn is an oft wicked thing of Danish folklore, typically born from the bloodied battlefield.

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kofi

Thralls of Skuld - Chapter 6: Eyes in the Sky

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After a night of scarce and fretful sleep, she sought out Geir. He had come to see her, briefly, when she was still bedridden, but she had not seen him since. Still in pain, the walk to Geir and Siv’s family house left her shaking and pale. When she sat down next to Geir on the wooden bench, there was a sheen of sweat on her brow, and her breathing was hard.

The house of the Geir was one of the largest in Eiklund. It had a well adorned boat-shaped oak exterior with carved wooden dragons on each end. Inside was a large central health and many benches and beds on either side. As the custom bid, four generations were living under Geir’s roof, all eating well thanks to Geir’s prowess as a warrior and subsequent investments in livestock. 

Eira indicated with her eyes that what she was about to tell Geir was not for the ears of everyone.

Siv looked none too amused as Geir and Eira shuffled to the far end of the house to carry on their conversation in hushed tones. As they settled on a small bench, Eira began telling Geir what had happened the night before. The quiet that had taken hold of Geir since Svidland reigned for a few more moments, before he said “Strange things are happening in our time” to no one in particular. 

Desperate to get back on the side of camaraderie with this sullen version of Geir, she pledged “Old friend, I need you to tell me your thoughts about all of this. I know you want to protect me, to protect everyone, and that is why you’re against it -” 

Geir cut her off: “Eira, I’m not against it. At least not anymore. What Rolf said in Roskilde.. It has stuck with me,” he took a deep breath, as if admitting to a deep secret. “What if we could really have changed all those terrible things that have happened?” His eyes moved to his wife, before looking back at Eira, deep wells of dark grey water.

Eira bent her head, pulling at a loose thread in her tunic. Without looking back to the wells of Geir’s eyes, she said quietly: “The vølve also taught Unn seiðr. That’s how she saved Ulf’s boy last winter.” 

Eira did not want to break the trust of her friend, but she knew this might sway Geir. She could not be alone in what she thought she might be getting herself into. Geir’s eyes glimmered more brightly now, ignited by her words, and Eira knew  she had cast the right net. For Eira, she was driven by the deep injustice of some people being born to power while others were born to thralldom, both figuratively and literally. But for Geir, it was a sorrowful need for bargaining with the universe, and she had just presented him a way to do it.

“There’s a far leap between whatever happened in Svidland, and saving the lives of children. Maybe I can only wield destruction, and maybe Unn can only heal, who knows,” the words flowed quickly from Eira, now a bit frantic, thinking she had struck an ore of something in the rock that was Geir “But maybe there is more to it. We can all learn magick, that’s what the vølve said. At least that’s what I think she meant. Maybe we have all been beaten into submission for so long that we have been blind to the opportunities. Maybe Geir, just maybe, we have a chance of something that has not been bestowed upon anyone else in the memory of man, and I think we’d be as dumb as trolls if we do not see it through.”

Geir looked for a long moment at Eira’s imploring eyes. Then, the strained heaviness in the air lifted around them, as his face split into a toothy smile. “By the Gods Eira. I should think you are scared of me, the way you are pleading for your life. Calm down now. I agree with you.”

“You do?” 

“I do.” He reached out to pat her knee awkwardly. “I think you should find out what the vølve is on about. Eira, you are woven from a different cloth than Unn, even than the rest of us. There’s a drive in you that the rest of us do not have, I have always seen it. I worry that you may have to pull the heaviest cart in this. You’re brave, I’ll give you that, but your impulsivity and your principles make you stupid.”

Eira scoffed, but submitted to a small smile. Where Geir had needed weeks of reflection to come to his conclusion, she had known from the moment she woke after the battle against the Geats, that she was going to pursue this. She had not dedicated much energy to consider the dangers of learning forbidden magick, in the same way Unn had when it had been bestowed upon her. Eira had simply propelled herself into it.

Geir’s silence had now been broken by the many thoughts he had undoubtedly harbored in the past many weeks. “Promise me you will do everything you can to keep this from the Jarl. It might not only catch up with you, but all of us. Ingmar is not a soft man. And do not pull anyone unwillingly into this. One bird chirps quieter than a hundred. You need to stay undetected until we know what is at stake. And who knows, maybe this is all a fluke. There is no need to lose your head before we know for certain.”

Eira nodded, although she knew that it was not a fluke. The vølve had given her a clear mission to find the magick around her, and she was brimming with ideas of how to do it. She stayed at Geir’s house for a little while longer, as they discussed in hushed tones the many opportunities that may be before them.

Naturally, she went to the vølve’s hut next. The low wooden structure was covered in turfing on the ceiling and outer walls, blending it completely into the tall grass around it. It had none of the typical adornments of most houses, yet there was a mystical air about it as she approached and realised that she had never been this close to the seeress’ hut.

As she stepped in the door, an odd darkness engulfed her. Unlike the airy longhouses made for socialization between family members, the vølve’s small hut was divided into even smaller sections by large pieces of dark, musty cloths hung from the walls. She entered into a small receiving room, furnished only with a small open fireplace with sleepy embers in the middle of the room and a few stools. When Eira knocked, the vølve had called for her to enter, but somehow seemed completely unaware that Eira was now standing in front of her. The pale woman was dressed in simple, dark robes and sat on the stamped earth floor in front of the embers, staring blankly ahead.

It was as if a large, soft fur had been laid over all of Eira’s senses, and the silence and darkness felt suffocating in the small space. She waited for a moment, shifting from one leg to another once, twice. Then she cleared her throat. Still, the vølve said nothing.

“I have thought about what you said yesterday,” Eira muttered through the thick air. “I would like for you to teach me.” 

At this, the vølve’s eyes clipped to look directly into hers. It was the first time she had looked the odd woman in the eyes. They were like fog on bleak autumn mornings.

“I cannot teach you,” she declared.

“But you said-” 

“I said you must look around.”

Where the vølve’s eyes the night before had danced in and out of Midgard, they were now overwhelmingly present on her. Eira had to avert her eyes, pretending to take in the hut around her, although she could barely see a thing.

“How in the nine realms am I supposed to learn on my own? Nobody can do that, not even those born to it.” she protested. Had the vølve truly sought her out, opening a door so significant, only to leave her no better off? 

“To share my knowledge untethered with you will be to invite destruction upon all of us. There are eyes in the sky.” 

Something about the vølve’s reluctance to say outright what she meant provoked Eira. Perhaps it was a tool of the trade, she thought, but she did not appreciate it. “You taught Unn!” she blurted her words accusingly. “Why is it different with me?”

“You will see eventually. Now you have to trust the world around you. Be quiet, and listen. Find the magick, it is there, I swear it to you.” 

“Will you not even tell me how?” 

“No.” the vølve said plainly. “Now leave me to my rumination.”

The seer looked back down into the embers before her, and seemed to almost fade into the darkness as she did. The suffocating air of the hut pushed Eira out.

Eira stomped away on the path back towards Eiklund. Her mission had been utterly unsuccessful, but something the vølve had said stuck in her mind. There are eyes in the sky. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw two large black birds circling above the hut.

…

Sól and Máni chased each other over the sky for days on end, as she tried to do as the vølve had told her. 

She started with what she knew. She cast runes of Kenaz and Perthro again and again in a hundred different forms. Kenaz, the rune of knowledge and revelation of hidden truths, she had painted onto her skin in numerous variations, with both pigs blood and ink. She even carved it carefully with a small knife into her arm, although blood rituals were a darker kind of magick that she had never experimented with before. Perthro, the revealer of fate and the unknown, was carved into her floors, above her bed, on the amulet she wore constantly around her neck. She sang the galdr she knew, although the verses were meant for war, and she sometimes worried that if it worked, she might set her house on fire or worse. There was no need to worry. None of her efforts had revealed anything to her.

This was all the magick of the common people, warriors and old crones. Amulets and symbols, runes and song. It was not what she was looking for, and it yielded her nothing more than a hoarse voice, and maybe a number of enchanted objects or unintended curses that might backfire on her at a later time.

Next, she had sought out Unn, asking her to share what the vølve had taught her about seiðr. Unn yielded to do so, only after Eira had once again sworn herself to secrecy, a secrecy she had already broken. Unn admitted that she had indeed gone back to the vølve again several times, going at night until the early hours of the morning to avoid being seen by nosy neighbours.

What Unn taught Eira kept her engaged for days. The healing seiðr rituals were frightening and exhilarating at the same time. The galdr was long, breathy verses calling upon Eir and Freyja, less harsh than the galdr of battle spells, but somehow more forceful, more earnest. Yet far more fascinating was the act itself of drawing upon seiðr. When Unn had first explained it, it had made no sense: There should be a thread of hurt or malaide that could somehow be touched, pulled out of the suffering subject. Unn kept telling Eira over and over again to visualise it as they practiced the ritual on Eira’s own wound, and Eira kept failing. There was no thread, no unearthly manifestation of her wound.

They could not practice on anyone else, lest they give away their wrongdoings. So the two were bound to practice, repeating the same exercise until both their patience wore thin, their words short and snappy, and their familiarity with each other became a hindrance for progress.

Late one afternoon, Unn had been seated over her cauldron brewing herbal poultices, when Eira’s impatient complaints had overflowed her cup. Unn threw her arms at Eira, gnarling “By the Gods, your skull is thicker than a troll’s!” and accidentally tipping the cauldron to spill its boiling contents over her calf. Unn yelped loudly, her delicate features twisted in pain as the skin on her legs was scorched. Eira gasped when she lifted her dress. 

The ugly sight of broiled skin ignited something in Eira, and she drew close to Unn, placing a calming hand on her knee to inspect the wound as she raised her voice in the healing galdr she had been taught. Unn flinched at her touch.

The adrenaline led her voice to a booming undulation as she lilted through the verses of galdr. Looking deeply into the wound, somehow she saw it. Not physically like a vision before her eyes or a change in the world before her. Instead, somehow, inside the physical world in front of her, she saw that something else was hidden. It was not a thread, as she had been looking for all this time. Instead, a disruptive floating mass, of no particular color or shape or density. It was not in this world, not here in Midgard, but somewhere else. She had to reach into the else-ness to touch it. The sound of Unn’s wailing disappeared around her. With the delicate, precise movements Unn had taught her, her fingers rolled and danced around it, until somehow the mass dispersed.

She was not sure how long it had taken, she had lost herself in the process. Only when Unn sighed loudly in relief and thanked her, did Eira look up to see her pale and blotchy face. Eira blinked her eyes numerous times, not quite able to focus on the actual world in front of her. She remembered the vølve’s floating eyes.

Once she had mastered this method, practicing over and over on Unn’s quickly healing leg, she began feeling restless again. She had always wanted to learn the ways of healing, but now she knew that it was not the full potential of what she was seeking. 

She began sitting out at night again, trying to reach an absolute stillness of the kind she had felt in the vølve’s hut. For endless hours she sat concentrating until her head hurt and her eyes blinked slowly with sleep. Sometimes, the screech of ravens jerked her awake.

Ravens seemed to flock to Eiklund these days, often sitting perched on longhouses or roaming the skies restlessly. Eira thought she knew what it meant, but tried to shrug it off. 

…

On the second fortnight of listening intently to the universe, which offered no sound, and staring resolutely into nature, which yielded no clues, she gave up. Casting aside all that was known to her about how long it took for even highborne’s to learn magick, she stomped back to the vølve’s hut to demand more.

When she slammed open the door without warning, she was met by an entirely different house than the first time she had been there. Light streamed in from the open door behind her, illuminating the walls hung with rich red tapestries. In the middle of the room, a fire roared happily. The beaten earth flooring felt warm through the soles of her shoes.

The toastiness of the empty room took the built up tension right out of her lungs. She had prepared a speech of demands and complaints to the stubborn, uncooperative seer, but there was no one to deliver it to. 

She called out a hesitant “Hello?”

After several minutes, the vølve emerged from behind a woolen curtain, a bowl of porridge in her hand. Even the pale seer looked less ghastly in the warm light of the fire. Eira quickly snapped shut her gaping mouth, after realizing that, well, of course, even mystical seeresses with floating eyes probably needed to eat. 

“Good morrow Eira,” the vølve greeted with her sing-songy thrill, seemingly unsurprised by the unexpected disturbance “I think you may be ready now.”

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