A Seeress Dressed for the Journey Between Worlds

The most detailed surviving description of Norse ritual dress belongs not to a priest of the Aesir or Vanir but to a volva, a traveling seeress who practiced seid, a form of divinatory and manipulative magic Norse sources treat as powerful, respected and, for a man to practice, somewhat shameful. The Icelandic Saga of Erik the Red describes a seeress named Thorbjorg arriving at a Greenlandic farmstead during a famine to foretell the coming season's fortunes, and gives her costume in unusual detail: a blue or black cloak set with stones from the collar down to the hem, a headdress or hood of black lambskin lined with white catskin, a staff topped with a knob set with stones and mounted with brass, and a pouch at her belt holding charms used in her craft.

Modern scholars generally treat this description with appropriate caution, since the saga was written down centuries after Iceland's conversion to Christianity and reflects a storyteller's memory and imagination as much as direct pagan-era observation. Even so, the costume's consistency with other scattered references to seid practitioners elsewhere in Norse literature, and its clear function of marking the volva out visually as someone operating outside the ordinary social categories of the farmstead she visited, are usually read as reflecting a real, recognizable Viking Age type of ritual dress rather than pure literary invention.