Beyond the cloak and hood, the saga gives Thorbjorg catskin gloves, calfskin shoes with a long lace and tin knobs, and a staff, an item so associated with seid practice that the Old Norse word for a seeress, volva, is itself usually derived from a term for a staff or wand. Archaeologists have identified a number of Viking Age burials, disproportionately of women, containing iron staffs of a distinctive design alongside grave goods, including narcotic plant remains in at least one well known Danish case, that many scholars interpret as belonging to seid practitioners, offering physical evidence that complements, without perfectly confirming every detail of, the literary picture the sagas preserve.
Once dressed and seated on a high platform prepared for her, Thorbjorg's saga account has her require a particular chant, sung by a woman present who alone knew the correct words, before she could enter the trance state needed to see forward into the coming season, a detail underscoring that the volva's costume alone did not accomplish the rite; it marked out and prepared a practitioner for a further, cooperative ritual act that still had to be separately performed. Because so much of the surviving picture rests on a single detailed literary source, modern historians of religion generally present the volva's costume as representative of a broader Norse type of ritual specialist dress rather than as a fixed, universally standardized uniform every seeress would have worn identically.