The Volva's Ceremonial Cloak

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.

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.