Folketro — what people quietly believed when church was over
The folk belief that ran underneath official Lutheran practice — the charms, the black-books, the second sight, the porridge left for the nisse on Christmas Eve. The same hand that folded in prayer on Sunday cut the cross in the bread and set iron by the bed.
In 1796, workmen pulling up the floor of the stave church at Vinje in Telemark found a handwritten book the size of a deck of cards. The paper dated to around 1480; the contents were Latin prayers, the Pentacle of Solomon, and a herbal cure for jaundice — a working magician’s handbook, under the floor of a Lutheran church. It is the oldest of Norway’s svarteboker, the black-books: roughly a hundred survive, most copied between 1650 and 1850, the densest cluster from Gudbrandsdalen, and some of them had belonged to parish clergy.
This is folketro — folk belief — the layer that ran underneath official Lutheran practice for centuries without anyone feeling the contradiction. The same hand cut the cross into the bread before baking, muttered a charm over a sick cow, set silver in a newborn’s cradle, laid iron by the bed against the mare, and folded in prayer at Sunday service. None of it was thought of as superstition by the people doing it. It was what their grandmothers had taught them, performed quietly, often without anyone naming what it was for.
The black-books were for use. A svartebok told you how to stop bleeding, bind a thief so he could not leave the room, win at cards, force a girl’s affection, or summon the Devil and send him back again — the Cyprianus tradition, named for a legendary magician-saint. Owning one in the wrong century could cost you your life: between the 1590s and the 1690s Norway tried hundreds of people for witchcraft and burned many of them, most heavily in the far north.
Some people were synske — second-sighted — able to perceive the dead, the vardøger, and sometimes what had not yet happened. The most consulted of the twentieth century was Marcello Haugen (1878–1967), a baker and railway stoker who set up in a cabin above Lillehammer, claimed to read the illness in a visitor’s body and the whereabouts of lost things, and kept a queue at his door that the quackery charges never thinned.
The state went looking for all of it on purpose. From the 1920s the Institute for Comparative Cultural Research mailed questionnaires to rural schoolteachers asking what their grandmothers had done; the returns came heaviest from Gudbrandsdalen, Setesdal, and the western fjords, and the practices were still being performed. In October 2009 the polling agency Synovate Norge asked Norwegians whether they set a bowl of porridge out on Christmas Eve. Nine in a hundred said yes — about three hundred and fifty thousand people. In Nord-Norge it was fourteen percent; in Oslo, six. The bowl still goes out on the barn floor at dusk, in a Lutheran country, for someone the church never admitted was there.