The Nords and the Norse: Magic and Poetry in Skyrim and the "Lokasenna"

Or: Why the Guards in Markarth don’t prepare for magic-using prisoners in Cidhna Mine

Why are the Nords of Skyrim so uneasy about spellcasting? Why do the prison guards in Cidhna Mine in Falkreath take ALL of your gear when they toss you in prison – but completely neglect to restrain your ability to cast spells? Why is Norse literature awesome? Why is it hard to incorporate directly into a modern video game? And why does Icehair start this essay with this barrage of unrelated questions? Well, honestly the latter is just my attempt at a slightly intriguing introduction, but I will try to give some .

First, though, I want to go back to late 2010, when Skyrim had been announced, but not yet released. As an Elder Scrolls addict going back to Morrowind, I was so hyped because I’d been waiting since Oblivion for the next instalment in the series. And as a Scandinavian, I was hyped because this instalment was going to be about the Nords, and the Nords are, in a way, my people in Tamriel. In case you didn’t know “N-o-r-d, Nord” is the common Scandinavian spelling of its English cognate word North. It’s the first element in the name of my country, Nor-way, the “way north”, and it also has the same root as the word Norse, which denotes the language and culture of ancient Scandinavia in the Viking era and early Middle Ages. Now, the Nords of Tamriel had always been similar to the Vikings of the Europe’s “North”. Already in Morrowind, the Nords were portrayed as Viking-like seafarers who boasted the northernmost settlement in Morrowind – Dagon Fel on the Sheogorad Islands. Morrowind’s expansion Bloodmoon had also focused on the Nords and used Norse words like draugr and Scandinavian names like Brynjolfr, Skjoldr, Ulfrun, Bergljot, Rigmor, Thorsten and Brandr. (I mean sometimes they mixed up men’s names with women’s names, but hey, it’s Nords, it’s Norse, I’m happy.) What’s more, playing Bloodmoon I’d learnt that the Nords believed those Nords who’d proved their mettle in war would spend the afterlife in a “Hall of Valor” called Sovngarde. This name is clearly composed from two Scandinavian words translating roughly as “Sleephome”. But more importantly, this is obviously inspired by the pagan Norse belief in Valhalla, literally the “Death-hall”, where the most valiant dead on the battlefield get to spend their afterlife with Odin. So I was hoping for a game steeped in Norse and Scandinavian inspirations.

And then Skyrim was released, and I loved it, and (spoiler warning) Sovngarde was there, and the draugr, and the Norse names, and the Viking-style longship at the docks of Windhelm, and the nobles were called jarl rather than the English cognate earl. And I didn’t mind that of course a lot of it was very Hollywood-ized, pop culture Viking age rather than actually Norse, like the horned helmets and the fur armor and the architecture, which seemed to resemble the 19th century retro-nationalistic “Dragon-style” (dragestil) rather than Viking longhouses.

But I felt I recognized something more than that in how the Nords treated magic and the supernatural.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying I liked how Skyrim the game catered to spellcasting player characters, especially if you try to rely on the Destruction skill line to do damage. Destro spells are too similar, too ineffective and on higher difficulty, magicka is in so short supply that no matter how many times I tried to do a “mage” character I soon ended up wielding a weapon anyway. The spell schools I did like, and still do, were Illusion and Conjuration. And of course some of the Shouts were cool, though for the purposes of this essay I think we should draw a distinction here between the respectable Nord art of Shouting and on the other hand, the act of casting spells, as in the kind of spells you equip instead of weapon or shield, an act the Nords regard with suspicion.

In a way it was this suspicion I liked, this Nord view of magic as something unsettling and alien, something they’d really prefer not to think about if it could be helped. Of course Skyrim was far from the first game world where magic was distrusted (Dragon Age: Origins from 2009 comes to mind). But in Tamriel, this generally negative view of magic was definitely a trait that helped set Skyrim apart from the settings of the older games in the franchise, like Morrowind, or even Daggerfall. Where those settings had a mages guild in most major settlements, or even several competing organizations for casters, Skyrim has only one small organization, based in one place: The College of Winterhold. And this College’s relations with the rest of Skyrim is strained at best. Onmund, apparently the only Nord student at this college, remarks that his family thinks his studying there is a death sentence “or worse”. It’s all to easy to imagine how his dedication to magic made his childhood very difficult.

This Nord unease about spellcasting clearly has an obvious in-game reason: the Nords are warriors. They have racial bonuses to warrior skills, not magic skills, because Nord culture in Skyrim is a warrior culture. Nords value physical prowess and weapon skills. Magic is associated with foreign peoples like Bretons and, especially, the elven peoples who have been the Nords’ enemies, both historically and in the period when Skyrim is set. In particular, distrust of magic is probably worsened by the fact that magic is the primary source of power for the Nords’ bitterest foes, the alien Thalmor, elven supremacists who have banned the worship of the Nords’ man-god, Talos. But Skyrim’s few homegrown mages also get their share of the dislike. As Onmund explains, when that city was decimated by natural disaster, the Mages’ College there got blamed.

But in addition to the in-game reasons, I’m going to argue that this distrust of magic may actually be inspired by Norse culture, at least in part – although if this is the case, Bethesda certainly tweaked and toned it down quite a lot to fit modern sensibilities about gender and sexual orientation.

You see, the Nords, on the whole, distrust magic. But the Norse, on the whole, were terrified of magic. Or at least, the Norse men were. Because in Norse society, magic was, on the whole, the province of women. The Norse word “seidhr” probably translates better as “witchcraft” than “magic”. Norse poetry and sagas speak of witches and seeresses, “volur”, “seidhkonur”. Their patron deity was Freya, the goddess of love, femininity and magic.

But to a Norse man, magic, witchcraft, was a threat to your masculinity. It was associated with ergi, which was pretty much the worst insult the Norse could think of. Ergi meant un-manliness, effeminacy – and here is why this could not and should not be incorporated into a modern game world, at least not without treating it extremely delicately: ergi denoted the passive form of homosexuality, and that was so base an insult that accusing someone of ergi was legal reason to challenge the accuser to a duel, a holmgang, similar to the duel where Ulfric Stormcloak kills High King Torygg before the game starts.

By the way, when Skyrim was being hyped up before release, the marketers promised that we would indeed be able to challenge any NPC in the game to a duel, a feature that was clearly abandoned before the game was released. But whatever made them scrap this idea, it’s clear why they couldn’t steal the Norse view of magic wholesale, as doing so would make the game both sexist and homophobic. And so the Norse male taboo on magic survives instead as a skepticism towards magic in general, male or female.

So let me reiterate: Norse men believed magic was real, but they didn’t understand it, nor did they want to, for the reasons I’ve explained.

But wait, you might say. Wasn’t Odin, the king of the gods, also a god of magic?

(Wasn’t he, according to the myths, the one who gave mankind the runes? Come to think of it, isn’t there even a type of Destruction spells in Skyrim called that – runes?

Well, yes. But we have to be clear that in real history, the runes were really just an alphabet suited to being carved into stone or wood instead of inscribing ink onto parchment as in Christendom. Of course you can employ writing in “magical” rites, but that doesn’t make the letters themselves magical. )

As for Odin – yes, he is definitely male, and yes, although he is also a warrior, what sets him apart is his devotion to arcane knowledge. He even sacrifices an eye to gain a deeper kind of insight. But not even the king of the gods, the god of kings, the head of the whole Norse pantheon – not even he is immune to accusations of ergi because of his magic. This is where it gets really interesting, because this is where I get to draw on evidence from what is probably my all-time favourite Norse poem: The Lokasenna – in English, “Loki’s quarrel.” And boy, is it a juicy quarrel, too.

The poem relates how he gods are having a mighty feast, but Loki, the god of mischief or trickster demon, turns it into a quarrel of epic proportions by porceeding to taunt all the gods one by one. The gods throw insults back at him to try to shut him up, and the whole thing quickly turns into a sort of full-contact rap battle with Loki and different gods taking turns composing stanzas mean to “burn” each other. Trouble is, Loki is a smart talker who always has a quick comeback, and it’s the gods who end up tongue-tied. Loki calls the god Bragi a coward; and like the gangsta that he is, he also treats all the goddesses as “hoes” (btw, the Norse word “hòr” means exactly the same as it does in English). Freyja, the goddess of both magic and erotic love calls him a liar. I’m going to quote his reply in an English translation:

“Be silent, Freyja! | thou foulest witch,
And steeped full sore in sin;
In the arms of thy brother | the bright gods caught thee
When Freyja her wind set free.”

Witchcraft is certainly used in a very negative sense here. I mean, Loki really paints a picture here: We’ve got Freya with her own brother, Cersei-and-Jaime-Lannister-Game of Thrones-style, and when the other gods find her, the goddess of beauty, love and magic in her consternation lets out a big, fat fart. And to think that people in modern times thought “Life of Brian” was blasphemous!

And this isn’t some sort of questionable translation either. While Norse poetry is often full of poetic metaphors and rephrasings, in the last line here the original language is actually more direct than the translator: “mvndir þv þa, Freyia! frata.“ “then you, Freyja, farted”. (Norse frata and English to fart is historically the same word, the R and the A just switched places in English, a common occurrence in language history known as metathesis.)

You’d perhaps expect Freya to refute this accusation, but no; at this point it’s the god Njord who steps in to try to “burn” Loki, but in turn gets burned himself. And this is actually six stanzas after Odin himself has already been silenced in the quarrel. How did Loki manage that? By connecting Odin’s magic to exactly the unmanliness I’ve talked about. Here’s the English translation again:

“They say that with spells | in Samsey once
Like witches with charms didst thou work;
And in witch’s guise | among men didst thou go;
Unmanly thy soul must seem.”

(In the original Norse, the line goes “ok hugðak þat args aðal”, where “arg” is the adjective counterpart of the noun, so more literally, Loki says “I find that [your magic] unmanly behavior”.)

(Just so you don’t think that Odin’s silence is just him trying to get out of the quarrel by staying aloof, Loki’s line about args aðal here only echo back at Odin his own taunt in the previous stanza:

Winters eight | wast thou under the earth,
Milking the cows as a maid,
Ay, and babes didst thou bear;
Unmanly thy soul must seem.

While we don’t know any other sources for Loki milking cows, there is indeed a myth that makes Loki the mother of Odin’s eight-legged horse, Sleipnir. In this tale, Loki took the form of a mare in order to distract the workhorse of a giant who had been promised both Freya, the sun and the moon as payment if he could build a fortification on deadline. Thus Loki’s questionable sexual activities in mare form saves the gods from losing both Freya and the lights of the world (the gods basically get a powerful defensive structure free of charge). But in the Lokasenna, the whole thing is used to insult Loki, and it’s pretty strong stuff when you think about it. I mean, just to spell it all out, what we’ve got here is Loki mating with a male horse, being impregnated and giving birth to a foal. But when Loki retorts that Odin uses witchcraft and casts spells, apparently, that’s even worse, because Odin’s got nothing to say in reply.

(So in effect, it suggests that in a man, witchcraft is even more womanly than pregnancy and childbirth.)

(And as if to underline Loki’s point that Odin isn’t being a real man here at all, it’s actually Odin’s wife, Frigg, who now steps in to rescue her husband by telling both Loki and Odin not to talk about old times and the things the two of them did back then.

But Loki isn’t about to be soothed by Frigg’s attempt at diplomacy. His next replies to Frigg are all the more devastating because they refer to Norse myths that we know from other sources. First, predictably perhaps, Frigg is accused of faithlessness, and with Odin’s own brothers, Vili and Vi, to boot:

Be silent, Frigg! | thou art Fjorgyn’s wife,
But ever lustful in love;
For Vili and Ve, | thou wife of Vithrir,
Both in thy bosom have lain.”

There is indeed a saga that recounts how Odin’s brothers took Frigg as a mistress while he was away, so this is no hollow accusation.

Many of Loki’s taunts also have a darker, far more unnerving side than the light-hearted physical humour of Freyja’s flatulence. At the end of his exchange with Frigg, he gloats over the death of her own son, Baldr, which he triumphantly announces that he caused. And then he starts to boast about his own role in ragnarok, the end of the world, where even the gods will die, as told in several other sources like the apocalyptic poem Voluspà.)

Clearly Loki knows exactly how to hit everyone where it hurts, and the circus continues until Thor shows up and three times threatens to crush Loki for his insolence. But it is only after having subjected Thor to three stanzas of abuse in response to his threats that Loki finally yields and flees the scene.

Now, who would write something like this? The most obvious answer would be to that the poet could be a Christian, maybe even a recent convert, satirizing the old religion in order to expose it as dishonorable drivel. It’s certainly possible that the fear and taboo on magic may have got a lot worse when the Norse converted to Christianity, which generally happened over the course of the eleventh century. However, if the poet was indeed trying satirize the old superstitions in order to root them out once and for all, this wouldn’t really work unless the un-manliness of magic was something that even the pagans would find repulsive or at least ridiculous.

Religious upheaval is certainly at the heart of Skyrim’s view of magic as well. After all, the Thalmor are trying to quell the cult of Talos which is perhaps the main reason why the Nords to feel their culture is threatened.

But in Skyrim, there is can be no gender-satire of Talos because men and women are in general much more equal than they were in Norse times. Skyrim’s women are equally warriors, and NPCs like Lydia, Uthgerd and Aela may well be inspired by the famous “shield maidens” also attested by some Norse sources. However, if such shield maidens even existed in Norse society, they were very much the exception – but of course the fact there are records of them at all is a great excuse to build a world that doesn’t instantly alienate women from the game. And it is clear that the developers did think about gender roles when they made female NPCs like Whiterun’s Olfine Gray-Mane comment on the difficulty of being a woman in a society dominated by male values : It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim, I know. But stay strong, and men will come to respect you, and maybe even fear you.

Despite this, men and women are in some ways also more equal in Skyrim than they’d been in the previous Elder Scrolls games, where male and female characters still had different starting stats. Interestingly, in Morrowind, Nord females started out with 50 Willpower, the same and Bretons and even better than Altmer (though those races of course get much better Intelligence and Magicka supply). Male Nords, on the other hand, start out with a measly 30 points in both the spell-casting attributes, Willpower and Intelligence. So Nord women made passable casters – or should I say witches – but the males rely instead on their high initial Strength and Endurance – warrior attributes.

But my point isn’t just that Norse society feared magic because it was unfitting for a man. The point is rather that magic was seen as troubling, strange, alien, as other. Just like the Nords, the Norse, too, associated magic with foreign peoples – not elves, who obviously never existed in real history, but with people like the “Finns”, or the Sami, the native people of northern Scandinavia. In other words, the Norse views of magic express a kind of xenophobia that is also at the heart of the conflicts in Skyrim. The Nords feel beset by Thalmor enemies, Forsworn Reachmen, Dark Elven refugees, and an Empire many Nords can no longer recognize; that is the background for Ulfric’s rebellion and the civil war.

So let me reiterate: Norse men believed magic was real, but they didn’t understand it, nor did they want to, because they found it alien, unsettling and, at least in a man, corruptive.

And this brings me to Cidhna Mine and Skyrim’s quest “The Forsworn Conspiracy”. You know, that quest where the guards take ALL of your gear and toss you in prison – but completely neglect to restrain your ability to cast spells or Shout. A YouTuber called The Closer Look recently used as his main example to illustrate what he calls “The Terrible Problem With Skyrim’s Magic”. For Mr Closer Look, the immersion is destroyed by the guards’ oversight in negating any spellcasting abilities the player might have .

The Closer Look’s complaint about the quest is that it apparently wrecks the internal consistency of Skyrim’s world creation. Why don’t the guards do anything to try to nullify their prisoner’s magical powers before locking them up? They could, for example, spice the prisoners’ food with magicka-inhibiting alchemical concoctions. Why didn’t they?

Now, if this were just any generic high fantasy setting rife with magic I’d be inclined to agree with Mr Closer Look that this could be a plot hole caused by devs who wrote a world with magic in it, but then promptly forgot that magic existed when they wrote this quest.

But it’s not as if Bethesda have never plugged this sort of plot hole about restraining magic users. In Morrowind, for example, Bethesda specifically fitted the slaves in that game with bracers that constantly Drained Magicka so that they couldn’t cast spells. Did they just get too lazy, greedy and generally incompetent to add something like those bracers to the prisoners in Skyrim?

By now it should be obvious what I think. Namely, that he reason for this design choice is that Skyrim ISN’T Morrowind, or Oblivion for that matter. To my mind, the guards neglecting to counter the magical abilities of prisoners speaks volumes about how many Nords just don’t understand magic at all. So to me, this doesn’t shatter the world-building; I’ll go so far as to say that it actively helps build a coherent world – one that has plenty of magic in it, but also plenty of people who don’t want anything to do with it.

(In addition, it probably also says something about how corrupt and careless the Silver-Blood family and their hired thugs-turned-prison-guards treat the whole prison as a concentration camp where prisoners are used as slaves to turn a profit for the owners.

(As Urzoga gra-Shugurz, one of the guards, puts it: “This is a jail, owned by the Silver-Blood family. We use the prisoners to mine for ore. It’s the most secure prison in Skyrim.)

Throw scum in, close the gates. No one gets out.”)

What the guards say reveals that being a top-security prison is actually a lower priority in the mine than making money for the SilverBloods. And like several commentators on the CloserLook’s video have noted, the alchemical “drain magic” effect he suggests using is pretty expensive; feeding prisoners this stuff would at least eat up a substantial share of the profits.)

Of course I’m not suggesting that Mr Closer Look’s sense of immersion is any less important than my own, and I certainly do NOT think that you should need special knowledge of Norse culture to enjoy the game. This part of the quest could certainly do with a bit more exposition.

What surprised me most about seeing this quest as the prime example of Skyrim’s bad treatment of magic is that I remember this as one of my FAVOURITE moments using magic in Skyrim. Admittedly, the adventure where you have to make do for a while without all the powerful loot you’ve acquired is an old RPG trope, but it’s one that I felt worked very well in Skyrim. On my first playthrough as Sneakers, the Khajiit thief/archer I’ve recorded on this channel, being thrown back upon his natural resources made me appreciate the moderate magical abilities he’d acquired much more. I suddenly found the Call of Valour shout that I’d picked up in Sovngarde had a real use – summoning one of the warriors from the hall of the afterlife actually made an important difference when I didn’t have my weapons and armor.

(I also do think Mr Closer Look is totally overstating his case when he argues that a “huge chunk of the population is well versed in using magic spells”. This is Skyrim. The FOREIGN races cast spells, yes, but the Nords don’t – and interestingly, warrior races like Orcs and Redguards seem to take a similar view of things, at least in Skyrim; and every Orc stronghold needs a “wise woman” – not a shaman or healer.)

(try to heal an Orc, for example, and they will remark that they prefer the natural way for wounds to heal.)

(Of course the Thalmor he shows in his video use magic – but Cidhna Mine is hardly the place to lock up such distinguished prisoners.)

(More interestingly, the Forsworn Reachmen are also magic users, and since Reachmen are effectively a racial underclass in Markarth, you’d perhaps expect the Nords to be a little more prepared for them to pull some magic tricks.)

I could list more counterarguments to those presented by The Closer Look, but I don’t want to make this just into a response to that video, partly because that video makes some valid points, and partly because I’m just more interested in the parallels between Skyrim and Norse culture.

In short, I guess what I am saying is simply that I experienced that quest very differently from the way mr Closer Look did. (Which is natural, since immersion is almost by definition a subjective experience.)

And perhaps also that in games, like any art form, our experience of the work of art is very much coloured by the interests, background knowledge and prior experience we bring to that work of art.

And finally, that Norse literature is awesome, but basing a modern game on requires tweaking.

If this foray into Norse literature sparked an interest, first, feel free to leave a comment. For one thing, while I’m no scholar, I still have one or two other favourite Norse texts that I should like to compare to the Elder Scrolls if someone is interested. And if you’re not inclined to wait around for the months and months it usually takes me to come up with anything, I can recommend a YouTuber called Jackson Crawford, who IS a scholar, and has lots of good videos on Norse literature and language.