#vitki

It is a magnificent night to consult the Runes by candlelight🔮🕯️✨

The word vitki only appears twice (technically three times but the third is irrelevant, described below) in Old Norse, without any real explanation, which is unfortunate because it’s doing some heavy lifting in both cases. This has generated a lot of debate and discussion, all of it considered inconclusive.

All translations in this post are mine, Norse text variously from http://heimskringla.no and https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php. I conferred Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon’s etymological dictionary heavily, entries from which can be found here (in Icelandic): https://malid.is/.

Hyndluljóð 33:

Eru völur allarfrá Viðolfi,vitkar allirfrá Vilmeiði,seiðberendrfrá Svarthöfða,jötnar allirfrá Ymi komnir.

All völur (völvas) arefrom Viðolfr,all vitkarare from Vilmeiðrseið-bearersfrom Svarthöfði,all jötnarcome from Ymir.

These names are not otherwise known except Svarthöfði (’the one with a black/swarthy head’) which also occurs elsewhere as a name of a jötunn. It was also a regular, if not especially common, personal name in Old Norse times, and in modern times is the standard Icelandic name for Darth Vader in the subtitles to Star Wars movies. There is some debate about the implied meaning of seiðberandi but I’m leaving it translated literally here. Rudolf Simek believes that Viðolfr is actually Vittolfr, apparently a variant (he doesn’t say where, I’m guessing in manuscripts of Gylfaginning where this stanza is quoted) and identifies him with the Vitolfus described in Saxo’s Gesta Danorum as a powerful magician. If true, the vitt- in his name could even be the same as the word vétt mentioned in connection with völur along with the one other use of vitki.

Lokasenna 24:

Loki kvað:“En þik síða kóðu Sámseyu í, ok draptu á vétt sem völur; vitka líki fórtu verþjóð yfir, ok hugða ek þat args aðal.”

Loki said [to Óðinn]:“But they say you did seiðrat Sámsey,and struck a vétt like völur;in the form of a vitkiyou fared above mankind,and I thought that a quality of one who is argr.

The meaning of the word vétt is usually a lid of a chest, though the meaning in this stanza specifically is debated and some scholars think it’s a drum. It’s theoretically possible that it could be the vitt otherwise being discussed in this post, though there is nothing to suggest that reading it as it appears is problematic.

Readers of The Viking Way by Neil Price should note that Price made a rather confusing error on page 76 of the second edition when he said that this is an attestation of a feminine *vitka. It’s not, it’s an inflected form of vitki. With the phrase vitka líki ‘in the form of a vitki’, Loki could be saying that Óðinn is or was a vitki, that he was dressed like a vitki, or even that this involved some kind of transformation or other change of state – the phrasing does not allow us to favor any of these over the other. Technically, as an outside possibility, it could even mean that Óðinn has possessed the body (then, lík rather than líki, but in the dative which is also líki) of a vitki – this is very unlikely to have been interpreted that way because the phrasing “(í) [noun in genitive] líki” is rather common in Old Norse (e.g. Synduzt þeir honum stundvm i liki hunda, warga eda annarra grimmuztu dyra ‘Sometimes they saw him in the form of dogs, wolves, or others of the fiercest beasts’).

What we can gather is little more than what you already mentioned, that it’s some kind of sorcerer. Given that it occurs in a triad with völva and seiðberandi, and because Loki is deploying it weaponized against Óðinn, it seems safe to infer that what the vitki does falls within the realm of seiðr along with its insinuation of ergi, but since we don’t have clear reason to say that what a völva does and what a seiðberandi does are substantially different from each other, we don’t know whether all three of these things are doing the exact same thing, or three distinct but related things. If Hyndluljóð is contrasting the terms, Lokasenna seems to be collapsing them together. Brit Solli has proposed an argument that this describes a threefold identification relating to gender, where völur are women; vitkar men; and seiðberendr neither, both, or something else (I haven’t read Solli, I’ve only read Price’s discussion of her work). This is a satisfying argument for its ability to provide answers to some of our questions, but Price points out that this is all contingent on a string of arguments, each of which is individually speculative, and converge on the word seiðberandi rather than on vitki, so it would still not really tell us about a vitki directly even if accepted. It’s worth noting for clarity that völva is grammatically feminine and appears to only be used of women in Norse, and vitki is grammatically masculine, though the grammatical gender of words in Norse is not necessarily coterminous with the gender of the people they describe, even if there is a general tendency for them to align when the vocabulary permits.

The word vitki is usually interpreted as the definite form the adjective vitugr ‘clever, ’ (literally ‘possessing/endowed with vitr (wit)‘), an exact etymological parallel with English witty. So ‘a/the vitugr one’ becomes *vitgi and then the *g loses its voicing next to the t, a regular phenomenon in Old Norse (see also eitt ‘one’ + -gi (negative suffix) → *eittgi > *eittki > *etki > ekki). So we have a magic person who is designated by reference to their possessing certain knowledge or cognitive abilities, like fjölkyngi ‘magic,’ literally something like ‘knowledge of many things,’ fjölkunnigr ‘magical’ but literally ‘knowledgeable about many things.’ This analysis is demonstrated by the third attestation of vitki in the compound word armvitki ‘compassion’ from armvitugr ‘compassionate’ (broken down into its components, meaning something like ‘knowing about the poor/wretched’ (armr)).

On the other hand, it could also be derived from the adjective vittugr ‘possessing magic power.’ That would mean it is etymologically related to the vitt above. It’s possible that these things became confused as well. The ability to analyze these words for etymological information is obscured by the fact that Old Norse went through a phase of really not liking superheavy syllables, so that a word like vittki with too many consonants in a row has to make some cuts.

We might gain a bit of insight by looking at other related words, in particular the verb vitka. Usually it occurs in a reflexive form vitkask (=vitka sik, to vitka oneself), meaning ‘to recover one’s senses’ (such as after being in a daze). There is also a compound word finnvitka meaning ‘to bewitch’ (literally ‘to vitka in the manner of a Finnish (=Sámi) person’). It’s not certain that a clear connection between vitkast and finnvitka would have been perceived by the speakers of the language at the time, but it is possible – then the lexical meaning is probably the imposition of cognition on someone or something, so that the reflexive vitkast means imposing senses on oneself, a.k.a. recovering from being senseless. Imposition of will or otherwise playing with the mind of another person, such as causing them to lose courage, is a feature of seiðr. We could also interpret this in relation to the idea of trance being a possible feature of seiðr (perhaps the line seið hon hugleikin ‘she did seiðr in a trance(???)’ from the Hauksbók version of Völuspá refers to this?).

However, we should be cognizant of the fact that much of the terminology of seiðr is used in a way that defies what we would expect on the basis of etymology, for example we expect that spá will always pertain to prophecy, yet we find examples of spá referring to offensive magic such as the Vanir’s vígspá ‘war-spá.’ So we have to be aware of lexical drift interfering with the ability of etymology to tell us what a particular word means at the moment that it’s being used in text. In other words, using etymology to figure out what it meant originally doesn’t necessarily tell us what Loki is accusing Óðinn of, or who these people are that came from Vilmeiðr. Indeed, the one use of finnvitka from Heimskringla seems to have nothing to do with mind control, though it’s a bit difficult to tell what precisely is meant by at þeir finnuitkade ór mer augat ‘that they finnvitka’d my eye out.’

So I think that in light of all of this what we can say is that a vitki falls securely into the context of a practitioner of seiðr, but narrowing it down further seems impossible. Neil Price has tried to establish a taxonomy or even general categories of different types of seiðr practitioners, but has not been able to do so. We can determine categories like “telling the future,” “finding lost/hidden objects,” “affecting others minds,” “killing with magic,” etc, but none of these map neatly to any of the words for magical people like völva, vitki, seiðmaðr, etc.

If you’ve found conflicting information, it’s possible that someone mistook one of the theories that have been generated by discourse about this word for being more secure than it actually is (e.g. that it means “male völva”). I have also seen it used in ways that we can be fairly certain are incorrect. In heathen circles it’s become common to define it as “rune magician,” I think following Edred Thorsson. This is not only wrong but probably by design. It turns the word into a Trojan horse to inject a modern concept – the so-called “rune magician” – into others’ beliefs about the past.