Before she was queen, before she was wife to Erik Bloodaxe, before she became the most hated woman in the Icelandic sagas, Gunnhild went north. She went to Finnmark — the deep north of Norway, where the Sámi lived — and she went to learn.
The story is told in Egil's Saga, and it is one of the strangest passages in Old Norse literature. Two Sámi shamans named &Thorn;órir and Álfr were renowned as the greatest practitioners of magic in the north. Gunnhild arrived at their dwelling and asked to stay. She told them she wanted to learn seiðr — Norse magical practice — from them. They agreed. She spent the winter there, living in their home, absorbing everything they knew.
The saga then does something remarkable: it shows Gunnhild outwitting her teachers. Before she left, she arranged for them to be killed, returning south with the knowledge and leaving the source behind her. The saga is hostile to Gunnhild throughout — its hero Egil Skallagrímsson is her sworn enemy — but even through that hostility, the account of her training carries the weight of something the saga writers believed was real.
What Seiðr Actually Was
Seiðr is the Old Norse word for a specific kind of magical practice, one of several that appear in the sagas and Eddic poetry. It was associated primarily with women, though Odin himself was said to have learned it from Freyja. The practice involved entering a trance state, journeying to other realms of consciousness, gathering knowledge, and influencing events — binding enemies, forecasting the future, altering luck.
The völva — the seiðr practitioner — was a figure of genuine social power in Norse society. She was hired, consulted, feared, and respected. She was also dangerous: several sagas describe the lengths to which powerful men went to destroy or neutralize a völva who opposed them.
Gunnhild is described across multiple sagas as practicing seiðr with exceptional skill. She is accused of killing enemies through magic, of bewildering men's minds, of using her abilities to protect her sons and destroy their opponents. Whether the medieval audience believed these accounts literally or metaphorically, the consistency of the accusation suggests it was central to how she was understood.
The Sámi Connection
The specifically Sámi origin of Gunnhild's training is significant. The Sámi had their own shamanic tradition called noaide — the noaide was a specialist who entered trance states, communicated with spirits, and navigated between worlds. The drum was their instrument. The nöita practice bears structural resemblances to Norse seiðr that have interested scholars of comparative religion for decades.
That the sagas place Gunnhild's education specifically in Sámi territory, learning from Sámi teachers, reflects something real about the relationship between Norse and Sámi spiritual practice. They were not isolated from each other. The Norse traded with the Sámi, intermarried with them, and apparently, in some cases, sought out their magical knowledge.
The detail that two Sámi practitioners were considered the best in the north, that Gunnhild traveled to find them specifically, and that she spent months in their household before returning south: this reads less like pure fantasy and more like a record of something people in the 10th century genuinely believed had happened.
A Woman Who Chose Her Power
One of the things the Gunnhild account does, despite itself, is show a woman taking her power rather than receiving it. She goes north under her own volition, negotiates her own training, and returns transformed. The saga tries to cast this as sinister. But the underlying structure is the same as hero journeys told about men across the entire corpus of Norse literature: you go to an extreme place, you encounter someone with knowledge, you obtain it, you return changed.
The hostile framing — she tricks and betrays her teachers — is the saga's way of making her gain illegitimate. But the arc is the arc of every Norse seeker of power who traveled to the ends of the earth for knowledge. Odin traded an eye for wisdom at Mímir's well. Gunnhild went to Finnmark and brought back seiðr.
The saga resented her for it. That is the point.
The Accusations That Followed
Throughout Egil's Saga, Laxdaela Saga, Fagrskinna, and Heimskringla, Gunnhild is credited with a series of magical acts that define her reputation:
She is said to have bewitched Egil himself during their first encounter, making him unable to compose poetry until she released the working. She is accused of directing magical attacks against his family. She is described as advising her sons using not just political intelligence but prophetic knowledge derived from her practice. Her enemies in the sagas are rarely able to explain their failures without attributing them to her interference.
None of this can be verified historically. But the consistency of the characterization across sources that were sometimes written by people who admired the Bloodaxe family and sometimes by their enemies suggests the core image was stable: Gunnhild was a practitioner, and a formidable one.
Why This Matters
The figure of Gunnhild is one of the few in Old Norse literature where a woman's spiritual power is treated as genuinely dangerous by everyone in the story, friends and enemies alike. She is not a peripheral wise woman called in to advise. She is not a passive figure with access to prophecy. She is someone who actively deployed magical skill as a tool of queenship, who trained specifically to acquire that power, and who used it over the course of decades.
Whether you read the accounts historically or mythologically, the Gunnhild that emerges is a woman who understood that in her world, power came in many forms — political alliance, dynastic marriage, sons placed on thrones, and the kind of knowledge that made even powerful men afraid of her.
She went north to learn. She came back knowing.
The Gunnhild Collection
👉 Gunnhild T-Shirt – Norse Queen, Mother of Kings
👉 Norse Queen Energy Embroidered Crewneck
Further reading: Gunnhild: The Most Dangerous Woman in the Viking Age — Gunnhild, Mother of Kings