Land Spirits in the Works of H.R.E. Davidson

The republication of Hilda Roderick Ellis’ (later Davidson) The Road to Hel, published initially in 1943, was an exciting event. It was one of the first attempts to correlate archaeological evidence with the data from surviving literature on the Norse views of the afterlife, the soul, the cult of the dead, and the journey to the land of the dead. I read it through with avidity, and only afterwards noticed that I already possess three other books by her on similar subjects, spanning her career from 1943 to 1993. I decided to take one topic, the land spirits. Over the course of fifty years, the author’s familiarity with archæological data deepened and spread to correlative evidence in Celtic lands as well as Germany. Accordingly, this paper examines her references to land spirits in the Nordic world in four books:

The Road to Hel, 1943, published originally by Cambridge University Press.

Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, Pelican Books, 1964.

Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe, Syracuse University Press, 1988.

The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe, Routledge, 1993.

While excerpting passages from these four books, I will add what little I know about related topics, from Xenophon in the 4^th century BCE to recent times. I will finish by considering what might be needed to recover the consciousness of land spirits at the present day.

Some biographical facts about the author would not be out of place. I derive these from online sources, chiefly Wikipedia, but cross-checking their statements from other sites.

Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson was an English antiquarian and academic, writing particularly on Germanic and Celtic paganism. She used literary, historical, and archaeological evidence to discuss the stories and customs of northern Europe. She was born in Cheshire in 1914 and passed away in Kent in 2006 at the age of ninety-one. She served on the council of the Folklore Society from 1956 to 1986 and was president of the council from 1974 to 1976. Her books have received many awards, and she has been cited as having ‘contributed greatly’ to the study of Norse mythology.

Land spirits are almost a separate topic in Norse religion. “They are not mentioned in the Edda or discussed by Snorri, and have, so far as we can tell, no entry into the world of the gods…” ¹ There are a number of references to them in Landnámabók, the book of the settlement of Iceland:

“It will be remembered that Landnámabók (IV, 7, p. 183) records the statement at the beginning of the heathen laws that men must not sail to land with grinning and gaping figureheads on their ships, but must remove them while some distance from Iceland, so that the land-spirits may not be frightened by them.” ²

The dragon heads adorning the bows of Viking ships, then, probably served to drive away the land spirits of other countries, such as England, when the aim was to despoil foreign lands without settling in them. The dragon heads found on the spires of early stavechurches in Norway were evidently intended to intimidate the land spirits round about, it being the aim of the Church to drive them out of Norway. This indicates that the peasantry retained the ability to experience such entities for a long time, and thus the latter received the particular hostility of the Christian establishment.

Belief in spirits of the land controlling fertility and ensuring health and prosperity is very ancient. It took many forms: heroes and nymphs in Greece, the sidhe in Celtic lands, land spirits and elves in the North. What they all had in common was a protective sympathy towards their human inhabitants, and thus invaders took care to placate them and enlist their aid when the aim was to settle in the invaded territory. Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, written in the 4^th century BCE, describes the Median invasion of Assyria by Cyaxares. It being his aim to conquer and occupy the Assyrian territory, as soon as his army crossed the frontier into Assyria they sacrificed to the local land spirits to enlist them on their side. ³

The land spirits were gifted, at least sometimes, with second sight and could warn farmers of events to come and how to meet them. They guarded their cattle and lived inside large stones with their own family. The Christians drove them out with holy water, which supposedly burnt them. ⁴

The enmity expressed on the part of the Church is probably due to the fact that these popular beliefs about spirits controlling the fertility of the soil and the health of human beings proved harder to eradicate than all the mythological concepts of the heathen gods; we find the same story in converted Anglo-Saxon England, in the threatening list of penalties for those who “bring any gifts to stream or stone or tree” or “worship springs or stones or wooden trees of any kind…” ⁵

“Many must have paid more attention to the land-spirits, for instance, than to the high gods, to the spirits said to follow men who were lucky at hunting and fishing, who dwelt in hills and stones round the farms, and sometimes appeared in animal form or sometimes like little men with wives and children of their own. They could either help or hinder, and men and women would instinctively turn to them – as to a favorite saint – in the little troubles and hopes of everyday life in the fields and on the sea.” ⁶

Returning to Landnámabók, we hear something of dealings with such spirits, and this will open the topic of access to land spirits, which will be taken up again in the conclusion to this paper. There is a reference to a family of brothers who were obliged to move their farm because of a flow of lava on their land, and were left with few animals until one of them had a lucky dream:

“One night Bjorn dreamed that a rock-dweller (bergbui) came to him and offered to enter into partnership with him, and it seemed to him that he agreed. Then a he-goat joined his goats, and his livestock increased so rapidly that he was soon prosperous; after that he was called Goat-Bjorn. People with second sight saw how all the land-spirits followed Goat-Bjorn to the Thing, and followed his brothers Thorstein and Thord when they went hunting and fishing.” ⁷

The author devotes an entire chapter of her book, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe, to the land spirits and guardian spirits, examining parallel evidence from Britain and France for beliefs in beings similar to the land spirits, often goddesses in multiples of three appearing alone or alongside gods from the Roman pantheon. The female figures are often unnamed individually, though as a group they might bear a name, such as the Matres or Mothers. Worship of the Mothers continued in Anglo-Saxon England well past the conversion, as Bede relates that the night before Christmas was called Modreniht, ‘the night of the Mothers’. ⁸

The Scandinavians sacrificed to the elves in the winter nights of December, and most likely to the land spirits as well. In her later books, the author seems increasingly inclined to associate them with the elves and Vanir, who likewise promoted fertility of the land under the god Freyr. ⁹

Returning to Iceland, we see a variety of habitations for the land spirits. One settler was said to make sacrifices of food to a waterfall, while another made offerings to one of the rare woods in Iceland, and a third made offerings to a great stone near his house. Besides providing fertility and prosperity, many land spirits had second sight and could predict the future, of which they advised their human partners in dreams. ¹⁰

While averse to domestic violence, land spirits were quite warlike towards invaders, and the belief in their guardianship of the land persisted for centuries after the Christian conversion. Even in the nineteenth century, a clergyman recorded that certain rocks and stones in north-eastern Iceland were called ‘Stones of the Landdisir (land-goddesses). It was said to be unwise to make a loud noise near them, and children were forbidden to play there, for bad luck would come if they were not treated with respect.” ¹¹

As guardians they were often depicted as little men living underground. The ‘Underground People’ of the Danish island of Bornholm became visible when they defended the island from attack by two Swedish warships in 1645. A solitary old soldier on sentry duty saw the invaders and knew there were no troops within call; however, he heard whispering voices: ‘Load and shoot!’, and when he shot at them, scores of little red-capped men became visible and shot at the Swedes, driving them off.” ¹²

As we come down to recent times, we may note that the scholar W.Y. Evans-Wentz, in his first book, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, traveled to all the Celtic lands in 1911, from Brittany to the Isle of Man to remote parts of Ireland (especially Connaught in the northwest), and the outlying Orkneys and Hebrides. In the more remote regions he found lingering examples of second sight, but these were becoming rarer. The ability to see the luminous bodies of the sidhe (fairies) appeared to be dying out. The poet who signed himself ‘AE’ (George William Russell, 1865-1937) had such an ability, but as the culture had no use for the talent, it lingered among solitaries only.

This brings us down to our final question. How, if possible, are we to re-establish contact with the land spirits in the 21^st century? The folklorist Ronald Hutton, at the conclusion of his The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, mentions two main obstacles to reviving ancient religions. One is our ignorance of them, and the other, perhaps more formidable, the fact that they do not speak to our condition. Thus, while our knowledge of the old beliefs continues to grow, largely on the archæological side of the evidence, we appear to be limited to holding a few blots per year, between which we go on with our secular modern lives.

Most of us are not farmers or cattle-ranchers, and if we were, we would rely more on principles of scientific farming (such as artificial fertilizer) than on relations of piety with spirits of the land. Living at the mercy of the elements, our ancestors were far more vulnerable than we are today. We have sought, and found, ways of craft to secure safe livelihoods for ourselves and thus feel no need for supernatural aid.

Considering the two channels of contact with the land spirits, second sight and visionary dreams, we must ask ourselves if the rarity of the former is due perhaps to our indifference towards the latter. Most people do not keep a dream journal, and those who do so for a time (such as comedian Woody Allen) give it up as “it didn’t seem to go anywhere.” Waking to the alarm clock, most of us forget our dreams as soon as we wake, and we are not guided by them throughout the day. If odd connections are noticed between waking events and remembered dream content, they are generally dismissed as ‘coincidences’. The word ‘coincidence’ is in general use as a talisman against the resurgence of interest in the paranormal these days.

The way we use our eyes tends to keep us focused on left-brain, purposive activity and excludes our awareness of those sensations lying to the side and of greater interest to our intuitive right brains. Thus, we pay almost exclusive attention to things we can see where our eyes are pointing and only note things on the periphery when they threaten to collide with us. Training ourselves to spread our attention to the side (or above or below) of where our eyes are pointing would relax the muscles around our eyes and promote a more meditative frame of mind. The same principle applies, to a degree, to attending to background sounds.

Finally, I would like to offer a personal experience. In 1964-65 I worked at an insurance brokerage in Los Angeles, where one of my friends was a somewhat older man named Lawrence Aldaco. He left the company before I did, and for fifteen years I never thought of him. Then, in 1980, when I was recently married, we lived near downtown San Diego in an upper apartment. A young couple lived in back in a small cottage. I noticed one day the name ‘Aldaco’ on their mailbox. That night I dreamed that the woman’s father, Lawrence Aldaco, came visiting. So far everything could be explained ‘rationally’, as scientific explanations are so-called.

But the next day, her father, Lawrence Aldaco, whom I had not seen for fifteen years, actually did come for a visit.

How is this to be explained except as a modern instance of contact with the land spirits? But, more importantly, what is to be done with it?

Bibliography of Supplementary Works

Evans-Wentz, W.Y., The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Gerrards Cross, Atlantic Highlands, Colin Smythe Humanities Press, 1911, reprinted 1999.

Hutton, Ronald, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, Oxford and Cambridge, UK, Blackwell’s, 1991.

Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, transl. H.G. Dakyns, London, J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, Everyman Library, 1992.