The Witches of Vardo

Anya Bergman

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, April 15th 2023

Most people will have heard of the Salem witch trials of 1692-93. Few here in New Zealand, however, will be familiar with the wave of witch-hunts that saw hundreds of women and men executed across England, Scotland, and Eastern Europe from the late 16^th to the mid-17th century. Perhaps the most intense of these occurred in Finnmark, Northern Norway, where almost 5% of the region’s population was put on trial and 3% executed for practising witchcraft during the 1600s.    

In The Witches of Vardø, Anya Bergman draws on court transcripts and historical records to give voice and agency to six of the thirty women and girls (twenty of whom were burned at the stake or died under torture) imprisoned on the island in the winter of 1662-63. She also re-examines the character of Anna Rhodius, the wife of a Bergen doctor whom history blames for initiating the panic that led to their deaths.

The story opens with Anna’s exile to the desolate island of Vardø, an act of betrayal she is at a loss to understand. The dark, filthy longhouse to which she is confined, attended by a single slovenly and uneducated maid, is a far cry from her well-appointed family home. But it is a palace compared to the witch hole that stands across the courtyard, and Anna soon convinces herself that she has been sent to save the king from the scourge of Northern witches. The cell is soon occupied by Zigli Olafsdatter, a fisherman’s widow accused of consorting with the devil, and she is later joined by two other village women, Zigli’s daughters Ingeborg and Kirsten, and a third girl, Maren Sigvaldsdatter, whose own mother was burned at the stake a few years earlier. Anna tries, unsuccessfully, to persuade the three older women to admit to their sins, then watches in horror as the Governor of Vardø, determined to convict all six of his prisoners, resorts to torture to elicit confessions. Unable to save the older women, she attempts to save the girls from a similar fate, while Ingeborg and Maren find their own ways to defy the men who would subdue them.

The narrative alternates between Anna and sixteen-year-old Ingeborg, the contrast in tone and perspective allowing Bergman to explore different aspects of the story. Ingeborg’s chapters, rich with sensation and emotion, are told in the close third person while Anna speaks in her own voice through a series of letters to her beloved king, a technique that invites us to understand, if not empathise with, the difficult choices she, too faces. And over and above them all towers the harsh and unforgiving Arctic, a character in and of itself and a place where the real and the magical mingle in the hours of night-long day and day-long night.

Intense, evocative, and compellingly written, The Witches of Vardø is both a memorial to the forgotten women of Finnmark and a celebration of their indomitable spirit.