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Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft - A fascinating and unusual
Museum in Strandir -
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The Early Court Cases |
The Early Court Cases In 1554 a priest in Eyjafjörður was charged with raping his sister-in-law, a minor, with the aid of grimoires found in his possession. He was outlawed from the region and sentenced to lose one arm and both ears, and to pay his father-in-law vast sums in compensation. The authorities later allowed him to keep his arm and ears, and he then became a parish priest in the Strandir region.
In
1617 the Danish authorities sent a royal order defining punishments
for witchcraft but it was probably never ratified by the general assembly
at Þingvellir. In the following years mentions of sorcery become more
numerous in the records, especially after the trials in the seventeen-thirties
of Jón the Learned of Strandir, one of the most remarkable men of the
17th century. Jón had previously fled the Westfjords because of his
criticism of the powerful sheriff, Ari in Ögur, who had ordered the
killing of over 40 shipwrecked Basque whalers in 1615. From 1654 when three men were executed in Trékyllisvík in Strandir only one or two court cases are mentioned in the sources until the 1670s, when the witch-hunt seems to have been at its zenith. After the last execution in 1683, and especially after 1690 when a royal decree ordered that all capital offenses must be referred to the authorities in Copenhagen, the cases became fewer. In 1719 the assembly at Þingvellir scolded a sheriff for wasting the court's time with an accusation for magic. This marks the end of the "burning-times" in Iceland.
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last
updated
19.04.2006
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