If you’ve picked up a Norse-inspired fantasy novel recently, you’ve probably encountered her: the woman who stands at the edge of firelight, staff in hand, eyes somewhere else entirely. She speaks in riddles. She knows too much. She makes the warriors uncomfortable in a way that no sword can.
She is the völva. And she is older than almost anything else in the Norse tradition.
But what exactly is a völva, and how does the world of Leifthasir’s Saga take that ancient archetype and deepen it into something alive?
The Völva in Norse Mythology: A Primer
The word völva (plural: völur) comes from Old Norse völr, meaning staff or wand. She is, quite literally, the staff-bearer, and that distinction matters more than it might seem.
In a society where authority was visible and tangible, where a king held a scepter and a jarl commanded a hall, the völva’s staff was her equivalent. It marked her as someone who moved between worlds: the world of the living, the world of the dead, and the hidden realm of fate. Her staff was not decorated. It was proof of office.
The völva’s staff was most likely a distaff, a tool used for spinning wool into thread. A correlation could be made that the weaver’s tool could be used as a nod to the Norns who weave the fates of gods and men. However, we should be clear that some earlier sources make no note of the Norns using any loom or spinning wheel at all.
The Völuspá: The Seeress Who Knows What Gods Do Not
The oldest and most dramatic appearance of the völva in Norse literature is the Völuspá, “Prophecy of the Völva”, from the Poetic Edda. In this poem, Odin, the highest of the gods, summons a völva from death to ask her what she knows.
He has to ask. She doesn’t volunteer.
This tells you everything about her social and cosmic position. Even Odin, the god of wisdom, who sacrificed his eye at the Well of Mímir, lacks something that only she possesses. The völva is not subordinate to divine power — she is its other edge. Where the gods hold authority, she holds memory. Where they wield fate, she reads it.
She recounts the emergence of the world from Ginnungagap, the primordial void. She traces the cycle of Urðr, the great weaving of fate, and she foresees Ragnarök without flinching. Her knowledge is not fortune-telling. It is something older: an embodied archive of what has been and what must be.
Þorbjörg Lítilvölva: The Social Reality of a Völva
Mythology gives us the cosmic seeress. The sagas give us her more grounded counterpart.
In the Saga of Erik the Red, we meet Þorbjörg (pronounced Thorbyorg) Lítilvölva, “the little völva”, a traveling seeress invited to a community suffering through famine and hardship. Her arrival is governed by strict ritual protocol: she is given a seat of honor, offered specific foods, and welcomed with a ceremony involving the varðlokkur, a choral chant performed by the women of the household to call the spirits near.
She is treated with deference. She is also, in a meaningful sense, hired.
“It was the custom that she was invited to the homes of the wealthy, and she made it her custom to travel as a guest to those farms where there was a hope of information about the season or the future.”
The völva of the sagas is an itinerant specialist. She travels from farm to farm, performs her rites, delivers her prophecy, and moves on. Her authority is real — but it is also transactional, and deeply tied to her ability to deliver results. The community respects her. The community also fears her. Both things are simultaneously true because she sits at the intersection of survival and the spirit world, which is exactly where things get complicated.
She is not a queen. She is not a priestess confined to a single temple. She is something harder to categorize: a woman whose power lives in motion, in community need, and in the careful ritual management of forces that could help or harm in equal measure.
The Staff, the Seiðr, and the Weaving of Fate
At the heart of the völva’s practice is seiðr, a form of Norse magic associated with prophecy, trance work, and the alteration of fate itself.
Scholars such as Britt-Mari Näsström have noted that the etymological root of seiðr may tie back to concepts of winding or binding, suggesting that the völva’s power was fundamentally about weaving and manipulating the threads of fate, the same threads spun by the Norns at the foot of Yggdrasil. To practice seiðr was not to break the laws of nature. It was to understand them well enough to pull a different thread.
This is why the staff matters so much. It is the tool through which the practitioner channels her work. Without it, she is a woman with knowledge. With it, she is a bridge.
The Germanic tradition is full of women like her. Roman observers, including Tacitus, recorded female prophetesses among the Germanic tribes — women who held significant influence over decisions of war and tribal legitimacy, who were treated as authorities in a way that had no precise Roman equivalent. The völva is not an anomaly. She is part of a persistent, continent-wide tradition of feminine spiritual authority that existed long before the Viking Age and continued well after it.
The Völva in the World of Leifthasir
In Leifthasir’s Saga, the völva is not a relic or a footnote. She is woven into the fabric of how the world works.
In Leifthasir, a völva is a seeress, witch, and priestess who attends to the spiritual needs of her community. Most are women. The most powerful among them can walk the world between, the liminal space between the living world and the unseen realms, call down curses, prophesy, and commune directly with the gods. They are given places of power and honor in every community, and their loss is treated as a community catastrophe.
In A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm, when Wexian forces begin targeting völur, the reaction from characters like Gunvald and Hallmundr is not just political—it is personal and spiritual. These women had assisted in births, advised karls, performed funerals, and anointed the dead. Their absence would leave a hole in the community’s relationship with the sacred that no warrior could fill.
Seiðr as the Magic of Creation
Where the Norse sources treat seiðr as socially fraught, powerful, but with a stigma attached to it, the world of Leifthasir clarifies its origins in a way that gives it cosmic weight.
In Leifthasir, seiðr is the magic left over from the creation of the world. It lives in all things. It shapes prophecy and influences nature. While anyone can theoretically access it, only those with the Vanir Blessing — or those willing to undergo the demanding ritual framework of the völva’s craft—can wield it with intention.
This traces back to Freya herself. In the lore of Leifthasir, Freya taught seiðr not just to the Aesir but to the dark elves and dwarves of the Fire Mountains, consecrating the forges of Oksurland and gifting mortal practitioners a framework through which to touch the primordial forces of creation. To practice seiðr, in Leifthasir, is to carry forward something Freya put in the world deliberately.
That’s not a small thing to hold in your hands.
Völur in Practice: From Oksurland to Helsingborg
The novels give us völur in strikingly different settings, and each one illuminates a different facet of the role.
In the upcoming novel Inheritance of Fire, the princess Indunna studies under Gudrun, one of six völur in Oksurland, the dark elf city where seiðr runs so deep beneath the stone that it pulls practitioners the way rich soil pulls seeds. Gudrun is protective, sharp, and conscious of the cost. She argues against pushing Indunna too hard, not out of timidity, but because she has seen what the seiðr does to those who take more than they can carry. “If she returns to Fjord’s Hold a shell, you can retreat into your mountain like a ghost. But it will be those of us with the blood of men who pay the price.”
Oksurland is remarkable precisely because of how many völur it sustains. In Fjord’s Hold, two or three seers would be extraordinary. In Oksurland, six active practitioners and a cohort of hopefuls train together, a concentration only possible because the seiðr is thick enough in the land to support them all.
By contrast, the Völva Birta in Helsingborg serves a single jarl’s hall and is, at the time we meet her, effectively his prisoner, used as a spiritual asset to be controlled rather than a sacred office to be honored. Llywelyn’s quiet effort to free her becomes one of the novel’s more quietly damning indictments of what happens when political power absorbs spiritual authority.
And in A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm, we see a völva in the field, defiant, blood-soaked earth in her hands, screaming into the faces of the Wexians who demand she perform on command. Her power is not given freely. It is earned, and she knows exactly what it costs to weaponize it against her will.
What Separates the Völva of Leifthasir from Her Mythological Counterpart?
The mythological völva is largely solitary and contextual, summoned for a purpose, performing a specific rite, then gone. She exists at the edges of society, invited in when needed and kept at arm’s length when not.
The völva of Leifthasir has a deeper institutional presence. She is not just a traveling specialist; she is a pillar of her community. She participates in births, deaths, marriages, and political decisions. She advises Karls. She trains successors. She leaves marks on the land through her practice (seiðr, we are told, leaves scars on both the weaver and the world). Her departure or death is not the loss of a service. It is the loss of a relationship that the community had with its own sacred life.
She is also, crucially, more vulnerable, not because her power is lesser, but because the world of Leifthasir is at war, and wars have a way of treating women who know too much as either tools or threats.
Why the Völva Matters in Myth and in Fiction
The völva endures because she represents something that formal religious hierarchies have always struggled to contain: authority that doesn’t require a throne or a title or a bloodline. She is not appointed. She is recognized. The community comes to her because it needs something only she can provide, and the exchange is explicit—hospitality, ritual, respect—rather than commanded.
In the Leifthasir series, this makes the völva a site of genuine political tension. A king can command an army. A jarl can dissolve a marriage. But no title in Leifthasir grants anyone the power to walk the world between, commune with the gods, or read the currents of fate. That belongs to the völva alone, and that makes her both invaluable and imperiled.
She is the woman who knows things that even gods seek out. She walks through the world carrying the weight of what has been and what is coming. She keeps her staff close because, without it she is only a woman with inconvenient knowledge, and with it, she is something the world has not figured out how to control.
Continue Reading
The völva is central to every book in the Leifthasir’s Saga, from the anonymous seeress of Hammerfel in A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm, to the imprisoned Birta in Inheritance of Fire, to the völur of Oksurland who teach Indunna what she carries in her blood.
If you want to explore the world where seiðr is the magic left over from creation itself — and where the women who wield it are fighting to survive a conquest that sees them as weapons, the series begins with A Tale of Scorched Ash and Elm.
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