SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

224 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
furt in r673, and the following year an English translation
was published at Oxford under the title The History of
Lapland. This has a chapter "Of the magicall Ceremonies
of the Laplanders" in which Scheffer quotes the common
opinion that this people is "addicted to magic" He lists
the practices attributed to them and describes different
sorts of magical drum that he has seen. He tells how the
Lapps predict success in hunting, heal the sick, propel
magical darts, shoot at their enemies over great distances
and send against them familiars in the form of flies, etc.
A. C. Brooke's A Winter in Lapland and Sweden.
(r827) states, "Formerly witchcraft was exercised to a
great degree among them", and tells of the use of magical
drums to accompany incantations and cerernonies.s"
The work of modern Lappologists has confirmed the strong
element of shamanism in Lapp religion.s"
It is unlikely that Shakespeare's reference to Lapland
sorcerers derives from published travellers' tales. For the
most part, as has been seen, these ignore Lapp magic,
while Fletcher, though recording it, suggests that he does
so partly from accounts already current in England. Nor
do pre-ryqo English treatises on witchcraft - as far as
I have read them - mention Lapland as a haunt of
sorcerers. Where, then, did Shakespeare get his knowledge
of Lapland magic from? The answer probably is:
from the works of certain late mediaeval and early modern
geographers.
The earliest references that I have found in English to
Lapland sorcerers (though Lapland is not named in them)
are from the fourteenth century. In r387 John of Trevisa
completed his translation of Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon,
written in the first half of the same century.
Trevisa's text, following the original very closely at this
point, gives the following account of Wyntlandya:
27 op, cit., 160•
•• See, for example, B. Collinder, The Lapps (1949), 146-53.