The diviners of the far north

When people talked of wizardry, their thoughts turned to Lappland (or Lapland) and Iceland, where the sun shone at midnight and magic was not a secret thing but a commonplace - the "Foible of the North," a traveler called it. Even the Swedes, Norterners themselves, marveled at the practices of their neighbours at the top of the world.

According to the Swedish archbishop Olaf Magnusson, for instance, no Northern king or commoner would risk an enterprise without first examining the future, and their wizards were expert at this. They divined clues in the darting of rabbits and reindeer, the leaping of fish and the flight of birds passing north, then south, each year. They forecast by the stars that fell in the long winter night, by the wind that sang in the mountains and by the smoky exhalations of volcanoes.

But their greatest power was over thier icy oceans. Magnusson told of a wizard who charmed a whalebone and rode it across the seas, guiding it by a spell that emanated from this hands. Most wizards, however, were content to control the winds upon which seafaring Northerners depended for commerce and conquest alike. These enterprising magicworkers sold ropes composed of knots of winde to merchants whose ships lay off their stormy coasts. When loosed, the first knot in a rope freed a tranquil and pleasant breeze; the second a boisterous wind; the third, used only at great peril, a veritable tempest.