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describes belongs to a larger system of magic associated primarily with
male practitioners such as Jón Guðmundsson lærði. In this interpretation,
the binding of a Latin prayer on a woman’s thigh represented spiritually
dangerous male intervention in the female space of childbed.
The obstetrical charm has parallels in late medieval leechcraft and is
perhaps more likely to have been transmitted as part of a larger remedy
book than as an independent “delivery book” as portrayed by Guðmundur
Einarsson. One such surviving fifteenth-century remedy collection from
England includes instructions for binding a Latin prayer to the right thigh
of a woman in labour that includes the “Anna peperit Mariam” motif.31
When considering the role of Margrétar saga in pre-modern birthing
practices, it is important to emphasise that seventeenth-century Icelandic
attitudes to the manuscript circulation of medieval religious literature
were vastly different from attitudes to the production of amulets and
charms that would physically bind words to the body.32 Whereas medieval
Icelandic poems celebrating the Virgin Mary and the saints circulated
openly in Icelandic manuscripts, the production of written magic such as
that described in Hugrás was framed as dangerous and anti-social behav-
iour.33
In practice, not all forms of magic were met with equally strong op-
position during the early modern period. The use of seedpods as protec-
tive amulets in childbirth is well attested in the North Atlantic region.34
In Iceland, these lausnarsteinar (lit. ‘delivery stones’) were used until the
twentieth century and were often in the possession of trained midwives.35
A lausnarsteinn was among the objects found the biskupskista (‘bishop’s
chest’) at Hólar in 1525, and there is no reason to believe that the practice
31 CAL MS Additional 9308, cf. Lea Olsan, “The Corpus of Charms in the Middle English
Leechcraft Remedy Books,” Charms, Charmers and Charming: International Research on
Verbal Magic, ed. by Jonathan Roper (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2009), 214–37.
32 On pre-modern textual amulets such as those described in Hugrás, see Don C. Skemer,
Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2006).
33 Katelin Marit Parsons, “Text and Context: Maríukvæði in Lbs 399 4to,” Opuscula 15 (2017):
57–86.
34 Torbjørn Alm, “Exotic Drift Seeds in Norway: Vernacular Names, Beliefs, and Uses,”
Journal of Ethnobiology 23.2 (2003): 227–61, at 234–37, 242–46.
35 Unnur B. Karlsdóttir, “Móðurlíf,” Kvennaslóðir: rit til heiðurs Sigríði Th. Erlendsdóttur Sagn-
fræðingi (Reykjavík: Kvennasögusafn Íslands, 2001), 466–75, at 469.
MAGIC, M A R G R É T A R S A G A