UDC

Authors

Abstract

This article is devoted to Icelandic folk fairy tales and aims to acquaint the reader with the peculiarities of images of Icelandic wizards. It is shown that a wizard is a prototype of the future scientist, who turns to rational thinking. To analyse the characters of Icelandic wizards, the fairy tales were divided into three groups: tales about good wizards helping people, tales about evil sorcerers ready to go all lengths in order to gain new knowledge, and fairy tales focusing on a certain form of witchcraft. A traditional Icelandic wizard is a priest who employs both pagan magic tricks and the Scriptures. Icelandic sagas describe two kinds of magic: the male one – galdr (from the verb gala – ‘caw’, ‘sing’), based on spells for singing or recitation, and the female one – seid, focused on falling into a trance. Among all the wizard characters, we found only one female representative, which can be explained by the historical situation in Iceland where magic had traditionally been considered as a male occupation. The composition of fairy tales about wizards is usually based on several independent stories having only the protagonist in common. The leading characters, as a rule, have real historical prototypes. This paper can be of interest to folklorists, ethnographers and those interested in the culture and history of Iceland.

Keywords

References

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