Abstrakt
The objective of the study is to list the major groups of Old Norse terms for magic according to their meaning and analyze their connotations and evaluative aspects in the texts where they are used. In most of the categories we see that the more specified the meaning of the terms is in every text, the less condemnatory is their tone; if the word denotes a particular type of magical practice and reflects its original etymological meaning, it usually has positive or neutral connotations; in contexts where a strongly condemnatory meaning is present, the words have lost their original specified meaning and come to denote magic in general.
An exception to this tendency is the category connected to the notion of distant past, in which the original meaning is associated with paganism and disorder, so that the less the word has retained its original meaning, the weaker is the condemnatory aspect. Other exceptions are the terms that are always condemnatory, as both their original connotations and their more general meaning are negative.
One feature shared by all of the categories is a connection to a certain sense of otherness, which can be based on social, physical, temporal or spatial criteria. In some categories one of these criteria is strongly dominant, in others various terms are based on different criteria.
It is this notion of otherness that is the common denominator of all the terms, allowing us in modern languages to contain all of them in one word such as "magic".