Witches, Outlaws, and Spirits: Liminal Beings in European Folklore

Author’s Note: The content of this blog reflects my personal experiences and perspectives on magic. Witchcraft is a deeply individual practice, and my approach may not align with everyone’s beliefs or traditions. I encourage readers to explore, question, and adapt what resonates with them. Nothing shared here is meant to serve as absolute truth or professional advice. Trust your intuition, do your own research, and walk your own path.

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In the rich body of Northern European folklore, the figures of the outlaw, the witch, and the spirit frequently intersect. Rather than being discrete entities, these figures are better understood as participants in a shared symbolic system, one in which removal from society confers an ambiguous, liminal power. To be outcast is not only to be socially marginalized; it is to be spiritually transformed. In the traditional worldview embedded in this folklore, those who dwell at the edges of human settlement—geographically or morally—become figures of uncanny influence, blurring the lines between human and other-than-human.

The Northern European outlaw was legally and ritually excluded from society. Such individuals were denied the protections of law and kinship, cast out to live in the wilderness, often for years. In realm of folklore, this juridical status takes on supernatural dimensions. Outlaws are frequently described as living in conditions of impossible isolation—deep in the mountains, forests, atop glaciers or highland plateaus, often in locales shrouded in mists or difficult to find by ordinary means. Travelers who encounter outlaw-dwellings experience confusion about where they are, how they arrived, or how time has passed, which are also classic markers of entry into the Otherworld.

Further still, outlaws often offer food and hospitality before requesting or compelling some favor from the visitor—help with a task, a promise, or a dangerous mission. In many areas of folk belief, to accept food in the Otherworld is often a binding act; we may ask whether this dynamic is at play here as well. Is this hospitality a spell of sorts, compelling the guest to stay or to serve? The frequent appearance of fog in tales involving outlaw encounters adds to the sense of enchantment and disorientation. Fog, in these stories, is not mere weather. It signals the thinning of the veil, the presence of spirits, and the intrusion of the uncanny.

These threads are also woven into depictions of witches from the some body of lore. Like outlaws, witches are often portrayed as living beyond the bounds of settled society—deep in forests, on barren heaths, or in solitary cottages far from human view. They, too, are frequently credited with supernatural power. The ability to lay curses, to predict the future, to bind or mislead others, or to shape fate through ritual means are all traits that appear in more witch-lore and outlaw-lore.

In many ways, the boundary between a witch and an outlaw is tenuous. Both may be feared and consulted in equal measure. Both are removed from normative society but retain, or even augment, their agency through this removal. The further they are from the human community, the closer they seem to draw to other realms: the land of the dead, the spirit world, or the domains of local nature spirits. The wilderness becomes a place of danger not merely because it lacks civilization, but because it teems with the supernatural…and those who survive or thrive there begin to resemble it.

What then can we conclude about folk belief and isolation from these parallels? Outlawry, in a folkloric sense, appears to be a transformation. It is not only a punishment but a rite of passage; one that strips the individual of social identity and replaces it with an ambiguous, potent, and sometimes terrifying spiritual one. The outlaw becomes a liminal figure, a walker between worlds, and thus acquires the traits of those worlds: secrecy, power, ambiguity, danger.

This transformation is mirrored in the witch. In many tales, the witch is not a figure who acquired her powers through formal training alone, but through separation: from church, from kin, from community. Isolation—whether chosen or imposed—seems to function as a magical mechanism in Northern European folklore. Removed from the structured rhythms of social life, the individual becomes sensitive to other forces. Spirits, nature, fate all draw closer. The individual no longer exists entirely within the human world and begins to resemble something else altogether.

The folkloric logic here is clear: to be separated from society is to approach the spirit world; to approach the spirit world is to become something like a spirit oneself. (Is this the Law of Contagion at play in folklore?) Whether outlaw or witch, the person who crosses into that marginal space begins to wield impossible power, which marks them as dangerous, uncanny, or sacred.

Ultimately, the figures of witch and outlaw in Northern European folklore invite us to reconsider what it means to be supernatural. These are not characters born with divine gifts or otherworldly parentage, but people transformed by circumstances of removal. To become magical is, in many of these stories, to become untethered. That untethering creates a space into which the spirit world flows. And once it does, the person ceases to be fully human.

This folklore teaches us something profound: that magic is not just about power, but about place. Not merely about ability, but about boundary. Witches, outlaws, and spirits all inhabit the edges and in doing so, they mirror one another.