In Iceland children use a small knuckle-like bone from a leg of lamb, called a vala, to ask questions about the future, much as adults might consult a horoscope or open a fortune cookie. The children place the one-inch bone on the bridge of their noses or on their foreheads, depending on district customs. Reciting a thula, a rhymed incantation, taught by mothers and grandmothers (ammas) in the age-old ways oral tradition, they implore the bone - addressed as a spákona (woman of vision; soothsayer) or vala - to tell them the truth. A typical thula:
“Tell me now, my soothsayer,
what I ask you:
With gold shall I gladden you
and silver feed you,
if you tell me the truth,
but in fire shall I burn you
if you tell me a lie.”
The children drop their heads forward, allowing the bone to fall. If the part of the bone with a depression lands upright, the answer is no. When it's opposite side, the convexity - sometimes referred to as the horns - faces upward, the answer is yes. A vala lying on its side indicates maybe, some say. Others understand it to mean the vala doesn't know the answer or is saying, "It's none of your business." Occasionally the vala settles on end (shut up), and the questioner knows to stop asking immediately.
Some adults remember tossing the vala from their hands, as in dice games, having first rubbed it against their foreheads or used their palm to turn it in circles atop the head. Others were taught to simply throw it into the air and let it land.
One respondent to a 1973 National Museum of Iceland questionnaire on the use of animal bones as toys remembered holding the vala beneath her hand, on top of her head, and moving it "sunwise" (clockwise) in three circles - by ancient tradition a magic or sacred number - before letting it fall. Another recalled that it was the person who turned sunwise three times. For some the vala had to be asked three times. Unless the same answer was received each time, the prophecy was not true.
Apparently there are as many variations in the recitation as there are in the ways the vala is handled. Sometimes the incantation offers the spákona a king or a prince and his kingdom of she (spákona and vala are both feminine nouns) tells the truth. Other promises include gold in a shoe, swathing or covering the vala in silk, giving her a piece of fat or meat, and offering the vala both a block of butter from the churn and red toys.
In addition to being cast into the fire if she lies, some also threaten to throw the ashes on the dunghill. Another variation tells the spákona she will be placed in the cream tub for telling the truth but put into the urine barrel for lying, referring to a time when human an animal urine was collected and used for washing woodland, sometimes, for washing women's hair. Later the threat was changed to being drowned, or choked, in the night pot, or chamber pot.
Actually the vala was seldom rewarded or punished, although one eastern Icelandic woman remembered an
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