This dissertation concerns legends of witches from fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century Scandinavia. My aim is to demonstrate that the figure of the witch was deeply meaningful and spoke in the symbolic language of legends to anxieties surrounding womanhood, motherhood, and the social power of women to construct and maintain communities. In particular, I investigate several productive motifs and motif-complexes, including “edible witchcraft,” shapeshifting, and magical milk-theft, showing how these tropes inform the construction of the witch figure as an anti-neighbor, anti-human, anti-wife, and anti-mother. I focus on how witchcraft legends functioned especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in two sites that each offer different types of sources for these legends: Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost province, and Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea that has since 1645 been a province of Sweden, and which previously was part of the Danish empire (as was the whole of Norway, from the sixteenth century until 1814). In Finnmark, I focus on the documentation of a series of witch trials that occurred over the course of the seventeenth century, Norway’s worst outbreak of witch trials and on par, in terms of execution ratios, with the worst in Continental Europe during the whole period of witch trials (roughly the 1420s to 1700). On Gotland, I focus on visual evidence: church murals, dating to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, that feature a legendary character known in English as the “milk-stealing witch” (in Swedish she is instead more typically called tjuvmjölkande kvinnan, ‘the milk-stealing woman’). I draw also on legends recorded by folklorists in later centuries, especially, in the case of Gotland, on the legends and beliefs collected in the nineteenth century on the island by the enterprising P. A. Säve. I do not seek to present these sites as a comparison, but rather seek to demonstrate how the witch emerged in localized legends, at different times and in different genres, and yet drew on common tropes and motifs to explore similar themes of gender and social power.