A fair amount of Norse pagans use the term “völva” when referring to a person (usually a woman, but not always, I’ll write about that at some point too.) who practices magic. Often they specifically mean divination through animistic journeying. I’ve chosen not to use that word to describe myself for a lot of reasons.
Seiðkona is a word that means, basically, “seid-wife” or “seid-woman”, but doesn’t seem to be used as much. It seems to encompass all parts of seidr, not just journeys and divination.
Seiðr is the Old Norse word that often gets translated as “witchcraft”, and there are a lot of opinions about exactly what that entails. I’m not going to get super involved in the academic and reconstructionist discussions about the lore, but I am going to leave a couple of links at the end of this, so you can learn further if you want. I am absolutely not a reconstructionist (Hence the “modern” part), but I firmly believe that one cannot build a solid modern practice based in an old religion without knowing at least a little of what we know about how that practice worked.
What seiðr involves in the lore is everything from the aforementioned animistic journeying and what we would call today “energy healing”, to true divination, soul work and other spell work using herbs and words and intent.
Since I use all those things, especially energy healing and soul work, I’ve adopted seiðkona as my label of choice.
I say modern, because I see a lot of what I do, and what large swathes of paganism and the metaphysical communities are doing, as the same things my Germanic ancestors did, just with different names and through the lens of hundreds of years of Christianity and capitalism. I see this and I feel drawn to, maybe, explain how well some of these seemingly disparate ideas actually mesh together, even to the point of being indistinguishable, except by name.
So this, in a nutshell, is why I call myself Modern Seidkona. I look forward to sharing a lot more of my personal practice with you. 🙂
Rising Peace 
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