Nine Herbs Charm

The "Nine Herbs Charm" is an Old English charm recorded in the tenth-century CE[1] Anglo-Saxon medical compilation known as Lacnunga, which survives on in the manuscript London, British Library, Harley 585.[2] The charm involves the preparation of nine plants. The numbers nine and three, significant in Germanic paganism and later Germanic folklore, are mentioned frequently within the charm.[2] The poem contains references to Christian and English Pagan elements, including a mention of the major Germanic god Woden.

According to R. K. Gordon, the poem is "clearly an old heathen thing which has been subjected to Christian censorship."[1] Malcolm Laurence Cameron states that chanting the poem aloud results in a "marvellously incantatory effect".[3]

Poem contents

Plants

The charm refers to at least nine plants. Scholars have proposed various translations for the plant names, including the following:

At the end of the charm, prose instructions are given to take the above-mentioned plants, crush them to dust, and to mix them with old soap and apple residue. Further instructions are given to make a paste from water and ashes, boil fennel into the paste, bathe it with beaten egg – both before and after the prepared salve is applied.

Further, the charm directs the reader to sing the charm three times over each of the herbs as well as the apple before they are prepared, into the mouth of the wounded, both of their ears, and over the wound itself prior to the application of the salve.

Woden

The poem contains one of two clear Old English mentions of Woden in Old English poetry; the other is Maxims I of the Exeter Book. The paragraph reads as follows:

A snake came crawling, it bit a man.
Then Woden took nine glory-twigs,
Smote the serpent so that it flew into nine parts.
There apple brought this pass against poison,
That she nevermore would enter her house.[1]

Suggestions have been made that this passage describes Woden coming to the assistance of the herbs through his use of nine twigs, each twig inscribed with the runic first-letter initial of a plant.[4]

See also

Notes
  1. Gordon (1962:92–93).
  2. Macleod (2006:127).
  3. Cameron (1993:144).
  4. Mayr-Harting (1991:27).

References
  • Cameron, Malcolm Laurence (1993). Anglo-Saxon Medicine. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40521-1
  • Gordon, R. K. (1962). Anglo-Saxon Poetry. Everyman's Library #794. M. Dent & Sons, LTD.
  • Macleod, Mindy; Mees, Bernard (2006). Runic Amulets and Magic Objects. Boydell Press. ISBN 1-84383-205-4
  • Mayr-Harting, Henry (1991). The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. Penn State Press ISBN 0-271-00769-9
  • This charm is edited, annotated and linked to digital images of its manuscript pages, with translation, in the Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project: https://uw.digitalmappa.org/58
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