Woden, Christ and Nine Plants

The charm addresses nine plants in turn, telling each what it prevails against, and then breaks into narrative: Woden took nine glory-twigs and struck the serpent, and it flew into nine parts. Christ is named elsewhere in the same text. Neither presence is a gloss added by a later hand; both are in the composition as it stands.

That is the whole of its importance and the whole of its difficulty. Written references to Woden in Old English are extremely rare outside royal genealogies, where he functions as a dynastic ancestor rather than as a god who does anything. Here he acts. He is the agent of the charm's central event, and the event has the shape of a myth rather than of a saint's miracle. A text in an eleventh century Christian medical manuscript is transmitting a story about a heathen god, evidently without difficulty.

Attempts to resolve this by declaring the charm either fundamentally pagan or fundamentally Christian have not been persuasive in either direction, because the text does not behave as though it contains a conflict. The more useful reading, and the one most current scholarship takes, is that the categories are the modern reader's rather than the compiler's, and that a remedy could draw on whatever had authority without its user experiencing that as syncretism.