The charm is short and its imagery is concentrated. A pain arrives suddenly and sharply. The verse says that they were loud as they rode over the mound, that mighty women sent their spears, and that the speaker will send another back. It names three sources for the shot, in a sequence: the ese, meaning gods; the ylfe, meaning elves; and the haegtessan, a word usually rendered as hags or witches. It also has smiths sitting and forging small iron, which is either where the shot came from or where the countermeasure does.
The manuscript sets the verse beside a herbal preparation, in the ordinary manner of the Lacnunga, which does not separate plant medicine from charm and prayer. This atlas does not reproduce that preparation. What is worth recording is the arrangement itself: the compiler saw no boundary between the plants and the words, and a modern reader who separates them is imposing a distinction the source does not make.
The three named sources of harm are the reason the charm is quoted so heavily. Elsewhere in Old English, elves are shadowy. Here they appear in a working medical text, alongside gods and hags, as a recognised cause of a specific complaint, which is a far stronger kind of evidence than a poetic mention.