Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Old English Metrical Charm

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An Old English metrical charm is an Anglo-Saxon healing or land-blessing formula preserved in verse, combining a spoken text with a prescribed physical act, an offering buried in a field, an ointment applied while the words are recited. None of the three recorded here, the Nine Herbs Charm, Wið Færstice and the field-blessing Æcerbot, survive as living practice; they are known only through the manuscripts that preserved them, chiefly the tenth century Lacnunga.

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Three Old English Verse Charms Preserved in the British Library

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Old English Metrical Charm gathers three of the atlas's Old English charms, verse remedies preserved in manuscripts now in the British Library, and together they are the standard exhibit for what survived of pre Christian belief in written English and what that survival actually means.

Æcerbot, a remedy for land that will not yield, is the most elaborate and the most thoroughly churched of the three: turf is cut and taken to a church, masses are sung over it and Latin prayers said before it is returned to the ground, and within that Christian frame the charm still addresses the earth itself, including a figure called Erce, named as the mother of earth and otherwise unattested in any surviving text. The Nine Herbs Charm, preserved in the Lacnunga, addresses nine plants one by one and then narrates Woden striking a serpent with nine glory twigs so that it flew into nine pieces; it is one of an extremely small number of Old English texts naming Woden outside royal genealogies, and it names Christ in the same composition.

Wið Færstice, against a sudden sharp pain, is the most discussed of the three and one of the very few Old English poems in which pre Christian material appears without an obvious Christian frame around it, describing the pain as a projectile sent by riders and mighty women and smiths at work, before turning the projectile back on whatever sent it. Read together, the three charms show Old English verse magic surviving mostly inside a Christian frame, with Wið Færstice the clearest exception rather than the rule.

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