The extant manuscripts from early medieval England include a set of short, metrical compositions written in vernacular Old English and referred to as ‘magical charms.’ Instructive in nature, the English people recited these poetic compositions orally, guided by a practitioner of magic. Whether seeking a cure for a small boil, a severe illness, or to find one’s missing cattle, the early English turned to magical charms for reprieve from misfortune in appealing to the transcendent power of magic. Old English charms contain traces of both Anglo-Saxon paganism and Christianity due to the influence of Christian missionaries on local cultures. The charms ‘For Theft of Cattle’ and ‘The Nine Herbs Charm’ exemplify how paganistic language was substituted for Latin incantations and references to biblical figures. Through mass conversion efforts, missionaries identified the  local customs,  taking advantage of pre-existing belief systems, to redirect the notion of magical efficacy to assume the power of Jesus Christ. Christian elements were strategically replaced by paganism in magical charms to associate native practices with the effective nature of devotional Christianity. Modern scholars have put forward evidence of certain magical remedies as effective against medical ailments, proving that charms had real value in society; therefore, missionaries had motives for the use of the in conversion efforts. Magical charms inhabited an overlapping space between the poetic and the practical, the mystical and the mundane, emphasizing the early English value of relying on higher, otherworldly powers for solutions and how this reliance was translated to Christian monotheism.

 

While the Old English metrical charms are associated with magic in the modern sense of the word—with references to the supernatural—they had practical, medical purposes for their original users. Most of the charms survive in two medical compendiums dating from the second half of the tenth century, which currently reside in the British Museum: Bald’s Leech Book and the Lacnunga. The former is a medical document compiled by a physician, while the latter is a mishmash of charms, medical texts, and Latin prayers. Magical charms occupy a space between the practical and the literary wherein “words are empowered and enhanced, carrying a stronger value than normal, since they are not only expressive but also performative, bringing with them consequences and results as soon as the words themselves are uttered” (Tornaghi). Charms often contain multiple sections with separate agendas. A charm could have a prosaic set of instructions for preparing the cure to an ailment and a poetic portion with typical Old English rhyming and alliteration that would have been orally incanted, “the first gathering or creating the power or force to be expended in the second” (Weston). A practitioner of magic—ambiguously known as shamans, sorcerers, magicians, etc.— would guide the sufferer through the incantation, acting as a “mediator between the material world and the magic one, where words evoked are able to change the state of things” (Tornaghi). The practice of charm magic empowered the average person to have a perceived effect on something out of their control in a time before the standardization of medical practices and the presence of scientific knowledge. The instructive sections work in tandem with the incantatory sections to provide a solution to a practical goal while invoking an otherworldly efficacy onto reality. 

 

In the early stages of the Christian conversion effort, missionaries adopted a fragile tolerance toward native Germanic paganism in England, reappropriating pagan customs and practitioners into a Christian context. Early Christians in England did not condemn paganism outright, even though “they were necessarily opposed to the conspicuous forms of heathendom” (Grendon). Instead, their “first attitude towards popular beliefs and superstitious healing was one of discreet conciliation. They assaulted beliefs, but respected customs” (Grendon). For example, the Germanic practice of dipping new-borns into running water to ensure good fortune morphed into the baptismal practice of pouring water over an infant’s head (Grendon). Christians tolerated a hybrid intermixing of Christian and pagan rites, acknowledging the existence of other gods but denying them the true divinity of the Christian God. Missionaries even recruited practitioners of ‘heathen’ magic to the Christian priesthood, and “these convert priests, nevertheless, continued in sympathy with the more deeply-rooted practices of their countrymen. They realized the power and fascination which spells, for instance, exerted on the popular mind: hence they sought to reconcile charm magic with the Christian faith” (Grendon). Heathen priests, while outwardly presenting as Christian, continued to manufacture amulets and employ tree, stone, and water charms of natural pagan spirits.  During this period, before the legislative denunciation of pagan practices, ancient rites and magic charms walked a fine line between being conspicuously Christian or pagan. Before sorcerers were punished for their connections to Germanic paganism, Christian missionaries infiltrated England gradually, taking advantage of existing local practices to further their own agenda.

 

Magical charms and the rituals associated with their practices were ripe for Christians to use them to alter how the English people perceived religion through the substitution of pagan deities for biblical figures. Tornaghi asserts that charms are essential in understanding the evolution of religious thought in the minds of the early English, since:

“Pagan elements in magic texts tend to be replaced by Christian elements, which 

are often conceptually similar and, moreover, charms are often copied in 

manuscripts together with religious texts written for a Christian clergy in order to 

be divulged to a Christian audience. Whoever used magic texts, regarded them 

as consistent with the view of the world and the whole of Christian values” 

(Tornaghi).

For instance, invocations to Norse or other pagan deities may have originally inhabited spots in charms where saints and the apostles are mentioned. To support this widely accepted theory,  “a German manuscript of the thirteenth century contains specific directions to pastors for dealing with popular charm remedies and for altering names in invocations to the autochthonic gods” (Grendon), which may point to this practice as existing long before then. Other pagan beings, such as the Valkyries, night-creatures, elves, and dwarves, were vilified by Christian missionaries and/or replaced with references to Satan or the devil. Spirits and creatures that were forces for good as well as evil in paganism did not have the potential to be benevolent in the eyes of Christian missionaries; all supernatural forces were mischievous, disease-causing, sinful fiends, and “one of the best examples is that of chicken-pox, waeterælfadle, deemed to be caused by the water elf” (Tornaghi). The nature of magical charms as incantatory and appealing to higher powers matches the Christian agenda of prayer to God as affecting a positive outcome in one’s life, and so missionaries only had to alter the details within this framework to recontextualize and reuse tools the English people already had at their disposal and had put their faith behind.

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Although the degree to which Christians tampered with magical charms remains an enigma, we can examine the extant charms analogous to one another to ascertain possible strategies for censorship and points of editorial erasure. The charm entitled ‘For Theft of Cattle’ is intended to be incanted in the instance that one’s cattle has been stolen, one of a few different charms dealing with cattle and containing the specific allusion to the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem. This technique compares the theft to the renowned birth of Christ, in that, through this charm, the theft will become widely known. Even though there are no pagan elements to this charm, “the text reveals a purely mythical and magical sensitivity, because the edifying aspect of the Holy Scriptures or the Christian legendary texts is not implied in the evocation” (Tornaghi). With a lack of a moral or didactic purpose for the mention of Christ’s birth and subsequent death on the cross—and if we assume that missionaries were the ones responsible for either the creation or rewriting of this charm—then the English people would come to associate the same sort of magical efficacy to be had in their other charms in a new Christian context. The missionaries may have opted for a gradual introduction to Christ and the biblical narrative without didactic rhetoric at first in order to ease the English peoples into familiarity with this new religion. The prosaic, instructory section includes incantatory Latin text, and it deals with the cross of Christ being hidden and found much like the intended goal to locate the missing cattle. The inclusion of the allusion to Christ through Latin text intensifies the charm, since “the exotic, ritualistic sound of Latin was, no doubt, intended as much to differentiate the language of the Charms from ordinary speech as to intensify the power of the charm itself” (Vaughn-Sterling). The English people would have been unfamiliar with the foreign language of Latin, and so its inclusion—as well as the repetitive nature of the incantation on a syntax level—would have made the charm more unique and perhaps more mystical in addition to the novel biblical allusion.

 

Another magical charm with content suggestive of Christian influence is the ‘Nine Herbs Charm,’ which presents an anomaly with a reference to Christ coming directly after a reference to the Norse deity Woden. While open to interpretation whether or not this was a mistake on the scribe’s part or an intentional choice by the missionaries themselves, there are clues in the text’s diction to support the idea that the addition of Christ was  a replacement for Woden not carried through the entire piece. In Banham’s translation, Woden attacks an adder, cutting it into nine pieces; in the lines afterward, two herbs are listed and there is a description of how “the wise Lord created these plants, / holy in the heavens, when he hung, / set and sent them into seven worlds / for poor and wealthy, a remedy for all.” The identity of this ‘Lord’ is ambiguous, especially when considering the reference to how “Christ stood above the old things in a unique way” (Banham) in a later line; however, the words ‘when he hung’ may provide a hint.

 

According to Banham, “this may refer to the crucifixion, but Odin, the Norse counterpart of Woden, was believed to have received wisdom while hanging upside down. There is no other evidence that the pagan Anglo-Saxons believed the same of Woden, but this passage may suggest a folk memory of such a story.” If we introduce the possibility that the ‘Lord’ may refer to Woden, or may have initially referred to Woden before referring to Christ, then this supports the theory that Christian missionaries used deep set associations and cultural knowledge of the pagan gods to introduce Christianity to the early English people. This enigmatic mixture of pagan and Christian symbols and figures reflects the hybridity of rituals at the time, and, in his letters, St. Boniface “bitterly laments the confusion of the ancient and the new rites, and declares that ‘foolish, reckless, or guilty priests are to blame’” (Grendon). The mystery of Woden and Christ in the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ is impossible to solve definitively, but, if present evidence is accepted, it suggests the amalgamation of paganism and Christianity in ritual practice. On a surface level, it appears to be a mistake on the scribe’s part, yet, upon investigation, details  suggest the tampering of an original pagan charm, adding Christ but leaving the reference to Woden in the attempt to ease conversion.

 

Besides the religious intersection at play, the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ also contains valuable insight concerning how the early English people may have viewed magical practices based on  literary techniques, such as point-of-view and references to past events. The charm directly addresses the herbs in the second person, referencing them as ‘you’, which implies that each one is its own entity with identifying characteristics and qualities. For the plantain herb, the narrative voice states that “carts have rumbled over you, queens have ridden over you, / brides have trodden over you, bulls have snorted over you; / you withstood everything then, and you crashed against everything, so may you withstand poison and what flies in” (Banham). This, paired with the references to Woden and Christ, underscore that “the emphasis is on the past and identification with a past, archetypal moment of power, rather than innate potential” (Weston). In a similar vein to the allusion of Christ in the ‘For Theft of Cattle’ charm, the voice associates a past occurrence with the present potential of the charm to affect its surroundings. Evidently, there is a tendency to relay a sense of the timelessness and universal nature of magic. The ‘For Theft of Cattle’ charm emphasizes its own far-reaching potential with the allusion of Christ’s renowned birth while the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ asserts how every social class has come into contact with the herbs on the ground, essentially equalizing the effect of herbal magic on all persons and stating that particular herb’s ability to withstand all duress. The charms reach into the past and allude to well-known mythologies in order to increase the potency of the charm and create a relatability with the user to breed faith in the charm’s magic.

 

Alongside literary techniques, the parallel syntax and structural format of charms emphasize the early English conception of effective magic as reliant on repetitive diction. The ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ contains such repetitive syntactical and structural elements. After a listing of the various herbs, there is a section where the speaker lists the nine poisons the herbs are effective against. The inclusion of each poison suggests that the orator would ensure another degree of protection against any harm that may come to the user of the charm, and the structure of these lines as repetitive with ‘against... against... against’ only enhances the ability of the charm, “using words to spellbind malignant, wild forces into the more predictable pattern represented by the Old English poetic line” (Paz). Incantors could obtain some semblance of control over the natural world through the command of language by asserting a formal structure on abstract concepts, and this is also evident in the separation between the incantation and instructory portions of the charm. There is a clear “bipartite division” wherein “the first half... raises the power; the second...directs the power” (Weston). The repetition and list structure in the first half builds magical potency which is then released when the user carries out the instructions of the prose section. The first half contains more repetition and parallel syntax, since it is intended to be incanted orally, most likely by the magic practitioner in a sing-song, whimsical manner; the second half would most likely have been confined to the page or given to the user in a subdued manner. The repetition of certain words in charms, such as ‘against’ in the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’, as well as structural intentionality enhances the building of verbal tension to translate to an orally-efficacious magic in these incantatory sections.

 

The disparity between the poetry and prose of the Old English magical charms highlights a neglect in scholarship to consider the practical value of the remedies in these charms. That certain remedies work scientifically proves that early English people relied on these charms to solve real issues with practical solutions, and this reliance was then taken advantage of by Christian missionaries to further their own agenda. According to Cameron, “[lily and shoot of elder] are known today to be effective against tumours, used in the same way as recommended in the Old English recipe,” and “ashes of hart's horn (calcined hart's horn) was a common source of ammonium salts in ancient and medieval times, and with vinegar formed ‘smelling salts’, giving off the vapour of ammonia” which is a treatment for headache. The real value of these remedies for symptom relief—even if they were not necessarily curative—indicates that the early English people had a system of remedies that worked at least some of the time. For historical peoples, some of the time would have certainly been better than all of the time, allowing for a margin of error for charms that have no practical, real-world value but instead serve a purely magical or literary purpose, such as ‘For Theft of Cattle.’It is not only the possible effectiveness of the remedies that contributed to the early English use of magical charms, but a combination of these outcomes with the mystical act of incanting the charm that would breed reassurance into what might be perceived as a dire, life-or-death situation (certainly in the case of fatal diseases). The goal of Christian missionaries was to translate the reassuring and comforting aspect of magical charms to relate to the power of the Christian God and Jesus Christ, thereby transferring faith in pagan magical practices to faith in their new, introduced religion.

 

Old English metrical charms contain traces of both Anglo-Saxon paganism and the monotheism of Christianity, employing both poetic and practical value as simultaneous magical and medicinal texts. The hybrid nature of these charms point to the influence of Christian missionaries, and their probable goal of redirecting magical efficacy to the power of Jesus Christ. The nature of religious substitution suggests the lasting prevalence these charms possessed in early English society, in that Christian missionaries recognized the value of local customs and incorporated them into their practices to facilitate conversion efforts. Although we may never truly know the degree of prevalence of these charms throughout all of early England, the fact that Christian missionaries deemed them important enough to be tampered with is testimony to how the English people relied on practitioners of magic to aid in their otherwise unsolvable everyday problems.