The Nine Herbs Charm

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.

A charm that names nine plants invites the question of what they were, and there have been many attempts to answer it, some of them keen to show that the remedy would have worked. The attempt runs into a hard limit. Old English plant names do not map cleanly onto modern species. A name may cover several plants, or may have shifted its reference between the writing of one manuscript and another, and the medical manuscripts themselves are not consistent.

Some of the nine are secure enough. Mucgwyrt is mugwort and wegbrade is the plant still called waybread or plantain; fille and finule are generally taken as chervil and fennel. Others are not. Maegde is usually identified with mayweed or camomile and attorlathe, whose name means poison-loather, has attracted several proposals without settling on one. Stune and wergulu have no agreed identification at all, and the atlas records that as an open gap rather than adopting a guess.

The consequence is that the charm cannot be assessed as pharmacology, and treating it that way misdescribes it in any case. Each plant is addressed and told what it can do. The remedy operates by speech directed at the plant as much as by anything the plant contains, and a modern account that keeps only the botany has removed the part the text spends most of its words on.