The Anxiety of Writing: A Reading of the Old English Journey Charm

The Old English Journey Charm is one of the twelve metrical charms¹ that have come down to us from this period. It is an appeal to the biblical patriarchs, the trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the evangelists for help and protection on a journey. The charm suggests that the speaker hopes for aid not only on a particular expedition on which he is about to set out, but throughout the journey of life. The prayer-like poem is intensified by the ritual of the speaker’s surrounding himself² with a rod to shield him against anything ranging from sore stitches to all evil in the land, as described at the beginning (Rodrigues 1993:156–57, lines 1–7):³

Ic me on þisse gyrde beluce and on godes helde bebeodewið þane sara stice, wið þane sara slege,wið þane grymma gryre,wið ðane micela egsa þe bið eghwam lað,and wið eal þæt lað þe in to land fare.Sygegealdor ic begale, sigegyrd ic me wege,wordsige and worcsige. Se me dege;

I encircle myself with this rod and entrust myself to God’s grace, against the sore stitch, against the sore bite, against the grim dread, against the great fear that is loathsome to everyone, and against all evil that enters the land. A victory charm I sing, a victory rod I bear, word-victory, work-victory. May they avail me;

The hope for protection against the potential dangers incurred on a journey by uttering magical words and drawing a shielding circle points to the charm’s explicitly performative and practical nature (Olsan 1999:401).⁴ Indeed, the term g(e)aldor used in line 6 (in the compound word sygegealdor) underlines the performative element of the charm as it derives from the verb galan, which means “to sing,” “to cry,” “to practice incantation” (Clark Hall 1960:147).⁵ According to Lori Garner (2004:20), the Old English charms therefore “require us to move beyond conventional text-based literary analysis and classification to apply performance-based approaches.” It is thus in performance that “the charm’s function as healing remedy becomes all-encompassing” (20). I quite agree that an analysis of the Old English charms profits considerably from a performance-based approach. However, in this article I want to examine what happens to the charm’s originally performative nature when it is brought to parchment. The process of writing down the charm, I maintain, weakens its protective or healing power that is most effective when performed. Moreover, in Journey Charm the scribe arguably incorporates an awareness of his own disempowering activity.

In a larger context, the charm is an example of what Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (1990:5) has termed transitional literacy, “a transitional state between orality and literacy” as she defines it. This phenomenon requires that we examine how a work was transmitted and received, which “admits into evidence manuscript, readers, textual variance and textual fixity, and situates the work in its proper historical context” (14). I would argue that transitional literacy also entails focusing on the anxiety caused by the largely incompatible relationship between the spoken and the written word. For even though the scribe writing down or copying a poem that had been transmitted orally was presumably familiar with its specifically oral characteristics and therefore did not consider them as something alien, he must have felt that there was a difference between the oral and literate word, precisely because he was accustomed to oral techniques.⁶ This sense of difference is acute when the gestures accompanying the original performance of the poem are described by the content of the text, and, more particularly still, when the speaking subject of these descriptions is the first person singular, as in the initial line of Journey Charm.

For my analysis of Journey Charm I am mainly interested in the manuscript, not only as physical evidence of transitional literacy but also in the literal sense of the word of writing by hand. Therefore my focus will be on the scribe’s relationship with the charm’s speaking subject that is silenced...