Anglo-Saxon Charms in Performance

Providing explicit ritual instructions alongside verbal incantations, the Old English healing charms offer us a relatively rare glimpse of poetry in performance in the Anglo-Saxon world. The well-studied verse incantations as well as the lesser known non-metrical remedies functioned as part of rituals performed to cure disease, improve crops, and even return lost or stolen property. Lea Olsan has noted that "unlike epic poetry, riddles, or lyrics, charms are performed toward specific practical ends" and "their mode of operation is performative" (1999:401). Scribes often underscored the importance of performance by stating explicitly that an incantation be spoken (cwean) or sung (singan). As John Niles reminds us, the modern usage of the term "charm" is perhaps too limited for conveying the importance of performance in these solemn rites of healing. The native term gealdor (or galdor),¹ with its broader semantic range, more explicitly denotes performance, deriving from the verb galan, which means "to sing," "to enchant," "to cry out aloud" (Niles 1999:27).

Because they are so deeply rooted in their performance context, the Old English charms require us to move beyond conventional text-based literary analysis and classification to apply performance-based approaches that allow us to examine the charms on their own terms. Taken collectively, the charms blur distinctions between the oral and the literate, the Christian and the Germanic, the metrical and the non-metrical, the poetic and the practical, even the sensical and non-sensical. In performance, the charm's function as healing remedy becomes all-encompassing, and once-familiar dichotomies quickly break down, revealing insightful intersections between categories that might at first seem mutually exclusive. In many significant ways, awareness of performance contexts allows us to transcend potentially reductive binaries and thus enhance our understanding of these complex texts. What follows is an exploration of several such binaries: living ritual/static text, poetry/science, verbal/nonverbal, "pagan"/Christian. In each case metrical charms will be examined alongside non-metrical analogues to gain a more complete understanding of the tradition as a whole.

Living Ritual/Static Text

The first and perhaps greatest challenge confronting any modern reader of the charms involves bridging the gap between their original performance context and their current manuscript form, a difficult task when dealing with any oral-derived text, but especially so in this case. The body of texts known collectively as "charms" are actually scattered across at least twenty-three manuscripts (Storms 1948:25-26) and are anything but uniform in the way they have been preserved in writing. A relatively small number, such as the "Æcerbot" ("Land-remedy" charm), include detailed directions for ceremonial ritual and corresponding incantations in what appear to be full form (Dobbie 1942:116-18).²

Typically, however, the performance cues are more cryptic. For instance, some of the charms, such as the so-called "Journey Charm," include lengthy incantations with no directions for performance or even a title indicating a clear purpose (Dobbie 1942:126-28).³ Others include elaborate ritual instructions with no verbal element, such as a remedy to cure wens (tumors or cysts) that requires a woman to draw cups of water from a spring running east and pour the cups into other vessels in order to bring about a cure (more below). Still others have neither clear performance instructions nor decipherable incantations. A charm marked in its manuscript as a remedy "Wi eofentum" ("Against theft"), for example, includes no directions but only a brief incantation that is dismissed by many as "gibberish" or "nonsense"⁴ (Storms 1948:303):⁵

Luben luben niga efi niga efi fel ceid fel delf fel cumer orcggaei ceufor dard giug farig pidig delou delupih.

Despite its lack of any discernible meaning at a lexical level, however, this chant has a meaning that would have been very powerful within its original performance context.⁶ In its function as remedy, it does not differ radically from other charms that...