Furies, Monks, and Folklore in the Earliest Miracula of Saint Swithun

On July 15, 971, eager crowds looked on as the remains of St. Swithun, a previously obscure ninth-century bishop of Winchester, were elevated from their resting place outside the western door of the Old Minster (Winchester Cathedral) and transferred to an impressive shrine inside the church, near the high altar.¹ Soon the celebrity of Swithun’s relics—both his body within the church and his former tomb outside it—would draw countless pilgrims to the city and lead to major expansions of the Old Minster.² About the translation of the relics and the miracles that accompanied it we are richly informed, thanks to two accounts written by members of the Old Minster community. Soon after the ceremony, between 972 and 974, a visiting foreign monk named Lantfred composed a lengthy Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni in ornate Latin prose.³ Later, in the 990s, another monk of the Old Minster, Wulfstan of Winchester, turned Lantfred’s prose into nearly 3,400 lines of Latin verse, the Narratio metrica de S. Swithuno. In substance his work closely follows Lantfred’s, but the poem adds some fascinating details, including an eyewitness account of the translation ceremony (I.789-896).⁴

Michael Lapidge has published definitive editions of both these texts, with commentary to illustrate the impressive learning of Lantfred and Wulfstan. Building on Lapidge’s work, the present study concerns one memorable scene, recorded by both hagiographers, in which a man of Winchester encounters three terrifying female figures, two of whom are compared to the Furies of classical myth. Among the dozens of stories that make up Swithun’s early miracula, this one deserves to be better known by students of Anglo-Saxon folklore and Old English lexicography.⁵ As Lapidge suggests, beneath the Latin reference to “Furies” may lie important evidence for Anglo-Saxon popular belief in a kind of supernatural female known to us otherwise from a small group of rare, difficult terms in Old English. My aim is to extend Lapidge’s arguments for a folkloric reading of the Fury scene (as I will call it) and to sort out, along the way, what the hagiographers’ descriptions owe to classical and Christian sources as well.⁶ A comparative approach to the episode will shed light on the Old English lexical evidence and, more importantly, on deeper connections between this tenth-century Anglo-Saxon account and other stories of the supernatural recorded in Latin, Celtic, and Romance sources that postdate Lantfred and Wulfstan by at least a century. Viewed within the longer history of such accounts, the episode in Swithun’s miracula appears all the more remarkable for its early date and for its contribution to the growing evidence of continuities across early European traditions about the otherworld.

It will be helpful to begin with a review of the relevant passages from Lantfred’s Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni and to offer a brief methodological rationale.⁷ Thereafter I consider in turn the classical, hagiographic, and folkloric dimensions of the scene. Such a stepwise approach is an artificial convenience; in actuality, those three dimensions cannot always be neatly distinguished, and this fact itself has implications to which I will return.

I. THE FURIES OF WINCHESTER AND ANGLO-SAXON POPULAR BELIEFS

Lantfred and Wulfstan begin their series of miracles with three complex stories leading up to the ceremonial translation.⁸ My concern is with the opening scene in Chapter Three, the last of these preliminary miracles. Its setting, described with some precision, is a field outside Winchester next to a river on a summer day in 971, roughly two weeks before the translation of Swithun’s relics.⁹ An unnamed male citizen of the town ventures out to fields nearby in order to check on his mules at pasture.¹⁰ Arriving exhausted, he lies down in the mid-day heat and sleeps for a time. Upon waking, he begins the walk back to town, following the course of the river. For the events that ensue, I quote in slightly abridged form Lapidge’s translation of Lantfred’s prose...