'Charms', Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England by Ciaran Arthur (review)

Having heard Ciaran Arthur present his studies on Anglo-Saxon charms (back then without the scare quotes), I was very excited to learn that he has published a full monograph on the topic. And I, for one, am very pleased by the result: Arthur's new publication is fresh, original, provocative, and well presented. It is also timely; for even if charm studies are very much alive and strong at the moment, and one hardly sees a medieval charms paper without the manuscript context being discussed, Arthur's work develops the study of the manuscript contexts into a full argument about textual genres.

One might wonder why Arthur has chosen to include those scare quotes around the word "charm" in his title. This becomes very evident already in the Introduction as Arthur states that his book "offers a re-evaluation of the concept of'charms' in Anglo-Saxon culture and proposes an alternative reading of these rituals as mainstream Christian rites." He then lists three principal issues that his publication engages with: 1) "the translation of the Old English noun 'galdor' as 'charm'"; 2) "the manuscript contexts of rituals that are included in this corpus"; and 3) "the phenomenon of'gibberish' writing that is used as a defining characteristic of'charms'" (2).

Plenty of water has flowed under the bridge since the antiquarian Thomas Oswald Cockayne completed his three-volume work Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England in 1866. As Arthur relates, Cockayne identified a total of thirty-two rituals from ten Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as belonging to the "charm" tradition (3). After this, as is shown in Arthur's overview of the historiography of the genre, scholars have added more rituals to this corpus. In short, traditional "understandings of'charms' have imposed connotations of magic, paganism, occultism, and superstition onto definitions of the Old English galdor" (17). Arthur endeavours to set the record straight by going back to the primary texts and contexts—both the manuscript contexts and the greater historical milieu in which these texts were written down by the medieval scribes—in order to argue that "'charms' were written down as experimental Christian rituals in late Anglo-Saxon England." According to Arthur, once these texts are read in their proper manuscript contexts, they "raise critical questions about Anglo-Saxon paganism, and they offer important insights into early English Christianity" (2).

Arthur's book is divided into three parts according to the three core issues ofhis study, the first ofwhich engages with the translation ofthe Old English noun galdor (pl. galdru) as "charm." In Chapter 1, "Kill or Cure: Anglo-Saxon Understanding of Galdor," Arthur explores the different non-ritual texts which use this word. Given that the Toronto Dictionary of Old English offers a wealth of definitions for the word galdor (including "poem," "song," "incantation," "charm," "spell," "illusion," "deception," "snake-charmer," "enchanter," "wizard," "divination," "soothsaying," "prophesying," "necromancy," "communication with the dead," "sorcery," and "sound/call of a horn"), I salute Arthur for having risen to the challenge of thoroughly investigating the instances in which the word actually appears and how the AngloSaxon scribes used it (21). This emic approach is not always covered in scholarship—even though, in my opinion, it is crucial in studying charms (or "charms") in any given language group at an any given time period.

Arthur thus ploughs through examples in which the word galdor appears. The non-condemnatory instances of using the word (outside the actual ritual use) are found in saints' lives, wisdom poems, two riddles, and in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, where galdor is used to describe "the sound of a horn in battle and a supernatural barrier that protects the dragon's hoard" (24). According to Arthur, most surviving appearances of galdor (this means over one hundred...