The Merseburg Charms: Text and Meaning

What was actually found

The manuscript is an ordinary piece of church property: a ninth-century collection of theological material, liturgical and sacramental, of the kind any cathedral chapter would own. At the end of one section the scribe reached the bottom of the text and left the rest of the leaf blank.

Someone — we do not know who, and we do not know exactly when, though the hand points to the ninth or tenth century — used that blank space to write down two charms in the vernacular. Not in Latin. Not in the careful book hand of the main text. Two short poems in the language people actually spoke, on a page in a Christian manuscript, naming gods the Church had spent generations trying to displace.

That fact alone is the most interesting thing about them. Whoever wrote them was literate, had access to a cathedral manuscript, and considered these formulas worth preserving. Whether they were copied as living practice, as antiquarian curiosity, or as something a cleric wanted recorded before it vanished, nobody can say — and the honest scholarship does not pretend to.

The codex stayed in Merseburg. In 1841 Georg Waitz, cataloguing the library, noticed the two stray poems. He passed them to Jacob Grimm, who presented them to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin the following year. Grimm had spent decades arguing that traces of pre-Christian Germanic religion survived in language and folk custom, and had been working largely from indirect evidence. This was direct evidence, and he knew immediately what he was holding.

The first charm: loosing the fetters

The shorter of the two. It describes female beings — the Idisi — settling in groups, and it distinguishes what different groups of them do: some fasten bonds, some hinder an army, some loosen the fetters of the bound. The charm closes by commanding the bound one to escape the shackles and flee the enemy.

The Idisi appear nowhere else in Old High German. The name is generally connected with the Old Norse dísir, a class of female powers associated with fate and protection, and comparisons are often drawn to the valkyries, though the identification is not secure. What the charm shows plainly is a functioning idea of female supernatural beings with power over binding and release, active on a battlefield — a religious world sketched in four or five lines and attested nowhere else in the language.

The second charm: bone to bone

This is the famous one. The scene: Phol and Wodan are riding in a wood, and a horse — usually read as Balder's foal — wrenches its foot. A sequence of goddesses tries to charm it: Sinthgunt and her sister Sunna, then Frija and her sister Volla. None succeeds. Then Wodan charms it, and the text notes that he could do so as well as anyone could.

The charm then turns from story to instruction, with a triple formula that matches like to like: bone set to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb — ben zi bena, bluot zi bluoda — and ends by declaring them joined.

The structure is the technique. Tell a story in which a god performed the cure; then apply that story to the horse standing in front of you. Scholars call the narrative part a historiola, and it is one of the most widespread devices in European magical practice. The logic is precedent: this has been done before, by a greater power, so let it be done again here.

The charm is older than the manuscript

The strongest evidence that the second charm preserves genuinely archaic material is that it is not unique. The same structure — a divine or holy figure encounters an injured horse, attempts a cure, and applies a like-to-like joining formula — turns up across an enormous range.

• European folk tradition. Horse-healing charms with the same shape were collected in Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Netherlands and the German-speaking lands into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by which point the divine actors had usually been replaced by Christ and an apostle.
• The Atharvaveda. The Sanskrit collection, far older, contains healing charms that join marrow to marrow, joint to joint, flesh to flesh in the same additive pattern.
• Later Germanic literature. Related joining formulas appear in Old English and Old Norse healing material.

The comparative spread does not prove a single common ancestor — charm formulas travel well and can be reinvented, because the underlying idea of joining like to like is not hard to arrive at independently. But the parallels are close enough that the Merseburg text is generally treated as a late written record of something considerably older than the page it sits on.

Why these two texts carry so much weight

Almost everything commonly known about Germanic myth comes from Iceland, was written in Old Norse, and was recorded by Christians in the thirteenth century — Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda above all. That material is invaluable and it is also late, geographically specific, and filtered through an author writing about a religion nobody around him practised.

Continental Germanic religion — what people believed in what is now Germany, the Netherlands and Austria — left almost nothing in its own voice. Conversion there was earlier and more thorough. We have Latin accounts by churchmen describing practices they wanted suppressed, place names, a handful of inscriptions, and archaeology.

And we have these two poems. That is why a few dozen lines on a spare leaf occupy so much space in the scholarship: they are, effectively, the whole of the direct evidence for continental Germanic religious language.

The charms in modern practice

The second charm in particular has had a vigorous afterlife. It is recited at ceremonies in Heathen and Ásatrú communities, including in the United States, where Norse-derived Heathenry has been a recognised religious movement since the 1970s; it has been set to music by folk and neofolk groups; and the historiola-plus-formula structure survives in living folk healing traditions across German-speaking Europe, where it is still used with Christian actors substituted for the old ones.

One thing is worth stating plainly, because readers coming to this material will encounter it. Germanic religious symbols and texts, these charms among them, have been appropriated by far-right and white-nationalist groups, and most major Heathen organisations in the US and Europe have issued explicit statements rejecting that use. The scholarship and the mainstream practice are separable from it, and it is better to know the situation in advance than to meet it unprepared.

What these charms are not

They are not evidence of a suppressed magical technology. They are not a spell you can use. There is no support of any kind for the idea that reciting a tenth-century formula sets a bone, loosens a restraint, or influences an outcome, and no reputable treatment of this material claims otherwise.

What they are is rarer than that, and more durable. They are a recording of how ritual language was constructed in a culture that left almost no written record of itself: the names it used, the way it built a case for a cure, the grammar of its request. Read that way they are not diminished at all. They are the only surviving sentence fragments of an entire religious world, preserved by accident on a page someone had not got round to filling.

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