The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser].

  • Wilfrid Bonser
Date:
1963
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CHAPTER XXX The Earth, and Charms for the Fertility of the Fields Our clearest information about the religion of the Ingaevonic tribes, including the ancestors of the Angles and Saxons [says R. H. Hodgkin], is a famous description given by Tacitus of the worship of ‘Nerthus, that is Mother Earth’.... In historic times the cult [of Nerthus] passed from the Danish islands to the Swedes, where the place of Nerthus was taken by the god Frey, the son of Njorth, that is of Nerthus. The Scandi navian traditions tell of a war between the Njorth-Frey family (‘the Vanir’) and the family of Odin (‘the Anses’). ... It was a struggle between the cult of Mother Earth on the one hand—bountiful Mother Earth with her gods who gave peace and who blessed agriculture with plentiful increase—and on the other hand the heroic gods, the gods of war who gave victory. 1 The introduction to the Ynglinga Saga says that ‘the first age is called the Age of Burning. . . . But after Frey had been laid in a howe at Uppsala, many chiefs raised howes as often as memorial stones in memory of their kinsmen’. The practice of inhumation further associates the worshippers of Nerthus and Frey with Mother Earth. The worship of Nature lies behind a great many charms, even those which are apparently Christian. The primary source of nature is Earth, the Great Mother. Invocations to her and reference to her purifying and protecting powers, as well as to her fruitful ness, are still traceable. A Latin prayer to the Earth has survived in a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century herbal of English workmanship in the Harleian collection. 2 ‘Earth, divine goddess, Mother Nature, who generatest all things . . . thou indeed art duly called great Mother of the gods. . . . Those who rightly receive these herbs from me, do thou make them whole’, &c. This prayer is perhaps unique in its 1 R. H. Hodgkin, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, 2nd. ed., 1939, vol. i, pp. 28-29. 2 MS. Harley 1585, ff. 126-130. Translated by C. Singer in ‘Early English magic and medicine’, Proc. Brit. Acad., 1920, ix. 373-3.