The Merseburg Charms

In 1841 the historian Georg Waitz was working in the library of the Merseburg cathedral chapter. He was looking for charters and sources on the history of the empire, the way historians of his century did it: volume by volume, leaf by leaf. In a sacramentary of the ninth century, a heavy theological composite manuscript, he came upon an endpaper that the binder had once left blank. Blank it no longer was. Some unknown hand had written twelve lines of Old High German on it.

The codex probably came from Fulda, where it is documented until the year 990; after that it rested in Merseburg. According to the palaeographical work of Bernhard Bischoff, the lines were added in the first or second third of the tenth century. Who wrote them is unknown. Why a monk should have put these particular verses on a free leaf of his mass book, nobody knows either.

Waitz saw that he had something unusual in front of him and passed the matter on. Jacob Grimm published and annotated the text for the first time in 1842. Since then the leaf has carried a name: Merseburg, Domstiftsbibliothek, Codex I, 136, fol. 85r. It is not a legend but a dated piece of parchment that can be looked at. For centuries it had lain in the chapter library, unread, or at least understood by nobody who wrote down what it said.

The first charm tells a tiny story in three lines. Once women settled themselves down, the «Idisi», some here, some there. Some fastened fetters, some held back the army, some picked at the bonds. Then the tone shifts and the story becomes a call: spring from the fetters, escape the enemies. In the manuscript that line reads «insprinc haftbandun». Who the Idisi were is disputed to this day: noblewomen, beings who know fate, or valkyrie-like figures — scholars have argued about it since Grimm.

The second charm is longer and more famous. Phol and Wodan ride into the wood. There a foal sprains its foot; the manuscript calls it the foal of Balder, and many readers take Phol and Balder to be the same. Three goddesses charm the leg: Sinthgunt and her sister Sunna, Frija and her sister Folla. Then Wodan steps up, who knew well how, and speaks: as bone-sprain, so blood-sprain, so limb-sprain. Bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limbs, as though they were glued together.

The build is the same in both: first a small story, then the formula. Specialists call this historiola and incantatio; it is found right across Europe, in Latin blessings as well as in vernacular ones. Whether a horse leg ever healed from it, no text and no source says. What remains is the language: two poems in alliterative verse, written at a time when such names had long ceased to belong in church books.

The leaf lies where it belongs: on the cathedral hill of Merseburg above the Saale. Otto the Great founded the bishopric here in 968, after making a vow before the Battle of the Lechfeld. Bishop Thietmar, the chronicler, laid the foundation stone of the cathedral on 18 May 1015; in 1021 it was consecrated in the presence of Emperor Henry II and Kunigunde. Of the Romanesque building there remain the crypt begun after 1036, the round choir towers and parts of the transept. The cathedral forms the fourth wing of the castle, which Bishop Thilo von Trotha had built between 1470 and 1500.

And then there is the raven. The legend tells that Thilo left his golden signet ring lying by the open window. When he came back, the ring was gone. In his anger he accused his long-serving manservant of theft and had him executed, although the man kept protesting his innocence. Later the ring was found in a raven nest. As a warning never to pass judgement in a rage, the bishop is said to have had a cage put up in the castle courtyard, in which a raven has been kept ever since.

That is tradition, not record. It was only the Merseburg grammar school director Georg Möbius who in the seventeenth century tied the story to Thilo, and the raven with the ring stood in the arms of the von Trotha family well before his day. The city arms still show the cathedral with the head of John the Baptist, not a raven. But the cage stands: in 2006 it was enlarged into a spacious aviary in which a pair of ravens lives.