Norse and Germanic

Bald's Leechbook and the Lacnunga

The oldest medical books written in English

Bald's Leechbook is the oldest medical book in the English language. It survives in a single manuscript of 128 leaves, copied in the mid tenth century and probably made at Winchester.

Emily Kesling calls it the earliest complete medical collection in a Western vernacular. A table of contents stands before each of the three books. Leechbook III, bound with the other two, is of separate origin and overlaps them only in part.

The practitioner these books served was the læce in Old English and the læknir in Old Norse, the word that survives in English as leech. The Lacnunga is a looser book. It gathers recipes, charms, and prayers in three languages, and it carries the Nine Herbs Charm and Wið færstice.

Leechbook I, the eyesalve

A recipe with a dose, a vessel, and a clock

The eyesalve recipe treats a wen, most probably a sty on an eyelash follicle. It names four ingredients and fixes their proportions: cropleac and garlic in equal amounts, wine and oxgall in equal amounts.

Then it fixes everything else. The mixture goes into a brass vessel. It stands nine nights. It is wrung through a cloth and clarified. It is stored in a horn. It goes on the eye at night, with a feather.

Nothing in that sequence is decorative. A tenth-century compiler recorded which container, which interval, and which route mattered enough to write down. He had no concept of a bacterium. That is a claim about the quality of an input, made a thousand years before anyone could test it.

The 2015 reconstruction

What the eyesalve actually did in the laboratory

The reconstruction killed Staphylococcus aureus, and the size of the effect depends on which model you read. Freya Harrison's group at Nottingham reported a 4 to 5 log drop against biofilms in a synthetic wound. In excised mouse wound tissue carrying MRSA Mu50 the drop was roughly tenfold.

The 2020 follow-up widened the panel to eight wound pathogens and confirmed the pattern. Whole eyesalve cleared Staphylococcus aureus biofilms by 6 to 7 logs. Purified allicin, the compound garlic is famous for, managed 2 to 3. Garlic on its own did nothing to biofilms, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa resisted the salve.

The popular version of this story is wrong on two counts. Bald's Leechbook is an English manuscript written in Old English, so no Viking wrote it. And no human infection has been treated with the eyesalve. What the work established is narrower and more interesting: a recipe copied about 950 encoded a real combination effect, and the nine-night wait was part of the chemistry.

The Merseburg charms

A joint set in words

The second Merseburg charm is a healing spell, and its patient is a horse. Phol and Wodan ride to the wood, Balder's foal wrenches its foot, and three goddesses sing over the injury in turn before Wodan speaks the formula himself.

The formula runs in three registers. The sprain is named as sprain of bone, sprain of blood, sprain of limb. Then each part is commanded home: bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb. No hand touches the leg anywhere in the text. The voice does the work, and it addresses the body part by named part.

The wording is older than the manuscript. In 1864 the philologist Adalbert Kuhn set the charm beside hymn 4.12 of the Atharvaveda, an Indian mending-spell of the same shape, and argued that both descend from a common Indo-European stock of healing speech. Most scholars accept the connection. Maurice Bloomfield held that the resemblance could have arisen twice from the same situation.

Galdr and the charms

Healing sung over the patient

Galdr is the Old Norse name for the high sung spell, from a verb meaning to crow or chant. The poems put it near the top of what a healer could do. In Hávamál stanza 148, the second charm Óðinn claims is medical, rendered by Henry Adams Bellows in 1923 as one that men shall need who leechcraft long to use.

Sigrdrífumál stanza 10 teaches branch-runes to anyone who would be a healer and work cure for wounds, to be written on bark and on trees with boughs bent eastward. Bellows notes the logic behind the stanza: the sickness was expected to pass out of the patient and into the tree.

Wið færstice, in the Lacnunga, treats a sudden stabbing pain. It assigns the pain to a shot from the esa, the Old English name for the gods called Æsir in Norse, from elves, and from hægtessan. The charm then names each source and orders it out. The Nine Herbs Charm in the same manuscript works through nine named plants and ends in prose instructions for a salve. Both do the same thing to the patient. They name the cause and declare the outcome before anything has changed.

The Eddas and the sagas

What the Norse sources can testify to, and what they cannot

The Old Norse sources were all written down after Iceland converted to Christianity around the year 1000. Codex Regius, the manuscript of the Poetic Edda, dates to about 1270. Snorri Sturluson compiled the Prose Edda in the early thirteenth century. The manuscript of Eiríks saga rauða dates to about 1260.

That is a gap of two to three centuries, crossed by Christian scribes writing about pagan practice. The Old English medical manuscripts are a different class of evidence. Harley MS 585 and Royal MS 12 D XVII are books of remedies, written for use, in the century their medicine was practiced.

The distinction decides what each source can carry. Gods, runes, and the powers claimed for a sung charm are literature. Practice is the detail that recurs across sources and matches the archaeology: wound washing, herbal preparations, grooming kits, and hot bathing.

Eir and the healing women

Who did the healing

In Gylfaginning, Snorri ranks Eir third among the goddesses and gives her one attribute. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur's 1916 translation reads that she is the best physician. Bellows's Svipdagsmál lists Eir among the maidens of Menglöð at stanza 54, on a hill called Lyfjaberg that stanza 52 calls a joy to the sick and the sore.

Beyond that there is silence. Hilda Ellis Davidson, in Roles of the Northern Goddess in 1998, observed that virtually nothing is known of Eir apart from her association with healing. What survives is the valuation. Of all the powers the north could imagine, being best at healing earned a seat among the gods.

In the sagas the healers on the ground are usually women. After the battle of Stiklestad in 1030, Heimskringla places an unnamed woman in a barn behind the field, warming water and tending the wounded. She boiled leeks and other herbs in a stone pot and fed the broth to men with belly wounds. A wound deep enough to pierce the gut would make the broth smell of leek. Snorri wrote that scene around 1230.

Seiðr and the völva

What seiðr was, and what the sources say it did

Seiðr is the Old Norse name for a body of magical practice concerned with knowing and shaping fate. Ynglinga saga chapter 7 credits Óðinn with an art by which he could know a man's fate in advance and could bring on death, ill luck, or bad health, in Samuel Laing's 1844 translation.

The fullest description is chapter 4 of Eiríks saga rauða. During a famine in Greenland, the seeress Þorbjörg lítilvölva arrives in a black lambskin hood lined with white catskin and gloves of catskin. She is fed a porridge of kid's milk and the hearts of every kind of animal on the farm. A song is sung, and she foretells when the dearth will lift.

That ritual is divination. No surviving source describes seiðr as the north's medicine. The recorded medicine of the north is plants, wounds, water, and speech, and it sits in other texts.

Bathing on a schedule

Laugardagr, the weekly bath

The Old Norse week set aside a day for washing. Laugardagr means hot water day, from laug, a bath, and it is still the word for Saturday in Icelandic and across Scandinavia. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde notes that the name breaks the pattern of the other weekdays.

The graves agree with the calendar. The National Museum of Denmark reports that combs of wood or bone are among the most common finds of the period. They were often kept in protective boxes, tweezers and ear picks were in regular use, and the museum records the Saturday bath as ordinary Viking practice.

Iceland added geothermal water to the habit. Snorralaug at Reykholt is a circular stone-lined pool fed by a hot spring, tied by tradition to Snorri Sturluson, and among the first archaeological remains placed under protection in Iceland in 1817.

Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, died 1213

When the leech became a physician

Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, a chieftain of the Icelandic Westfjords killed in 1213, is the thirteenth-century north's named practitioner with a biography. His saga presents him as a healer whose reputation drew the sick to his farm.

Anne Tjomsland's 1951 English edition, published by Cornell, is titled The Saga of Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson: The Life of an Icelandic Physician of the Thirteenth Century. Learned medicine was reaching the edge of the inhabited world by book and by pilgrimage, and later Icelandic manuscripts gather remedies and regimen into leech-books of their own.

What the north hands forward is a manner of working. Name the injury part by part. Fix the input down to the vessel and the interval. Treat rhythm and warmth as medicine. Speak to the person while you do it. Each is a decision about how to change the state of a living body, and that state is now measurable.

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