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Elves, Elf-shot, and Epilepsy: OE ælfādl , ælfsiden , ælfsogeþa , bræccoþu , and bræcsēoc

2009; Routledge; Volume: 81; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00393270903364028

1651-2308

Joseph P. McGowan,

Ancient Near East History

Abstract Notes 1 N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, Oxford, 1957, item 91; see also Phillip Pulsiano, Old English Glossed Psalters: Psalms 1–50, Toronto, 2001, pp. xix–xxii. 2 The MS illustration is reproduced as a frontispiece to part I of J.H.G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine, London, 1952; see also, The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury, ed. Margaret Gibson, T.A. Heslop, Richard W. Pfaff, University Park, PA, 1992. The illustration at fol. 66R is discussed by Karen L. Jolly in her “Elves in the Psalms? The Experience of Evil from a Cosmic Perspective”, in The Devil, Heresy, and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. Alberto Ferreiro, Leiden, 1998, pp. 19–44, at 32–7. See also her Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context, Chapel Hill, 1996. 3 “Elves on the Brain: Chaucer, Old English, and elvish,” Anglia 124 (2006), 225–43; the material appears again in Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity, Cambridge, 2007, especially at pp. 98–103. A discussion of ælf-compounds occurs also in Joseph McGowan, “Old English Lexicographical Studies,” diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991. 4 “Elves on the Brain,” 234–5. 5 BT = Joseph Bosworth, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Oxford, 1898/rpt. 1989; BTS = T. Northcote Toller, Supplement to An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, with enlarged addenda and corrigenda by Alistair Campbell, Oxford, 1972; CHM = J.R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, with supplement by Herbert Dean Meritt, 4th ed., Toronto, 1984; DOE = The Dictionary of Old English: A–G on CD-ROM, Toronto, 2008. 6 “Elves on the Brain,” 235–40. 7 “Elves on the Brain,” 242–3. 8 The Harley Latin-Old English Glossary, ed. Robert T. Oliphant, The Hague, 1966, entry F151. 9 The lemma fanaticus appears in a series of entries in the Digby Aldhelm glosses (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 146; Ker, Catalogue, item 320), to the prose De laude virginitatis, most easily to be had in Napier's collection (Arthur S. Napier, Old English Glosses: Chiefly Unpublished, Oxford, 1900; rpt. Hildesheim, 1969; as examples, the entries: 2058 fanatic e: dioflices (to De virginitate [hereafter AldV] 27.36); 2622 fanatic e: manfulles (AldV 35.35); 3232 fanatica: templicere, deoflicere (AldV 44.24); 3495 fanatic e: manfulles (AldV 48.12); 4428 fanatice: manfulles, gewidledre (AldV 62.8). The pattern establishes a diabolical and (perhaps) prophetic, or at least pagan, context, and it makes the appearance of ylfig as the OE interpretamentum in the Harley Glossary entry all the more interesting. 10 DOE transcript is cited; cf. Lowell Kindschi, “The Latin-Old English Glossaries in Plantin-Moretus MS. 32 and British Museum MS. Additional 32246”, diss., Stanford University, 1955. The emendation to comitialis likely belongs to Wright-Wülcker, who at 112, 26–7, rearranged the order to read: Epilepsia, uel caduca, uel laruatio, uel comitialis, bræccoþu, fylleseoc (Anglo-Saxon and Old-English Vocabularies, 2 vols, ed. Thomas Wright and Richard Paul Wülcker, London: Trübner & Co., 1883–4, hereafter WW). Wright-Wülcker have their epilepsia … comitialis entry in a bundle of entries derived from Ælfric's Glossary and, apparently, elsewhere (e.g. Virgil) under the rubric nomina omnium hominum communiter . Wright-Wülcker dated the MS transcribed too early, and the matter of how this copy fits in with others is enormously complicated; see Helmut Gneuss's introduction to the re-issue of Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar. Text und Varianten, ed. Julius Zupitza, Berlin: Weidmann, 2003, at vi–xii. 11 Niermeyer glosses larvatus ‘un possédé/one possessed’; J.F. Niermeyer and C. van de Kieft, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, rev. ed., 2 vols., Leiden, 2002, s.v. Interestingly, the attestation is from Aldhelm's prose De virginitate (cap. 52: larvatos et comitiales…pristinae sanitati restituit). 12 Cf. Celsus, De medicina 2.1, 3.23 (A. Cornelii Celsi quae supersunt, ed. Friedrich Marx, Leipzig, 1915), and Seneca, De ira 3.10.3 (L. Annaei Senecae De ira ad Novatum libri tres, ed. A. Barriera, Corpus scriptorum latinorum Paravianum no. 21, Turin, 1919). 13 DOE, s.v. fylleseoc. Compare also Mt 4:24 qui daemonia habebant et lunaticos et paralyticos – a passage that clearly made its way into the glossarial traditions: e.g. in Ælfric's Glossary one finds, in sequence, the entries: paraliticus: bedreda oÐÐe se Ðe PARALISIN hæfÐ, leprosus: hreoflig oÐÐe licÐrowere, lunaticus: monaÐseoc, daemoniacus: deofolseoc (Zupitza and Gneuss, 304–5). Oxford, St. John's College 154 (Zupitza's O) has interlinear fell seoc l to monaÐseoc. 14 The Harley Glossary, C28. 15 The Harley Glossary, D631. 16 Godfrid Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, The Hague, 1948, no. 17. 17 Storms, no. 17; the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, Toronto, 2004, provides the text with the rubric “Charm 19 (Storms)'. 18 Storms, no. 20; on the Christian influence upon what are clearly earlier, native practices, see, for instance, Wilfrid Bonser, The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study in History, Psychology, and Folklore, London, 1963, at pp. 158–67. 19 Ferdinand Holthausen, Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg, 1934/rpt. 1974, s.v. 20 Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd ed., Leiden, 1962, s.vv. On ON seiÐr see also Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Woodbridge, 1993, s.vv. ‘magic’, ‘seeresses’, and Åke Ohlmarks, “Arktischer Schamanismus und altnordischer seiÐr”, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 36 (1939), 171–80. 21 These, along with the muntælfen, deserve a fuller study of their own; they are found glossing Lat. Castalis, three times in conjunction with nymphas, such as in the Harley Glossary entry castalidas nymphas: þa manfullan gydena l dunelfa (C475). Interesting is the pejoration of the Muses at the Castalian fount at Parnassus into ‘the wicked goddesses’ or ‘mountain elves’. 22 Cited from the DOE Corpus, Toronto, 2004. 23 Thomas Oswald Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols., London, 1864–6/rpt. 1961, II, p. 304. 24 Cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. T.F. Hoad, Oxford, 1986, s.v. hiccough. 25 “The Malignant Elves: Notes on Anglo-Saxon Magic and Germanic Myth”. Studia Neophilologica 41 (1969), 378–96; Thun had followed in part Johann Geldner's interpretation of the word as ‘Elf-Saugen’: cf. Untersuchungen zu altenglischen Krankheitsnamen, Augsburg, 1908, p. 47. 26 The tradition of ‘elf-shot’ seemed to involve the collection of the darts and arrowheads purportedly used by elves in their attacks and recovered for use as talismans or periapts; cf. Wilfrid Bonser, “Magical Practices Against Elves”, Folk-Lore 37 (1926), 350–63. See also Richard Jente, Die mythologischen Ausdrücke im altenglischen Wortschatz. Eine kulturgeschichtlich-etymologische Untersuchung, Heidelberg, 1921.