Z
SUZSAZ
ÁVOTI“Ðaða Drihten ðam scipe genealæhte, ða wurdon hi afyrhte, wendon þæt hit sum gedwimor wære. Drihten cwæð him to, Habbað eow truwan; ic hit eom; ne beo ge ofdrædde.” Ne eom ic na scinnhiw, swa swa ge wenað:
oncnawað þone þe ge geseoð.
[“When the Lord drew near unto the ship they were afraid, thinking that it was an apparition. The Lord said unto them, Have trust, it is I, be ye not afraid.” I am not a phantom, as ye ween: know him whom ye see.]
(Thorpe, 388-9)
According to medical texts circulating in ninth- to eleventh-century England, the cause of certain diseases was attributed to supernatural beings. These creatures were mostly part of the Germanic pagan heritage such as elves, the nihtgenga (‘night-walker’) or the night-mare. But because these medical texts were the results of a long interaction between Anglo-Saxon and various continental medical traditions, attitudes towards sickness and conceptions regarding these sickness-afflicting creatures constantly moulded and incorporated foreign elements. One such creature is the scín.
In Bosworth and Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, the meaning of scín is ‘an extraordinary appearance, deceptive appearance, spectre, evil spirit, phantom’ (832);
in addition, the verb scinan means ‘to shine, to appear’ (832). In an eleventh-century glossary preserved in MS Cotton Cleopatra A iii, the Latin word fantasma is translated with scín as well as “idem et nebulum” (Wright, column 407), implying that if a Latin text describes phantoms and eerie clouds of mist, then the Anglo-Saxon reader should think of a scín. Scín-lác, in the same glossary is given as an equivalent for the Latin monstra adding the meaning of miracle, portent or supernatural appearance. However, in the Old English version of the text entitled Medicina de Quadrupedibus (“Medicine [made] of four-legged animals”), the creature related to epilepsy is translated from Latin as scín. However, I argue that scín as a sickness (and especially epilepsy) causing ghost-like apparition was not innate in Anglo-Saxon medicine but was the product of translations of Latin medical texts into Old English.
Four major medical compendia survive in Old English: the sequence of the Leechbooks consisting of three books; the Lacnunga; the Old English Herbarium; and the translation of Medicina de Quadrupedibus. The Leechbooks contain the bipartite Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III; the Herbarium is often written as one continuous text with (i) De herba vettonica liber, (ii) Herbarium Apulei and (iii) Liber medicinæ ex herbis femininis and is often accompanied by the Medicina de Quadrupedibus consisting of (i) Liber taxone, (ii) a treatise on the mulberry’s healing properties, and (iii) a short version of the Liber medicinæ ex animalibus. Both the
Latin and the Old English versions of the Herbarium and the Medicina de Quadrupedibus could be found in Anglo-Saxon England; in fact, the Latin version was known from the eighth century and probably even earlier, while the translation is believed to have been completed no later than the ninth or tenth century (De Vriend xlii).
While the Leechbooks and the Lacnunga, compiled and edited by Anglo-Saxons, are miscellaneous collections of recipes reflecting Classical, Byzantine, medieval continental and Germanic folkloric influences, the Old English Herbarium and the Old English version of the Medicina de Quadrupedibus are translations of existing, independent works originating from the Continent.
Even though the Leechbooks and the Lacnunga were written down most plausibly in the tenth-eleventh centuries by Christians (Ker 333), they obviously reached back to a much older tradition, both in using classical sources, medieval continental sources and in resorting to Germanic folkloric tradition. “There is convincing evidence that the compiler [of the Leechbooks] had the following works available for direct quotation: Oribasius’ Synopsis and Euporistes; Practica Alexandri (for all extracts from the works of Philemanus, Philagrius and Alexander of Tralles);
Marcellus’ De Medicamentis; Physica Plinii and possibly Medicina Plinii” (Cameron 154) which were among the most outstanding and popular medical texts circulating at the time. Bald’s Leechbook shows a stronger Classical and continental influence than Leechbook III. There is a more apparent logic in the structure and the arrangement of the recipes, which follow the classical head-to-toe pattern. In this system, diseases and their treatments were vertically mapped onto the body, starting with different types of headaches and finishing with the ills of the feet. In addition, another organizing principle of Bald’s Leechbook is the classical (Hyppocratic) theory of the four humours and the four elements. Diseases are mostly ascribed to the imbalance of the four humours of the human body (phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile) or to “ill humours”. While Leechbook III also attests to knowledge of the theory of the four humours, it rather resorts to a magico-medical stratagem and contains more elements of the Germanic pagan tradition. Already the first leechdom fights headaches, nihtgenga (night-walker), mara (personified nightmare) and yflum gealdor cræftum (evil chanting) (Cockayne 306). Compared to Bald’s Leechbook, a significantly greater number of curious medical conditions are attributed to elves, as, for instance, the so-called ælf-adl (elf-illness) (Cockayne 344), ælf-sogoþa (the exact meaning of this ailment is still debated but sogoþa is translated by Cockayne as hiccup) (Cockayne 348) or wæter-ælf-adl (water-elf-disease) (Cockayne 350).
The existence of the Latin original of the Old English Herbarium or the
“enlarged Herbarium” can be traced back as early as the fourth century (De Vriend lvi–lvii). However, in one of its surviving manuscripts, a dedication is found to the physician Antonius Musa of the first century BC and parts of it are “purported to be an Old English translation of a work . . . attributed to Dioscorides” of the first century AD (De Vriend lviii). Similarly, the Medicina de Quadrupedibus goes back to the fifth century, and its third part is ascribed to Sextus Placitus (no such person has been identified so far), who resorts to Pliny the Elder’s lore and uses his texts. Hence, we
can see that the Herbarium and the Medicina de Quadrupedibus are rooted more referred to as ‘the principle of the uniformity of Nature’, i.e. the view that like causes always produce like results” (Van der Eijk 3). As opposed to this, the Leechbooks and the Lacnunga, even though relying on classical (and thus, rational) sources to a certain extent, drift farther away in space and time from the Hippocratic tradition.
Thus they allow more folklore leaking in: since they were written down about five centuries later and many hundred miles farther than the Herbarium and the Medicina, more layers of medical lore and local vernacular beliefs were built into them that were procured throughout the passing centuries and miles.
The impact of Christianity is also evident in the Leechbooks and the Lacnunga as a great deal of ailments are cured by means closely associated with Christianity:
herbs are made efficient by singing masses over them,1 salves are to be drunk out of church bells,2 Pater Nosters are to be sung over the patients,3 lichen taken off a stone cross is to be concocted into a “holy salve”,4 and devils possess people causing diseases.5
1 C.f. e.g. Cockayne 334 (all quotes from this edition are in my translation):
Vyrc [sic!] godne drenc wiþ eallum feondes costungum. Nim betonican bisceop wyrt elehtran gyþrifan . . . lege under weofod gesinge viiii mæssan ofer . . .
[Make a good drink against the devil’s temptations. Take betony and bishop’s wort and lupine and corncockle . . . lay them under altar and sing 9 masses over them . . .]
2 C.f. Cockayne 136:
Drenc wiþ feondseocum men of ciricbellan to drincanne . . . gesinge seofon mæssan ofer þam wyrtum do garleac 7 halig wæter to 7 drype on ælcne drincan þone drenc þe he drincan wille eft 7 singe þone sealm Beati Immaculati 7 exurgat 7 Saluum me fac deus 7 þonne drince þone drenc of ciricbellan 7 se mæsse preost him singe æfter þam drence þis ofer . . .
[A drink for the devil sick men that should be drunk out of church bell . . . seven masses should be sung over the plants, add garlic and holy water and drip in every drink he drinks. And he should sing the psalms Beati Immaculati and exurgat and Saluum me fac deus and then he should drink this out of church bell and after the drink the priest should sing this over him . . .]
3 E.g. Cockayne 138:
Wið weden heorte bisceopwyrt . . . þonne sing þu on ciricean letanias þat is þara haliga naman 7 pater noster mid þy sange þu ga þat þu sie æt þam wyrtum 7 þriwa ymbga 7 þonne þu hie nime gang eft to ciricean mid þy ilcan sange . . .
[For wooden heart bishop’s wort (…) and then sing upon church litanies that is the names of the holy and the Pater Noster and while singing go near the plants and go around them three times and when you pick them go to church singing the same . . .]
4 Cockayne 344:
Við (sic!) ælfadle nim bisceop wyrt finul . . . 7 gehalgodes cristes mæles ragu . . . bebind ealla þa wyrta on claþe bedyp on font wætre gehalgodum þriwa . . .
Against ælf disease take bishop’s wort, fennel . . . and lichen taken off a holy Christ’s cross . . . bind all the plants in a cloth and dip them three times into consecrated font water . . .
5 Cockayne 136:
Wiþ feond seocum men þonne deofol þone monnan fede oððe hine innan gewealde mid adle.
Spiwedrenc eluhtre bisceopwyrt . . .
Against devil-sick people when the devil possesses the man or controls him with illness from within.
Purgative drink from lupine, bishop’s wort . . .
As opposed to this, there is no sign of Christianization in the Old English Herbarium and the Medicina de Quadrupedibus. They show, on the one hand, that they were written in an age when the Church did not have such an authority in medicine as it had in the time of the Leechbooks. On the other hand, the authority of these works was appreciated so much that the new prevailing principles reflected in the Leechbooks and Lacnunga were not allowed to modify the original text; the Leechbooks and Lacnunga, even though sometimes citing classical, non-Christian sources word-by-word, are imbued with Christianity. Whereas the Old English Herbarium and the Medicina de Quadrupedibus are intact in this sense, although they do offer opportunities here and there where one could insert some Christian thought (e.g. praying over patients or using holy water to make a salve more efficient).
Unlike the Herbarium or the Medicina where the source of sickness is either rational or ignored, the Leechbooks and the Lacnunga often originate diseases from transcendental beings. As mentioned before, much of the vernacular folk traditions were incorporated into Anglo-Saxon medicine, as the Leechbooks and the Lacnunga reveal. Remnants of the old Germanic pagan faith survive in the form of ritual or in transcendental beings causing sickness. For instance, the ælf whose Proto-Germanic origin is well attested in Scandinavian mythology and other Germanic languages is a common source of sickness, just like the so-called nihtgenga or the mæra. The more
“international” Christian demons and devils are also members of the army bullying medieval Anglo-Saxons . . . but not the scín. Scín occurs five times in the text of the Old English Herbarium and the Medicina de Quadrupedibus, four out of five times in the form of scínlác, and is the only transcendental being associated with sickness in these works. Interestingly, this association of scín with sickness is missing from other Anglo-Saxon medical texts.
As mentioned before, scín is rather associated with light, apparitions and delusion. Scín-lác denotes a portent or supernatural appearance in the glosses, however, in a tenth century glossary in MS Harley 3376 (Wright, column 236), the more sinister phrase “ferale monstrum” (deadly omen/apparition) occurs as reþlic scinhiw. Scín-lác, in addition, has a twofold interpretation: according to Bosworth-Toller, lác, on the one hand, has a meaning of a special movement describing “the motion of a vessel riding on the waves, the flight of a bird as it rises and falls in the air, the flickering, wavering motion of flame, and the like” (Bosworth-Toller 603); on the other hand, it bears the meaning of battle, playing, sacrifice and offering, possibly the dancing and ancillary rituals included as well (Bosworth-Toller 603). In this sense, scín-lác can mean both an apparition with emphasis on the optics of a flickering light, and a ritual involving the phenomenon of the scín.
Other texts of Old English literature further nuance the meaning of scín: scín is often connected to the devil and to delusion. For instance, in the poem The Whale preserved in the Exeter Book, the whale is described as similar to the devil:
. . . swa þæt wenaþ wægliþende
þæt hy on ealond sum eagum wliten, ond þonne gehydað heahstefn scipu
to þam unlonde oncyrrapum,
sælaþ sæmearas sundes æt ende, . . . Ðonne gewiciað werigferðe,
faroðlacende, frecnes ne wenað, . . . ðonne semninga on sealtne wæg mid þa noþe niþer gewiteþ garsecges gæst, grund geseceð,
ond þonne in deaðsele drence bifæsteð scipu mid scealcum.
Swa bið scinna þeaw,
deofla wise, þæt hi drohtende þurh dyrne meaht duguðe beswicað . . . . . . so the sea-farers imagine
that on an island they gaze with their eyes, and so fasten the high prowed ships to that non-land with anchor ropes,
they sail the sea-horses to the verge of the sea, . . . Then encamp weary-hearted,
sailing, they do not think of danger, . . . then suddenly on the salty way
with the group down goes
the ocean's guest, seeks the bottom
and then in the death-hall the current brings ships with crew.
Such is the habit of scín-s,
the way of the devils that they by converse through secret power the virtuous deceive . . .
(Muir 270-71, translation mine)
In the Dialogues of Salomon and Saturn, when Salomon explains the power of the Pater Noster, he says of letter R: “Bócstafa brego bregdeþ sóna feónd be ðam feaxe, lǽteþ flint brecan scínes sconcan” (‘the prince of letters shall soon whirl the fiend by his hair, he will let the flint break the phantasm's shanks’) showing that scín is used almost like a synonym to devil (Kemble 203).
Words derived from scín often denote deluding magical tricks, as for example, in Ælfric’s Metrical Lives of Saints. In St. Basilius’s story a man falls in love with a woman who originally was to be a nun. In order to get her, the man seeks help at a dry-man (‘sorcerer’) in other words a scín-læca, who applies scinncræft on the woman, and thus she falls sick with desire towards the man (Skeat 72).
To sum up, the word scín signifies a shining appearance which is often deceiving and carries negative connotations relating to devils, spectres and deception.
Whether the negative sinister dimension was added to it only by the arrival of
Christianity, possibly as an analogue of Lucifer the “Light Bearer” remains a puzzle;
however, Scandinavian scín-like beings are often heralds of death and misfortune but function as a message, or a portent, rather than something evil (cf. the fylgja in Icelandic sagas foreshadowing people’s death).
The Norrøn (Old Norse) cognates of the word also confirm the same connotations. Both the word skí (‘sorcery’, ‘jugglery’) and skrípi (‘phantom’) are recognized to derive from the root *skei (‘appear’, ‘shine’), which is present in the Old Norse verb skína (‘shine’). The alliterative formula often occurring in sagas ski ok skrípi means a hallucination, and skí-maðr denotes a sorcerer (Sturtevart 155). In addition, the base *skrei is present in Old Norse skrim (‘a faint light’) and skrimsl (‘spook’, ‘ghost’), which has survived in modern Norwegian as skrimsel/skrimsle (‘weak light’, ‘dim’, ‘shady’) (Sturtevart 156–7). The presence of obscurity and deception in the meaning is emphasized both in the Norrøn and in the Old English scín, in line with other Northern supernatural beings, like the Anglo-Saxon ælf (in Anglo-Saxon literature, the compound ælf-sciéne denotes an enchanting beauty with the potency of deluding6) or the Old Norse draugr ‘deceiver’ (Sturtevart 152), an apparition often haunting the sea and shrieking at fishermen. As it has been pointed out, “[t]he idea of deception was often fundamental in words for a supernatural creature” (Sturtevart 153).
Since scín is represented as a supernatural being related to sickness in the Medicina de Quadrupedibus, we might expect it to occur in the Leechbooks and Lacnunga, those being the major vernacular, “almost originally” Anglo-Saxon medical compendia. However, to our surprise, we can realize that instead of scín—
elves, devils, mæra-s and nihtgenga-s are roaming the Anglo-Saxon wastelands hunting for people, and only one single word derived from scín (scínlac) emerges beside the condition of fever once:
Þis balzaman smyring wiþ eallum untrumnessum þe on mannes lichoman biþ wiþ fefre 7 wiþ scinlace 7 wið eallum gedwolþinge.
[This smearing with balsam is against all infirmities that are on a mans body, against fever, and against apparitions, and against all delusions.]
(Cockayne 288–89)
It is difficult to identify now what ailments could have been understood under those connected to supernatural beings, but scínlac, mentioned in the second part of Bald’s Leechbook might not even be afflicted by a supernatural being, as Cockayne’s translation suggests. It rather appears to be some sort of malicious sorcery aimed at someone by another person. Scínlac in this remedy stands beside gedwolþing and fefer, and gedwolþing means according to Bosworth-Toller, a false thing, an erroneous thing and deceit, which resonates with the expressions used in laws for doing sorcery, idolatry and heresy:
6 E.g. in the poem “Judith”, in Benjamin Thorpe’s Cædmon’s Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of the Holy Scriptures (109).
[preosta] forbeode wil-weorðunga 7 lic-wiglunga 7 hwata 7 galdra 7 man-weorðunga 6 þa gemearr þe man drifð on mislicum gewiglungum 7 on frið-splottum 7 on ellenum 7 eac on oðrum mislicum treowum 7 on stanum 7 on manegum mislicum gedwimerum þe men ondreogað fela þær þe hi na ne scoldon.
[And we enjoin, that every priest zealously promote Christianity, and totally extinguish every heathenism; and forbid well-worshipings, and necromancies, and divinations, and enchantments, and man-worshipings, and the vain practices which are carried on with various spells, and with
“frith-splots,” and with elders, and also with various other trees, and with stones, and with many various delusions [errors], with which men do much of what they should not.]
(Ancient Laws and Institutes of England 248–49)
Gemearr and gedwimer > dwimor mean a ‘hindrance’, ‘an error’ (Bosworth-Toller 415) and an ‘illusion’, ‘delusion’, ‘error’ (Bosworth-(Bosworth-Toller 220), respectively.
Here, the word “error” denotes acts of pagan rituals, and this suggests that gedwolþing in the leechdom might also be a pagan ritual performed to harm somebody, perhaps in the form of a curse. As we have already noted above, scín-lác can also mean a ritual performed, so it allows the interpretation that gedwolþing and scín-lác in the leechdom are activities meant to deteriorate a person’s health. But even if the malevolent voodoo-like magic produced epilepsy-like symptoms, the main and primary feature of the scín-condition in this leechdom is not of epilepsy but of sorcery.
On the other hand, the ailments which are in connection with epilepsy in the Leechbooks are called fylle-wærc, fellewærc and bræc-seoc and appear in both parts of Bald’s Leechbook, but nothing resembling epilepsy is found in the “more vernacular” Leechbook III, except for lunatic (monaþ-seoc) and those obscure conditions which are related to elves and devils. Scín, however, was apparently not a sickness-afflicting factor in the context of the Leechbooks.
In line with the terms in the Leechbooks, it can be found in the glosses of Ælfric that “epilepsia, vel caduca, vel larvatio, vel commitialis” is translated as
In line with the terms in the Leechbooks, it can be found in the glosses of Ælfric that “epilepsia, vel caduca, vel larvatio, vel commitialis” is translated as