Onomastics, especially place-names

While the noun os “god” (cf. the Old Icelandic noun ass, plural acsir “the high gods”) is not attested in Old English except in one instance discussed below, it survives with some frequency as an element of English personal names.

The theophoric English names of certain days of the week have an obvious connection to pre-Christian belief. This is a curious fact since Christian authors did not generally wish to publicize the names of pagan deities. It is of interest, then, that the proper names Tiw (Old Norse Tyr), Woden (Old Norse Odinri), Thunor (Old Norse Porr) and Friga (or Frigg; Old Norse Freyja) are incorporated into the days of the week known in English as Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and in Latin and several Romance languages (in various forms) as Mars’s day, Mercury’s day, Jove’s day and Venus’s day, respectively. This fact alone, however, does not make idolaters out of the English-speaking people of early England any more than it makes idolaters out of English speakers today. The Germanic day names do not appear to date from the early Germanic era, as is often assumed, but rather derive from a transfer of knowledge in scholarly circles during the seventh and eighth centuries (Shaw 2007).

Place-names connected to Tiw, Woden and Thunor provide evidence that those gods were indeed venerated in Britain during pre-Christian times. Examples pointing to worship of Woden are Wednesbury “Woden’s stronghold” (Staffordshire), Wansdyke “Woden’s dyke” (Wiltshire) and Wensley “Woden’s woodland clearing” (Derbyshire).

Nevertheless, a few place-names do point unmistakably to sites of pre- Christian religious observances. Names involving Old English hearh or hearg (“shrine, sacred place”) and weoh or wih (probably originally meaning “sacred place”) are of special interest in this regard. Examples of the first are Harrow-on- the-Hill (Middlesex), Harrowdown “hill of the shrine” (Essex) and Peper Harrow (Surrey).²⁹ Examples of the second are Weedon “hill of the sanctuary” (Northhamptonshire), Weeford “shrine at the ford” (Staffordshire) and Wye (Kent). When mapped onto the landscape, these names indicate that the Angles and Saxons living before the Christian era favoured open-air sites as places of worship. The hearh names (pl. heargas) are often associated with high ground; these probably denoted public gathering places. A sacred place located on low ground, or a wayside shrine, was more likely to be called a weoh.

Other place-name elements are suggestive of a distinctive style of worship involving trees, pillars or posts.

Some provisions in the late law codes seem to be directed against the non­Christian practices of Viking-Age settlers who had migrated to Britain from Scandinavia. The early eleventh-century Canons of Edgar, for example, asks priests to put down “every heathen practice”. The practices itemized include sacrifices at springs, necromancy, the casting of spells, sacrifices at various trees including the elder, sacrifices at stones, and the cultivation of various delusions “in which people experience many things which they should not”. This last provision may refer to shamanic trances.³⁸ Perhaps all these practices (if these clerical proscriptions do indeed correspond to reality) had been features of pre- Christian Anglo-Saxon religion too, but it is impossible to tell.

Public worship of the old Germanic gods must have ceased in Britain as part of the seventh-century process of conversion, which tended to work in a top-down manner, so that the power of the state joined with that of the church in enforcing the new religious order. In private, especially among the lower ranks of society, change may have come more slowly. Thus there are provisions in the law code of King Wihtred of Kent (ca. 690-725) against sacrifice to devils - that is, to pagan gods - whether by a ceorl “ordinary freeman” or by a slave, with the implication that these were the ranks most likely to engage in such practices. Relatively innocuous aspects of pre-Christian religion may have been tolerated as long as they were absorbed into a broadly Christian world-view. Thus we see evidence, up to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, of some members of the church struggling to do away with remnants of non-Christian religious belief, while certain healing texts (to be discussed below) suggest that unorthodox habits of thought persisted even among the clergy.

From penitentials, which specify how persons were to atone for sundry offences, we learn that amulets other than the cross were proscribed, as was the consulting of diviners and the casting of lots in the pagan manner. All practices involving witchcraft and sorcery are severely proscribed, as well, including “driving a stake into a man” so as to do harm: an evident reference to black magic worked on an effigy of an intended victim (Meaney 2006: 155). One eighth­century penitential that originated in England, the work known as Theodore’s Penitential, discusses what penalties were to be assigned to people who confessed to eating food that had been offered to pagan gods, a confirmation that sacrifices of this kind were made. The burning of grain in funerary contexts “for the well­being of the living and of the house” is also proscribed, and again, archaeology has confirmed that grains were sometimes burnt where bodies were laid out, perhaps as a rite of purification (Meaney 1992: 105). One of the more curious provisions in Theodore’s Penitential requires seven years’ penance should a woman place her daughter on the roof or in an oven to cure fever. Another clause specifies three years’ penance should a woman mix her husband’s semen in food in order to receive more love. A sliding scale of penalties thus applies to a miscellany of acts that the Penitential considered superstitious. The proscriptions in such texts are to some extent formulaic, but they nevertheless shed light on the possible survival of pre-Christian practices.

Given the church’s hostility to all forms of idolatry, it is an unsolved mystery why, towards the end of a late Old English text that specifies how to restore fertility to barren fields, one prayer begins with an invocation to “Erce, Erce, Erce, eor]?an modor”, that is, to “Erce, Erce, Erce, mother of earth”. This is a curious element to find in what is otherwise a pious document, albeit one that pertains to the realm of folk religion in its effort to cast down witchcraft.³⁹ Should we try to connect the Erce of this prayer with the goddess Nerthus referred to by Tacitus in chapter 40 of Germania, or to the goddess Hred (or Hretha) mentioned by Bede in his treatise on the seasons? A competent linguist would say “probably not”; here is an instance where there are no good guesses.

Woden is the one god of ancient Germania who receives explicit mention in late Old English texts, though it is not clear if he is thought of as a god rather than as an ancestral figure of special potency. A passage of gnomic verse recorded in the Exeter Book of Old English poetry, a miscellany that was written out shortly before the end of the first millennium, draws a sharp contrast between Woden and the God of the book of Genesis: “Woden fashioned pagan shrines; the Almighty created splendor, the spacious skies...”⁴⁽⁾ More curiously, Woden is also named in a late tenth-century book of cures known as Lacnunga in a text that tells of the power of nine named herbs to fight off nine venoms. The venoms, it seems, were released into the world when Woden destroyed a wyrm, or poisonous serpent, using “nine glory-twigs” (a unique weapon of his?) to do so: “A serpent came crawling; it killed no one. Then Woden took up nine glory­twigs; he then struck the snake so that it flew into nine pieces.”⁴¹ This may have been a rash act since the serpent had been doing no harm, but fortunately, as we are told in the next verses, the Lord at the time of his crucifixion created nine herbs as antidotes to the nine venoms, and the healer proceeds to compound these herbs into a salve. Whatever value this medicine may have had as a means of warding off infection, its mythological basis takes us some distance away from orthodox Christianity.

Another charm from Lacnunga is meant to cure a sharp pain that, it is imagined, has resulted from the spear-shot of some malicious creature that had been riding over barrows by night. The shaman-like healer seeks to nullify the power of this mysterious enemy no matter whether it was one of the esa (that is, the ALsir, the gods of the old religion), or one of the ylfa (elves), or one of a group of mighty haegtessan “witches, hags”.

In no fewer than seven Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, Woden is euhemerized rather than being demonized in that he is named with pride as an ancestral figure. In particular, Woden is given a place in the greatly expanded late ninth­century West Saxon royal pseudo-genealogy that is generally thought to have been an invention of the reign of King Alfred the Great (d. 899). Named in the same line of descent as Woden are such other quasi-mythological figures as Brand, Baeldaeg, Geat, Beaw, Sceldwa, Heremod, Bedwig and Sceaf, in a genealogy that extends back to Noah and Adam. Names from Germanic myth and legend are introduced as if they pertained to nothing but earthly men. The genealogy thus serves to reconcile two pasts, one northern and one biblical.⁴"⁴

A similarly syncretistic motive may underlie the Old English epic poem Beowulf While scholars have long tried to mine that poem for evidence about pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon religion, this is perhaps for no better reason than that it is set in the Heroic Age of the Germanic peoples and in the continental homeland of the English. In terms of its thematic content, the poem is a thoroughly Christian document. Given the author’s temporal and spatial distance from the events he describes, the poem can scarcely be taken as a reliable witness to pre-Christian religious practices even when the poet tells of a ship burial (lines 26-52) or a great cremation funeral (lines 1107-24, 3137-55), features for which archaeological parallels are known. In the sole passage in which sacrifice to a non-Christian power is mentioned, that practice is roundly condemned (lines 175-88). Few scholars these days view Beowulf whenever it was composed, as anything other than the work of a Christian poet looking back at the Germanic past with a combination of admiration and mistrust.⁴⁵ The poem is a significant contribution to religious history precisely because it dramatizes the plight of noble pagans. That is, it tells of persons of the pre-Christian past who lived by the highest code of ethics that they could conceive of, and who yet, from a Christian perspective, were blundering in a kind of half-light. Along with a handful of other Anglo-Saxon poems that deal with the characters of Germanic legend (for discussion of which see Frank 1991), Beowulf thus expresses the essential conservatism of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, a group whose backward-looking tendencies coexisted with literary efforts to integrate ancestral lore - “cultural paganism”, as it might well be called - into the framework of salvation history.⁴⁶