England, the year 1073 – seven years after the Norman Conquest. In the margin of a Christian manuscript someone carves a charm in runes. And he invokes not Christ but Thor.
Picture the scene: England, the year 1073, seven years after the Norman Conquest. In a scriptorium someone sits over an Anglo-Saxon manuscript – a Christian book, in a long-Christian land. And onto a blank space in the margin this hand carves a charm. Not in Latin letters, but in Old Norse runes. And it invokes not Christ, not the saints, but the old thunder-god Thor.
This Canterbury charm, now kept in the British Library, is one of the most astonishing witnesses to how long and how quietly the old faith lived on in everyday life – in the midst of the Christian Middle Ages.
The charm is a healing formula. It is directed against a concrete ailment – a „blood-vessel pus", that is, an infected, festering wound, the kind that in a world without antibiotics could turn deadly. In the manner of many magical charms it first names and banishes the disease-demon, the harmful being that causes the inflammation. Then it invokes the highest protective power known.
„May Thor hallow you, lord of the ogres!" — Canterbury charm (1073), þórr uīki þik, þursa dróttinn
The logic behind it is clear and old: just as Thor slays the giants – the thursar – with his hammer, so he shall drive out this disease-demon too. Thor is here the „lord of the ogres" not because he rules them but because he is their greatest enemy and vanquisher. So one called the conqueror of monsters against the little monster in the wound. The somewhat older Kvinneby amulet from Sweden works in much the same way, likewise conjuring Thor’s protection.
The truly remarkable thing is the date. The charm was made not in heathen early times but long after the official Christianisation of England and Scandinavia, in a Christian book, written by a literate – that is, educated – hand. This shows: the old faith did not vanish with baptism. It lived on, not as an open creed but as familiar, practical healing-magic in the undergrowth of everyday life.
When it came to sickness, pain and naked need, people reached for what helped – or for what they believed helped. And for many, Thor, the strong protector, was evidently still a reliable address, even if on Sundays they went to church. Religion in daily life was rarely as clear-cut as the official creeds wished.
The text and dating of the Canterbury charm are secure; only the exact translation of individual words, such as the demon’s name, is disputed. But the basic fact is clear and strong: a heathen invocation of a god, in runes, in Christian England of the 11th century. It is a rare, immediate glimpse into the lived, mixed religiosity of ordinary and educated people alike.
For us there is something deeply human in it too: the wish, in fear and sickness, to be able to fall back on a protecting power, and the belief in the force of the right word, rightly carved. It is exactly this age-old bond of script, protection and hope that is one of the reasons runes still work on us so strongly today – and why we so gladly bind them into lasting material.
The Merseburg Charms · Runes · Thor & Mjöllnir · Seiðr & Magic.
Canterbury charm (BL Cotton Caligula A.xv). Mindy MacLeod & Bernard Mees, Runic Amulets and Magic Objects; Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology.