In 1841, a scholar named Georg Waitz was cataloguing manuscripts in the cathedral chapter library at Merseburg when he found something unusual. In the margin of a 9th-century liturgical manuscript, written in Old High German, were two short healing charms. They were not Christian prayers. They were something older. And they were the only pre-Christian literary texts in the Old High German language that have ever been found.
The Merseburg Incantations are, by the standard measures of folklore and religious history, a minor find. Two short charms. A few dozen words each. For the Continental Germanic tradition, however, they are everything. They are the only surviving indigenous literary evidence for the religious world of the pre-Christian German-speaking peoples.
The First Merseburg Incantation
The First Merseburg Incantation is a binding charm, designed to immobilize enemies. In a loose modern translation: Once the Idisi sat, sat here and there. Some fastened fetters; some hindered the host, some plucked at the fetters. Escape from the fetters! Flee from the foe!
The Idisi are female beings, cognate with the Old Norse Disir, the ancestral female spirits whose veneration is one of the most consistent features across all branches of the Germanic tradition. In the charm, they are depicted performing three functions simultaneously: binding some people, hindering armies, and releasing others from bonds. The charm presumably invokes their binding power for the practical purpose of immobilizing enemies.
This is evidence for the Disir as active ritual agents in Continental Germanic practice, not merely figures of veneration. The person performing this charm was invoking beings with specific powers to perform specific tasks. That is a working relationship with a category of supernatural beings, not just an abstract belief in their existence.
The Second Merseburg Incantation
The Second Merseburg Incantation is a healing charm for a horse’s injured foot, specifically an injury described as a dislocation or sprain. In translation: Phol and Wodan rode to the forest. Then Balder’s foal sprained its foot. Then charmed it Sinthgunt, Sunna’s sister; then charmed it Frija, Volla’s sister; then charmed it Wodan, as well he knew how, as the bone-sprain, so for the blood-sprain, so for the limb-sprain: bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, so be they glued.
Every element of this short text is significant. Wodan appears by name, in a healing context, performing magic on an injured animal. This is unexpected given his primary association with war and death in the Norse tradition, but it is consistent with the broader range of functions attributed to him in the Continental tradition. The healing formula itself, bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, is attested in similar forms in other Indo-European healing traditions, suggesting it is very old.
Frija appears as a healer alongside Wodan, cognate with Norse Frigg and Anglo-Saxon Frig. Sinthgunt appears as the sister of Sunna, the sun maiden, a figure who has no direct cognate in the Norse mythological record. Her appearance here is the only surviving attestation of her name in any Germanic source. Volla appears as Frija’s sister, also otherwise unattested in surviving texts but with a cognate in Old Norse Fulla, one of Frigg’s attendants in the Prose Edda. Phol, who rides with Wodan to the forest, is entirely mysterious, identified by some scholars as a deity otherwise lost from the record, by others as a misreading or variant of another known figure.
What the Incantations Reveal
Several things are clear from even a careful reading of these two short texts.
First, there was a Continental Germanic divine world that partially overlaps with the Norse and Anglo-Saxon traditions but contains figures not attested elsewhere. Sinthgunt and Phol are not found in the Eddas. Volla appears only in passing in the Prose Edda. The Continental tradition was not simply a provincial version of the Norse tradition. It had its own figures and its own mythology, most of which is simply gone.
Second, the magical practice attested in the incantations is embedded in specific narrative events. The second charm does not just give the formula for healing a horse’s foot. It tells a story in which divine beings, including Wodan himself, are depicted performing the magic in a specific mythological context. The charm invokes that mythological precedent: what worked then, works now. This is the mythological pattern underlying magical practice, and it is consistent with what we see in the Norse sources.
Third, the Disir, the ancestral female spirits, had an active role in Continental Germanic magical practice, not just in ancestor veneration. The first incantation shows them performing specific acts of binding and releasing, which implies a practitioner tradition of working with the Disir for practical purposes.
The Discovery and Its Significance
Waitz’s 1841 discovery was an accident. The charms survived because someone, probably a Christian monk, copied them into the margin of a liturgical manuscript, apparently as items of antiquarian interest or as practical medical reference material. They were not preserved because anyone thought they were religiously important in their own right. They survived by accident.
This accidental survival is a reminder of how contingent our source record is. If that particular monk had not copied those particular charms, the name Sinthgunt would not appear anywhere in the surviving record. The entire body of evidence for the Disir in Continental Germanic practice would be reduced to what Tacitus says about similar figures, without any indigenous attestation. One accident in 9th-century Germany gave us something irreplaceable.
Using the Incantations in Practice
Modern Continental Germanic practitioners use the Merseburg Incantations in several ways. Some work with the specific charms as practical ritual texts, adapting the formulas for contemporary use. Some use them primarily as evidence of what the tradition contained, as proof that the divine figures named in them were real parts of the Continental Germanic religious world. Some use them as a starting point for reconstructive work, following the deities named in them into the Norse and Anglo-Saxon sources for comparative information about their characteristics.
What the incantations cannot do is give you a comprehensive picture of Continental Germanic religion. Two short charms, however remarkable, are two short charms. They are a door opened into a room that is otherwise almost entirely dark. What they show you of that room is genuine and invaluable. It is also a fragment of something much larger that did not survive.
