Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/81

Rh mounted in gold. Sir J. Evans, I may add, traces back this keraunic belief about celts in Greece to about 2000 years before our time.

So far do our modern facts take us, but this in itself is only the beginning. A little research will show us that there is unquestionable evidence as to the immense antiquity of this "elf-shot" idea in English. In Cockayne's Leechdoms etc. we find a very remarkable Anglo-Saxon incantation "Against the Stitch," of which I shall here give a literal rendering. The spell begins, as is so very frequently the case, with a sort of rubric, which recited the objects to be used in the charm for which the incantation is to be sung, and describes the method of their application. This rubric, which I propose to take first, runs as follows:—

"Fever-few" is an Anglo-Saxon name for the well-known plant pyrethrum partenium, and is borrowed from the Latin febrifugia, a febri-füge or "fever-chaser." The "red nettle" is familiar enough, and "way-bread" is the plantain, a strange Anglo-Saxon name that has survived right on down to modern English, but the real meaning of which is not, as might be supposed, "bread that grows by the way," but "way-broad," or more strictly speaking, "way-breadth," a fact that will be evident as soon as we recall its modern German equivalent Wege-breit, even were it not that the application of "broad" or "breadth" to the leaves of the plantain in itself has an application that is perfectly fitting. These three ingredients, then, feverfew, the red nettle, and the plantain, were to be boiled in butter, no doubt for external application to the real or supposed wound in the form of a poultice. It is at this point that the magician begins his incantation:—