Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/83

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This is thy remedy against the shot of the elves,

This is thy remedy against the shot of the hag,

I will help thee!

[To the evil spirits] Flee to the mountain-head!

[To the patient] Whole be thou, The Lord help thee!”

This magnificent incantation concludes here with the rubric “Here take the knife (seax), and put it in water,”—no doubt for the purpose of immediate administration. The knife was dipped into water, and the water drunk by the patient, in the very same way that water in which a stone implement has been dipped is to this day medicinally drunk not only, as I myself am aware, by the Malays, but by very many other races in the earlier stages of culture. The word sax or seax is of especial interest. The Anglo-Saxon form was seax, the Mercian sax, and they are both not borrowed from but cognate with the Latin saxum, which even in Latin meant a weapon, (as in Vergil, Aeneid, Bk. I. jamque faces, et saxa volant). It may well be that originally to the Anglo-Saxons, as well as to the Romans, saxum was once a stone, but of this stage there is no trace in Anglo-Saxon, whereas “stone” is the quite regular and usual meaning of the word in Latin, the records of which go back to nearly 1000 years earlier than our existing Anglo-Saxon records, the date of these particular charms being perhaps about the tenth century.

So in the Icelandic legend of Gylfaginning, one of Thor’s three precious things is the hammer “that giants and ogres know well, when it comes flying through the air,” and this hammer is believed by Montelius to have been a development from the sun-god’s axe, a fact which brings these old Scandinavian beliefs very near to those contained in our own English charms. It only remains to consider why the stone celt or other weapon was used as a remedy for anyone who had been wounded by a similar weapon. I believe the true reason for this to be precisely