Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/553

 THE FOLK-LORE OF HERBALS.

subject of the paper I have been asked to read this evening is so vast that it is impossible to deal with it in any detail, and one can only touch on its broadest outlines. The Anglo-Saxon manuscripts on herbs alone are mines of valuable information to the student of folk-lore, and it is with these I propose to begin. The most important of these manuscripts are the famous Leech Book of Bald (Brit. Mus. MS. Reg. 12), generally believed to have been written during Alfred's reign and possibly by some one who was a personal friend of the King, the Saxon translation of the Herbarium Apuleius (Brit. Mus. Cottonian MSS. Vitellius C. in), the Lacnunga (Brit. Mus. Harleian MS. 585), containing the remarkable alliterative lay in praise of herbs—supposed to have been written in the tenth century but probably a copy of a much older MS.—and the Saxon translation of the ΙΙΕΡΙ ΔΙΔΑΞΕΩΝ (Brit. Mus. Harleian MS. 6258). In these manuscripts one is transported to an age older than ours, and yet in some ways so young that we have lost the magic key of it. For in them we read not only of herbs and the endless uses our fore-fathers made of them, but if we try and read them with understanding they open for us a magic casement through which we see the past bathed in a glamour of romance. We see "as through a glass darkly" a time when grown men believed in elves and goblins as naturally as they believed in trees, an age when it was the belief of everyday folk that the air was peopled with unseen powers of evil