"Ich beswer dich wurm und wyrmin…." Formen und Typen altdeutscher Zauberspruche und Segen

"Ich beswer dich wurm und wyrmin...." Formen und Typen altdeutscher Zauberspruche und Segen. By Verena Holzmann. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001. 322 pp. 30.00 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 3-906758-65-6

Many of the most important studies of verbal charms have been produced by German-language scholars--in the twentieth century the names of Oskar Ebermann, Gerhard Eis, and Adolf Spamer come to mind. But in recent years such studies have been thin on the ground, which is why it is such a pleasure to receive this work by Verena Holzmann. It can be seen as part of the current renaissance in charms studies, as is evidenced by, among other things, the recent well-attended conference on Charms and Charming in Europe, jointly organised by The Folklore Society and The Warburg Institute, and by Sanda Golopentia's discussion of Romanian love charms, Desire Machines (1998).

Holzmann's work focuses on charms from medieval Germany, a corpus that is directly comparable with that of charms from medieval England in two respects. First, while in both countries there are a number of very early (tenth-century and eleventh-century) charms, the majority of surviving charms date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Second, in both countries, important material survives in both Latin and the vernacular.

After some preliminary remarks about charms and charming in the first two chapters, Holzmann turns in the third chapter to a brief discussion of the different criteria--contents, goal, and form--by which charms may be classified, before plumping here for a classification based on formal characteristics (i.e. their internal logic) as being the one that is the most revealing of the various facets of her corpus.

The meat of the book comes in Chapter Four (pp. 56-132), where Holzmann sets forth her classification. Following the greatest of twentieth-century charms-scholars, Ferdinand Ohrt, she makes a basic four-fold division among charms involving commands, narratives, comparisons, and requests. All but one of these divisions are easily broken down into simple subdivisions. Take, for example, commands (.1 in her system). They are divided into pure commands (.1.1), personal commands (.1.2), commands in the name of a divine authority (.1.3), and mixed forms (.1.4). And, where necessary, straightforward subcategories are used; for example, charms invoking divine authority may call on God (.1.3.1), Christ (.1.3.2), Angels, Prophets, Apostles (.1.3.3), etc. The exception to this otherwise straightforward system are the narrative charms. Whereas the other charms fit nicely into structural pigeonholes, narrative charms call for a less logical system, something indeed of the nature of the Aarne-Thompson typology of traditional narratives. This is what the author is clearly reaching out for in this section, but does not fully lay hold of. But it would be unfair to criticise her for this--what is needed is nothing less than a prolonged joint effort by European charms scholars to construct a useful, comprehensive "Aarne-Thompson" for common European narrative charms.

Chapter Five presents the 325 charms of her corpus, and, as might be expected, this takes up more than one-half of the book (pp. 133-299). While it is extremely useful to be able to find all of these texts in a single work, it is not the texts themselves that offer anything significantly new to the charms scholar--all of them have been published before. What is more interesting is that she has arranged the charms according to the system she presents in the preceding chapter--commands, narrative charms, comparison charms, prayer-charms (and their corresponding subdivisions)--which facilitates the drawing of formal parallels between superficially diverse charms.

As opposed to an electronic collection that can be sorted and re-sorted at will, any printed collection of charms will have to remain fixed, ordered by a single principle, contents, or goal, or form. This is at once an advantage and a disadvantage, in that any arrangement is bound to emphasise some points of connection, while obscuring others. Hence, therefore, the importance of the three full indices (of keywords, charm titles, and charm incipits) that conclude the work. These indices allow for the reconnection of what Holzmann's chosen arrangement separates. For example, a researcher interested in Job in the charms can be guided by the relevant index not just to the obvious section, that group of narrative charms Holzmann terms the "Hiob-Segen" (.2.3.7 in her system), but also to occurrence of Job in commands involving saints (.1.3.4).

All in all, this fine work is another sign of the rebirth of charm studies and will serve as a stimulus to future work in the field.

Jonathan Roper, University of Sheffield, UK

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