Ep.53: Old English Plant Lore with Stephen Pollington

Stephen Pollington is an accomplished author and historian with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon period and the Old English language. He's written many books on these subjects and today's episode is about, "Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plant Lore and Healing." We learned how difficult it is to translate these old texts with discrepancies among the various copies and missing sections, it's like you have to be part detective as well to figure out what plant they were actually talking about. Stephen gave us some insights on Medieval understandings of the origins of disease and some of the main types of healing modalities they used such as spell healing, knife healing, and herb healing. We discuss animist ideas (as we do) regarding how folks would chant directly to the plants themselves rather than pray or chant to a divinity or god in the 9 Herbs Charm. We highlighted a bit about runes, chants, plants and the thundergod Thor or Thunar. Stephen is a joy to listen to and we hope you learn as much from this episode as we did.