Merseburg Echoes:
About the Project
Joseph S. Hopkins for Mimisbrunnr.info, May 2025
Quick attribution:
Hopkins, Joseph S. 2025. “About the Project”. Eddic to English, Mimisbrunnr.info. URL: https://www.mimisbrunnr.info/merseburg-echoes-about
Merseburg Echoes is a collection of spell types first recorded in Merseburg, Germany and known as Merseburg Spell II, among other names (see discussion from folklorist John Lindow on the topic here). While it is one of the most studied and discussed spell types in all of the folklore record, there exists no centralized and approachable database to aggregate known examples and add new ones. Merseburg Echoes aims to assist in this manner.
The comparative study of these projects begins with trailblazing philologist Jacob Grimm’s 1842 announcement of George Waitz’s 1841 discovery of the spells:
Grimm, Jacob. 1842. Über zwei entdeckte Gedichte aus der Zeit des deutschen Heidenthums. Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften.
It is worth keeping in mind that spells recorded after 1842 present the possibility of being influenced in some way or another by Waitz’s discovery. On the other hand, the spells are quite widespread in most of Europe and the 1841 discovery of the spells led to an increased effort to collect and compare versions, as we will see below.
resources
Literature around the Merseburg Spells is vast and we will highlight only a few resources here that were particularly influential on Merseburg Echoes. The project builds upon a variety of resources, including the material compiled by Oskar Ebermann (1903):
Ebermann, Oskar. 1903. Blut- und Wundsegen ihrer Entwickelung dargestellt. Mayer & Müller. URL: https://archive.org/details/blutundwundsege00ebergoog/page/n7/mode/2up
And its reception by scholars such as Reidar Thoralf Christiansen (1914):
Christiansen, R. Th. 1914. Die Finnischen und Nordischen Varianten des Zweiten Merseburgerspruches: Eine vergleichende Studie. Hamina, 1914. (FFC, No. 18). URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Die_Finnischen_und_Nordlischen_Varianten/78MsAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Scandinavian collections include those of Norwegian folklorist Anton Christian Bang (1901-1902: 1-17):
Bang, A. Chr. 1901-1902. Norske Hexeformularer. Hans A. Benneches Fond. URL: https://www.nb.no/items/1994a3ddbed624be42e2ce42e7c8dc3a?page=49
And Swedish examples collected by Emanuel Linderholm and published in Svenska landsmål och svenskt folkliv (1939: 427-446):
Linderholm, Emanuel. 1939. “Signelser ock Besvärjelser från Medeltid ock Nytid”. Svenska landsmål och svenskt folkliv, vol. 3, p. 427-446.
See also fairly recent discussion in the following resource:
Agapkina, Tatiana; Vladimir Karpov; & Andrey Toporkov. 2019. “The Slavic and German Versions of the Second Merseburg Charms”. INCANTATIO, 3. URL: https://www.academia.edu/101763924/The_Slavic_And_German_Versions_Of_The_Second_Merseburg_Charm
As Agapkina, Karpov, and Toporkov highlight (and many before them), there are many more examples to be described.
Scope
The corpus of known Merseburg Spell-type items is huge. In turn, the project will focus on Germanic languages first and may expand outward from there.