Ofer Hreðerlocan

Beyond the chest-locker: Locating the Old English mind & soul

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Approaching a native Old English soul concept

When attempting to reconstruct a pre-Christian concept of the mind and soul in early England, the chief obstacle we are faced with is that no such sources exist; all the extant writing on the topic of the soul in Old English is written, or at least recorded, by Christians, and seems to have been approached from a Christian lens. Faced with this obstacle, many of those who wish to understand what possible pagan conceptions of the soul may have existed in early England have largely looked to systems built on the foundations of Norse mythological sources, such as that presented by Claude Lecouteux (2009). However, while such reconstructions might provide a plausible explanation for the (not-at-all obviously in their interpretation) pieces of evidence in the Norse corpus, I would identify two suppositions one must make in order to utilize such systems as a basis for whatever pagan concept of the soul may have existed in pre-Christian England.

• First, there is the notion that the Norse evidence is more suitable as a basis for reconstruction than the English. This seems based on a rather vague but commonly held belief that, while virtually all of our literary evidence in both Old Norse and Old English was recorded by Chrisitian hands, the Old English sources are “too Christianized” to be worth investigating, whereas the Old Norse sources are “just non-Christianized enough” to warrant the privileging of the information therein.
• Secondly, an even more fundamental assumption must be made, which is that the pagan soul concept we should expect to find in early England should derive directly from a common/proto-Germanic form, which might have been “corrupted” through transmission or interaction with “foreign” cultures, but was still fundamentally Germanic.

I deem these suppositions to be problematic when trying to investigate early English concepts of the soul. Against the first notion, I would hold that, while a comparative study of Germanic sources is incredibly valuable to our understanding of both Old Norse and Old English traditions, there is value to be found in the Old English sources themselves, however Christianized they may be, and I would interrogate the degree to which we can be sure that a given Old Norse source was or was not Christianized. While Scandinavia was converted to Christianity much later than England was, this does not mean that what is preserved in (chronologically later) Old Norse sources is more accurately representative of ancient Germanic thought than what we find in Old English sources.

I would counter the second assumption with the possibility that pre-Christian thought on the soul in early England might have been comprised of a unique worldview that was the organic confluence of cultural interaction between sub-Roman Celtic and Germanic traditions in early England, rather than a purely Germanic concept.

The goal of this study is to present and analyze evidence found in Old English texts which might give us an idea of early English beliefs about the mind and the soul. Contrary to the former assumption described above, there is a traditional early English view of the soul that is discernible in the Old English corpus.

Two traditions

In a 2002 analysis of Old English literature on the mind and soul, MR Godden identifies “two distinct traditions of thought” on the topic:

In other words, the Old English literature on the soul has, on the one hand, a conception of a single mind-soul inner self which was developing in a Christian context, and, on the other hand, a more native, perhaps originally pagan, concept of an inner mind/self associated with both thought and passion which was not the same as the (im)mortal soul.

We can see the former unification of mind and immortal soul in Ælfrǽd’s translations of Boethius, where he frequently conflates sáwol and mód while Boethius himself is careful to distinguish Latin mens (mind) and animus/cor (soul/heart).^❦2Godden 2002, p 287-288 Similarly, Ælfríc emphatically rejects the notion that animals have souls on the basis that the soul “is not just a life-spirit but a rational and immortal spirit unique to man and created specifically by God for each individual, to endow him simultaneously with life and understanding.”^❦3Godden 2002, p 298 However, we can see hints — in both Ælfrǽd and Ælfríc’s writings — of the latter differentiation of soul and mind that was, perhaps, the native English conception.

The mind within the heart

The Old English mind seems to have been tied with both thought and emotion. We can see this with the active way in which certain mental states are taken with the verb niman ‘to take,’ as Godden (2002) notes:

Godden also brings in the use of active verbs módigian ‘to be proud,’ yrsian, ‘to be angry,’ murnan ‘to be sad,’ and gladian ‘to be happy,’ noting that, “passions can resemble mental actions rather than mental states.”^❦4 Godden 2002, p 299

The most common terms for the mind in Old English poetry and prose are mód and hyge. Of mód, Godden remarks:

Godden also notes that hyge “is used similarly of both thought and emotion,”^❦5 Godden 2002, p 303 and that “The Wanderer uses various apparently synonymous terms for the mind, mod, hyge, modsefa and ferð,”^❦6 Godden 2002, p 304 particularly in lines 15-19, 88-90, 111a, and so on. While it may be tempting to draw out a distinction between these terms, the corpus does not support an overarching distinction. In The Seafarer 58a-64a, we read about the hyge which travels beyond the body, and in this context we see terms hyge, módsefa, and hreðer equated:

Just a few lines earlier, we see the sefa also described as journeying: sefan tó síþe […] on flódwegas feor gewítan ‘the sefa to a journey […] to travel far upon the sea paths.’ There are a myriad of similar conflations we can also find in The Wanderer and other elegiac and heroic poems in Old English. We can even see a connection between these terms in some of the Old Icelandic sources. Vivian Salmon (1960) notes that “[a] connection with hugr is suggested by one O.I. occurrence of the term móðsefi (Háttatal st. 50), where tjǫld móðsefa as a kenning for ‘breast’ (‘coverings of the spirit’) in the first part of the stanza is paralleled by hugtún (‘enclosure of the spirit’) in the second,” and that sefi “is interesting because of its fairly common equation with hugr/hyge,” citing Hávamál 162^❦7hugi hverfik […] ok snýk hennar ǫllum sefa and Béowulf 593,^❦8gif þín hige wǽre / sefa swá searogrim and suggesting that the evidence “does indicate that, since modsefa and sefa and their O.I. cognates could be equated with hyge/hugr, they might in suitable contexts bear a similar connotation of ‘free-ranging soul’.” ^❦9 Salmon 1960, p 6

Godden (2002) also connects mód, hyge, and ferhþ, comparing

• stíeran mon sceal strongum móde (The Seafarer 109)
• stýran sceal mon strongum móde (Maxims I 50)

with

• hyge sceal gehealden hond gewealden (Maxims I 121)
• heald hordlocan hyge fæst bind (Homiletic Fragment II 3)
• þæt hé his ferðlocan fæste binde / healde his hordcorfan hyge swá hé wille (The Wanderer 13-14).

Godden remarks that, in addition to mód, Old English poetry, “uses for the concept ‘mind’ the poetic terms hyge, sefa and ferð […] more or less interchangeably.”^❦10 Godden 2022, p 300-301 We might add to this list, on the basis of the poetic corpus, the terms hreðer, heorte, and bréost.^❦11 Godden p 302-304; cf. Maxims, The Wife’s Lament, The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Order of the World, Precepts. The heart as the seat of mind may connect with the idea that the soul was associated with the breath, as we will see below. Riddle 39 of the Exeter Book riddles also offers some evidence of the relation between the mind, the heart, and the breath. Here, we learn that the answer to the riddle ne gewit hafað […] ne hafað hío sáwle ne feorh “has neither consciousness […] nor has she soul or life.” ^❦12 DiNapoli 2000, p 437

In contrast to the varying attempts to parse some sort of functional difference between these terms, the evidence in Old English literature would suggest that these terms functioned synonymously. There certainly seem to have been nuances, such as the propensity for hyge to be used more often for the intellect, and the way that mód’s derivatives tend to be associated more with pride; however, we also see examples of the inverse, such as oferhygd for ‘pride’ and gléawmód/módgléaw for ‘wise.’ Moreover, we can see, even in the few examples present thus far, how useful the existence of various synonymous words for the mind-heart aspect would have been for alliterative poetry.

Rather than attempting to parse out strict divisions between these similarly used and usually equated terms, we may instead present a contrast between all of these terms for the inner or traveling mind/intellect on the one hand, and the (im)mortal sáwol/gást on the other. According to Godden (2002),

Having established a concept of the mind-heart aspect in Old English literature, which I will chiefly refer to with the term mód moving forward (for the sake of clarity), we may now turn to the other aspect of the self presented by Godden above: the soul that becomes evident under threat of death.

The breath of life

There is one point in Ælfrǽd’s translation of Boethius where he uses the word gást to render Latin spiritus:

Here, he “speaks of our spirit [gást] wandering abroad while we sleep, without us wishing it or having power over it […] Alfred seems to be reflecting the common folk-belief that in dreams and trances an inner spirit or soul (usually quite distinct from the conscious mind) leaves the body and wanders about in the world.” ^❦15 Godden 2002, p 290 While Ælfríc speaks here of the gást leaving the body during sleep, rather than the mód (as we established in the prior section), we must also remember that he was working to equate the mód with the gást. However, the connection of gást with the mortal soul, rather than the traveling mind, is reinforced by the use of the term gástgedál “gást-separation; death” found in Gúþlác and in the Genesis poem.

We also see Ælfríc, quite unpromptedly, rejecting the “theory that the soul is breath: ‘Nis na seo orðung ðe we utblawað . and innateoð ure sawul . ac is seo lyft þe we on lybbað on ðisum deadlicum life.’ [“It is not the breath that we exhale, and draw in our soul, but is the air upon which we live in this mortal life”] […] Presumably the ancient identification of the soul with breath was current among Ælfric’s readers or listeners.”^❦3 Godden 2002, p 298

The main terms we see for ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ in the above quotations are gást ‘spirit, ghost’ and sáwol ‘soul.’ The term orðung, which also means ‘breath,’ never seems to be used of one's life, but rather just of the air we breath, as Ælfríc describes above. Other terms for ‘breath’ also seem to be limited to the physical air taken in, such as ǽðm and fnæst. We do find éðung referring to abstract inspiration in addition to breathing, much as we do with orðung, but it is not identified with the soul; in a translation of the Latin Vulgate Psalm 17:16, we even see it as something obtained by the soul: of éðunge gástes graman ðínes “from the spirit (gást) of your wrath’s inspiration (éðung).”^❦16 cf. þurh orðunge þæs hálgan gástes “through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit” in Ælfríc’s homilies Brǽþ (the ancestor of the modern English word breath) most often refers to an odor rather than any kind of life’s breath.

Instead, we can add to the ranks of gást and sáwol the term blǽd, which is used for both physical breath and inspiration in much the same way as orðung and éðung, but is also found meaning ‘life’ in e.g. Judith 63 and Elene 489. However, we also see it functioning with a meaning of ‘glory, honor, joy’ which may remind us of the use of mód for similar concepts. In addition to these terms for breath, we see ealdor refer to ‘life’ throughout Old English literature.^❦17 Solomon & Saturn, Gúþlác, Béowulf, Andreas, The Phoenix, various Psalms translations, &c.

Another term which could be applied to soul/breath that departs at death is the term feorh, which is often translated as ‘life.’ In Béowulf it is especially used of the life-force of Grendel, but also of Béowulf himself, but we can also see its connection to the term sáwol in the following lines foreshadowing Béowulf’s death:

The terms are equated even more closely in the description of Grendel’s death, where he feorh álegde / hǽþene sáwle· þǽr him hel onféng “laid down his life, his heathen soul; there hell received him” (851b-852b). The other instances of feorh found in Old English poetry also refer to the idea of the soul or life-force that departs when one dies. This function for the word is even paralleled in the Old Norse poems, where the cognate fjǫr is often used of the life of those dying.^❦18 e.g. Fáfnir and Reginn in Fáfnismál 5, 21, 22, 26, 32 The Old Saxon cognate ferah is also found throughout the Hêliand fulfilling a similar function. This may suggest the antiquity of the connection between feorh and the life/soul of living beings; this is also an intriguing usage, given the word’s etymological connections to the oak tree and storm deities in Germanic and Slavic cultures. On the basis of this possible antiquity, and the consistency with which it is used of the soul/life-force in Old English poetry, I will be using feorh to refer to this part of the self moving forward.

The bodily container

Instead of Plato’s tripartite view of the soul (reason vs. spirit vs. appetite), or the unified Christian mind-soul of Ælfrǽd and Ælfríc, we find in Old English literary tradition a system wherein the body contains the intellect/mind/heart on one hand and the breath/life/soul on the other. The vocabulary for each of these parts is rich, as we would expect given the alliterative nature of Germanic poetry.

The body as a container is a prevalent image in Old English sources. In contrast to the use of the cognate Old Norse hamr ‘skin,’ which refers to “the inner shape that determines outside appearance,”^❦19 Lecouteux 2009, p 169 i.e. the shape the hugr ‘mind’ takes when it is traveling (either in dreams or through magic), the Old English hama ‘covering’ refers rather to the physical body; Salmon (1960) notes that it appears “especially in kennings for the body such as feorh-hama ‘covering of the spirit’, flæschama ‘flesh-covering’, lic-hama ‘body-covering’,” indicating that “the soul was regarded as a separate entity enclosed by a wall of flesh.”^❦20 Salmon 1960, p 3-4 Salmon also connects with this idea the Old Norse term líkhamr ([near] cognate to líchama), which, although only appearing in Christian contexts in Old Norse, also has cognates in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Frisian, which “suggests its antiquity and possibly heathen origin.”^❦20 Salmon 1960, p 3-4

In contrast to this understanding, Britt Mize (2006) presents the possibility that, at least in The Wanderer and similar elegiac poems, these compounds, along with others such as those ending in the element -cófa and -lóca, could refer to the mód rather than the body:

While Mize grants that these terms are used primarily of the physical body elsewhere in the Old English corpus, their use in reference to the mód in elegiac poems is key to Mize’s conclusion that the mind was viewed as an enclosure capable of opening or closing, as is also evident by the way to which speech is referred in Old English: phrases like módhord onléac ‘unlocked his mind-hoard’ in Andreas and wordhord onléac in Béowulf, Vainglory, Wídsíþ, and the Metres of Boethius reveal that the mind was thought to contain words which could only be shared by way of unlocking (onlúcan) or unfastening (onspéon in Andreas) the mód.^❦22 Mize 2006, p 70-71 In this way, we may compare the way that the mód acts as a container for thoughts and words that it can release through speech with the way that the body, and particularly the breast, is a container for the feorh that it releases at death.

As we saw before, the mód too may be (temporarily) released or projected beyond the confines of the body, as we see of the speaker in The Seafarer. Salmon (1960) also compares the feþerhoma ‘feather-covering’ Satan uses to visit the earth in bird form in Genesis B with Freyja’s near cognate fjaðrhamr used by Loki in Þrymskviða to venture to and from Jǫtunheimr.^❦20 Salmon 1960, p 3-4 Salmon also considers the possibility that the comparison between the speaker’s mód and the birds described in The Seafarer indicates that the speaker’s mód may indeed be traveling in the form of a bird,^❦20 Salmon 1960, p 3-4 possibly comparable to the appearance of the fylgja as a bird or other animal in Old Norse sources.^❦23 Lecouteux 2009, p 164

However, unlike the fylgja, which appears to have been both a tutelary spirit to an individual or family and something of a doppelganger or second self,^❦24 Lecouteux 2009, p 167 the wandering mód in Old English literature is still identifiable with the same mód which is typically found in the body (cf. Ælfrǽd’s use of scip módes ‘ship of the mind’); additionally, whereas the hamr is an “inner shape” that determines the outer appearance of the fylgja in Norse sources, ^❦25 Lecouteux 2009, p 169, the haman of the birds in The Seafarer and Genesis B seem to be physical, in keeping with the typical interpretation of the element hama in the words for the body. Salmon’s invocation of werewolves may also be an indication of this as, in the case of a werewolf’s transformation, “the change may have affected the whole body, not only the free-ranging soul.”^❦20 Salmon 1960, p 3-4 Thus, rather than postulating a separate soul-entity such as the fylgja, the evidence points us to a notion that the mód itself had the capability in some circumstances of transforming the shape of its body-container when traveling.

Finally, Godden (2002) presents some evidence that perhaps the body itself was seen as having some agency. Based on a close reading of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, Godden remarks that they “suggest an astonishing dislocation between the self and the mind […] the thought of the heart stems from an inner self with its own volition, which a man needs to learn to understand and anticipate, since it can, presumably, dictate his actions in spite of his conscious self.” This conscious self “seems here to be almost identified with the body rather than the mind.”^❦26 Godden 2002, p 305-306 Thus, there seem to be “two centres of the consciousness: an inner, urgent, passionate personality [mód] and a more reluctant self which controls action [the body].” Godden notes, based on The Seafarer 94-96, that this latter body seems to have more control of that part of the mód which is usually referred to as the hyge (usually translated ‘mind’ though, as discussed above, not wholly distinguishable from the other terms for the mód).^❦27 Godden 2002, p 306-307

Conclusions

Based on studies of Old English sources, we have established a rough idea of what might have been the vernacular concept of the body/mind/soul in early England: there is the body (líc, &c.) which functioned as the (usual, while living) container for the mind and soul; there is the soul (feorh, &c.), often associated with the breath, that is the life itself which one lays down upon death; and there is the mind (mód, &c.) which is the seat of both what we would today call rational thought as well as emotion.

The líc was seen as having its own agency apart from the mód — a control over physical action and perhaps the power to suppress the urges and thoughts of the mód. It is the entity which lets go of the feorh when a person dies.

The feorh is often spoken of as being “laid down” or “lost” by the body at death. However, there does seem to be some indication that it survived beyond death, and not just in sources which treat the sáwol in the everlasting Christian sense. For example, we find the term scínhíw ‘phantom-shape’ applied to a gást in an Old English homily, and a reference to scíngelác ‘phantom-play, i.e. necromancy’ in Andreas (767) which was used to cause a stone to speak (perhaps by calling forth the soul of the stone). We might even see indirect evidence of the feorh’s continued existence after death in the development of the term gást into modern English ghost.

The mód, or the mind of a person, was understood as housing thoughts and emotions; even words were thought to reside there. It was conceived of as having been located in the heart/chest, and thus may have been tied (at least during life) to the feorh. There is some circumstantial evidence for this in the etymological relationship between feorh and its derivative mód-synonym ferhþ; ferhþ is thought to be formed from the root of feorh with the addition of the abstract-noun suffix -þ. It may have been that, during life, it was difficult to isolate the mód from the feorh, as the latter is typically only invoked in contexts related to death. While we have indications that, during life, the mód had the ability to travel beyond the bounds of its usual bodily container in dreams and meditative/trance states, or through magic, we do not have a clear indication of what, if anything, is the fate of the mód after death.

Much remains to be investigated on the topic of an Old English soul concept, but hopefully this study has demonstrated that there is valuable information to be found within the Old English corpus itself regarding this topic.

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references

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bibliography

Secondary sources

• DiNapoli, R 2000. “In the Kingdom of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is a Seller of Garlic: Depth-Perception and the Poet’s Perspective in the Exeter Book Riddles.” English Studies 5, p 422-455
• Godden, MR 2002. ‘Anglo-Saxons on the Mind.’ Liuzza, RM (ed), Old English Literature, Yale, p 284-314
• Lecouteux, C 2009. “Nine: The Soul.” The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind. Inner Traditions, p 162-180
• Mize, B 2006. “The representation of the mind as an enclosure in Old English poetry.” Anglo-Saxon England 35, p 57-30
• Salmon, V 1960. “‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’, and the Old English Conception of the Soul.” The Modern Language Review 55,1, p 1-10

Consulted primary sources

Old English

• Andreas
• Béowulf
• Déor
• Elene
• Genesis A
• Gúþlác
• Judith
• Maxims I
• Maxims II
• Metres of Boethius
• The Seafarer
• The Soul & the Body I
• The Soul & the Body II
• The Wanderer
• Vainglory
• Wídsíþ

Old Saxon

• Genesis B
• Hêliand

Old Norse

• Fáfnismál
• Hávamál
• Þrymskviða

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philology