Threads of Healing: Charms, Runes, and Prayers in the Old Norse Way

They used to speak to sickness like it was a thing you could look in the eye. Not just a fever. Not just an ache. Something alive enough to be named, ordered, and sent away.

Over the next ten storytimes, we’re going to sit with some of the oldest healing charms the Germanic world left behind. Old Saxon. Old English. Old High German. Norse. We’ll hold each one up to the firelight, turn it in our hands, and see what’s there. Where the history is certain. Where the threads tie into the old Norse ways. And where Seiðr might have breathed through the work.

We’re not here to reenact them. We’re here to listen close, to dissect their bones and see how they were built, then let our minds step into the space between fact and possibility. And at the end, I’ll tell you what it stirs in me now.

The Old Saxons called this one Uuormsegen, the Worm Charm. We have it written from the 9th or 10th century, in a language close enough to our own Norse roots that you can hear the echo. It starts in the bone and works its way out, bone to flesh, flesh to hide, hide to arrow, arrow away. Every line is a step. Every step is a loosening.

In the Norse tongue, the power to bind and to loosen sat at the heart of Seiðr. A völva could tangle a fate so tight it could not move… or she could unbind the knot and set it free. We see that in Egils saga, when runes are carved to drive bad magic out of a sick woman. We see it in Kormáks saga, when an illness blamed on the elves is met with ritual, chant, and offering. The logic is the same here: name the harm, command it to go, seal the way behind it.

I imagine a winter night. A farmhouse with smoke clinging to the rafters. The patient lying pale, the family watching. The völva sits close, staff in one hand, her other hand tracing slow over the body, her words low but certain. Not to comfort. To command. When the last line falls, the staff knocks once on the floor. An offering is made. A carved stave is set above the door to keep the sickness from finding its way back.

And this… this is where the old and the living meet. Because whether you call it a worm or a curse, an elf-shot or bad luck…there is still a place in Seiðr for unbinding. For finding what’s wound too tight in the soul, naming it without fear, and sending it where it can’t follow.