The general character of this poem is one well known to us: there are many Anglosaxon spells of the same description. What makes this valuable beyond all that have ever been discovered, is the number of genuine heathen names that survive in it, which in others of the same kind have been replaced by other sanctions; and which teach us the true meaning of those which have survived in the altered form. In a paper read before the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Grimm identified Phol with Baldr[[682]], and this view he has further developed in the new edition of his Mythology[[683]]. It is confirmatory of this view that we possess the same spell in England, without the heathendom, and where the place of the god Baldr is occupied by that of our Lord himself. The English version of the spell runs thus:
The lord rade,
and the foal slade;
He lighted
and he righted;
set joint to joint
and bone to bone,
sinew to sinew.
Heal, in the Holy Ghost’s name[[684]]!
It will be admitted that this is something more than a merely curious coincidence, and that it leads to an induction of no little value. Now it appears to me that we have reasonable ground to believe our version quite as ancient and quite as heathen as the German one which still retains the heathen names, and that we have good right to suppose that it once referred to the same god. How then was this god named in England? Undoubtedly Pol or Pal[[685]]. Of such a god we have some obscure traces in England. We may pass over the Appolyn and Apollo, whom many of our early romancers number among the Saxon gods, although the confused remembrance of an ancient and genuine divinity may have lurked under this foreign garb, and confine ourselves to the names of places hearing signs of Pol or Pal. Grimm has shown that the dikes called Phalgraben in Germany are much more likely to have been originally Pfolgraben, and his conclusion applies equally to Palgrave, two parishes in Norfolk and Suffolk:—so Wódnes Díc, and the Devil’s Dike between Cambridge and Newmarket. Polebrooke in Northamptonshire, Polesworth in Warwickshire, Polhampton in Hants[[686]], Polstead in Suffolk, Polstead close under Wanborough (Wódnesbeorh) in Surrey,—which is remarkable for the exquisite beauty of its springs of water,—Polsden in Hants, Polsdon in Surrey, seem all of the same class. To these we must add Polsley and Polthorn, which last name would seem to connect the god with that particular tree: last, but not least, we have in Poling, in Sussex, the record of a race of Polingas, who may possibly have carried up their genealogy to Bældæg in this form.