«ÞUR SARRIÞU ÞURSA TRUTIN»: LA LUCHA CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS Y LA MEDICINA EN ESCANDINAVIA EN LA TEMPRANA EDAD MEDIA RESUMEN

This paper seeks evidence among our extensive Scandinavian mythological texts for an area which they seldom discuss explicitly: the conceptualisation and handling of illness and healing. Its core evidence is two runic texts (the Canterbury Rune-Charm and the Sigtuna Amulet) which conceptualise illness as a þurs (‘ogre, monster’). The article discusses the semantics of þurs, arguing that illness and supernatural beings could be conceptualised as identical in medieval Scandinavia. This provides a basis for arguing that myths in which gods and heroes fight monsters provided a paradigm for the struggle with illness. The article proceeds, more speculatively, to use the Eddaic poem Skírnismál and the Finnish Riiden synty as the basis for arguing that one cause of illness could be the transgression of moral norms.


INTRODUCTION
Healing does not feature prominently in those medieval texts canonically associated with what has traditionally been termed 'Old Norse mythology'.Although healing powers find mention, 2 medical texts themselves are little attested in our medieval Scandinavian manuscript record, while illness and healing are not presented as central themes of medieval Scandinavians' mythical understanding of the world.Healing in this tradition has, accordingly, also received little attention from scholars. 3This image contrasts with the medieval Christianity with which non-Christian Scandinavian traditions coexisted: miracles and metaphors of healing are central not only to the New Testament, but also to the many saints' lives which it inspired, putting the healing of the sick at the centre of Christian ideologies -as the considerations of the relationships between Christianity and healing in later periods by Eilola and Hokkanen in this volume emphasise. 4We need not doubt that the differences in emphasis between traditional Scandinavian mythological texts ----and Christian ones do reflect different ideologies or cultural concerns.But I argue here that interactions between ideas about health and healing on the one hand, and wider belief-systems, encompassing morality, on the other, were more important in traditional Scandinavian beliefs than our manuscript record would suggest.
The core evidence from which I argue comprises two texts in Old Norse (the medieval Scandinavian language), written using runes.Perhaps significantly, given the limited interest in medicine shown in the accounts of traditional mythology in Scandinavian manuscripts, both survive outside the mainstream of our Scandinavian textual record -one in an English manuscript, the other archaeologically.Each text is a medicinal charm intended to counteract illness, and directed at beings called þursar (singular þurs).In themselves, these texts are well-known, but I suggest that the attitudes to illness which they imply are more deeply connected to the wider world-views attested in medieval Scandinavian mythological texts than has been realised.If I am right, then we can situate Scandinavian beliefs about illness and healing in a broader cultural -and therefore moral-context, to understand more fully the interactions between health and morality in medieval Scandinavia's non-Christian traditions.
One of my main methods is to argue that the meanings of the words which we find in our texts contain revealing evidence about past cultural categorisations.In doing so, I draw on the methods of comparative philology, which recognises that, where we lack detailed evidence for the meanings of a word in one language, the meanings of its cognates in closely related languages can provide useful additional indicators for what it is likely to have meant.The main source of comparisons here is Old English, a language closely related to Old Norse in which medicinal terminology is well-attested.I argue that þurs can be understood at some level not only to denote a kind of monster (as has traditionally been recognised) but also, at one and the same time, an illness.This opens up a reading of our evidence in which healing and illness was understood as a transformation of one of the fundamental themes of medieval Scandinavian mythologies: the cosmic struggle of the human in-group and its gods against the barbarians and monsters which threaten the fabric of society.
My arguments introduce connections between morality and health into our understanding of medieval Scandinavian world-views.However, the place of moral transgression, investigated in this volume by Hokkanen and Eilola with regard to Malawi and early modern Scandinavia, is harder to identify, because the evidence on which I focus here does not present clear correlations between moral transgression and the aetiology of illness.The final stage of my argument, then, aims only to sketch a possibility, on the basis only of a small part of the available medieval and comparative evidence.Some evidence concerning þursar does include indicators linking their activities to people's moral transgressions, the most prominent text being a mythological poem called Skírnismál.Moreover, the nineteenth-century Finnish folk-poem Riiden synty, an aetiological text about the origin (literally, the birth) of rickets, describes the activities of a tursas -tursas being a loanword into Finnish cognate with þurs.In keeping with the spirit of the present collection, this text provides a modern anthropological parallel to the medieval material which helps to illustrate the kinds of networks between moral transgression and health which beliefs in þursar might have promoted.

WHAT IS A ÞURS?
Þurs is an Old Norse word with cognates in all the medieval Germanic languages. 5In addition, the Common Germanic word from which all these descend was borrowed into Finnish, as tursas (and possibly, at later times or with developments within Finnish, as turso, turilas and turisas, but the case here is less clear). 6Dictionaries define it with terms such as 'ogre' and 'giant', while also mentioning the fact that þurs was the name of the rune þ. 7 This is consistent with the cognate evidence. 8However, there are more subtle ----aspects to þurs's (doubtless changing) meanings, which have yet to receive a full analysis.Cleasby and Vigfusson specified the 'notion of surliness and stupidity'. 9In our canonical mythological texts, þursar invariably appear evil, but the þurs Þórir in Grettis saga chapter 61, born of mixed giant and human parentage, is a sympathetic character. 10Another connotation, omitted by the lexicographers but which I discuss somewhat below, is one of sexuality, which emerges most clearly from a line in the Icelandic rune-poem, first attested in manuscript around 1500, explicating the rune-name þurs: 'þ[urs] is women's torment and crags' inhabitant, / and Valrún's mate '. 11 This description is fairly well paralleled by Norwegian sources: the Norwegian rune-poem, whose earliest surviving copies are from 1636 but were based on a lost, earlier manuscript, describes þ with 'þurs causes women's illness', which parallels the Icelandic text. 12Meanwhile, Jonna Louis-Jensen has argued that the cryptic runic inscription 7 from Bø church in Telemark, from around 1200, uses the phrase 'mountain's inhabitant' to denote the rune þ, which seems to indicate that another characterisation of þursar in the Icelandic text was already current centuries before our manuscripts of the rune-poems, showing that the rest of the characterisation may also be old. 13nderstanding the connotations of þurs may be particularly important for understanding how far it was synonymous with words of related meaning.There has long been a tendency to regard our words for mythical beings in Old Icelandic to represent a lexical set like robin, sparrow and hawk, in which each word's meaning is mutually exclusive of the others', but it is also possible that þurs belongs (as well or instead) to a more common kind of ---clops, Orcus and Colossus (though not these alone), indicating meanings similar to the Norse þurs.Our English evidence also shows connections with water, which may correlate with the Finnish tradition, discussed below, in which the tursas is a sea-dwelling monster: WHITELOCK, D. (1951), The Audience of 'Beowulf', Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp.72-73, 75; DICKINS, B. (1942), Yorkshire Hobs, Transactions of the Yorshire Dialect Society, 7, pp.9-23 (at p. 14).
9 For which see further DICKINS (1942), p. 12. lexical set, which can be exemplified by monarch, king and ruler.It would be possible to find people who could only be described with one of these words, and people who could be described by all at once -and this seems fairly clearly to be true of words like þurs and other words for monsters. 14Thus stanza 25 of the poem Helgakviða Hjǫrvarðssonar, one of the collection of mythological and heroic poems known as the Poetic Edda, has the hero Atli refuse a request by the giantess Hrímgerðr, who wants to take compensation for her father's killing by sleeping with his slayer, with the insult Atli refers to Loðinn with þurs, jǫtunn, hraunbúi, and even maðr. 16One reason for the variation in terminology in this and similar texts is of course the metrical and aesthetic requirements of poetry (and inventive insults), but equally Snorri Sturluson supported his prose claim, in the earlier thirteenth century, that 'the races of the frost-þursar' descend from Aurgelmir/Ymir by quoting the statement in stanza 33 of the Eddaic poem Hyndluljóð that 'all giants [jǫtnar] come from Ymir'. 17The variation between þurs and jǫtunn is also paralleled in Old English. 18Such evidence is sufficient to put the burden ----14 It is widely recognised that our texts suggest this kind of overlapping meaning: see especially SCHULZ (2004), pp.29-37; ÁRMANN JAKOBSSON (2006), Where do the Giants Live?, Arkiv för nordisk filologi, 122, pp.101-12.But commentators still usually assume that meanings were discrete in pre-literary periods: see for example HAAVIO (1967) of proof on those who would assume that words like þurs and jǫtunn denoted distinct races.My argument in the next section extends this kind of thinking to another aspect of the meanings of þurs, to argue that we must not only be willing to see different words for monsters as partial synonyms, but to be able to denote things which are in our world-views members of entirely different ontological categories -specifically illnesses.

MONSTERS AND ILLNESS
As my summary above shows, senses relating to illness have not been recognised for þurs in Old Norse lexicography.Tellingly, our principal evidence for such associations derives from a text-type which enjoys little direct representation in our medieval Scandinavian corpus, but which references in Eddaic poems, alongside the evidence of neighbouring medieval regions and later texts, suggest was widespread: healing charms.Though written in Old Norse and in runic form, the most relevant of these survives not in Scandinavia, but in a portion of the English manuscript British Library, Cotton Caligula A.xv, from Christ Church Canterbury and dated to around 1073×76; it is known accordingly as the Canterbury Rune-Charm.Linguistic evidence suggests that the charm is likely first to have been written down by about 1000, by a speaker of East Norse (the ancestor-language of Danish and Swedish).The charm is not without its problems, but can be translated fairly confidently as 'Kuril of the wound-spear, go now, you have been found.May Þórr consecrate you, lord of þursar, Kuril of the wound-spear.Against ?vein-pus'.At any rate, it clearly envisages Kuril both as a supernatural being (and specifically lord of þursar), and as the root cause of poisonous fluid in the veins. 19inding and attacking Kuril seems to be a means to deal with this symptom.Trying to decide whether Kuril is to be classified in our own world-views as a ----Boston, Heath, pp.16 and 29.Though there is again a likelihood that we are dealing at least partly here with poetic, figurative language.
19 'kuril sarþuara far þu nu funtin istu þur uigi þik / þorsa trutin iuril sarþuara uiþr aþrauari'.This can be standardised as 'Kuril sárþvara far þú nú, fundinn ertu.Þórr vígi þik þursa dróttin, Iuril (leg.Kuril) sárþvara.Viðr áðravari (leg.-vara)'.FRANKIS, J. ( 2000 being or an illnesses will not greatly help us to understand this text: what will is to recognise that illness could in some sense be conceptualised as a being, and interacted with on that basis. Þórr's role as the god invoked for healing in the Canterbury Rune-Charm is not well paralleled in our manuscript evidence.However, about seventyfive pendants in the form of hammers survive from early medieval Scandinavia, and have been associated with Þórr on account of his possession of the hammer Mjǫllnir in a wide range of texts.Meanwhile, they have also been assumed to have had amuletic functions, which gains support from the existence of hammers inscribed with crosses, worn alongside crosses in burials, or cast alongside crosses in moulds, suggesting that the hammers may have had similar functions to crucifixes. 20Moreover, an early eleventh-century copper amulet from Kvinneby in Sweden seems to invoke Þórr in healing, which seems fairly certainly to include the statement 'may Þórr guard him with that hammer which strikes Ámr', connects both Þórr and his hammer with (amuletic) healing. 21These points would link Þórr with amuletic protection against day-to-day threats, whether from monsters, illnesses, or other misfortune.
Moreover, there is an important analogue for the Canterbury Rune-Charm in Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, book 4, chapters 26-27, written around 1075: The reliability of Adam's account has long been doubted: to name the main issues, he was operating in an ideologically and politically charged Christian community, which is likely to have strongly coloured his understanding and reporting of pagan traditions; he clearly Classicised his material to some degree, and perhaps considerably; and he was not an eye-witness to what he described, while the proximity of his oral sources to events is not clear either. 23It is worth emphasising, however, that the passage in question is part of Adam's original Gesta, to be distinguished from the infamous scholia 138-41, which provide more lurid and accordingly less plausible further details about the temple 24 .Meanwhile, Adam's source value relative to our other material is rising, insofar as we are increasingly aware that our later, vernacular Icelandic sources -most especially Snorri Sturluson's Edda-are themselves compromised by similar problems. 25Moreover, Perkins has pointed out that Adam's attribution to Thor of power over the wind, though not apparent in Snorri's mythography, is well attested in sources which must be independent, most strikingly Dudo of St Quentin's Gesta Normannorum, of around 1060, ---tur populus, ita ut potentissimus eorum Thor in medio solium habeat triclinio; hinc et inde locum possident Wodan et Fricco.Quorum significationes eiusmodi sunt: 'Thor', inquiunt, 'praesidet in aere, qui tonitrus et fulmina, ventos ymbresque, serena et fruges gubernat (...) Thor autem cum sceptro Iovem simulare videtur (...) Omnibus itaque diis suis attributos habent sacerdotes, qui sacrificia populi offerant.Si pestis et famis imminet, Thor ydolo lybatur, si bellum, Wodani, si nuptiae celebrendae sunt, Fricconi».and so is surely reliable. 26In the same way, we can see Adam's association of Thor with the aversion of plague to be consistent with the evidence of the Canterbury Rune-Charm, which invokes Þórr against Kuril, the 'lord of þursar', to cure áðravari -apparently some kind of dangerous fluid in the veins.
If Þórr's role as a healer of illness is well paralleled, what about the Canterbury rune-charm's representation of þursar as sources of illness?This is consistent with their portrayal in the Norwegian rune-poem as the cause of 'women's illness', but, as I have mentioned, this evidence is late.However, roughly contemporary with the Canterbury rune-charm is the Sigtuna Amulet, found during excavations in 1931.This may represent the medium in which the text of the Canterbury Rune Charm found its way to Christ Church, Canterbury; at any rate, it comes from more or less the same time and place as described by Adam of Bremen.The amulet is a thin copper plate with an inscription on each side.Despite Høst's claim that 'side B has nothing in common with the Canterbury inscription', it is not self-evident whether the inscriptions are to be read consecutively or as two separate texts, and it is worth quoting both: 27 A: Þórr/þurs of wound-fever, lord of þursar, flee now; you have been found.B: Have for yourself three pangs of deprivation, wolf!Have for yourself nine contraints/n-runes, wolf! ?Three ices/i-runes, these ices/i-runes drive on, the wolf is content!Benefit from the medicine! 28---- Besides the uncertainty as to the relationship between the two inscriptions, these texts present a number of complications, and the translations of the inscriptions are necessarily tentative.Two things are clear, however.The inscription on the second side seems unambiguously to associate itself with lyf 'medicine', encouraging us to suppose that the shorter inscription on the first side was also -like the Canterbury Rune-Charm-intended for medicinal purposes rather than, for example, helping the bearer in other kinds of encounters with supernatural beings.Meanwhile, the inscription on the first side is verbally similar to the Canterbury Rune-Charm, suggesting that they are representatives of a wider tradition of incantations in which the cause of an illness might be a 'lord of þursar'.Whether the 'lord of þursar' on the Sigtuna Amulet should be identified as the pagan god Þórr or simply as a þurs is hard to judge. 29Either way, however, the prospect that a þurs could in some sense be synonymous with an illness is clear.
As a proportion of our complete corpus of earlier medieval Scandinavian charms, the Canterbury Rune-Charm and the Sigtuna Amulet are significant enough to suggest that discourses associating þursar with causing illness were prominent; but in finite terms, they admittedly afford rather slight evidence for traditions associating supernatural beings with illness.However, wider parallels are easily come by.One set is provided by medieval Christian thought, in which possession by a demon -whereby monster and illness are again effectively identical-was a reasonably prominent aetiology of certain kinds of illness. 30In such cases, the illness is usually identical with the supernatural being, insofar as it commences with its possession and ceases with its expulsion.
Analogues can also be found, however, in the non-Christian traditions of Germanic-speaking cultures.The strongest case is that of dvergr and its Old ----In MCKINNELL, SIMEK, DÜWEL (2004), p. 126 [O 16] (with omission, for typographical convenience, of markings for bind-runes).
29 It was conventional in runic inscriptions, when two identical consonants appeared next to each other, to write only one rune, and HØST (1952), p. 345 cites examples where this occurs despite intervening punctuation, while the vowels distinguished as ó and u in standardised Old Norse spelling were not distinguished in runic writing, meaning that the first word of the inscription could be read as Þórr or þurs.If we read þurs sárriðu, the metrical requirement for alliteration would be met by repeating the word with þursa dróttinn, which from the point of view of literary merit is not promising; but if we read Þórr sárriðu we must probably envisage the demonisation in an increasingly Christianised Scandinavian culture of the traditionally benign god Þórr such that he becomes aligned with his traditional enemies the þursar.English cognate dweorg.The modern English reflex of this word is dwarf, and in our medieval English and Icelandic texts it indeed denotes small beings, usually, at least in the Scandinavian tradition, supernatural. 31We have, however, just enough evidence in Scandinavia to discern a quite different side to the word's meaning, in the form of a fragment of a human cranium from Ribe inscribed, around the eighth century, with a text which we might tentatively translate as 'Ulfr/Wolf and Óðinn and high-tiur.buri is help against this pain.And the dvergr Bóurr (is) overcome'. 32This evidence is consolidated by Old English material: by contrast with the other earlier medieval Germanic languages, surviving writings in Old English include a large number of medical texts, ranging from poetic charms though mundane but apparently traditional prose remedies to translated Latin medical writing.Without this corpus, the meaning of dweorg would have seemed limited to short people, but the medical texts show that by the eleventh century, dweorg could denote fever, and need not (always) have connoted beings, as in the eleventh -or twelfth-century Old English translation of the Peri didaxeon, where a remedy for asthma mentions the symptom 'sometimes he shakes/writhes as though he was on dweorge' probably for 'sometimes they also suffer fever' in the Latin original. 33As with the Norse lexicography mentioned above, the recent Dictionary of Old English divides citations of dweorg neatly into the two senses 'dwarf, pygmy' and 'fever, perhaps high fever with delerium and convulsions'. 34However, the two senses are surely bridged by usage of dvergr on the Ribe Cranium, and by a text in the early eleventh----- century manuscript British Library Harley 585, which contains a range of medical texts, the last of which comprises a miscellaneous collection of remedies known as Lacnunga.Lacnunga includes a charm for an illness identified in the prose as dweorh, which explicitly conceives of the illness in terms of a being treating the sufferer of the disease as its horse. 35Here, the distinction between illness and being is not, I would argue, a helpful one.The Harley 585 text in turn recalls well-attested traditions in our medieval and later evidence from Germanic-speaking cultures in which the female supernatural beings called mǫrur in Old Norse and maran in Old English, who give their name to the modern English nightmare, ride their victims, causing illness, injury or death, and particularly hallucinatory experiences which might be categorised alongside the fevers mentioned above. 36

MYTH, HEALTH, AND MORAL TRANSGRESSION
Reinterpreting þursar, then, as potentially not only causes of illness, but to be at some levels synonymous with illness, is plausible, and moreover seems to be representative of a larger and more widespread, if only patchily attested, medieval Scandinavian discourse.Recognising this affords us, in turn, an opportunity to situate these discourses in a wider cultural -specifically mythological-framework.Our unusually rich mythological evidence from medieval Scandinavia allows us to argue that an individual's experience of a þurs as a cause of illness could be reinterpreted as a microcosm of a larger, mythical struggle, aligning the experience of the sufferer with a wider world charged with moral meaning.To begin explicating this claim at a lexical level, it is possible to situate the term þurs, as a word denoting monsters, in a ---- wider semantic mapping of Old Icelandic words for supernatural beings, for which I have argued elsewhere mainly on the basis of our early poetic records, and which itself correlates with narrative evidence for traditional medieval Scandinavian world-views. 37As figure 1 shows, the world of male supernatural beings 38 can be divided into beings whose actions are fundamentally aligned with the interests of the human in-group, whom we might term gods, and those whose actions fundamentally threaten the fabric of the human in-group's existence, whom we might term monsters.Questions of the relationship of humans to supernatural beings are not ones which I can go into at length here -the seventeenth-century Scandinavian witches, the topic of Eilola's contribution to this collection, provide one example of the complexities which these questions can entail.I have argued elsewhere that the ontological distinction between pre-Christian Scandinavians and their gods may never have been sharp, to the point at which we should perhaps understand gods as a subcategory of humans (or at least humans of the in-group), while some categories of people could be monstrous. 39Notwithstanding these complexities, however, the diagram still represents the fundamental lineaments of a world view.
The semantic field diagram in turn represents one of the basic structuring principles of medieval Scandinavian world-views, in which the human in-group and their gods were locked into a cosmic struggle with the monsters which threatened their society. 40Monster-fighting occurs widely in medieval Scandinavian narratives of all kinds and carries great ideological significance; the point is epitomised by the fact that the guiding framework for our surviving Scandinavian mythological texts is the inevitability of the Ragnarǫk, a cataclysm in which gods and men will fight against the monsters and, to at least a significant extent, die. 41Of all the gods, it is Þórr who is pre-eminent as a fighter of monsters.This being so, his invocation against a þurs in the Canterbury Rune-Charm represents the local application of a global mythological concept.If we are willing to connect the wider evidence for Þórr's invocation against illness and for the conceptual association of (some) illness with monsters, we can begin to perceive a discourse in which the cosmological framework of medieval Scandinavian worldviews was applied at a day-to-day level to provide a medium for healing.If Þórr was the gods' bulwark against monsters, and if monsters were potentially, in some sense, illness, he might also be people's bulwark against illnesses.Having reconstructed this discourse, we can in turn posit that it gave meaning and structure to the experience of illness, not least in allowing potentially debilitating ailments to be interpreted in terms of a model of heroic struggle against external forces whose threats to individuals were symptomatic of the threat they posed to society as a whole.This would be paralleled by Eilola's analyses in this volume of the associations of witchcraft and the aetiologies of illness.
---- It is possible, then, to perceive external, supernatural forces as causes of illness in early medieval, and to some extent pre-Conversion, Scandinavian society.Given our limited evidence for this society, this is a significant achievement.Moving beyond it to link illness with moral transgression specifically -as in the 'diseases of men' discussed by Hokkanen-is a greater challenge again.Links between morality and health were prominent in medieval Christian thought -albeit that the idea of illness as punishment for sin, or purgation of sin, had to compete with a range of other aetiologies-but texts like the Canterbury Rune-Charm provide little basis for linking the assault of a þurs with moral transgressions. 42We must be ready to accept the possibility, then, that moral transgression was not a (prominent) aetiology of illness -which, if so, would be a noteworthy feature of pre-and non-Christian medieval Scandinavian culture.There is, however, enough evidence to connect assaults by þursar with moral transgression to establish the possibility that this kind of discourse existed.The key text for this discussion is the Eddaic poem with the most extensive attestations of þurs, Skírnismál. 43nlike our material concerning Þórr, which emphasises only the martial hostility between the AEsir (the main group of gods) and the jǫtnar (the giants), Skírnismál is a paradigmatic text for a more complex side of their relationship.As Clunies Ross, in particular, has argued, the medieval Scandinavian mythological world allowed for marriage between mythological groups, but only according to patterns determined by group status (as perceived from the perspective of the in-group -mythologically the AEsir, mundanely the culturally and linguistically Scandinavian in-group).The group of highest status was the AEsir; a group of gods from a different tribe, the Vanir, were of second highest status; and the lowest status group was that of the monsters, prototypically the jǫtnar.From the point of view of the AEsir, it was unacceptable for women to marry men of a lower-status group, but it was acceptable for men to have sexual liaisons with women of a group lower in status than their own, and for men of the Vanir to marry giantesses. 44Skírnismál is the pre-eminent example of this process: in it, the Vanr Freyr falls in love with the giantess Gerðr, and Freyr sends his servant Skírnir to woo her.
----42 On competing aetiologies, see for example KROLL, J. and BACKRACH, B. (1984), Sin and Mental Illness in the Middle Ages, Psychological Medicine, 14, pp.507-14. 43Although þurs occurs as a simplex six times in Þrymskviða but only four in Skírnismal, Þrymskviða's attestations are limited to the formula þursa dróttin.Skírnir begins his attempt by offering Gerðr wealth, but she refuses.He threatens to decapitate her, which gets him no further.Finally, then, he pronounces an eleven-stanza curse -or perhaps we should say threatens Gerðr by describing the curse which he can put on her, since the status of his speech act is somewhat ambiguous within the poem-which is sufficient to convince her to accept Freyr.It is the content of the curse, however, which is my main concern here, and I quote its final sequence, stanzas 30-36, in which þurs occurs in almost every stanza: Monsters [tramar] must humiliate you the whole day in the farmsteads of jötnar; to the hall of hrímþursar you must creep, every day, without choice, creep lacking choice; you must have weeping in return for pleasure and accompany grief with tears.
You must live forever with a three-headed þurs or be without a man; may your lust grip may ?consumption ?consume you; become like a thistle -one which was crushed in ?the last part of harvest.I walked to a wood and up to a young tree to get a ?magic wand, a ?magic wand I got.
Óðinn is angry with you, the best of the gods is angry with you, Freyr must hate you, the amazingly bad girl, and you have gained the ?violent anger of the gods.
Let the jötnar hear, let the hrímþursar hear, the sons of the Suttungar, the troop of the AEsir themselves, how I forbid, how I exclude, the merriment of people from the maid, the enjoyment of people['s company] from the maid.
Hrímgrímnir is the name of the þurs who must have you down below the corpse-gates; there may farm-boys give you goats' urine at the roots of the tree.Never get another drink, girl, from your wishes, girl, at my wishes.At this point, Gerðr capitulates, welcomes Skírnir, and agrees to love (unna) Freyr.

I carve þurs
In a sense, this curse is a response to Gerðr's transgression of the will of the gods; much the same reading is demanded of the story told by Saxo Grammaticus around 1216×23 of Odinus (Old Norse Óðinn) being repeatedly rebuffed by Rinda (Old Norse Rindr) in his attempts to woo her (partly by afflicting her with a fever), whose similarities to Skírnismál McKinnell and I have independently emphasised, and which consolidates this reading. 46Admittedly, Skírnir's own moral probity in the text is open to question: if nothing else, Gerðr's successful resistance to the conventional exercise of patriarchal power (wealth and violence) reduces Skírnir to turning to the unmasculine and morally dubious method of using magic, and similar criticisms can be levelled at Odinus in Saxo's narrative.Meanwhile, Bibire has shown that Snorri Sturluson was able to develop the story of Freyja and Gerðr (which he derived at least partly through a text similar to our version of Skírnismál) into a tale in which 'the gods bring about their own downfall through their own explicit moral failure'. 47All the same, Skírnir's demands represent the will of the in-group, to which Gerðr is expected to accede: as Larrington put it, ter), þurs begins the culminating stanza of Skírnir's curse. 49Þursar here, then, are effectively invoked as a potential punishment for resisting the will of the gods; and this gives us a framework for supposing likewise that there could also be a moral dimension for the affliction of someone by a þurs in the sense of an illness.
Dronke considered that it is apt, succinct, integrating, to use the ogre-world as her [Gerðr's] hell, since proverbially Þurs er kvenna kvǫl, 'Ogre is women's torment', Þurs vaeldr kvinna kvillu, 'Ogre causes women's illness'.This is the motto applied to the þ-rune in the Icelandic and Norwegian Runic Poems.Precisely what torment or illness of women is meant can hardly be determined, nor why a þurs should cause it. 50e comparanda which Dronke adduced are surely important, but her final statement that 'precisely what torment of illness of women is meant can hardly be determined' seems a little over-cautious (if not, indeed, coy). 51Regarding the þurs as an illness, although our evidence is sparse, it is fairly clear that þursar were associated with causing some kind of poisonous fluid in the veins, apparently by means of (metaphorical?) projectiles, and with inflicting some kind of fever (sár-riða).Frankis drew attention to the similarity of a þurs causing illness using a 'wound-spear' (sár-þvara) to the phenomenon of elves, pagan gods and witches (ylfe, ese, haegtessan) causing illness with projectiles in the Old English charm Wið faerstice -to which we might add that Wið faerstice envisages that the patient may have been 'shot in the blood', recalling the use of the Canterbury Rune-Charm against dangerous fluid in the veins. 52I have admittedly taken pains elsewhere to show that Anglo-Saxon elves, the bestattested traditional supernatural agents of illness in our Anglo-Saxon evidence, need not have been synonymous with illness, nor necessarily aligned with monsters in our Old English medical texts. 53While I still think that my argumentation holds, the perspectives adopted in the current article discourage its ----dogmatic assertion or overextension, in favour of accepting a degree of ambiguity concerning the position of supernatural beings. 54It is noteworthy, then, that the symptoms associated with þursar are similar to the range attributed to the elves, which are most frequently associated with fevers.Despite the sparsity of the data, then, it is plausible that our two texts linking þursar with illness are roughly representative.Meanwhile, Skírnir's curse leaves little doubt that one sort of torment that a þurs might inflict on a woman was rape.That þurs as sexual torment might overlap conceptually with the þurs as illness is consistent to some extent with the comparisons adduced above for the concept of monster as illness: the image of Anglo-Saxon dweorgas and maran inflicting fever by riding their victims arguably has sexual connotations, while elves were associated with seduction as well as causing fever.
Alongside Skírnismál, another stimulating if less proximate analogue for the idea of afflictions by þursar as related to moral transgression is provided by the Finnish folk-poem Riiden synty ('The Birth/Origin of Rickets'), collected in the nineteenth century by Elias Lönnrot, and one of the main texts in the canon of Finnish folk-poetry to mention a tursas, the Finnish cognate of þurs.Parallels for Skírnir's charm have been noted, particularly from Old Norse and Old English texts, showing that it was neither unique not solely a literary phenomenon, 55 but riiden synty has been discussed little, if at all, in connection with þursar, nor with Skírnismál.Lönnroth's edition is not, admittedly, an ideal source -Lönnrot was inclined to conflate different oral variants which he had collected, and archival investigation of our recorded variants of the poem would be illuminating-but it suffices here to show the potential of the material: ----From a dell [v. the sea] a maiden rose, a 'soft skirts' from a clump of grass, who was lovely to behold, the delight of the world; to suitors she paid no regard, for the good men no fancy had.
A giant (turilas) came, a shirted monster (tursas) of the sea, the wretch to be sure had planned a scheme, had thought upon a fine affair: a nightmare he put down on her, he caused the unwilling one to sleep, brought her to seek repose on a honey-dropping sward, on the liver-coloured earth.There he lay with the girl, made the maiden with child, quickened her into pregnancy, himself his departure took, the scoundrel started to go away, the wretch to wander forth. 56e text goes on to describe how the girl wakes to find herself pregnant and how God banishes her, describing her as a portto ('prostitute (working at a port)'), but that she chooses not to go where she has been sent; the child which she begets winds up being christened by evil women, using water in which they have washed their filthy clothes, as riisi ('rickets').
tion of this detail with the subsequent description of how the meritursas has sex with her, and God's immediate indictment of her immorality, implies a causal connection between the events (though the text is not explicit on the point): the moral failing facilitates the rape (or perhaps seduction?)by the meritursas.This in turn leads to the girl's banishment by God.(A further moral transgression -this time not paralleled in Skírnismál-is that she refuses to undertake the exile prescribed, and this in turn implicitly contributes to the dire outcome of her liaison with the meritursas, the disease of rickets.)If Finnic traditions concerning tursaat were similar to those concerning þursar, Riiden synty would support the argument that there could have been a moral dimension to the harm inflicted by þursar.

CONCLUSIONS
It is possible, then, to understand some Old Norse words -I have focused here on þurs-to denote not only monsters, but also illnesses.Moreover, it is at least at times helpful to understand these words as presenting monster and illness as identical -as one and the same category.Reading the evidence in this way helps us to interpret the presence of the term þurs in two runic charms in relation to the occurrences of the word in mythological texts: it becomes possible to posit a discourse in which the mundane experience of an ailment could be transformed, partly through the polysemy of words, into a struggle between man and monster.This discouse connected illness with a struggle deeply encoded in the mythology of medieval Scandinavian culture, most clearly in stories of the Ragnarǫk.Reading þurs in this way also allows the prominent role of the god Þórr as a monster-fighter to be linked with his less prominent but nonetheless well-attested associations with healing, giving his attributes a greater degree of conceptual coherence than has hitherto been recognised, and suggesting a greater role for beliefs in gods in ideas about health than has hitherto been recognised.
It is reasonable to say that the wider range of cultural meanings with which I have connected illness had a moral dimension: it had implications for defining proper and improper behaviour.To this extent, my association of mundane ailments with mythological beings also implicitly associates morality with health.Bringing our patchy evidence this far is an achievement, and to take it further is a speculative exercise: certainly our medical texts concerning þursar offer no clear evidence that they might afflict people specifically in response to moral transgression.But the broader historical and anthropologi-cal context of the present collection, supplemented in my own article with reference to nineteenth-century Finnish tradition, makes it clear that affliction by þursar might have been associated with moral transgression.Moreover, the Old Norse poem Skírnismál does provide some encouragement for this reading, since it prominently invokes affliction by þursar as part of a curse, uttered in an effort to bring about actions desirable to the gods.This is a fleeting glimpse of a possible world of moral meaning in medieval Scandinavian medicine.
39 H [rune-name] at you and three letters: ergi [perversion] and oði [madness] and óþoli [unbearability]; thus will I cut it away, just as I carved it on, if there should be need of it'.45