Towards a Poetics, Rhetorics and Proxemics of Verbal Charms

This article is intended as a first attempt to assemble and, where necessary, to newly devise, a series of terms which can be used to indicate the poetical features1 and rhetorical structures and devices typically present in the words of a charm, and also the proxemic manoeuvres employed in the “performance” of charms.2 In the English-speaking world academic investigations into individual verbal charms and into whole charm traditions have tended to be undeveloped in approach and few in number, excepting, of course, the standard authorities on the Anglo-Saxon charms.3 Such studies of English-language charms as have been carried out, most especially in the lateand post-medieval fields, have been limited, hampered by the lack of adequate critical terminology. This tendency for charmstudies to be undeveloped when compared with studies of other aspects of folklore is not just apparent in the English-speaking world: Rørbye (1992: 435) discussing “the first wave of folkloristic documentation 1880–1960” in the Nordic countries, comments that folk medicine (the general area which the majority of charms fall under)4 “was chiefly studied [--as] a means to the end in the programme of evolutionistic reconstruction” i.e. it was admitted into folkloristics as a theme and not as a free-standing phenomenon or genre. Similarly, Conrad (1989: 422) remarks: