File Under: The things you find out while wasting time on a Sunday morning.

Eleanor Parker’s excellent newsletter this morning is about Old English people gearing up for Lent by eating everything they can. 1 She points us to Kate Thomas’s “For the Wynn” essay on cheese. That essay is wonderful for many reasons, but one that jumped out at me was the part about the use of cheese in jurisprudence:

Some early medieval liturgical books contain an ordeal using barley bread and cheese – a way of ascertaining a person’s guilt or innocence via the eating of small pieces of food. It operates upon the same rationale as ducking witches – nature rejects someone who has done wrong, so a guilty person will choke on the bread or cheese.

Of course, my mind went immediately to the pool beneath Henneth Annun, where Frodo compels Smeagol with force majeure: “I shall take Precious, and I shall say: make him swallow the bones and choke. Never taste fish again.” [LR 4.06.047] 2

This is the second time we’ve seen little asides in LotR that come straight from Anglo-Saxon law. I don’t imagine it’s the last.

 

Notes

Notes

  1. This may not be the reason the NFL moved the Super Bowl to February.
  2. As Tom Hillman notes, when Galadriel said, Frodo “must train [his] will to the domination of others,” she didn’t intend it as career advice.