“Gummarpstenen“. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikipedia.
One of the observable desires in the pagan community is to value the age of a practice. Age gives authenticity. This is possibly best known in Initiatory Wiccan (BTW in the States), whose creator, Gerald Gardner, made claims of having been initiated by a coven that existed forever. (OK, I may be exaggerating a tad, there 😉 ) If you add the deliberate aging of rituals by trying to write them in the sort of English that as spoken at the time the King James Bible was written, there is the obvious feeling there that age = authenticity. Now, I’m not saying that Doreen was trying to pass of what she wrote as having been created a few centuries before she was born. There are others reasons for trying to duplicate the style of English one grows up associating with approved religious activity. But, for whatever reasons it may have been used when the Rede or the Charge was written, it has become subsumed into the older = better paradigm.
This is taken on board, in spades, by the Traditional Witch (not to be confused with the BTWs!) community. If you want to base your practices on witches have done for centuries, then you really need to believe that they have, indeed, been done for centuries. The older, the better. Except there seems to be a cut-off that they have to be from a culture that still exists, as Romano-British practices don’t really count. But Anglo-Saxon, oddly, does.
Anyway, one of those lovely examples is the Trad Witch sign off: FFF. Or FFFF. This is Flags, Flax, Fodder and (optionally) Frig. In other words: housing, clothing, food and sex. It was used by Robert Cochrane, who wrote beautiful rituals but otherwise lied about his history, by creating a magical background that dated back centuries. (Yes, another one). Trad Witches tend to claim that FFF was a traditional Anglo Saxon thing, but that’s bollocks. If you go onto the ‘net, it’s impossible to call up anything but pages of these claims. I cannot get further back than Cochrane, though some say it was used by their grandparents or elderly relatives (the older the better) before Cochrane may have used it, in the 1950s or 60s.
Here is one story: “I’ve been told that Frigg(a) (as part of this blessing) was added by Alex Sanders. The original Saxon blessing was just FFF. Joe Wilson got something of this sort from Robert Cochrane AKA Roy Bowers in their correspondence with one another: “Flags are a form of rush, a plant that grows in European waters. Flags equal water. Flax being the weaver’s plant, and blue besides, represents the Goddess of Birth and Death (Fate), the principle of air. Fodder which means grass, equals the earth. Thus the expression ‘Flags, Flax, and Fodder’ means ‘I bless you by water, by air, and by earth,’ the three elements which belong to the Goddess.” –Joe Wilson, quoted in Witches U.S.A., by Susan Roberts, 1971, p.102.”
And look at the Gummarp Runestone (at the top of the page). There is a clear FFF on that (those funny looking things on the right hand edge). The problem there is that F in runic alphabets = fehu, the rune for wealth. It’s one of the few rune meanings all the poems agree on. And repetition of a rune was common folk magic to increase its influence in the way one wanted. There are any number of objects with a significant rune repeatedly inscribed on it – such as T on a sword (for the war god “Tiw”). Alas, that really isn’t evidence by itself that there is an AS source for the phrase.
But is there any reason why it couldn’t predate Cochrane? He worked as a bargee for a while, so let’s say he picked it up during that phase of his life. But I will argue it cannot be Anglo Saxon (AS). For one thing, it simply doesn’t feel AS to me. Oh, I’m no expert, but I’ve read a few AS things, mostly in translation. It doesn’t really have the same feel as that stuff. But, like anyone else, I’d love it be so. so I did a bit of digging.
For this, I used three main tools, backed up with and double checked using a few others. There’s Bosworth-Toller Online modern English/Anglo Saxon dictionary, the online English/Old Norse Dictionary, and the Online Etymological Dictionary. I also had recourse to Zoega (Old Icelandic dictionary), my shortened Oxford English Dictionary, some back-up English/Anglo Saxon dictionaries etc. But you can do this using the main three.
Let us start with the optional F – Frig. If this saying is AS, some might suppose this refers to the pagan goddess Frigg, or Frige as she was called in AS. Anglo Saxon England became Christianised in the 7th century, and the level of Christianisation was deep. The old gods were wiped out so thoroughly that it is difficult for us to reconstruct AS paganism. If FFFF were an AS benediction, then it is likely the final F would be lost early on. However, it could be a late addition. Frig as a word referring to sex came into use during the 16th century. So is it possible that FFF was AS, but FFFF was much later? Let’s take the other Fs one at a time. I’ll start with flags.
Stone flags are also found on the floor of some old cottages or might have been (as Cochrane suggests) rush mats to cover floors. “Flag” didn’t mean stone back in Anglo Saxon times. The AS word for stone is stan. And ordinary houses did not have stone floors until late medieval times. The use of “flag” in relation to stone paving is recorded from c.1600 and may derive not from AS, but from the Old Norse word flaga, meaning “stone slab”. Rushes might well have been used in houses but flag wasn’t an AS word relating to rushes or anything like rushes, or straw or anything that I can find. Its association with reeds seems to begin in the 14th century. This means that any use of the word “flag” in connection with housing doesn’t seem to arise until medieval times. There is also the possibility that flag refers to turf rooves, but this, also, is a usage not recorded until the mid 15th century in England.
We run into even more problems with the word ‘fodder’. In AS, the word meant food for kine (animals). The OED does not record an instance of usage of fodder meaning food in general until the 17th century. The Old Norse for “food” appears to have been matr, with fodhr again referring to food for kine only. It’s difficult to trace an Old Saxon dictionary online, but, in any case, Saxon would have become Anglo Saxon. (The word is a hint. 😉 ) Some of the Old Saxon words might have lingered, but the only Old Saxon online dictionary I can find gives very different words for ‘food’ and ‘fodder’ – though both come with health warnings.
So at least – surely – ‘flax’ meant ‘clothes? ‘Fraid not. It meant a flask or small bottle in AS.
Now, one might argue (and I have had this said to me) that the words might have been in use in some part of the country in dialect form, as many Old Norse words have been preserved in place names, or in the east of England.
The problem is that we are dealing with a phrase of three or four words. The chances of all three (or four) having unrecorded dialect use, in the same period, that exactly matches FFF(F) is difficult enough, but there is the added burden of then making the leap that the phrase, tied to specific part of the country by a specific dialect, then became universally adopted by people elsewhere in the UK who had no knowledge of that dialect. After all, in this age, with our communications equipment, how many people universally adopt a dialect phrase from another part of the country? As a writer, I am always struggling with the problem of how far to use any dialect words or phrases in my books, on the basis I might lose the reader. And that is just about reading, not using.
So to argue the phrase FFF is dialect use that has become widespread requires the following suppositions:
- that there was a part of England that used all three (or four) of the words in the local dialect in ways that reflect the modern FFF use, and
- that usage dates back to before the Norman conquest, and
- even though the usage was meaningless outside of that area, it was generally adopted elsewhere in England.
Personally, I would actually find that set of arguments much harder to validate in any form than to believe that the phrase was constructed in modern times, no earlier than (say) 17th century and probably in the 20th.
Of course anyone is free to believe whatever they please. After all, some people believe they are really dragons in human form. 😉
Leaves from a Book of Shadows 
