Tacitus reports that the German tribes in general worship ‘Nerthum, id
est Terram matrem’ (Germ. 40. 2). The clearest traces of Mother Earth in a
Germanic source appear in an Anglo-Saxon ritual to be performed on
ploughland that is unfruitful (ASPR vi. 117 f.). It contains four metrical
prayers, superficially Christian but pagan in substance. The first contains the
line ‘I pray to Earth and Heaven above’. The second begins:
Erce Erce Erce, Eorþan mo ̄dor,
geunne þe ̄ se alwalda e ̄ce drihten
æcera wexendra and wrı ̄dendra.
Erce Erce Erce, Earth’s mother,
may the Almighty, the Eternal Lord,
grant thee growing fields and flourishing.Erce is evidently an old goddess; she is here titled the mother of Earth, but the
following lines suggest identification with Mother Earth herself. The name
may mean ‘Bright’ or ‘Pure’.^47 The third prayer, to be uttered as one ploughs
thefirst furrow, runs:
Ha ̄l wes þu ̄ , Folde fı ̄ra mo ̄dor:
be ̄o þu ̄ gro ̄wende on Godes fæþme,
fo ̄dre gefylled ̄rum to ̄ nytte.fı
Hail, Earth, mother of men!
Be thou fertile in God’s embrace,
filled with fodder for men’s benefit.Folde, which has a counterpart in Old Norse fo ̨ld, goes back to *pl
̊
th 2 wı ̄, ‘the
Broad One’, and so is cognate with Pr
̇
thivı ̄ and Plataia. Cædmon in his fam-
ous hymn praises God who created heaven as a roof for the children of men,
ælda barnum, or according to a variant that has the air of authenticity, for the
children of Earth, eorðan bearnum.
In his account of the development of religion in the Prologue to the Prose
Edda, Snorri writes that from the properties of the earth men reasoned that
she was alive, ‘and they realized that she was extremely old in years and
mighty in nature. She fed all living things, and took to herself everything that
died. For this reason they gave her a name, and traced their lineages to her.’
There is some scattered Celtic evidence. The Gaulish divine name Litavi- is
perhaps, as Thurneysen suggested, a further example of *Pl
̊
th 2 wı ̄, ‘the Broad
One’.^48 A goddess Ana is listed in Cormac’sGlossary and explained as ‘mater
deorum Hibernensium’; she is said to feed the gods well. That she was the
(^47) Cf. Old High German ërchan, Gothic airkns, Greek qργο ́ .
(^48) Olmsted (1994), 421.
- Sky and Earth 177