Phol- Germanic GodDeity

The First Line and the Last

Phol is known from exactly one text: the Second Merseburg Charm, an Old High German healing spell preserved in a ninth- or tenth-century manuscript. Phol ende Wuodan vuorun zi holza: Phol and Wodan rode to the forest. Balder's foal stumbled and wrenched its leg. Sinthgunt and her sister Sunna spoke charms over it, then Frija and her sister Volla. None of their spells worked. Finally Wodan spoke the incantation himself, bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, and the leg knit back together. Phol opens the charm paired with Wodan, then disappears. No other source mentions him.

His relationship to Balder, named in the same charm, is the open question. One reading takes them as the same figure: Phol as a name or title for Balder, the god whose horse is injured. But if the poet meant Balder, he could have used the name throughout, and Phol may be a distinct deity whose traditions did not survive Christianization. The name itself is uncertain. It may connect to fol, "foal," making Phol a horse-god, or it may be an appellative meaning "lord." One attestation cannot settle the matter. Phol rides into the forest with Wodan, and that is where the trail ends.

The Accident of Survival

The Second Merseburg Charm was discovered in 1841 in the library of Merseburg Cathedral: a pagan healing formula copied into the margins of a Christian manuscript, surviving by accident. Two other figures named in the charm, Sinthgunt and Phol himself, appear nowhere else in Germanic literature. The charm preserves a snapshot of a pantheon already being dismantled when someone recorded these words. Phol rides out in the opening line, paired with the chief god, and then the record falls silent.