Magic in Anglo-Saxon England the pantheon of Anglo-Saxon gods in order to understand "the sort of powers that may lie behind magic ritual." He argued that the Anglo-Saxon pagan religion was "a mass of unorganised popular belief" with various traditions being passed down orally. The language of the Anglo-Saxons was Old English, a Germanic language descended from those of several tribes in continental Europe. Old English had several words that refer to "powerful women associated with divination, magical protection, healing and cursing". One of these was "hægtesse" or "hægtis", whilst another was "burgrune". Another Old English term for magicians was "dry", making them practitioners
Germanic peoples classical source, modern linguists sometimes designate the Frankish language (and its descendant Dutch) as Istvaeonic, although the geographical term "Weser-Rhine Germanic" is often preferred. However, the classical ""Germani"" near the Rhine, to whom the term was originally applied by Caesar, may not have even spoken Germanic languages, let alone a language recognizably ancestral to modern Dutch. The close relatives of Dutch, Low German, Anglo-Saxon and Frisian, are in fact sometimes designated as Ingvaeonic, or alternatively, "North-Sea Germanic". Frankish, (and later Dutch, Luxembourgish and the Frankish dialects of German in Germany) has continuously been intelligible to some extent with both "Ingvaeonic"