Medieval texts are aglow with tales of mysterious lights: the strange flame in Havelok’s mouth, exotic gemstones lit from within, beacons that appear above treasure-filled barrows. Many of these accounts are no doubt purely fanciful—but not all. The eleventh-century Gesta Herewardi, which the author claims to have assembled from a damaged Anglo-Saxon manuscript and a collection of oral interviews, preserves an account of odd lights that gather on the weapons of Hereward’s outlaws in the marsh one stormy night. This episode has proved somewhat confusing for scholars, who have described the lights variously as will-o’-the-wisps or bioluminescence. The general tendency has been to view the scene as fantastic; Knight and Ohlgren count it as one of the ‘elements of romance’ that might be distinguished against those apparently true recollections with an ‘air of reality’ (635) about them, and Maurice Keen describes the lights as ‘magic’ (188).1¹ In fact, this episode accurately describes a scientific phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s Fire, strengthening its claim to truth. The present note seeks to disambiguate some of the terms that have been applied to the phenomena in this tale by explaining the scientific basis of each and demonstrating why none, save the last, is accurate.

中文翻译：

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在Gesta Herewardi中消除圣埃尔莫之火事件的歧义

中世纪的文字中充斥着神秘的灯光故事：哈夫洛克嘴里的奇怪火焰，从内部点燃的奇特宝石，在装满宝藏的手推车上方的信标。毫无疑问，这些帐户中有许多纯粹是虚幻的，但并非全部。十一世纪的格斯塔·赫雷瓦迪（Gesta Herewardi）作者声称这是从受损的盎格鲁-撒克逊手稿和一系列口头采访中收集而来的，它保留了一个奇特的光线，该光线在一个暴风雨的夜晚聚集在赫瑞沃德的out徒武器上。对于学者来说，这种情节有些令人困惑，他们以不同的方式将这些光描述为“遗忘”或“生物发光”。通常的趋势是将场景视为奇妙。奈特和奥格伦认为这是“浪漫的元素”之一，可以与那些带有“现实气息”（635）的真实回忆区分开来，莫里斯·基恩（Maurice Keen）将这些灯形容为“魔术”（188）。 1 ¹实际上，这一集准确地描述了一种被称为“圣埃尔莫之火”的科学现象，从而增强了其对真理的主张。本注释旨在通过解释每个故事的科学依据并说明为什么除了最后一个之外没有一个是准确的，来消除已应用到该故事中的现象的某些术语的歧义。