The Miracle of Saint Mina, anonymous

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language: Old Nubian (tr. Vincent van Gerven Oei)
country: Nubia
year: medieval
form: hagiography
genre(s): literary
dates read: 4.5.23

The Miracle of Saint Mina, translated by Vincent van Gerven Oei (open access, with an accompanying translation from Old Nubian into Andaandi/Dongolawi by El-Shafie El-Ghuzuuli), is a short account of a miracle/group of related miracles performed by St. Mina: a woman who’s unable to have children and whose entire household (servants and livestock) is similarly afflicted out of desperation invokes the Christian god in hopes of turning things around. one of her hens lays an egg and she asks a sailor to take it to the church where St. Mina operates. he “forgets” to do so, but when he goes to church himself St. Mina arrives and shames him into admitting what he’s done, and also giving birth to the chicken whose egg he’d eaten. St. Mina then goes to the woman’s house and blesses everyone and everything in it, restoring the normal processes of heterosexual reproduction.

it’s a fun, at times almost silly, little miracle story, and it only took like ten minutes to read (most of the book is comprised of detailed grammatical commentary on the Old Nubian text and a word-by-word gloss of the Andaandi/Dongolawi text). a few things I found particularly interesting:

• the woman’s husband is mentioned only twice: once by the sailor, who invokes him while telling the woman to go home instead of going to St. Mina’s church herself, and once by the narration, at the very end when the woman and her household are all getting baptized.
• I’m kind of obsessed with the beginning, which after an introductory “A miracle performed by Mina, the holy martyr of Christ. In the forgiveness of God. Amen.” opens by addressing the readers as ontakragueke “you [pl.] beloved”
• when St. Mina arrives at the church, what he says to the sailor is “it is in my Lord’s name that I have entered you”, after which he kicks the sailor in the head and “the egg which he had eaten suddenly came to life as a fowl, also coming out from under him [i.e., the sailor]”. van Gerven Oei glosses the verb here like this: “In this case, the implicit object of the transitive verb tor-r- is therefore the sailor, whom Saint Mina entered to make him lay the egg he had eaten”. fellas.

I’m not saying this is mpreg, but I’m not not saying it.

moods: lighthearted, wacky

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