Juliana 53a has long been recognized as a crux. This verse is part of Juliana's warning to her importunate suitor Eliseus that she will never marry him if he practices pagan religion:
Swylce ic þe secge, gif þu to sæmran gode
þurh deofolgield dæde biþencest,
hætsð hæþenweoh, ne meaht þu habban mec
ne geþreatian þe to gesingan. (Juliana 51–54)
So too, I tell you, if you commit your deeds to a weaker god by way of devil-worship, hætsð hæþenweoh, you will not be able to have me or compel me to be your spouse.
The identity of the two words that constitute 53a in the form in which it is transmitted is not a matter of dispute. The first (hætsð) is a second-person present singular form of the verb hātan, which usually means either ‘to name, call’ or ‘to command’, the final -sð being an orthographic variant of -st that is not uncommon, especially in early West Saxon; the second (hæþenweoh) is a compound, unattested elsewhere, having the constituents hǣþen ‘heathen, pagan’ and wēoh (or wīh) ‘idol’, probably also ‘altar’ and ‘(pagan) shrine, temple’. What the verse means in its context is nonetheless doubtful. No sense can be made of it if hætsð means either ‘you call’ or ‘you command’, and the various interpretations that have been proposed accordingly all assume that hātan is used here in some extraordinary or even unparalleled sense.
One such interpretation was offered by Krapp and Dobbie, who provided ‘dedicate a heathen idol’ as a rendering of hætsð hæþenweoh in a textual note without further explanation. This reading involves two obvious difficulties. The first is that hātan does not appear to mean ‘to dedicate’ elsewhere. It is true that this sense may be present in some few instances of the ge-prefixed verb, especially in contexts that concern pagan offerings, although in these cases the possibility cannot be excluded that hātan means ‘to vow (a future offering)’ rather than ‘to dedicate (a present offering)’.