Winters In The World: A Journey Through The Anglo-Saxon Year, Parker - B

                     This book "will look at the festivals and traditions associated with particular times of year ... as well as investigating the language English writers used to describe their experience of the year."  The adoption of Christianity in the seventh century brought the Julian calendar to England. "Developing a festival calendar for the new English church meant harmonizing a religion which had its origins in the Middle East and the Mediterranean world with the seasonal and agricultural calendar of a country on the edge of Northern Europe." 

                   "Snow, hail, frost and ice beset the characters of many Old English poems, and it's clear that this season appealed strongly to the imaginations of Anglo-Saxon writers." Winter is imagined as a conquering warrior who sweeps through the country with frost and snow from early November to early February. Winter constrains, imprisons, and oppresses. Midwinter, the solstice and the birth of Christ come to symbolize hope for the future. Christmas came to an end on Feb. 2nd with Candelmas, the last feast of winter and the first of spring. It is midway between the winter and spring solstices. It celebrates Christ's parents taking him to the Temple forty days after his birth. "As Mary bears Christ to the temple, so winter is carried away and spring makes its entrance." Liberation from winter begins with floods in "fierce and wild" March. Spring, a time in agricultural communities where food stocks run low, was adopted by the church as a time for fasting for Lent. Easter, Christ's resurrection and the spring equinox are the high point of the church's liturgical calendar. They perfectly coincide with all of God's wonders coming back to life. "After Easter, the summer months brought a sequence of festivals which allowed people to take advantage of better weather to gather outdoors and celebrate in the sunshine." Bounteous fertility, greening meadows, and blooming flowers are all conjured up in the poets' pictures of May. The sun is described as God's candle, the jewel of gladness, and the noblest of stars. "The highpoint of summer was the solstice: the longest day of the year, the time of maximum light before the turn toward the waning days of autumn." Although there was certainly a pagan Midsummer celebration, no name for one has been found. Feasts, parades, music and bonfires marked the day. "For the Anglo-Saxons, an interest in the solstice, the healing powers of plants and the story of John the Baptist were all interrelated, and they all converged to make Midsummer a powerful time of year." For them, the fourth season of the year was harvest and a bountiful harvest was essential to sustaining life. There was a profoundly spiritual side to harvest as prayers were said to provide for a good harvest, and to give thanks for one.The last feast celebrated was Martinmas in mid-November.  It was a time of slaughtering and preparing meats for storage for the upcoming winter. It was known as a blood ritual and had roots in the pagan past before its adaptation by the Christian church. Autumn came for Anglo-Saxon England with the Norman conquest in 1066. But there was little change to the cycles of the seasons, feasts, and traditions outlined above. All the festivals named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were still celebrated when the Reformation came 500 years later. It was only the upheavals of the 20th century that made these rituals fade into the past. This is a somewhat quirky but delightful read.