Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

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Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user. So what’s going on here? Part of the answer lies in the nature of their quest, which is difficult, even penitential. You sometimes get the impression that Chaucer’s pilgrims might as well be going on holiday but that’s clearly not the case for Bilbo or Frodo. They are in deadly danger the moment they leave Lake-town (in The Hobbit ) and the Shire (in The Lord of the Rings ). Maybe Tolkien was thinking more of Sir Gawain than The Canterbury Tales when he wrote these passages. Here, for example, is Tolkien’s own translation of a wonderful passage about the passing of the seasons in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : I also was surprised to see how integral the Catholic faith was in the Anglo-Saxon world. I'd expected to read a fair amount about pagan rituals but the author made it clear that this was a Christian world with only a glancing relationship with pagan religions. The way the faith was practiced then was, of course, different than now but there was enough in common to make me feel a connection with those times. In fact, I now am interested in getting my hands on some of Aelfric's homilies, many excerpts of which were featured in this book. The importance of the cycle of the seasons and the way key dates marked agricultural activity and the maintenance of social structure is consistently emphasised. Parker also has little time for popular but largely erroneous ideas about pagan origins to festivals like Easter, noting that it took its name (indirectly) from a almost forgotten pagan goddess, but that is about all. This was a Christian world, though it's often a form of Christianity that is weird to any modern person even if they are themselves Christians. Saints were powerful beings that were "only a prayer away" in a world where otherworldly help would often be useful. We get insights into everyday life through a line or two in a poem and a sense of the endless cycle of sacred time even as it is punctuated by the coming of battles and the rise and fall of kings.

Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World is a lyrical journey through the Anglo-Saxon year, witnessing the major festivals and the turning of the seasons through the eyes of the poets. Beginning during the darkest days of winter, when writers read desolation and dread in the world, we are introduced to the hopefulness of the festivals of returning light; the promise of better (and less hungry) times ahead as the days lengthen and the plants bud; the fruitfulness of the harvest; and the calm reflection of the autumn. We feel the thrumming in our souls as we recognize on some primaeval level the connectedness of humanity, the environment, and the cycles of nature and life, even if other aspects – the marking of the seasons, the religiosity, the extremes of feast and famine – are alien to us. And we approach an appreciation of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors as we dive into the rhythms of their lives and language, their turns of phrase, and the force of their habits. These beliefs weren’t unique to the English, of course. St Augustine of Hippo once wrote that Christ “is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since.”)It’s a very different version of Christianity than those of today which emphasize forgiveness, fellowship and the historical Jesus of Nazareth; it’s instead m rooted in the idea that pagan myths are just so many prefigurements of the one true myth of the Christ figure. Eleanor Parker only mentions Tolkien in passing in this book, though she has written and spoken about him in detail elsewhere. However, her book incidentally provides all sorts of insights for anyone who enjoys Tolkien’s fiction.

Winters in the World' is a lyrical journey through the Anglo-Saxon year, witnessing the major festivals and the turning of the seasons through the eyes of the poets. It is a beautiful, charming, and descriptive voyage into what, to many of us, seems a very distant past. But in venturing forth, the early Middle Ages are shown to be, if not entirely familiar, then at least recognizable. Through Parker's writing, almost everything in this strange land, from the roots of our language to the sense of community - and the appreciation for drink - becomes closer, more relatable. This is no more so than in the appreciation for nature. As Parker points out, while on the surface our lives bear no relation to those of our distant ancestors, we still witness and mark the changing of the seasons; we still marvel at the stark beauty of a wintry landscape; we still enjoy the summer sun while snoozing under the branches of a spreading tree. The reliance on nature might be less pronounced now than a thousand years ago, but our responses to it are not so different. Eleanor Parker’s book also got me thinking about the passing of the seasons in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (for The Lord of the Rings , in particular, is a very seasonal book) . Let’s look at these parallel passages, for example. Over these descriptions Parker lays a historical account of how the pagan, chilly Anglo-Saxons gradually came to accommodate the feast days of a religion that had its roots in the sweltering eastern Mediterranean. Not until the early decades of the 11th century did the Anglo-Saxon festival of middewinter start to cede to Cristesmæsse, while in the north of England and Scotland, where Scandinavian influence remained strong, the old Norse Jol or “Yule” lasted longer. The time-markers and calendar-makers were kept busy making sure that this patchworked world still hung together. I expected this book to be interesting. I didn't expect to fall in love with it. Eleanor Parker weaves a tapestry of poetry, literature, history, religion, and language to go through the seasons and practices of the Anglo-Saxon year. The result is a masterpiece that gave me a real sense of connection with the people of long ago. This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.I never knew, fully, what this meant until I read Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World. There the Christianization of England is described more as an evolutionary process than the born again altar call of modern Evangelicalism. Most of all I felt a deep appreciation with the sacred cycle of time both then and now. I really love the Catholic liturgical cycles and how they connect with the natural world. This book brings that to the fore since the Anglo-Saxons were so much more in tune with nature and the seasons. All this combines to make a work of rare value. It will be interesting to the history or literature buff. For me, I found my prayer life took on new focus and depth. As I went my day and the recent liturgical seasons, I thought of those long-ago Catholic Anglo-Saxons doing the same thing, taking it seriously, knowing that prayer matters, that saints will rush to your aid, that God gives us all that is good in life beginning with the riches of the natural world around us. This sense of relationship between nature and humanity is something these poets drew upon. They used it as a metaphor for emotion, and for the processes of the world that their Christian god had created. Of course, as these poets and other writers were almost without exception learned men of the church, it is hardly surprising that the focus of their writing, and therefore the focus of this book, is very much Christian. Yet there is some effort to trace festivals, where appropriate, to their pagan past and, equally, to rubbish a few myths that have sprung up in the twentieth century. In some ways, then, 'Winters in the World' is an Anglo-Saxon, early-Christian version of Ronald Hutton's 'Stations of the Sun'. Now, this is very curious because, as Eleanor Parker points out, autumn is very much not the time for journeying (not even the Anglo-Saxon autumn which began on 7th August!). Spring is the journeying season and, of course, that is when Bilbo sets off at the start of The Hobbit . He leaves in April, a month forever associated with pilgrimage since Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales . But the key date at the start of The Lord of the Rings is not April 28th (when Bilbo first leaves Bag End) but September 22nd, Bilbo’s birthday and Frodo’s too. Rather than leave Bag End in spring, they leave on or about the autumn solstice. In other words, they leave the Shire at precisely the wrong time of year.

Today it’s become a popular myth that that symbols linked in modern Britain with Easter, especially eggs, hares or rabbits, derive from the worship of Eostre, but there’s no Anglo-Saxon evidence to support that. None of these symbols were linked to Easter in the Anglo-Saxon period; eggs weren’t associated with Easter in Britain until the later Middle Ages, hares and rabbits not until much later still. There’s nothing to suggest any continuity of customs between the pre-conversion festival and the Anglo-Saxon Christian Easter, and the modern observance of Easter owes nothing to Anglo-Saxon paganism, with the sole exception of its English name.

A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

There are many things I love about this book. As readers of her blog , History Today columns , Patreon articles , and books will already know, Eleanor Parker writes with great clarity and a deep knowledge of British history. On this occasion, she takes us, season by season, through the Anglo-Saxon year, teaching us a surprising amount about our own age as well as a great deal about the ways the Anglo-Saxons saw the world. On the way she also scuppers some deep-rooted myths. For example, she writes: Let’s take just a couple of examples, starting with the most important date in The Lord of the Rings : 25th March. This was the day on which the ring was destroyed and Sauron fell. As a direct consequence, it also became the first day of the new year in Gondor. What’s more, it was the day Aragorn arrived at the Bridge of Baranduin and the birthday of Elanor, Sam’s first child. (Elanor is, I think, a much more significant character in The Lord of the Rings than is widely recognised, but more on her another time.) As Eleanor Parker points out, many Anglo-Saxons believed that the 25th March was also the date of the Annunciation, the date of the Crucifixion, and the eighth day of creation. In other words, it was the most important date in history. On a side note this book makes Tolkien's use of Anglo-Saxon literature as one of his main influence so obvious. Even if you already know it. Not just names and stories but how he adapts their culture in more general terms.

There isn’t space to explore the implications of all this here - though I am attempting to do so more thoroughly in my PhD - but even this brief survey suggests that, in some respects, the action in The Lord of Rings shadows, or fore-shadows, salvation history itself. This is a lyrical and wide-ranging exploration of the Anglo-Saxon world through its literature, using the framing device of the cycle of the traditional year. A someone who has read most of the Old English poetry and other works Parker draws on, some of it in the original language, it was a pleasure to revisit it via this perspective. She highlights both the elements which are timeless and have not changed and the ways in which this world was very alien. Spring and summer are welcomed and celebrated, but a world in which winter was hard and sometimes fatal didn't go in much for Keatsian wistfulness about autumn, for example. The process was evolutionary in the sense that, not only did Christian feasts and rituals come to make use of Pagan traditions but that the common peasant would have seen Christianity in some ways as merely a fuller version of what he already believed.She also writes beautifully about many Anglo-Saxon poems. Time and time again, she models how to read literature closely and sensitively. Winters in the World isn’t simply a book about the Anglo-Saxon calendar and world view, it’s a great example of what literary criticism can be when it’s done well. In that sense, it reminds me of Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth , another book which opens works of literature as you would unwrap a gift rather than dissecting them as you might a cadaver.