Winters in the World Quotes

“September marks a transitional point in the year: it’s the month of the autumnal equinox, the end of harvest and the first sight of winter coming over the horizon. According to Bede, the Old English name for September was Haligmonað, which means ‘holy month’. Unusually, Bede doesn’t offer any explanation for why this month should be thought holy, but only gives a Latin translation, mensis sacrorum, ‘month of sacred rites’.1 Possibly he didn’t know what those rites consisted of, and chose not to guess. However, it’s reasonable to assume that the name has some connection to harvest, the main agricultural event of this time of year.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“In the Old English translation, Christ’s statement that ‘where your gold-hoard is, there is your heart’ is particularly apt, because in Anglo-Saxon poetry the heart itself is often called a ‘hoard’, the place where the treasures of the spirit are kept. It’s the breosthord, feorhhord or sawelhord, the storehouse of thoughts, life or the soul.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“The cycle of the seasons, to which poets have so often turned as a reminder that nothing in this world is stable, is in fact one of the great constants in life. In some ways, the thousand years or more that have elapsed since the poems in this book were written have changed our world beyond recognition - but every year, when the blossom springs and the leaves fall, we see what the Anglo-Saxon poets saw. The revolving cycle finds us each year at a different moment in the story of our own lives; the unfolding events of history change us, but the seasons do not change.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“It seems likely that whatever people called the season, what they did to celebrate it has never changed all that much: at heart it has always been what it is today, a festival to brighten the darkest time of the year.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“In a time of ecological crisis, Anglo-Saxon poems which recognize how fundamentally we are connected to the rhythms of nature - how dependent we are on the well-being of the earth, how grateful we should be for its gifts and its beauties - speak truths we still need to hear.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“Whatever one thing we give to God's needy for the sake of his love, he will repay us for it a hundredfold in the life to come.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“A man cannot grow wise before he has had his share of winters in the world.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“There are two features of this intriguing text which seem to connect it with much later rituals for ensuring the health of crops. One is the salutation to the earth, ‘be well’, hal wes þu. In Old English this phrase was a common greeting, more usually found in the order wes þu hal, ‘be thou well’. By the twelfth century, this phrase is recorded as a toast, used to wish someone health when presenting them with a cup of drink.18 In time, it became contracted to wassail, and in Middle English it appears both as a toast and a general word for drinking and feasting. In medieval sources, wassailing has no connection to crops. From the sixteenth century onwards, however, there are records from across southern England of the custom of wassailing fruit-trees in the winter season, around Christmas or Twelfth Night, to ensure a good harvest of fruit in the coming year.19 This often involved singing to the trees, beating them with sticks, toasting them with cider or putting pieces of cider-soaked bread in their roots or branches. More than five hundred years separate this Anglo-Saxon field-ritual from the first records of wassailing, so there may be no direct connection between the Old English text and the later custom. However, the use of the phrase hal wes þu as a salutation to the earth is a remarkable similarity, even if it’s just coincidence.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“The new Norman elite had their own forms of poetry, in their own language, and they knew or cared little about stories like Beowulf or the poems of the Exeter Book. As the English language changed in the centuries after the conquest, the complex and archaic vocabulary in which most Anglo-Saxon poetry is composed became gradually more and more incomprehensible, and this poetic tradition withered and died. That might have happened even without the conquerors, since the tradition was probably already in retreat some decades before 1066.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“For all his talk of wonders, Ælfric makes it sound very ordinary: God, like any human king, has ‘thegns’ – noble followers and soldiers – to do his work, and the living can interact with them as readily as with any earthly attendants. The daily company of the dead is seen as entirely normal and profoundly reassuring.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“All Saints’ Day, however, reflected a profound devotion to the saints which was as deeply felt in Anglo-Saxon England as it was anywhere in the medieval church. For medieval Christians, the saints were the helpful and familiar dead, always only a prayer away, ready to rush to the aid of the living. Unlike the spirits of the modern version of Halloween, they were not to be feared or avoided, unless one had done something to offend them; they possessed a power that could be awe-inspiring, but they only ever worked for the forces of good.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“The widespread observance of Halloween in England is more recent still; the eve of All Saints’ Day seems never to have been an important part of the Anglo-Saxon or later English Hallowtide, at least not in the form we understand it today, as a time for encountering ghosts or spirits.3 In the past few decades Halloween has become popular throughout Britain, but even a hundred years ago it was absent from most of England, while being widely kept in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and parts of northwest England.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“Harvest ends with the coming of what the poet calls the ‘Michaelmas moon’, which must be the full moon (and perhaps the month) closest to Michaelmas at the end of September. This moon brings with it wynter wage, meaning the first ‘pledge of winter’. We might think of that as the first chill in the air in an October dusk, or the first time it seems to be getting dark too early, or the first breath of mist in the morning – anything which says that summer is gone and the dark half of the year is coming.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“There they find
sustenance, joy in feasting, when frost and snow with overwhelming force wrap the earth in winter garments.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“September has two attested names in Old English: while Bede calls it Haligmonað, Ælfric refers to September as Hærfestmonað, ‘harvest month’.6 Though not elsewhere recorded in Anglo-Saxon sources, the name Hærfestmonað is paralleled in other Germanic languages: for instance, a list of Old Norse month-names recorded by the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson includes Haustmánuðr, cognate with the English ‘harvest month’.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“Ead is a common element in Anglo-Saxon personal names, including some still in use, such as Edward and Edmund (Eadweard and Eadmund), meaning happy/blessed ‘guardian’ and ‘protector’, respectively. These names – and others beginning with Ead – were used by many Anglo-Saxon kings, and they suggest aspirations for ideal kingship: if rulers prosper, so will their people.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“The evolution from hlaf- to la- in the modern form is comparable to two words with the same root, ‘lord’ and ‘lady’: these words ultimately derive from the Old English compounds hlafweard and hlæfdige, which originally meant something like ‘bread-guardian’ and ‘bread-kneader’, suggesting those who protect and provide for a household.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“Though we’ll get to the poetry of fallen leaves in the next chapter, there’s really no word in Old English corresponding to what English-speakers today would call ‘autumn’ or ‘fall’. To the Anglo-Saxons the fourth season of the year was hærfest, ‘harvest’, and that continued to be its usual name throughout the medieval period. In the four--season pattern of the year, hærfest was used as the equivalent of Latin autumnus, and theoretically ran from 7 August until 6 November. However, in general use hærfest referred more loosely to the period when harvesting was actually being done, from late July to September. In that sense it’s the latter part of summer, as it would have been in the older two-season cycle – and once it’s over, winter begins.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“As with the period around the winter solstice (Geola, ‘Yule’), the Old English name Liða corresponds to two months in our calendar: June is called se ærra liða, ‘the earlier Liða’, and July se æftera liða, ‘the later Liða’.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“Along with its unforgettable description of the eerie space this woman inhabits, the poem also locates her very precisely in time, offering two almost unique words which transport the reader into the exact moment of her sorrow. First is uhtcearu, a compound which means ‘sorrow before dawn’ or ‘grief at early morning’. In Old English uht is the name for the last part of the night, the empty chilly hours just before the dawn, an especially painful time for grief and loneliness (as well as other kinds of threat: the dragon in Beowulf is called an uhtfloga, a creature who flies before dawn). The word suggests the sting of waking to the memory of sorrow, or the anxiety of lying awake in the early morning, worrying over what the day will bring.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“Rogationtide’s stated function may have changed over time, but its expression and key themes remained remarkably similar over the course of more than a thousand years. Anglo-Saxon preachers talk of penitence and blessing; later medieval writers speak of the processions driving away evil spirits, purifying the air and protecting crops from harm; post-Reformation descriptions instead extol the perambulations for promoting good neighbourliness and gratitude to God.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“Beorc is the root of the Modern English word ‘birch’, but it’s usually thought that the tree described here is actually a poplar.8 What’s notable about this verse is its emphasis on the tree’s beauty, which distinguishes it from the other trees included in the Rune Poem. In their respective verses, the oak, ash and yew are all characterized by their important functions in human society: the ash provides wood for weapons, the oak timber for ships and the yew firewood, a ‘joy in the home’.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“In its opening image of the cross towering as tall as the heavens, worshipped by all beings in the world, The Dream of the Rood shows us this great tree as the steady axis around which the universe revolves, the world-tree. As such images found their way into Old English poetry, they must have resonated with older beliefs, since there’s evidence for the veneration of sacred trees in pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon culture as well as in the Christian tradition.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“This way of envisioning the cross as a real tree, with leaves and branches, and often blossom and fruit, is widespread in medieval literature and art. In early medieval depictions of the Crucifixion the cross is often shown sprouting tendrils of growth, or coloured green to make it an emblem of life and vitality.4 The emphasis on the cross as a living tree, not a dead wooden object, helps to underline the parallel between the cross and that other tree in the Garden of Eden: ‘through a tree came to us death, when Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and through a tree came to us again life and redemption, when Christ hung on the cross to redeem us,’ as Ælfric says in one of his sermons.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“Though Ælfric refers to these branches as palmtwigu, real palms are of course not easy to obtain in England, so they probably carried branches of pussy-willow or yew – the traditional substitutes for Palm Sunday ‘palms’ in Britain until the twentieth century.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“For the medieval church, Christ’s death was the most significant event in history, so it was thought fitting to link to this crucial date other key events connected to or prefiguring his death and resurrection. One of these was the beginning of time itself. That special date, 25 March, was pinpointed as the last of the days of creation, the eighth day on which God rested after completing his work – the end of another significant circle, the world’s first week. If the eighth day was 25 March, it was possible to count back and identify the date on which each day of creation fell, starting with 18 March. Medieval calendars for March sometimes mark this date with a note, ‘first day of the world’ – just another day among the list of saints’ feasts and commemorations.18 So 18 March was the first day of creation”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“The sea is often called by names like this in Anglo-Saxon poetry: ‘whale’s home’, ‘gannet’s bath’, ‘seal’s track’, ‘swan-road’. All these phrases emphasize that the sea is a space which belongs to wild creatures, not to human beings; they have roads, settlements and homes there, where they form societies and networks hidden from human eyes.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“The Latin and English names seem to agree: whether it gets its name from a Roman god, an Anglo-Saxon goddess or just the loudness of its winds, March is the fiercest of months.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“hrime gehyrsted, hagolscurum færð
geond middangeard Martius reðe,
Hlyda healic. adorned with frost, with hail-showers
fierce March journeys through the earth,
loud-voiced Hlyda.”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

“It recalls a simile used in Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, as he explains how all the waters on earth are related: Every sea, however deep it may be, has its bottom on the earth, and the earth carries all the seas and the great ocean, and all wellsprings and rivers flow through it. Just as veins lie in a man’s body, so these veins of water lie throughout this earth.2”
― Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year