Summer has Come; A Folklorist’s Notebook

A summer hare enjoying clover in my yard in southern New Hampshire. (Photo by author.)

Summer has been here for a couple of weeks now and my wife and I have had a blessed break from the Massachusetts school systems we work in. We had our first long-distance trip since the pandemic and are measuring the days of July carefully lest we find ourselves bombarded with the back-to-school advertisements all teachers loath (and which seem to strike earlier each year!)

It has been a full year of New England Bard and this blog. I meant to produce a piece every other week and I did so dutifully, sometimes running a bit late, but then sometimes turning out something extra. The most enjoyable thing about having this blog is that I get to learn things about myth, folklore, culture and history and have the added pleasure of figuring out how to share those things. It’s exciting and fun and even more enjoyable when an article I write catches people’s attention.

The biggest surprise has been the number of scholars and artists have graciously allowed me to interview them, and this has emboldened me to reach out more frequently. A well-researched article is its own reward. I hope to continue to interact with experts as I learn more about the fields of folklore and mythology. I also hope to continue to learn more about world myth and folklore to share. My topics are very Euro-centric, and although I love the cultural treasure trove I grew up with, I’ve loved encountering new stories. I hope to do some reading and research of African and South American folklore in the coming year as well as continue my reading adventure further into Asia.

At the moment I am reading different versions of folktales native to New Hampshire, where I live and write. I am also corresponding with experts to come to a better understanding of the culture and history of the Abenaki peoples who ranged throughout New England, parts of New York and Quebec. I wrote a piece called “Discovering the Dawnland” last fall and when I shared it with tribal elders in New Hampshire, they called out a few of my claims. I took these claims from authors of Abenaki heritage, but it is important to me to understand the critiques of living people in the living culture and to produce a new piece with my refined understanding. This may be my next post, but I have several others in the works and would like to take the summer a bit slower for what I think of as enterprise stories, articles that benefit from more research and additional sources.

I have been “gathering string” for four other stories for a few months now. One of them is about three Massachusetts women who took on legendary status for acts of violence that people do not usually associate with women. Another story is about the origins or purposes of folktales about the bones of murder victims singing or being turned into instruments. I am also looking at horses in folklore and trying to do something with the etymology of words related to the word goblin.

Almost ready for Primetime?

Me rehearsing one of the songs I will record this summer.

The other parts of the New England Bard site have languished for a while, partially for want of time, partially because of the pandemic. I’ve been working steadily on learning songs to sing with my lyre, but the lack of public performance for a year has made it harder to motivate myself to bring them to a level where I feel comfortable recording them for an audience other than friends on social media. I hope to have some kind of performance material to add to the website in 2021. The Widsith Project, my long term work to illustrate stories from the Old English poem “Widsith,” is sitting in my workshop waiting for me to gather the steam to finish constructing the rudiments of a mead hall to photograph the Frisian attack on Queen Hildeburh’s visiting family, a story told in Beowulf and in a separate fragment text. I expect to complete these shots of the Fight at Finnsburg this month and to be able to post an update.

My plans for the sort of output for this blog this summer are a bit in flux. I plan to post every couple of weeks, but I would also like to take the time to develop my more complicated articles. I anticipate a busier school year with a return to a more normal schedule and I would like to get ahead to keep production on schedule through the school year. July and August may see more notebook style posts unless I run into a story that is more about the summer season or that strikes me as time-sensitive. Another possibility is that I share a bit more about the excitement of my yard, which is alive with rabbits and chipmunks and a variety of birds and other critters.

Thank you to anyone who has followed this blog this year. It’s been a pleasure and I look forward to another year of researching, learning and writing!

Daylight for the Win; A Folklorist’s Notebook Celebrating Equinox

An arrival of daffodils in our yard in Southern New Hampshire, March 19. Photo by my wife, who helped uncover them a bit yesterday.

In just hours our daily allotments of light and darkness will balance precariously for a moment and then tumble in the direction of the sun. It is the spring equinox, and it will occur at 5:37 a.m. EDT. If you are awake, you will have sixty seconds to be aware of the actual moment. Or you can choose to enjoy it all day. It is the first day of spring, a day of equal day and night that heralds longer days to come.

I’ve made a more conscious effort to note the solar holidays since I began writing this blog. They are the traditional holidays of the year, celebrated and observed by our ancestors in preindustrial times, when the light of the day governed so much of what they could do. The time of the year also determined the sorts of activities they engaged in as they were more tied to the raising of animals and crops for food. I feel that I benefit by stopping to observe not only the changes of the seasons, but the midpoints that herald their coming. The sun is the great reality that all life shares.

Early Morning Deer

Deer venturing into the fields at dawn. By author on March 16 in Merrimac, Massachusetts.

This particular solar holiday has special interest to me because it is my birthday. I felt excited when I first saw “First Day of Spring” on a calendar page on my birth date. It seemed special, to confer a mythological dimension to my life. I still feel that way. The day is traditionally cold in New England. I spent many birthdays arguing that I should be able to play outside in shirtsleeves. I would slowly grow disavowed of that determination until finally, I came in, chilled to the bone.

This month had an association with traditions that have attached themselves to Christian Easter: fertility symbols of eggs and rabbits. Easter takes its name from a goddess figure and the month named for her: Eostre; Ēosturmōnaþ (Eostre’s Month). Eostre was likely a dawn goddess. Her name rings similar to the Greek goddess of the rosy-fingered dawn: Eos; also of the East, where the sun rises. I have researched Eostre before, but there is never as much to know about Old English divinities and their Germanic cousins as I would like. So let me speculate. All seasons are reflections of relative sunlight, the coming or leaving of the light. It seems fitting to celebrate a goddess of the dawn in this season. Perhaps the particular timing of the equinox this year provides us the opportunity to celebrate the moment of balance and the dawn, an hour or so later.

Nowruz: Persian New Year

An Iranian Haftsin (هفت‌سین‎) table, traditional for the Persian celebration of New Year, Nowruz. Haftsin means "seven S’s" and in Farsi, each of the objects on a Haftsin start with the letter S and symbolize hopes and wishes for a happy new year. (From Share.America.gov).

In Iran and for Persian peoples around the world, tomorrow is New Year, Nowruz. I like the Persian New Year because (unlike the western New Year) it is positioned in a time of significant seasonal change. (Of course, it is also my birthday!) But the western New Year is in the dead of winter. It’s cold and dark on December 31st and it’s cold and dark on January 1st. There is no magical day on Earth when the local weather always agrees to change on a certain date and tomorrow’s weather may or may not make you feel that something special has happened. But the spring is a time of new life, which I see in the daffodils pushing up outside my house and the birds carrying bits of dry grass and twigs to the birdhouses I obstinately mounted on poles in December, screwing the bases with difficulty into the frozen ground. Life has decided it is a new year, however we should observe it.

So Happy Spring to the light-loving peoples of the northern hemisphere and to you if you celebrate tomorrow as a holiday. Happy Eostre Month to the people who undoubtedly celebrate it and Happy Nowruz!

Look to the Light; A Folklorist’s Notebook for February

Dawn in southern New Hampshire, the first week of February.

The light is returning. Every day the afternoon seems to last longer and that’s a reason to celebrate. Imbolc was officially the first of February, but this is the season of returns. With the cold weather and persistent snow, it might be hard to believe that we are headed to spring, but look to the light when you despair. It is coming. In my neck of the woods, maple sugaring has begun, the time of year when the shifting temperatures between day and night get the sap flowing that will be boiled down to maple syrup. I’ve got a bit in my beard from adding it to my oatmeal this morning, which puts it in my mind. The Abenaki people of the area have a story that the syrup once ran straight from the trees, without needing to be boiled down, but people got fat and lazy lying on the ground with syrup dripping straight into their mouths. Gluskabe, the helper (and trickster) god, saw that something must be done to help the people and watered down the sap.

This is the week of February vacation for Massachusetts schools and should be a time of rest and recharging for me, but I’ve had so many ideas running through my head, that it’s taken longer for me to give myself a break. I’ve been rereading John Colarusso’s Nart Sagas from the Caucasus, which I believe had its moment of fame because the independent women of the Circassian people likely fueled the Greek imagination, giving them Amazons. Any template for strong, independent women in past is a thing to celebrate and the stories of the Narts do have remarkably independent women, by the standards of many of the human women in Greek myth. The word Amazon itself, says Colarusso, is a rendering of a female name from one of these tales, not a word denoting the lack of a breast.

People Like Horses with Personality

Rostam sleeps while his horse Rakhsh fights off a lion, a painting in gouache on paper, from a tale in the Shahnameh. Dated to 1515. Made in Tabriz. Part of the British Museum's collection.

I watched a bit of Disney’s Tangled earlier in the week and was struck by the personality of the horse Maximillian. It has such personality and agency that I was reminded of Rakhsh, the Iranian hero Rostam’s horse, which actually helps Rostam fighting dragons and protects him from lions. (Rakhsh means lightning, a terrific name for a horse!) That made me think of a refrain from a ballad about Sigurd, the dragon slayer, about his horse Grani. In working on an English adaptation of it for people who didn’t know the story, I was struck that the refrain was about the horse carrying the gold and not the hero who slew the dragon to get the gold. Why would the writer have done that? And then I looked at Maximillian, the horse in Tangled, and I got it. People like horses with personality.

I finished a draft of lyrics based on the Norwegian ballad “Margit Hjuska” yesterday and made a preliminary video with questionable sound. The song is one of a series of ballads about young women being stolen by a troll or a mountain king. It is thought of as a variant of “Little Kjersti,” another ballad that also exists in a number of forms. Add these to “Sir Mannelig” and you see a trend of stories about creatures bent on taking human spouses against their will. I was struck also though that Margit’s particular Mountain King husband seems more like an abusive and controlling spouse than a supernatural terror. He reminds Margit of their children and how they need their mother to come home (and not leave the mountain again.) Human relationships seem remarkably stable over the ages.

Highlighting my Catoblepas

I’ve been working on my wall sculpture this week, the Catoblepas, trying to get the paint right to make his features visible from the floor. I take on art projects without having learned the prerequisite skills to complete them. This coupled with a stubborn streak of perfectionism means that I sometimes work on a project for a very long time before I feel it’s right. My Catoblepas could be ready to hang next week or in a year, if the past tells me anything. (Hopefully closer to next week) The Catoblepas is a fantasy creature from medieval bestiaries based on earlier Greek writings. The name of the animal comes from the Greek word meaning “to look downward” and indeed, the Catoblepas was said to have a neck that did not support the weight of its head. It literally always looked down. But this is a good thing because the stare of Catoblepas was thought to kill. My Catoblepas will stare directly at the main entrance of my home, greeting all comers. Don’t tell my friends. It can be our inside joke.

I love bestiaries, but I came across the Catoblepas as a kid playing Dungeons and Dragons, which has also been on my mind. I’ve been curious about how playing D&D as a child colored my expectations of folklore, gave me the expectations that folkloric beasts met the modern standards of scientific taxonomies. (They don’t.) This has swirled around my brain with another project I have wanted to pursue, of creating a linguistic tree documenting the spread of all creatures with a name related to the word goblin.

I had hoped to write a more cohesive piece for the blog this week, but clearly, I’m a bit scattered. I think that brings me back to the opening of this post, about the return of the daylight and the coming of a fresh solar year in March. The winter that started in 2020 may feel like it is lingering, but it cannot hold. The trees will wake back up and everything else will eventually fall into place for a more civilized spring and summer to come.