Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker

Author:Eleanor Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

SUMMER

7

BLOSSOMING SUMMER

TREES OF 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. In the next two chapters we’ll look at Rogationtide, Ascension Day, Whitsun and Midsummer, festivals of the height of summer in May and June. But first, let’s explore some poetic descriptions of this season, which extol the beauties of the natural world in its summer fullness and give us an insight into how people in Anglo-Saxon England liked to enjoy themselves at this time of year.

Summer in Anglo-Saxon calendars runs from 9 May until 6 August. This is how The Menologium describes its arrival, sketching the coming of May and then, close behind it, summer itself:

[On 1 May] comes to the city

sweeping swiftly, splendid in its adornments

of woods and plants, beautiful Þrymilce

to the dwellings; May brings many benefits

everywhere among the multitudes.

On the same day those noble companions,

Philip and James, brave thegns,

gave up their lives for love of the Lord.

And two nights afterwards God revealed

to blessed Helena the noblest of trees,

on which the Lord of the angels suffered

for love of mankind, the Measurer on the gallows

by his Father’s will. And after a week,

minus one night, summer brings sun-bright days

to the dwellings for mankind,

with warm weathers. Then the meadows

quickly bloom with blossoms, and joy mounts up

throughout the earth among many kinds

of living creatures; in manifold ways

they speak the praise of the King, extol the glorious one,

the Almighty.

Of all the months, May gets the longest description in The Menologium; this passage is like a blossoming hedgerow in May, overflowing with beauties. Its abundance echoes the Old English name for May, Þrymilce: Bede claims that this name arose because ‘in that month the cattle were milked three times a day,’ a token of the season’s bounteous fertility.1 The visual beauty of May’s greening meadows and blooming flowers is conjured up by the poet’s picture of the month as smicere on gearwum wudum and wyrtum, ‘splendid in its adornments of woods and plants’. In Old English these words have connotations of elegant clothing, as if the world is sporting its best attire when it’s dressed in summer foliage.

Then a few days later summer comes, with its ‘sun-bright days’ (sigelbeorhte dagas) and ‘warm weathers’ (wearme gewyderu), its blossom and birdsong – a sound the poem imagines as a chorus of diverse voices singing in praise. These lines evoke all the different sensual pleasures of summer, in sight, touch and sound, and the delight they bring to human beings. The verb used to describe how joy mounts up (astihð) in this season, all through the world, will be used later in the poem to describe the sun as it appears to climb higher in the sky in summer. There’s an implied link – a note repeatedly struck in this poem – between the seasonal patterns of growth and fertility in the natural world and the joy felt by humans as we live through the cycle of the year, with all its changing, manifold forms of loveliness.

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