Accidental Blogger

Anna’s post on the recent kerfuffle at the Seattle Airport sent me onto a tangent about about how the Church made Christ’s birthday at the time of the Germanic winter solstice celebration.  It was a fertility holiday; I’m sure other groups had their equivalents.  Fusing the two celebrations was intended to promote adoption of Christianity.  But the fertility celebration is why we bring into our houses holly, trees, wreaths, and other green things: on the darkest day of the year, they looked for re-greening, and the days would grow longer and spring would follow.

But because my mind works by making odd tangential skips, I’m reminded of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Jessie Weston has both prose and lyric modernizations online.  I can’t vouch for either, but knowing Weston, I’d imagine they’re both very good (read the lyric version!).  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an amazing poem.  Even if you don’t geek out on the growth of the Arthurian legend and the appropriation of the originally Welsh and pagan King Arthur to fit various political needs, it’s an excellent poem which I very much recommend reading.  While we don’t know who the Gawain-poet was, I wouldn’t hestitate–much–to place him in the same class as the Beowulf-poet, Chaucer, Milton, and the like.

(The tenuous connection to Anna’s post is that the poem takes place at midwinter, and the Green Knight is a fertility symbol.)