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O the rising of the Sun,

and the running of the deer;

the singing of Robin Redbreast,

when merry Yule draws near.

Wednesday, December 18

Holy gods. The robins are back already.

Robins don't overwinter here in Minneapolis. (Being worm-eaters, once the ground freezes, they can't access food.) I saw the last...sometime before Samhain, if memory serves.

But now they're back.

The two crab trees that flank the back gate are filled with maybe 50 robins—not normally flocking birds—gorging on crab apples. The repeated freeze-thaw cycles of late Autumn hasten fermentation of the sugars in the fruit. The robins are getting drunk.

The robins are having a Yule party.

Well, the worst of Winter is yet to come. After Yule is when the bottom usually drops out, and the Cold from Between the Stars descends. We can only wait and see.

Meanwhile, the omens suggest an early Spring.

“We'd like to sing a Solstice blessing on the house,” I tell the barrista. “Is that cool?”

Her eyes sparkle.

“I'll go turn down the music,” she says.

Yule Morning 2022.

Having sung the Sun up from a snowy Powderhorn Park, the coven has adjourned to nearby May Day Cafe for Sunrise brunch. (Yes, that's the place's real name. Welcome to Paganistan.) The food was good, the talk as well, and it's the Yule of the year. Before we go, we'd like to give something back.

I'm a little concerned about interrupting meals or conversation, but when we turn at the door and begin to sing, people look up and listen.

We sing.

Joy, health, love and peace

be all here in this place.

By your leaves, we will sing

concerning our king.

The song is an old one, a quête-song that children used to sing going from door-to-door with the body of a wren, the King of the Birds. (Remind me some time to tell you the story of how he beat out Eagle for the title.) We don't have a wren with us, though, and I find myself wondering as we sing: who will they think we're singing about?

Our king is well-dressed,

in silks of the best,

in ribbons so rare,

no king can compare.

For me, the answer is plain, this Solstice morning: it's the Sun. Who else? Even the birds all agreed that whoever flew closest to the Sun would be their rightful King.

 As the Northern hemisphere enters Winter, a bit of seasonal humor from that bilious old Fascist, Ezra Pound, to the tune of Sumer Is Icumen In, the oldest song in English (circa 1350) to which we still have both words and music,.

Pound's piece, in mock Middle English, turns the original on its head. One is about the joys of spring in the natural world, in which humans appear not at all; the other evokes the discomforts of urban winter in a world entirely human, in which nature is reduced to the inconveniences that it brings. (His reference to "winter's balm [=ointment]" refers ironically to the road-slop with which the passing bus has just sprayed him.) The implied contrasts between the two offer a mordant critique of what the West has become. Even Fascists have their occasional points.

You can hear a spirited Winter Solstice performance of this modern classic by the Bayesian choir here (though the audience clearly doesn't get the joke).

Happy Winter!

Antient Music

Winter is icumen in,

lhude sing, Goddamm.

Raineth drop and staineth slop,

and how the wind doth ramm:

sing Goddamm!

If you don't yet know Christopher Raible's no-holds-barred parody of the Christmas classic, from his 1964 Songs for the Cessation of Strife, you probably should.

God(s) Rest Ye, Unitarians

God(s) rest ye, Unitarians:

let nothing you dismay.

Remember, there's no evidence

there was a Christmas Day.

When Christ was born

is just not known,

no matter what they say.

Oh tidings of reason and fact,

reason and fact,

glad tidings of reason and fact.

There was no Star of Bethlehem,

there was no angel song;

there couldn't have been wise men,

for the trip would take too long.

The stories in the Bible

are historically wrong.

Chorus

Our current Christmas customs

come from Persia and from Greece,

from Solstice celebrations

of the ancient Middle East.

This whole damned Christmas shpiel

is just another pagan feast!

Chorus

Our story so far:

Since the 17^th century (at least) the rising of the Sun on Yule Morning has been greeted in Shetland with the plaintive and darkly beautiful fiddle tune The Day Dawn. For four hundred years (at least), the tune had words no more than the birdsong which greets the same dawn.

Then, a few years back, Jane Hazelden wrote lyrics for The Day Dawn. They're good, maybe even very good: as good a nutshell definition of Yule as any that ever I've heard and, indeed, better than most.

But they don't quite fit the tune.

To fit her new words to the old fiddle tune, Hazelden has truncated some of the musical phrasing, notably certain repetitions and, in so doing—to my ear, at least—thereby diminished something of the tune's integrity, and dulled something of its luminosity.

(Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift, the Goddess once, through Laura Riding, told Robert Graves: It is so nearly what I want, I cannot but perfect it.)

So I've tweaked Hazelden's lyrics to fit the original tune by matching verbal repetitions to the musical ones.

Well, you be the judge. Maybe you're a fiddler and don't need words at all to sing the Sun his Old Song.

But out on the bridge, singing the Sun up out of the Mississippi valley on Solstice morning, these are the words that I'll be singing myself.

So join me if you will.

The Day Dawn

Maybe it's the Norse influence.

Up in Shetland, where Yule is Yule, and no one ever bothers with that newfangled southron Christmas business, there's one tune that says “Yule” like no other.

It's called, variously, The Day Dawn or The Day Dawns Well (in Shetland dialect, that's Da Day Dawe, but if you're not a Shetlander, for gods' sakes, please don't try to say it that way), and of all the days of all the year, it's played on only one.

Yes, of course: you guessed it.

It greets the rising of the Sun on Yule morning, the bittersweet dawn song of one lone bird, and throughout that first day of the year, you'll hear it again and again.

And then, for a year, no more.

Shetland being fiddle territory, it's a fiddle tune, of course, and this much we can say: it's old, old; no one knows just quite how old. Seventeenth century, perhaps?

It's a haunting tune—you can hear it (played on concertina) here—expansive, horizon-gazing, with all the knowing sadness of the worldly-wise. Oh, bittersweet Yule.

I've always wondered: if, of all the days of the year, The Day Dawn is played only on Yule, how then do you learn it? How do you rehearse?

But there's an answer ready enough to hand. (We do the same with the song for the dead, which you only sing through when you mean it.) Play, rehearse, as you will, but never entirely through. That's for one day, and for one day only.

Though the tune has never historically had words, a few years back Jane Hazelden wrote some, and they'll do, they'll do.

So here's your song with which to greet the newborn Sun on Solstice Morn.

Well, you've all of a month. If you start the learning now, my friend, you'll have it down, and well down, by then.

The Day Dawn