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Nou Is Yole Comen: A 15th-Century Yule Carol

The “secular” carol is no new thing. Most of the oldest surviving Yule carols are thoroughly non-religious, describing the earthy joys of the festal tide with little (if any) religious content. The season, as they say, is the reason.

What follows is a 15th-century English carol, set to music by Early Musicologist Shira Kammen on her stunning 2003 album The Castle of the Holly King: Secular Songs for the Yuletide. For those of you who didn't happen to grow up speaking Middle English, a modern English rendering follows.

Note that personifying holidays as guests who come to visit is an ancient Indo-European poetic trope with its roots in deepest antiquity. Note also the playful AAAB rhyme-scheme, and the fact that the poet uses only two rhymes throughout the entire song. That's a pretty bravura performance, technically speaking.

Nou is Yole Comen

Hay, ay, ay, ay:

make we merry as we may.

Nou is Yole comen with gentil chere,

of mirth and gomen he has no pere;

in every londe where he comes nere

is merthe and gomen, I dar wele say.

Now is comen a messingere

of your lorde, Ser NuYere—

biddes us all be merie here

and make as merie as we may.

English composer Peter Warlock (né Philip Heseltine, 1894-1930) wrote this mysterious little carol, a variant on the traditional I Saw Three Ships, in 1923. It didn't get pagan words until nearly eighty years later, but—considering Warlock's lifelong interest in the occult—we can be sure that he would be delighted to know that the witches were singing his carol at their Yuletide festivities. Absolutely delighted.

As for the meaning of those three mysterious ships...well, all will be revealed.

Just watch this blog.

The Sycamore Tree

As I sat under a sycamore tree,

a sycamore tree, a sycamore tree,

I looked me out upon the sea,

a Midwinter's day in the morning.

I saw three ships come sailing there,

come sailing there, come sailing there:

the Horned One and His Lady they bare,

a Midwinter's day in the morning.

I've always hated “Silent Night.”

The whiny tune, the maudlin lyrics, the sappy sentimentalism it evokes. Its unassailable preeminence in the Christmas canon. Ugh.

I also think that some texts are best left unreclaimed. “Our Mother who art in Heaven....” “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/that saved a witch like me....” “The little lord Sun God, asleep in the hay....”

Kill me now, please.

Given these two facts, one would expect that I would categorically reject my teacher Tony Kelly's pagan “Silent Night.” And, for the most part, I do.

And yet.

Rewrites can be problematic.

They call for a certain delicacy of touch, and need to be rooted in respect for the original. You can't impose; you need to work with, matching style for style and diction for diction.

When done well, though, they can potentially both renew and transform the original.

Possibly forever.

 I Saw Three Ships

I saw three ships come sailing in

on New Year's Day, on New Year's Day

I saw three ships come sailing in

on New Year's Day in the morning.

They say that if you add up all the gifts in The Twelve Days of Christmas, you get 364.

364.

The Twelve (witches would say Thirteen) Days of Yule are a microcosm, a year in little.

So Yule is actually the Yules: Twelve (witches would say Thirteen) of them, and every one a Yule.

The same pattern of the Twelve Between turns up elsewhere. The old Zoroastrian New Year, Nawrúz, at the vernal equinox, is a festival of thirteen days.

Mircea Eliade suggests that the intercalary dozen serves to reconcile a solar year of 365 days with a lunar year (= 12 lunations) of 352.

There's actually an old (15th century) Scots song kin to the one you may know called The Thirteen Days of Yule. It begins:

In English, it's called Carol of the Bells, and has become a regular part of the December soundscape.

But the Ukrainian original—like folk carols all over Europe—although sung at Christmas, doesn't have anything to do with Christmas.

Or bells.

Instead, it's about spring.

And fertility.

And sex.

Which is to say: it's thoroughly pagan, through and through. Because to pagans, Yule isn't just a self-referential blaze that sits in its own golden halo at the end of the year; it's the first spark of what comes next, a collective turning towards spring, and the growing season to come.