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Overview
Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award and runner-up for Countryfile Book of the Year.
For millennia, the passing seasons and their rhythms have marked our progress through the year. But what do they mean to us now that we lead increasingly atomised and urban lives and our weather becomes ever more unpredictable or extreme?
In this splendidly rich and lyrical celebration of the English seasons, Nick Groom investigates the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries and shows how tradition and our links with nature still have a vital role to play in all our lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782392064 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atlantic Books |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter, and Director of ECLIPSE (Exeter Centre for Literatures of Identity, Place, and Sustainability). He has written widely on literature, music, and contemporary art in both academic and popular publications, and is the author of several books including Introducing Shakespeare and The Forger's Shadow. He lives on Dartmoor. TheUnion Jack was published by Atlantic in 2006.
Read an Excerpt
The Seasons
An Elegy for the Passing of the Year
By Nick Groom
Atlantic Books Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Nick GroomAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84887-162-5
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
A word spoken in due season, how good is it!
Proverbs 15: 23
Once, the annual cycle of the seasons must have seemed eternal and indomitable. The year moved from the birdsong and flowers of spring through summer's work of harvesting and husbandry to autumnal stocktaking and into the icy challenge of winter. Every year was different, but the pattern of the seasons was consistent — a consistency powerfully strengthened by a rich calendar of proverbial lore, annual rituals, and frequent festivities. Although the weather and the seasons actually had an element of unpredictability from year to year, they were nevertheless yoked to a calendar that marked their characteristics and their progress with absolute certainty.
But now everything is changing. The seasons are blurring, they no longer have such apparently distinctive beginnings and ends. Winters can be unpleasantly warm, and summers uncomfortably wet and windy, and the months are no longer so readily defined by what weather or fortune they might bring. And as the complex rhythms of our weather are changing — and with them our sense, once close and vital, of the seasons — we are also losing and forgetting that shared seasonal heritage too. Once common cultural references are forgotten, and twenty-first-century British society is becoming ever more remote from the social and economic realities of rural life. Modern agricultural practice and climate change have clearly had their unwelcome effects, but perhaps it is precisely because those shared reference points and memories are fading that the seasons now seem so unstable.
It is time then to reflect what we risk losing if we cannot make sense of the sun, rain, and tempest, or of snow, frost, and hail — if we cannot make sense of them, that is, beyond the immediate practicalities of the weather forecast. What of our relationships with solstices and equinoxes, with the first cuckoo of spring and the last swallow of summer, and with all our rich inheritance of axiomatic wisdom, national folklore, and traditional festivity? What of the extraordinary compendium that centuries, if not millennia, of worship and study and experience of the seasons — as well as straightforward, first-hand familiarity with the weather — have created and bequeathed to us? If we abandon — or are forced to abandon — our hitherto intimate relationship with the seasons, will our lives be any the less? Will we lose an arcane knowledge, a key to an understanding of ourselves and our own place within the natural world: a key that is irreplaceable?
This book will touch upon many subjects to argue that our daily experience of the climate and the calendar still bears the deep stamp of centuries of culture, history, religion, politics, and agriculture. Yet that stamp is not indelible, and we need now more than ever to be reminded of our cultural inheritance. So here there are chapters on the folklore, customs, and literature of each season mixed with, among other things, a history of the calendar, accounts of saints' days, early theories of the weather, the calculation of Easter, the arrival of the cuckoo, James Thomson's best-selling political-pastoral poem The Seasons, and a summary of the grievous impact of the Enclosure Laws.
How we have viewed that climate and calendar is a vast subject, but any book can only be so long, and I have reluctantly had to exclude chapters on a number of closely associated themes, among them the pastoral and picturesque, and their often deleterious effect on the countryside and our perceptions of it. Pastoral poetry evolved out of the Renaissance's fascination with all things classical, spinning a direct line from Hesiod, Theocritus, and, later, Virgil to the English countryside — finding perhaps its greatest exponent in Edmund Spenser. In essence, the pervasive cult of the pastoral attempted to overlay an ancient, classical, and largely bucolic view of the land onto the fields, woods, and common ground of sixteenth-century England. But although for the vast majority of its inhabitants the Elizabethan and Stuart countryside was less an Arcadia than a harsh and unforgiving working environment, a stranger to prancing satyrs, flute-playing shepherds, and the Mediterranean sun alike, the cult of the pastoral proved to be remarkably tenacious, subtly shaping the land and making the labouring rural population vanish from this vision of England — and indeed, the pastoral still survives in a popular if degraded form today.
Similarly, picturesque painting styles approached the natural scenery of late eighteenth-century England with expectations and preconceptions derived from Claude Lorrain, a French Baroque artist best known for his Italian landscapes. Moreover, science was at hand to help England conform to Claude's Mediterranean visualization. For those spectators who lacked the imagination to see as Claude might have seen, or for those painters who lacked the artistic skills to paint as he might have painted, there was the 'Claude glass'. This was a tinted convex mirror: the tinting enhanced colours, while the convexity flattened and miniaturized a natural scene into what appeared to be a two-dimensional composition, drawing all the elements together. Detail was lost, but harmony was enhanced: voilà, the picturesque, which drained history, tradition, and folklore from seasonal landscapes and replaced them with an oddly disengaged sentimentality. To this was added a sometimes frankly bizarre obsession with the sublime, and much ink was spilt on ascertaining how many cows gave the best balance to a painting, the most tonally effective time of day or year to paint flowers and trees, or where best to situate a ruined temple or wild cataract in a composition. And once again, the actual population of the countryside was, quite literally, expunged from the picture, just as it had been physically removed by the Enclosure Acts.
In spite of all this, the seasons still remain not only integral to our identity as a nation today but their heritage also demonstrates that culture can be a vital guide as we march blindly down the dark road of environmental change. If we ignore or choose to forget the culture of the seasons that has accumulated over thousands of years, our very humanity risks being eroded forever. Traditionally, our identity has been firmly built on the weather. Televised weather forecasts are a constant reminder of the proximity of the nations, provinces, and regions that make up the British Isles, of the island mentality, and of separation from Europe and the European climate. Samuel Johnson famously noted over 250 years ago that, 'It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.' Weather is unpredictable and yet is continually being predicted, as if in an attempt to master it. But the weather does — or at least did — go through recognizable seasons, each with its own horticultural and agricultural role, and also each with its own character, history, and folklore. Together, they can map out the year, the countryside, and one's place in it. The disappearance of the seasons will therefore erode a shared sense of identity, the present will become cut off from the past, and the culture of the seasons, from Geoffrey Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, will become strange. The ground we walk upon will fundamentally change as familiar flora and fauna become less numerous and are replaced by more aggressive imports such as grey squirrels, ladybugs, and Spanish bluebells.
There is nothing new in this — many apparently indigenous animals and plants, from rabbits to roses, are imports — but the gradual abstraction of seasonal life is accelerating, and alongside it the human aspect, the festive calendar, increasingly appears to be in terminal decline:
Merry Old England died in the country a great while ago; and the sports, the pastimes, the holidays, the Christmas greens and gambols, the archeries, the may-mornings, the May-poles, the country dances, the masks, the harvest-homes, the new-year's-gifts, the gallantries, the golden means, the poetries, the pleasures, the leisures, the real treasures — were all buried with her.
This nostalgic lament for Merry England does not date from the early twenty-first century, nor even from the early twentieth century, but was written by the poet and radical Leigh Hunt in 1817. It is ironic that it was written before the Victorian age, which through revival and invention has furnished us with so many of the images and impressions, customs and celebrations that seem to characterize the festive year. Indeed, what the English today are often most nostalgic for are traditions that go back no further than the nineteenth century. Nearly all of the current Christmas traditions, for instance, are examples of Victoriana.
But whether some or other Christmas custom was a Victorian invention does not much matter: what is important is how we continue to value these traditions and the ways in which they connect us with both the seasons and our communities, great and small. After all, the glorious poetry of the calendar resides precisely in its flaws, disparities, contradictions, and errors. Indeed, the drift of the Julian calendar (see Chapter 2) meant that even as it was still developing, the Christian calendar was already one day awry by AD 136, and a further day every 128 years or so after that. So the emergence of English folk traditions tied to saints' days — such as rain on St Swithin's Day meaning that it will rain for another forty days — took place at a time when the calendar was perpetually slipping, with the result that calendar-based traditions are not even stable relative to each other. But this, in all its glorious confusion, is what we have inherited, and it still resists every attempt to impose homogeneity upon it. For every year is different. We may have a dry or wet summer, a warm or chilly winter. Harvests may be bountiful or crops may fail. Easter, determined by calculations of hair-raising complexity (see Chapter 6), may fall early or late — and in doing so exerts a huge influence on how we lead our professional and personal lives.
Even now, in this age of all-year strawberries, of aggressively changing flora and fauna, of apocalyptic anxieties about extreme weather and ecological crisis, the calendar can provide reassurance; its rituals and rhythms can still help us to understand the natural world in more 'natural' ways, by which I mean more historical and more cultural ways. This is one of its many prodigious gifts, and so we must beware not to sentimentalize the land or fall victims to the nostalgia of the countryside. But if the seasons and the way we mark their progress do eventually become more remote and if we further loosen our cultural connections with them, what then? What will have been lost when we no longer hear the first cuckoo of spring, or even recognize the first flowers? The sobering answer is an immeasurable amount, and a large and vital part of ourselves. This book is first and foremost a celebration of England's seasons; I hope that it does not also prove to be a memorial to them.
CHAPTER 2THE YEAR
He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.
Psalms 104: 19
Where does our year come from? In one sense, the year exists independent of human society and history, reflecting the cycles of the sun and the moon, which in turn affect the earth's climate and are a key factor in long-term weather patterns. But in another sense the year is clearly a human invention — one of the most significant, if perhaps inevitable, inventions in history, and also one of the most successful. The seasons emerge from the solar, lunar, and calendar years as a rough compromise between nature and culture: between those things that happen independently of human engagement, such as the annual summer solstice, and those things that are dependent on that engagement — naming, recognizing, and celebrating the solstice as being somehow significant. We all know the order of the months of the year, and the number of days in each month, but there is no precise alignment of the months with the seasons, and neither is there a precise alignment of the seasons with the moveable feasts determined by Easter. Easter may be early or late, as calculated by the solar and lunar calendars, but spring too may be early or late — increasingly early, it should be said — depending on whether daffodils are out or cuckoos are calling. The tilt of the earth's axis and the earth's elliptical orbit create seasonal differences, but this only influences weather patterns over time: it does not determine the specific weather on a certain day or in a particular place, or even in a certain year or a particular era. Consequently there is an odd disjuncture when trying to map the months over the seasons: is May in springtime or the summer, should midsummer and midwinter be in the middle of their respective seasons, can autumn really begin as early as August? The weather might 'feel like spring' or there could be 'an autumnal chill in the air', but such observations could apply to almost any season. The seasons are in any case slipping and sliding due to trends measured over decades and centuries, while climate change will dramatically increase the unpredictability of our weather patterns.
The moon orbits the earth approximately once every twenty-nine-and-a-half days (every 29.5306 days, to be precise). As it orbits, it is caught in the light of the sun, which can obviously only ever illuminate one side of the moon. Depending on one's position on earth relative to these stages of illumination, the moon appears to go through phases, waxing as a crescent, first quarter, gibbous, and full moon, and waning through gibbous, last quarter, crescent, and finally the dark moon. The cycle then commences again: traditionally the waxing crescent was known as the new moon, but the new moon is now defined as occurring in the middle of the dark moon phase. Twelve cycles of the moon roughly correspond to the annual cycle of four seasons, and because of the clarity of the moon's phases, the lunar cycle was a convenient early calendar and continues to be used as the Islamic religious calendar, or Hijri.
The lunar year does not, however, correspond with the solar year, which is the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun. This is where things become complicated. First, the earth's orbit is not a perfect circle with the sun at the middle, but is offset and elliptical. The earth also has a tilted axis of rotation — it does not spin on a precisely vertical plane but with a deviation of about 23.5 degrees; this was known at least as far back as ancient Egypt, when the Alexandrian astronomer Eratosthenes (276–194 BC) calculated within one tenth of a degree the tilt in the earth's axis. This tilt is what causes seasonal variation: it means that at different times of the year each hemisphere receives more or less sunlight; the northern hemisphere is inclined towards the sun in June and the southern hemisphere in December. Between these two solstices, there are two moments — the vernal equinoxes — when the equator is perfectly aligned with the ecliptic (the apparent cyclical path of the sun), and the effect of the earth's elliptical orbit means that at these times light from the sun may be of stronger or weaker intensity. The earth's orbit also fluctuates because the earth is not a perfect sphere and because it drifts and wobbles. The moon and every other planet in the solar system exercise some gravitational influence on the earth's orbit, pushing and pulling it out of true; furthermore the earth's oceans, themselves drawn to ebb and flow by the moon, can create a 'tidal drag' on the orbit and perturb the movement of the earth. The extent of these variations depends on how the orbit is defined: whether by measuring the earth's movement from and to a fixed position, this fixed point being calculated in relation to the stars — the sidereal year; or in relation to the earth itself, returning exactly to its own alignment in relation to the sun — the tropical year.
The average sidereal year, calculated for the year 2000, was 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.7676 seconds; the average tropical year for the same period was 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds. That twenty-minute variation is not going to affect our everyday lives in any meaningful way, but this is not the case with the lunar year. The lunar year works out at just under 354.5 days long (354.3672 days precisely). This means that the lunar year moves much more swiftly than the solar year — by eleven or twelve days every twelve months. Following a lunar calendar means that within sixteen years the seasons are inverted: spring becomes autumn and summer becomes winter, and vice versa. After thirty-three years the lunar and solar years are again approximately in synchronization before the drift begins once more. This is why Ramadan, which is calculated using the Islamic Hijri, appears to be celebrated earlier every calendar year.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Seasons by Nick Groom. Copyright © 2013 Nick Groom. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Notes on the Text,
List of Illustrations,
Foreword,
Part I,
1 Introduction,
2 The Year,
3 Months and Days,
4 The [Weather,
Part II,
5 SPRING,
6 Easter,
7 The Cuckoo,
Part III,
8 May Day,
9 SUMMER,
Part IV,
10 A Land Enclosed,
11 AUTUMN,
Part V,
12 WINTER,
13 Christmas and the Twelve Days,
14 Past, Present, and Future,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,