Rather than 12 days of Christmas, I’m giving you 12 words of Christmas; essentially 12 words you are unlikely to know which have something to do with Christmas. However, I’m posting them one-by-one because most of them proved far more interesting than I could have imagined and hence needed more than a few words. The first of the 12 is Hweolor-tid.
1. Hweolor-tid.
In a bleak mid-winter, frost and ice made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone,
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow
In a bleak mid winter, long ago…
While it doesn’t really snow much at Christmas in the Holy Land, it can happen. So a drafty stable with a manger, cows and sheep, a hoard of shepherds, three oriental kings and a blanket of snow would have been possible. And the point of the carol is clear. Christmas is ultimately a winter festival and, what could be more appropriate than that Christ be born around the winter solstice, when the sun itself is reborn. Of course, that’s a pagan idea and Christmas is not supposed to be a pagan festival. But it is.
For Christians, Christmas may be about is celebrating kenosis, (more of that in a later posting), but for most of Europe it was and still is about the Winter Solstice. Hweolor-tid is an alternative Norse name for Yuletide. It literally means the “turning time”. Yuletide is derived from the Norse word “jul” meaning wheel, and the Norse month in which it occurs is called Jol.
So this is astronomical. It was obvious to all cultures that the sun retreated and then returned as the year went round and the turning point was the Winter Solstice – the Hweolor-tid. In Northern Europe, they celebrated with a festival of fire and light, with people building bonfires and feasting to celebrate the imminent the return of the Sun.
Baldur and the Mistletoe
Why do we kiss under the mistletoe at Xmas?
The feast of Hweolor-tid is associated with the death of Baldur in Norse legend. The story goes like this:
Baldur and his mother Frigg had the same bad dream, that Baldur will be slain. Unfortunately the dream didn’t reveal how or why. Since Bladur is the Norse sun god, this is really disturbing news for everyone, but particularly so for his mother Frigg. Wanting to prevent such an event, Frigg decides to go round the world and make every type of rock, tree and microbe promise that they will never injure Baldur no matter what the circumstances.
Unfortunately, in her travels, Frigg fails to notice the mistletoe, which grows on the branches of oak trees. So she fails to extract such a binding promise from the mistletoe. This would not have mattered a wit if Loki, Norse God of Mischief, hadn’t noticed her error of omission. Everyone except Loki now believes that Baldur is immortally invulnerable.
One day, the gods are amusing themselves by throwing things at Baldur (like spears, axes, hammers, rocket-propelled grenades, IEDs and so on). You gotta conclude that these Norse Gods are deeply bored and a bit retarded:
“Nothing can kill Baldur, so let’s throw murderous projectiles at him.”
Anyway, Loki sees what’s going down and thinks it would be a jolly jape if one of the Gods actually killed Baldur. So he finds some mistletoe and fashions a spear from it. (No easy task, by the way, but he’s a god so he gets it done.) He then gives the spear to Hoder, Bladur’s blind brother. Blinf though he is, Hoder has been throwing stuff at Bladur like all the other moronic Gods, although he probably missed most of the time.
So far, if you switch Superman for Baldur, Lex Luthor for Loki and Kryptonite for the mistletoe, this is a plot for a superman movie. The US Army decides to use Superman for target practice, Lex Luther infiltrates the military and adds a kryptonite shell to the munitions. The army fires the shell and Superman is toast. Except, of course, that in the Superman movie the dastardly scheme just fails.
Baldur has no such luck. Hoder actually hits Baldur in the center of the chest with the mistletoe spear and kills him. Baldur is toast and just to make sure of that, the Gods put his body into a boat, set it on fire and push it out to sea.
The death of Baldur was associated with the death of most vegetation as the sun retreat But if the sun actually died, that would be a bad thing. Moronic though they might be, the Norse gods realize this and eventually restore Baldur to life. Frigg then declares the mistletoe to be sacred and orders that it should bring love rather than death.
That’s why we hang it over doorways and kiss beneath it, during Hweolor-tid.
The following are links to all the Xmas words: #1 Hwoelor-tid, #2 Brumalia, #3 Protomartyr, #4 Dulocracy, #5 Pohutukawa, #6 Hagiolatry, #7 Sinterklaas, #8 Prolicide, #9 Apophoret,#10 Kenosis,#11 Psilanthropy,#12 Parepochism
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~ Albert Einstein
