Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year

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This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout. I found this a fascinating read. Not just for its insight's into how the Anglo-Saxon year ran, but for the literature it introduces you to. I've read Beowulf but there were quotes from many other poems and works that made me want to take a deep dive into Anglo-Saxon literature.* DeGroot, Gerard; Sandbrook, Dominic (26 November 2022). "25 best history books of 2022". The Times . Retrieved 26 November 2022.

Foot, Sarah (19 August 2022). "Conquered: The last children of Anglo-Saxon England by Eleanor Parker". Church Times . Retrieved 26 August 2022. Howse, Christopher (4 July 2015). "A Clerk of Oxford's guide to a bright old world". ISSN 0307-1235 . Retrieved 5 February 2020. These beliefs weren’t unique to the English, of course. St Augustine of Hippo once wrote that Christ “is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since.”) Winters in the World' is a lyrical journey through the Anglo-Saxon year, witnessing the major festivals and the turning of the seasons through the eyes of the poets. It is a beautiful, charming, and descriptive voyage into what, to many of us, seems a very distant past. But in venturing forth, the early Middle Ages are shown to be, if not entirely familiar, then at least recognizable. Through Parker's writing, almost everything in this strange land, from the roots of our language to the sense of community - and the appreciation for drink - becomes closer, more relatable. This is no more so than in the appreciation for nature. As Parker points out, while on the surface our lives bear no relation to those of our distant ancestors, we still witness and mark the changing of the seasons; we still marvel at the stark beauty of a wintry landscape; we still enjoy the summer sun while snoozing under the branches of a spreading tree. The reliance on nature might be less pronounced now than a thousand years ago, but our responses to it are not so different.

She also writes beautifully about many Anglo-Saxon poems. Time and time again, she models how to read literature closely and sensitively. Winters in the World isn’t simply a book about the Anglo-Saxon calendar and world view, it’s a great example of what literary criticism can be when it’s done well. In that sense, it reminds me of Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth , another book which opens works of literature as you would unwrap a gift rather than dissecting them as you might a cadaver.

Holgate, Andrew; Millen, Robbie (4 March 2022). "The best books of 2022". The Times . Retrieved 11 March 2022. I also was surprised to see how integral the Catholic faith was in the Anglo-Saxon world. I'd expected to read a fair amount about pagan rituals but the author made it clear that this was a Christian world with only a glancing relationship with pagan religions. The way the faith was practiced then was, of course, different than now but there was enough in common to make me feel a connection with those times. In fact, I now am interested in getting my hands on some of Aelfric's homilies, many excerpts of which were featured in this book. BBC World Service – The Forum, Cnut: England's Viking king, The Viking's bloodthirsty Skaldic poetry". BBC . Retrieved 5 February 2020. It is, however, literary analysis with aplomb. The selection of texts is as diverse as possible, covering poetry, sermons, scientific texts, and more. The quotations are well chosen, expertly illustrating not just Parker's argument, but the feelings of the Anglo-Saxon writers. In addition, many of these quotations are provided both in translation (usually by Parker herself) and in the original Old English. For the geek, this can provide hours of amusement and a useful way of attempting to learn the language. There can be few better ways of showing the connections between now and then than by showing the similarity in vocabulary.

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So one day, although autumn was now getting far on, and winds were cold, and leaves were falling fast, three large boats left Lake-town, laden with rowers, dwarves, Mr Baggins, and many provisions… The only person thoroughly unhappy was Bilbo. Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World is a lyrical journey through the Anglo-Saxon year, witnessing the major festivals and the turning of the seasons through the eyes of the poets. Beginning during the darkest days of winter, when writers read desolation and dread in the world, we are introduced to the hopefulness of the festivals of returning light; the promise of better (and less hungry) times ahead as the days lengthen and the plants bud; the fruitfulness of the harvest; and the calm reflection of the autumn. We feel the thrumming in our souls as we recognize on some primaeval level the connectedness of humanity, the environment, and the cycles of nature and life, even if other aspects – the marking of the seasons, the religiosity, the extremes of feast and famine – are alien to us. And we approach an appreciation of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors as we dive into the rhythms of their lives and language, their turns of phrase, and the force of their habits. Thurber, Bev (18 January 2019). "19.08.10 Parker, Dragon Lords". The Medieval Review. ISSN 1096-746X.

Eleanor Parker’s book also got me thinking about the passing of the seasons in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (for The Lord of the Rings , in particular, is a very seasonal book) . Let’s look at these parallel passages, for example.

Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including poetry, histories and religious literature, medievalist Eleanor Parker of the University of Oxford takes you on a journey through the cycle of the year in Anglo-Saxon England. This sense of relationship between nature and humanity is something the Anglo-Saxon poets drew upon. They used it as a metaphor for emotion, and as a way to understand the processes of the world that their Christian god had created. The church calendar, and its method of dating, does, then, determine the course of the book. However, there is some effort to trace festivals, where appropriate, to their pagan past and, equally, to rubbish a few myths that have sprung up in the twentieth century. The line between myth and fact can be a fine one, and the reader can on occasion sense the extent of Parker’s frustration at modern notions, particularly when there is no textual evidence from the era to support various claims. Davies, Rhiannon (2 December 2022). "21 best books for history lovers: BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year 2022". BBC History . Retrieved 7 December 2022.