The night sky must have seemed huge to the people of Middle-earth, compared with today. Then, on clear nights, the stars glittered and the moon hung bright, pouring silvery shadows across a landscape undimmed by the electric glare of cities. On cloudy nights, when the celestial sources sank out of sight, the world would have been plunged into darkness. In the houses and villages, people moved about by the soft and flickering light of fires, candles, burning torches and oil lamps.
Against this gentle glow, the prominent sight of the moon seems to have inspired people. They carried the monthly lunar rhythm close to their heart. They even told each other variations on legends in which night was dominant over day. One, Snorri Sturluson’s collection of myths called The Prose Edda, told of a woman called Night, daughter of one of the original giants. She was dark-skinned and dusky-haired, like the family she came from. Then she married a god called Shining One – the Sun – and they had a son named Day. He took after his father’s side being bright and beautiful. So Night was conceived of as the original state of the cosmos.
The story goes on to explain that Night and her son Day were given two horses and two chariots and they were put in the sky, so that they should ride around the world every twenty-four hours. Night rides first on a horse called Frosty-mane, and every morning he bedews the earth with the foam from his bit. Day’s horse is called Shining-mane, and the whole earth and sky are illuminated by his mane.
The story gives the impression of a universal version of mind-rhythms, in which the nocturnal came first, a deep darkness in which ‘external’ images were no longer visible, and allowed the Earth’s imagination to roam freely. In this dreamlike state, the realms of spirits were created. And then Day was born, and people awoke into a perception of what had been created.
Tacitus in his Germania says of the ancient Germans that ‘they do not reckon time by days, as we do, but by nights. All their engagements and appointments are made on this system. Night is regarded as ushering in the day’. Longer time-spans, too, were calculated in ‘moons’. But this counting by the moon was not simply a unit of time passed, metered out in equal durations of apparently arbitrary significance, like our relentlessly marching minutes, hours and days. Each stage of the moon had a presence which was palpable, and affected everything people did, and everything around them. We can see this in the way they approached the collecting of plants and crops.
Moon Cycles
In ancient Europe, people seemed to experience what we have largely forgotten – that moon cycles affect plants, animals and humans profoundly. The moon’s gentle but persistent pull affected everything. For example, people believed the moon’s presence to influence the growth rhythms of plants, just as strongly as it punctuated the lives of people. The position of the moon readied the plant’s power. Expeditions for collecting the plants to be used in healing remedies had to be carried out according to the moon’s phase. This cycle of influence was finely calibrated. The Lacnunga medical spellbook instructed that the wizard collecting periwinkle must pluck it ‘when the moon is nine nights old, and eleven nights, and thirteen nights, and thirty nights, and when it is one night old’. The mulberry plant should be picked ‘when to all men the moon is seventeen nights old, after the setting of the sun, ere the rising of the moon’. These timings are specific. They take the collecting of plants for magical medicine to a finely-tuned art.
The Anglo-Saxons’ measurements of the power of plants at periods in the moon’s cycle was partly the result of observation. The people of Middle-earth did not have our biological knowledge of plant life, but they had intimate and detailed experience of collecting wild plants at various stages in their life cycle. However, regardless of the extent of their practical knowledge of the plants’ natural healing powers, their collecting rituals emphasized other forces. They were attuned not only to biological factors, but matters of spirit, too. In filling a plant-collecting sack, a wizard was keen to take into account the total balance of influences.
Not only was the particular point of the moon’s cycle important, but the balance between sun and moon was also crucial. The ancient Anglo-Saxon Herbal, translated from the ancient herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, listed 132 plants and added some more from classical sources. It incorporated classical injunctions into Old English usage, prescribing for sea-holly: ‘And when thou shalt take up this wort with its roots, then beware that no sun shine upon it, lest its beauty and its might be spoiled through the brightness of the sun.’
Balance of Sun and Moon
The sun was not always cast in the role of spoiler. The farming people of ancient England were well aware of the seasons of the sun and its influence on growth of crops. But for them it was the alternation and balance between the energies of moon and sun, night and day, darkness and light, which determined the condition of a plant for use in medical remedies. The people of Middle-earth hallowed the moon and celebrated the life-force of the sun. These two great presences empowered all of life. They had to stay in balance; if not the result was chaos.
In another legend, an apocalyptic story from near the end of the Middle-earth times and reproduced in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the moon and sun are depicted as driving chariots through the sky. They are both being chased by powerful wolves who embody the primal energy of wildness, untamed forces, entropy and chaos. They come from the east of Middle-earth, in a forest called Iron Wood. There lives a giant troll. This aged giantess has given birth to many giant sons, all of them in the shape of wolves. One night one of the wolves will catch the moon and, in the words of the ancient poem, ‘… he will swallow the moon and bespatter the sky and all the air with blood. Because of this the sun will lose its brightness, and the winds will then become wild and rage on every side.’ It is an image of the End. It is the time when people have lost their balanced attunement to the bright and dark sides of life – and are overwhelmed by the chaos that ensues.
For the people of Middle-earth, the way to avoid this scenario was through keen awareness of those places, times, events in life which were pitched right on the balance point between great forces.
Liminal Moments
In the historical Middle-earth, the dividing lines between the contrasting periods of time, whether night and day, first and second halves of months, or halves of the year, were charged by a special power. People were not surprised to feel the presence of spirits in these moments. Events could take a leap, and suddenly appear very differently from just before. These critical points of balance between the earth’s forces, these liminal moments, were out of the ordinary, beyond understanding and explanation, because they were supercharged. Even the setting sun and the rising moon created a charged atmosphere in which remarkable events could transpire.
Liminal moments and spaces at sunrise and at sunset bestowed benefits. Wizards mixing healing herbal mixtures could add to their potency by stirring in fresh dew from the early morning. And in applying these medicinal potions along with a chanted healing spell, the powers of magic were at their height as the sun set on the dusk horizon.
Tolkien reflected this Anglo-Saxon belief in the power of such moments in The Hobbit. There, he described how Bilbo sat on a hill all day long, watching the glowing sun slide gradually across the treetops of the distant forest. As sunset came, the sun burned orange and drifted down towards the horizon, revealing another light in the sky: a thin new moon. Then, as the sun disappeared into a haze at the edge of the world, it shone a last red ray of light which illuminated the face of the rock behind Bilbo. Suddenly a piece of the rock cracked, fell off, and revealed a hidden door. It was the entrance to the secret pathway that the hobbits had been searching for. Then the sun disappeared, and the moon too. So the rock cracked and revealed a secret just as the sun set and the moon rose.
In the historical Middle-earth, supernatural power was thought to be present in its most potent form on November eve and May eve, the joints between the two great seasons of the year. These two eves (together with Midsummer’s eve) were known as ‘spirit nights’, for they were marked by a dramatic increase in the presence of spirits from the Otherworld among the people and activities of Middle-earth.
Following the pattern of night and day, so the year in the real Middle-earth was divided into winter and summer. The year began on 31 October, celebrated with great festivals which have survived until today as Hallowe’en. Winter is the dark side of the year – Earth’s night, the time when nature sleeps. 1 May brought in the summer, filled with outdoor activities, crop farming and animal husbandry, land clearing and building. These two festivals divided the year into two halves of six months each.
The Celts’ Samhain festival, called by the Anglo-Saxons, Hallowe’en, and Christianized as All Saints’ or All Souls’ Day, was the great festival to mark the beginning of winter. It was also a festival of the dead. The bonfire and the lit brands carried into the fields were a fertility rite impregnating the earth with the seed of the dying sun, so that after a long winter of gestation vegetation would burst forth again in spring. The cattle too were driven through the fires, and people leaped over them, taking on themselves the potency of the magical flames.
As well as times of special power, there were also physical places which had a similar liminal capacity. We have few concepts today which compare with the Lowerworld. It was demonized by Christian missionaries as a bad realm, Hell, but is less prominent in modern discussions of that religion. But then, the Lowerworld was equivalent in power to the Upperworld concept of ‘heaven’ which characterizes Christianity and various other religions.
The Celtic peoples’ image of these spirit worlds was very close to the everyday world. Enticing and yet threatening, it hung intangibly near, like a reflection in a deep, clear pool. Natural features of the landscape provided the dividing line between this world and that. They were also the points of juncture, the connections, the doorways into the Otherworld. So when a person from Middle-earth forded a river, the swirling waters felt like the very energy of the Otherworld, ready to sweep the person away at any moment. How the physical landscape intersected with the spiritual is evidenced in Celtic mythology, where the source of the Irish River Boyne, named after the goddess Boann, is described as ‘a shining fountain, with five streams flowing out of it … Nine hazels … grew over the well. The purple hazels dropped their nuts into the fountain, and five salmon which were in the fountain severed them, and sent their husks floating down the streams.’
The streams leap by metaphor into spirit-world significance, where they are described as ‘the five streams of the senses, through which knowledge is obtained. And no one will have knowledge who drinks not a draught out of the fountain itself and out of the streams.’
The experience must have been exhilarating, transcending, terrifying. Ridges of high hills similarly carried the traveller into a space between worlds, straddling Middle-earth and the mysteries of a different world. It did not even have to be natural features of the landscape only, for the people living in Middle-earth times infused the landscape with the spirit of their souls. Boundaries, or tribal markers between clans of people in early Middle-earth were charged with magical power. More than mundane territories of trespass, they were also points through which the mist of the Otherworld could seep into this world.
Liminal points were many. In the course of a year everyone would negotiate a number of times, places and events which made them feel poised between the worlds, one foot in the familiar Middle-earth, another in the half-hidden Otherworld. These points at which the material world and the Otherworld came close included psychological shifts between states of consciousness, moments of light shift at dawn and dusk, turning points in the periodic waxing and waning of the moon, New Year’s Day, the summer and winter festivals, and the beginning and ending points of thunderstorms. All were occasions when the unseen powers from the Otherworld came very close, and were to be guarded against, unless one was preparing an intentional journey into those realms. At these times and in these places, powers from the Otherworld might disturb the expected unfolding of events.
On Samhain (Hallowe’en) the interpenetration was mutual and open for all who sought successfully, for it was the night of celebration of the unity of the material and spirit worlds.
Enchanting the Earth
The earth’s fertility, the fecundity with which it had its ‘babies’, be they animal, human, crops, fruit and so on, was of prime importance in the subsistence economy of ancient England. Accordingly, sun and moon festivals took place at these high points in the calendar. In the spring, through dramatic metaphor, their rituals attuned to the heat of the sun and the cool of the moon in drawing sprouting seedlings from the ground. The Lacnunga details an account of a spiritual invocation for fertility of the fields. The entire ceremony began in the cool dark of night, before dawn, and reached its climax in the rays of the setting sun at the end of the day. The activities had three aims; relating to the sun and its power over the vitality of the grass fields; invocations in honour of Mother Earth to bless the crops, and protection of the crops from damage by hostile wizards or witches.
The Lacnunga explains: ‘at night before daybreak take four sods from four sides of the land and mark how they stood before’. In the early hours of the morning, by the light of bright moonlight or fire torches, the wizards service the rural people of Anglo-Saxon England dug up chunks of earth at the four corners of a farm field. They placed markers carefully on the pieces of sod so that they could be restored later to the holes in their original positions. The ancient manuscript says that the wizard next takes ‘oil and honey and yeast and milk of all the cattle that are on the land, and part of every kind of tree growing on the land, except hard trees, and part of every well-known herb, except burdock only, and pour moonglow dew on them, and then let it drip three times on the bottom of the sods’.
Collecting all these natural ingredients would have taken days of preparation. The list excludes hardwood trees like oak and beech. They are slow-growing and perhaps are not therefore appropriate for encouraging the fertility spirit of fast-growing crops.
Moonglow dew was revered as a sacred liquid. It sprinkled onto the Earth at night, the overflow from the moonlit watering of the mythological World Tree by The Wyrd Sisters, the three sacred beings who symbolized the birth of the cosmos. Oil, honey, yeast and milk were all catalysts used in cooking and fermentation; in other words, processes in which the bounty of the land was prepared and transformed for people to eat and drink. This spell itself is like a recipe, with tips for the ways in which the ingredients should be combined for maximum benefit.
The sods of earth and grass were then sprinkled three times with water and the wizard chanted: ‘Grow, and multiply, and fill the Earth.’ In the Lacnunga manuscript, written by Christians, the account of the ceremony has the sods being taken to a church and placed with their grassy sides facing towards the altar, while masses were sung. But it is likely that the mass is a later Christian substitution, or even just an interpolation by the Christian author of the manuscript. In the original ceremony, it is more likely that the sods would be taken to a sacred site, a forest sanctuary or stone circle, where they could be placed so that the first rays of the sun would strike upon the grass, and incantations would be sung rather than a mass.
The manuscript records some of the incantations used in this magical ceremony: ‘I may through this magic spell, open from my teeth, through a thought firm-grasped; waken up the swelling crops for our worldly need; fill the fielded earth, and make the green fields beautiful.’ After this enchantment, the wizard turned about three times ‘sunwise’, then stretched full length along the ground, chanting for the fields to be green for the benefit of the owner of the land and all those who were subject to him.
The people of ancient England lived in a way which reflected their perceptions of the sun and moon, day and night. They maintained a balance between the brightness of ‘sun thinking’ and the imagination of ‘moon thinking’. The objective days were when they could ‘see what is there’ and ‘get things done’. But their lives were also informed by the intelligence of night, the power of the imaginal, the states of mind that manifest when the constraints of a visible, material world are lifted. In the real Middle-earth, the interplay of the sun and moon created many a shimmering pathway into the Otherworld. The sun, moon and stars were essential to the magic and mystery of life.
Celestial Powers
The seeing of a connection between celestial and earthly events attracted the frustration of Bishop Wulfstan near the end of the Middle-earth period, when he was Archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023. He composed a large body of directives which railed against the traditions which had been current all through the millennium, and still thrived. He said deprecatingly of the non-Christian people of Middle-earth: ‘… they took it as wisdom to worship the sun and moon as gods on account of their shining brightness … Some men also said that the shining stars were gods and began to worship them earnestly; and some believed in the earth because it nourished all things.’ He contrasted these beliefs with the truth according to the Gospels: ‘But they might have readily discerned, if they had the power of reason, that he is the true God who created all things for the enjoyment and use of us men, which he granted mankind because of his great goodness.’
For many today Wulfstan’s words have an ominous ring. In a time of ecological reawakening, Wulfstan’s early Christian view of man in all his goodness being granted dominion over the earth presages many centuries in which we progressively lost touch with an intimate connection with nature. But it certainly highlights clear differences between magical perceptions of Middle-earth in which the great forces of life are located in the natural features of this and the Otherworld; and the Christianity of the medieval period which asserted the primacy of humans. And Wulfstan’s claim that it was the ‘brightness’ of sun, moon and stars that attracted people as objects of magic and mystery is a caricature of their beliefs.