New Moon ♎️
When most people think of autumn, they think of gold and rust coloured leaves, hot food and cool misty mornings. What they are actually thinking about is the month of October.
Interesting then that the Anglo-Saxon mindset, at least according to Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World in examining their poetry, sees autumn as the weakening of world, the people and the culture. And after summer’s bright radiance and richness from being in our prime, now must our youth give way to age and all that was lithe and supple now becomes stiff, aged and withered.
Strangely enough this year, here in the UK, October had been one of the warmest it has ever been. The signs of climate change are indeed hard to ignore!
And yet, on the day of writing, this very morning, we had the first frost already!
Bede wrote of Winterfylleth coming from:
“They called the month in which the winter season began Winterfylleth, a name made up from ‘winter’ and ‘full moon’, because winter began on the full moon of that month.”
The moon in question refers to the first full moon after the autumn equinox. Depending on how you look at it in 2023, this would either mean the full of the 29th September (Michaelmas, or the feast of St Michael), or is yet to come on the 28th October. Indeed, for the Anglo-Saxon Christians, the harvest was considered as having ended come the full moon closest to Michaelmas. Perhaps this is where such local traditions such as those associated with blackberries came from? Especially where it is said to be of no good to pick blackberries after the 29th September (again, Michaelmas) as the devil is said to piss all over them and make them horrid! Of course, this has less to do with unholy urine and more to do with mildew and bacteria having set in and making such fruits go over into rot and fermentation.
With its longer nights trees becoming skeletal, the cooler winds and damper air, we can see how the Anglo-Saxons would have seen the full moon of this month as being the herald of winter. It is by the privilege of living in the times we are in that we can allow ourselves the luxury of appreciating the beauty of autumn; whereas for our ancestors, it was a race to get the harvest in as quickly as they could and begin preparations on the home as well as ensuring enough food to last until spring before the cold arrived. Did they see the same beauty we do now? I’d like to think they could, but that must have been hard to appreciate if the harvest of that year was not a good one and there would have been serious choices to have been made who would survive the coming winter.
Whether for you, October is a time of decay and withering, a time of colour, of change, of coziness, or perhaps a time of dread?
I wish you a merry Winterfylleth and may this winter not be harsh with you.
Be well!
Locksley. /|\
A Wise Fool 