Summer is when the blessings catch you

Where are all the summer solstice songs?

Where are all the summer solstice songs?

Reminder: I’m recording my first Q&A audio episode for paid subscribers (and those with a free preview) this Monday. You can submit questions here anytime.

A question has been arising for me every summer since I began researching seasonal ritual and song that I think will interest those of you interested in reconstructing a pre-industrial (and even pre-Christian) ritual calendar:

Considering ritual songs are in great supply for the rest of the year, why are there comparatively few around the summer solstice and the month of July?

Summertime is when the plants are happy and the animals run free and the nuts and fruits swell on the trees. So where are all the happy, celebratory fruit and nut and tree songs we might expect of this period of time? Have these rituals and songs been lost to time, or are we somehow barking up the wrong tree?

We simply don’t know nearly as much about the spiritual practices of summertime in pre-modern and pre-Christian northern Europe as we do about ritual life in winter. I’m not saying we know nothing, we just know a lot less. And we tend to assume that because the winter solstice was a big deal in the ritual year in northern Europe, that the summer solstice would warrant the same attention. But just because we care about the summer solstice doesn’t necessarily mean it mattered in precisely the same way to past peoples, does it?

Some of you will be like, “but wait, Danica, what about Midsummer (aka St. John’s day/Kupala/Joninės/Jāni)?” And you’d be right to bring it up. Midsummer has been intensely celebrated in northern Europe since at least the Middle Ages, and is especially rich in song in the Baltic and Slavic areas. But it’s not at all clear whether or how this holiday was celebrated in the period preceding this time. 

If you dig around, you’ll find that many of the customs connected to Midsummer seem to originate in other occasions – the maypole, for example, whose name suggests its origin in Mayday celebrations. Songs, too, may have migrated to Midsummer from another sphere, such as in Lithuania, where many Midsummer songs were previously traditional wedding songs, likening the bride and groom to the sun and moon, who were wed in Baltic myth.

The film Midsommar suggests to foreign audiences an unbroken (albeit horrific) pagan lineage of Midsummer ritual in Sweden, yet Swedes themselves often lament the fact that the most “traditional” song and dance tied to the Midsummer maypole in most regions is Små Godorna, a goofy modern children’s song about little frogs, akin to the Chicken Dance that has increasingly appeared at North American weddings in the past decade.

One reasonable theory explaining the dearth of evidence for summer solstice rituals in northern Europe argues that folks were simply too busy at that time of year sailing and walking and going to market and harvesting berries and enjoying the sun to bother making ritual (and with it, ritual song).

Here’s another explanation, which you can take or leave, but I find compelling:

In my research on seasonal folklore and song from northern Europe generally, I’ve noticed that many, if not most of the rituals of the winter and springtime are looking forward to the future and asking something of it – whether the entity they are asking is a god, a saint, or their own village neighbour. And this makes sense, because the winter and the spring are the times of greatest need in the human relationship to the year. They are also, therefore, the seasons with the most ritual activity, especially relating to abundance and fertility. Consider the guising traditions of winter, most of which involve people going door to door in costume, often singing or playing, and begging for a treat, like a soul cake, or a drink, such as wassail. We still do this, and call it trick-or-treating.

In the winters of the past, we couldn’t pick up a mango from Peru at the grocery store to slake our hunger. We needed the life around us, both human and non-human, to help us, to feed us, or we would quite simply die. You could argue (though I wouldn’t) that communal fertility rituals had no material effect on the land, but they clearly had a social, cultural effect: they cultivated hope. And when people have hope, they are far more likely to flourish, and to make choices that assist others in flourishing.

Wintertime ritual is oriented towards spiritually preparing for and bringing about the harvest on the other side of the seasonal wheel. That’s why there are so many songs and so many rituals at that time of year. As the skies begin to darken and the wind bites in autumn I too feel this instinct in my body: It’s time to light the fires. It’s time for dreaming. It’s time to commune with the ancestors underground, and ask them to help push the life up from inside the earth again come summertime. 

I wonder, then, if the question of the lack of summer solstice songs relates to the question of what song does for us in the first place. Considering the abundance of winter ritual songs, we might ask, is it possible that we sing more often out of need than out of celebration? And if we do, could that explain the fact that there are relatively few songs of Midsummer compared to other nodes of the year’s wheel? 

On that note, should we even be imagining the year as a wheel at all? Why do we assume that all times in the year would have the same kind of importance or emphasis as all the others, like the 7-day workweek, endlessly cycling in homogeneity, irrespective of climate or circadian rhythms?

For myself, I know I am more often motivated to sing (and make ritual) out of longing than for joy, though maybe I am of a somewhat more melancholy temperament than most people. I did grow up in the north of Canada though: a cold, dark, and difficult climate, so maybe my experience is a decent litmus test for how historical Northern Europeans responded emotionally to their own seasonal contexts.

What summer songs do

As you may have gathered from my most recent newsletter, it’s not as if there are no summer songs at all. Last month while I prepared for the summer songs talk and workshop I recently led at Cascadian Midsummer, I had an occasion to sum up what existing summer folk songs actually have in common, and what they might tell us about traditional ways of relating to the land in this season.¹

Summer songs are often about observable phenomena in the landscape — they reference what people are doing out in the outside world: roving on hillsides, chasing sheep, trysting in forest bowers, appreciating the sight of flowers and the sound of migratory birds. They feature especially the cunning and mysterious cuckoo, who travels to the otherworld every year and returns with secret knowledge, which lovers hope to receive by addressing the mythical bird in its tree.

Beyond this common imagery, I’ve noticed that there can often be a timeless quality to summer songs, a belief or wish that this pleasant moment of ease and goodness could last forever, as it does in some accounts of the land of Fairy, where people are eternally young, and trees bear fruit and the fields are endlessly green, and the sun shines every day.

You can see this timeless quality embodied in the (evidently) replaceable lover of some versions of Wild Mountain Thyme:

If my true love were gone, I would surely find another,

To pluck wild mountain thyme among the blooming heather

It’s there in the image of the young man who appears to rise from the dead when kissed by his lover in the many versions of Amang the Blue Flowers and the Yellow:

She lifted up the green covering
And gave him kisses three,
Then he looked up into her face,
The blythe blink in his e’e.

O then he started to his feet
And thus to her said he,
“Fair Annie since we’ve met again
Parted no more we’ll be.²

You’ll find it in Bonny Cuckoo’s fanciful plea that the cuckoo should stay and sing the whole year ‘round:

The ash and the hazel shall mourning say,
O bonny cuckoo, don’t go away;
Don’t go away, but tarry here,
And sing for us throughout the year.

Isn’t it interesting, too, that these songs evoke timelessness when at Midsummer the sun itself appears to stand still, giving us the etymological origin of the word “solstice:” sun standing still?

What is the ritual quality of summer?

I wonder if the lower number of mid-summer songs themselves, combined with this tendency for them to exhibit (arguably) a timeless quality, lobs the question of the ritual character of summer back to us moderns instead of answering it.

Personally, I get kind of excited when this happens. When the past is (mostly) silent on a question of precedent, we are being invited to feel into our own experiential knowing for once. What does summer really mean to us, aside from what the school or work calendar tells us it does?

As a culture, we are uncomfortable with stillness. We aren’t terribly good with satisfaction. And I’m including myself in this observation. It’s hard to trust when things are going well, and just be with it. Have you ever thought in the middle of winter “man, I wish I had spent more of the summertime just looking at leaves, or just feeling the warm Earth underneath me”? I sure have.

Maybe we are so accustomed to trying to move the wheel along, to plan for the future, to make things happen, that the raw, settled, abundant experience of summer itself makes us a little – dare I say – uncomfortable? Are we looking for songs for this moment because we are forgetting that there is birdsong and leaf-song and wind-song already enriching the apparent stillness?

What if our ancestors weren’t singing as much this month because they were busy enjoying the rich and fulsome quiet and the general absence of hardship? Is it possible at this time of year they were praying with their ears and eyes instead of their lungs, that they were listening for the echoing answer to their prayers in the upsurging flowers and dangling boughs?

After the most intense period of COVID was over, in 2022, I had to re-learn how to run into people on the street. I realized this one day when I came across a good friend in front of the grocery store, and noticed that I unconsciously made an excuse to cut the interaction short, with the assumption that she wouldn’t want to stand in front of me for any longer than absolutely necessary. 

I had developed a fear of simply “hanging out.” And it was clearly a hindrance to connection. I had lost all capacity for the thing that creates real intimacy, which is simply being in another person’s presence without an agenda.

So the next time I ran into someone on the street, instead of immediately inventing an “out,” I counted three breaths of silence the first time a natural pause occurred. And then I did it again. And the conversation bloomed. I had been praying for more social connection, but I had forgotten how to step back and let it unfurl into my world.

I remembered in that moment that sometimes you need to stand still so the blessings can catch up with you.

Perhaps this is one ritual quality of the summer, then:

An invitation to listen for the answer to our prayers.

A glimpse into the level of reality where nothing is wrong, and nothing needs fixing.

A vision of the paradise that lays ever alongside this world, only rarely flashing into view.

What do you think? Is summer folklore quieter because our ancestors were taking a breather to let their prayers be answered?

And will you drink a little deeper from the flowers and leaves and light this month for having wondered about it?

1.  It’s important to note that the majority of what could qualify as “summer songs” relate to moments that we don’t popularly consider “the summer” these days, and those are May Day songs (of which there are plenty), and harvest songs (a likewise brimming category). It’s helpful when thinking about seasonal rituals to know that much of northern Europe in pre-Christian times thought of the year as having two seasons, winter and summer. Therefore, summer began at the start of May and ended when the harvest – hærfest in Old English – was complete and grazing domestic animals returned to the byre (or the knife), usually around October 31st.

2. Lyrics from June Tabor’s If My Love Loves Me, as this version makes this faux-resurrection more explicit than others.