Climate Change — Back in the Day

We’re still trying to figure out the climate patterns after an unusually hard winter of 2019 that brought record snowfall to our part of the world, following by virtually no precipitation this past winter. Back in the day when the fortunes of harvest meant the difference between a local population’s prospect of plenty or privation for an entire year, an atmosphere of intense anticipation stirred across the countryside as summer beckoned. For the small tenant farmers of medieval times, several acres the harvest required the labor of all able-bodied family members from older children to adults. On the manorial estates of England and France, workers could number more than 200 so the harvest could be completed within the few prime weeks of summer between the kernel’s full ripeness and risk of damage from sprout or threat of rotting. Forces of nature that had brought forth bounty in the fields could also conspire to ruin crops in late summer with shattering hail, incessant rain, or felling winds, torching entire fields by lightning, or with a plague of all-consuming locusts. Fasts and feasts of the medieval church followed a sacred rhythm of agrarian wholeness represented by a liturgical calendar in recognition of parishioners’ reliance upon divine sustenance and protection from forces beyond mortal control.

Johann Hans, Celebration of the Harvest Festival in Ulm (1817), Lithograph, 9 ½ x 13 ¼ inches; Columbia Heritage Collection

Ulm’s grand medieval Ulmer Münster church and Münsterplatz are depicted in an early nineteenth century print that indicates the vulnerability and devotion of the populace in the wake of the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The Northern Hemisphere’s subsequent “Year without a Summer” with recurrent rains and cooler temperatures led to the catastrophic crop failures and famine in central Europe. With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and return of the climate to more normal conditions by 1817, city folk and farmers alike gave thanks and renewed harvest celebrations  throughout the land. In Frankfurt Pastor Gerhard Friederich led worshippers in a grand July Erntedankefest with prayers and hymns; Johann Hans’s Celebration of the Harvest Festival in Ulm depicts a similar event in that southern German city with verse about the calamity:

It was a sad year, a year of sorrow.

The poor spoke with tears every morning:

“Where do I find bread for my children today?”

The joy had been veiled, hidden.

Wherever one went, it was still and deathly.

“Oh open your heart, Mother Earth,” we begged,

“That we may be helped!”

And see, a beautiful day has come,

Joyous laughter has returned to all.

Folk Tunes and Corn Dollies in Merry Olde England

English folk tunes sung during harvest time and other field labors took various forms including ballads with charming melodies and lively tunes of ribald verse. The final cutting of grain after weeks of arduous work was commonly assigned to the youngest girl present. “O’ tis the merry time,” wrote cavalier poet Matthew Stevenson (c. 1654-1684), “wherein honest neighbours make good cheer and God is glorified in his blessings on the earth.” In some parts of Scotland the last sheaf was called the Cailleach (Old Wife), on the Isle of Skye the Boabbir Bhacagh (Crippled Goat), and the “Gander’s Neck” in western England. Cutting the last sheaf was considered unlucky in some folk traditions, perhaps a relic of pagan memory since the dwindling patch of standing grain was seen as a sanctuary for the field’s fertility spirit sometimes represented by a hare, bustard or crane, or other creature seeking refuge among the stalks. For this reason, workers might simply toss their sickles at the hallowed last stand in half-hearted effort to complete the harvest and begin celebrating.

Wheat Wreath, Columbia Heritage Collection

Solomki Straw Art Overlay, Columbia Heritage Collection

Harvesters typically adorned a young girl with a wreath of woven stalks and wildflowers and carried her in a jubilant procession led by a boy carrying the hallowed last sheaf. A “Kirn Baby” deftly woven of straw—the “Harvest Queen,” “Harvest Maiden,” or “Harvest Child,” depending on regional tradition, and honored sheaf typically served as table centerpieces for the annual Harvest-Home feast. Afterward the effigies of these “dollies,” which could also be made from barley, oats, and rye, were hung in the farmhouse or barn as a talisman to provide safe haven for the spirit of fertility until threshed for release with the seeding of spring crops. Scottish classicist and folklorist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) identified such mother-maiden traditions that continued into modern times as personifications of the ancient Demeter and Persephone myth without the elements that typically perpetuate such beliefs—a priestly class, designated holy places, or rites of propitiation. In parts of Scotland, Silesia, and Saxony, the maiden was chosen as the Wheat-Bride, Oat-Bride, or Rye-Bride according to the crop, and was joined by a respective Grain-Bridegroom to represent the productive powers of vegetation. The pair was honored at the local harvest celebration to which they came gaily dressed and tended by friends to imitate a festive marriage procession.

Old World traditions honoring the grain’s vitality by weaving “Kirn Babies” (“Corn Dollies”) of artfully twisted shapes have endured since medieval times and has been revived for exhibition at rural county fairs and craft displays. Popular traditional designs include the Cambridge Umbrella, Norfolk Lantern, Durham Chandelier, Devon Cross, Worchester Fan, and Irish Countryman’s Favor. The related agrarian folk art of solomki still popular in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine involves the meticulous design of grain straw marquetry overlay on wooden boxes bowls, plates, and other objects.

Among the most magnificent and monumental examples of golden straw weaving and wickerwork are three sets of Orthodox Holy Gates appropriately located in a restored nineteenth century church which serves as the Belarus Museum of Folk Art in Raubichi near Minsk. Dating from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, these exquisitely crafted panels served as centerpieces for Orthodox cathedral iconostases which formed the high wall of framed icons that divided the sanctuary from the nave where worshippers assembled. Skillfully drawn gold-colored thread fashioned from wheat stalks was also for exquisite decoration of white silk religious fabrics. Among these treasures’ earliest extant examples are The Good Shepherd and Jesus and the Samaritan altarpieces (c. 1650) that were deftly embroidered by nuns of the seventeenth century Order of Celestial Annunciades in Nozeroy, France, and preserved in the city’s Collegiate Church of St. Antoine.

Western European Folklore — Oat Goats and Rye Hounds

Scandinavian farmers customarily saved the last harvest cuttings for the ceremonial “Yule Sheaf” (Norwegian Julenek, Swedish Julkarve) of oats or other grain. The sheaf was suspended from a pole or barn roof during Christmas week as a blessing to the birds and goodwill offering for a favorable growing season in the coming year. This tradition continued among some families in eighteenth century America as described in verse by Ohio poet Phoebe Cary’s “The Christmas Sheaf”: 

“And bid the children fetch,” he said,
“The last ripe sheaf of wheat,
And set it on the roof o’erhead
That the birds may come and eat.

And this we do for His dear sake,
The Master kind and good,
Who of the loaves He blest and brake
Fed all the multitude.”

Adolph Tidermand (1814-1876), Traditions—The Christmas Sheaf (1846)

Oil on canvas, 14 ¼ x 16 ½ inches

National Gallery, Oslo

Upon completion of harvest in some parts of Germany during medieval times, farmers preserved the last remaining grain as “Wödin’s Share” (Vergodendeel, Vergodenstruss), an offering to the ancient pagan Allfather (Norse Odin, Slavic Volos). To solicit Wödin’s favor for the coming year, the cuttings were left for his thundering herd of horses sometimes glimpsed swirling aloft as heaps of roiling clouds. Four-wheeled “Wödin’s Wagon” was known in some German traditions as the four stars of Ursa Major with the three that descend from the corner forming the wain’s tongue. German folklorist-philologist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) found evidence of these traditions persisting well into the nineteenth century. After the ceremonial final reaping, some Saxon and Hessian farmers then struck the sides of their scythes three times with the strop, spilled a small amount of their beer, brandy, or milk on the ground, and waved their hats and beat their scythes three more times. Grimm further described a custom among some farmers to then parade home to the cry of “Wôld, Wôld, Wôld!/haven hüne weit schüt/jümm hei van haven süt….” British antiquarian John Symonds Udal (1848-1925) found vestiges of these beliefs in the celebratory end-of-harvest “crying of the neck whooping” of some Wessex descendants of Anglo-Saxon farmers in southern England. (“The neck,” in some places pronounced “knack,” was a small tied bundle of large heads gathered from the last cuttings.) Udal supposed their shouting “We hav’en” three times was “a survival of the old invocation to the great god Woden” that had remained through the centuries.

German farmers also contended with a malevolent menagerie of imaginary creatures—die Feldgeister (field spirits), including the Kornkuh (Grain Cow), Gerstenwolf (Barley Wolf), Haferbock (Oat Goat), Roggenhund (Rye Hound), and Aprilochs (April Ox). Folklore in Slavic Eastern Europe prescribed sparing the last few stalks of uncut grain for the field’s wild goat-like spirit, or for Baba Yagá (“Grandmother Witch”), though Christian influence confronted tradition in the words of a Russian folksong:

Let’s go girls, let’s go girls,

Out to the grain, out to the grain.

In our grain, in our grain,

Sits a witch, sits a witch.

Get out, witch; get out, witch,

Get out of our grain.

Our grain, our grain,

Has been consecrated, has been consecrated!

Go away witch, go away witch.

To Sen’kovo, to Sen’kovo—

There the grain there the grain,

Has not been consecrated.

Lodewijk Toeput (c. 1550-c.1605), Summer Harvest (c. 1590)

Black ink and gray wash over graphite, 10 ⅝ x 16 ⅝ inches

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.