Hello, hello everyone.
By next week, we will have turned the corner on the longest night of the year. The Solstice will be barely behind us, and the days will start, by tiny increments, to get longer again. But right now, the nights are still getting longer and darker, and storms are brewing and breaking across the land. Hopefully, wherever you are is warm and cozy and filled with friendly light.
I’m not sure when exactly I learned about St. Lucy’s day, but as a culturally blandified Kansas kid of vaguely English, Irish, German extraction, I’ve always had a sort of wistful pining for intact cultural traditions. St. Lucy’s day, as it was presented, was about the oldest daughter in the household waking her family with light and bread or sweet rolls in the darkest days of winter. I wasn’t too sold on the idea of a candle wreath on my head, but the overall idea sounded like something I could get behind. The daughter gets to do the special thing and remind the family that the light will return. Hope in dark, and dreary, and cold times.
Of course, the deeper story is always more complicated.
The St. Lucy’s day celebrations I learned about were probably blandified themselves, seeing as the Swedish immigrants to Kansas (Lindsborg is a particular example) were pretty thoroughly Lutheran when they got to the Americas. Additionally, there’s other evidence that celebrating Lucia day like this was a relatively new tradition practiced by upper class Swedish families.
If we go back before the Protestant Reformation, before the split between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, all the way back to the early saints, then we find out that Lucia was one of the early Christian (ahem) virgin martyrs, killed around 300 AD/CE. If ancient accounts are to be believed, she turned to Christianity after her mother was healed during a visit to a Christian shrine. While the last great persecution of Christians raged (before the Roman Empire subsumed Christianity into an official state religion), Lucia was said to have brought food to Christians hiding in catacombs. Wearing a crown of candles, so she could carry more in her hands. Her fiance, a pagan, found out she was aiding the Christians (and doing so with money from her dowry) and turned her over to the authorities.
Here things get fantastical, because yes, sainthood and martyrdom is involved.
When the officials and soldiers arrived to take her away to her punishment (ancient misogyny for $500, Alex: what is defilement in a brothel?), she could not be moved, not by men, nor by teams of oxen. So they stacked wood around her and tried to burn her. The wood would not burn. Eventually a soldier ended her with a sword through the throat. Because she wouldn’t stop speaking (why hello, again misogyny) about how them killing her was going to encourage Christians everywhere.
Martyrs, man. They never do go quietly.
The lugubrious 15th-century glorifiers of the saints really went full macabre by tacking on the fun detail of her eyes being gouged out. And then when her body was prepared for burial, miraculously, her eyes were intact. This is why St. Lucia is depicted in medieval to Renaissance paintings as holding a pair of eyes on a plate or in a cup, and is also how she came to be one of the patron saints of the blind.
Authors too, apparently. Make of that what you will.
Like usual though, there’s an older cultural tradition that’s been subsumed or transformed over the centuries after the introduction of Christianity. Enter Lussi Langnatt. (google translate does ok with the Norwegian; and here’s a Norwegian-American take on her)
In Norwegian and Swedish folklore, Lussi was a vette, or a witch who checked up on people at the beginning of the Yule month. A little more than checked up, actually. She might snatch naughty children, or she’d talk to the farm animals to see if they’d been treated well. If preparations for Yule weren’t complete, she’d let loose all the little magical mischief makers under her power, and they’d trash your unwinter-ready farmstead. She might even go so far as to kick your chimney over. People stayed indoors on Langnatt, because the oskorei (aka, the wild hunt) might snap them up never to be seen again. Dead people might walk.
Not somebody you want to get cross-ways with, Lussi Langnatt.
So, writers — where do you fall? Are you ready for the holiday season, slipping easily into St. Lucy’s shoes bringing sweetness and light, or is Lussi Langnatt getting ready to loose the trolls on you?
Challenge options (choose one, choose all, but stay under 250 words)
- One of your stock characters (Togwogmagog or otherwise) philosophizes on the nature of light and darkness whilst doing something unnecessarily complicated, or conversely, something simple unnecessarily complicated.
- St. Lucy and Lussi Langnatt have a showdown. Include saffron buns/lussi cats.
- Eyeballs. On a plate.
- The oskorei, and their zombie friends, plus a troll or two.
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