#darkspringtide

Today, O best beloved, they mark the first day of summer up in Iceland. Why today, you ask, of all the days and the answer is simple. In the old days, they counted only two seasons. Summer and Winter. And gaukmánaðr, the cuckoo month, marked the change.

On Sumardagurinn fyrsti, the first day of summer, people still say “Gleðilegt sumar og takk fyrir veturinn!”, a happy summer and thank you for the winter, and hope that summer and winter freeze together for one night.

They say that if the bowl of water you leave outside freezes overnight, it means summer will be good. It means that winter and summer have shaken hands.

It means that the Hidden Folk, Huldufólk, are content.

But who knows with the Huldufólk?

And not so long ago, in Vopnafjörður, the bowl outside Harpa Jónsdóttir’s home did not freeze.

It sang.

A single note. Clear. Like a wine glass touched by a breath of wind.

When Harpa stepped out before breakfast, she saw the bowl undisturbed by frost, but swirling softly, as though stirred by an invisible fingertip. At its centre: a raven feather, glossy as ink.

Beside it, in the gravel - footprints.

Small. Bare. But not a child’s.

And to Harpa it was as if the bowl hummed a melody.

She went back to house, humming, and her amma murmured :“We haven’t heard that song since the French left.”

And crossed herself.

Twice.

And knocked on wood, saying “sjö níu þrettán”, for good measure.

Fáskrúðsfjörður. A home for French fishermen. Before the war.

Who knows with the Huldufólk.

The ravens came at noon. Two of them. Silent. Watching.

That afternoon, Harpa found a summer gift not from her family, but left on her windowsill: a folded slip of birchbark, sealed with wax, and inside it, a page of an old magazine and a name she could not pronounce. But she  knew the name.

And ever since, at the beginning of each summer month, from eggtið to kornskurðarmánaðr, Harpa took flowers and nuts, liquorice and home-made sweetmeats, and pages she ripped out of magazines, and went up into the hills.

And she sang a song she heard on the radio.

Loud. To the hills.

A new one for every month. Until Winter.

And the bowl outside of Harpa’s home always froze on Sumardagurinn fyrsti.

O best beloved, it begins in the way of many old tales: with a door that is meant to be shut tightly, and someone who opens it regardless.

The girl - call her Solveig, for she was solaced once by sunlight - found the door beneath the cairn while gathering birch bark for the spring fire. The lambs were born, the snow was thinning, and yet the earth still shivered with coldl. She said no prayer, as she was taught for such cases, only leaned into the chill gap, where wind smelled of salt and rot and copper.

She stepped through, as if called. And the stone slid closed behind.

Beneath the cairn was not silence, but music, weird fiddles and goat-skin drums, hopefully of goatskin, exciting, exhilarating, threatening. Candles of marrow lit a passage of antlers and roots. The deeper she went, the more she heard her name spoken in whispering voices echoing from the tunnel walls.

“Solveig,” they called. “Once of the sun.”

“Queen of lamb-blood,” they called. “Bride of the bone-king.”

At the foot of the stair stood the King of the Mountain. Crown of stag-horn, eyes like dull coals, beard tangled with earthworms. “I’ve waited long,” he said, voice like grindstone on sword.

“But I never asked,” she replied.

“No,” he smiled. “Yet you opened.”

He offered her a goblet of mead the colour of melting ice. She drank. All went still. But the tunes they heard, they went frantic.

Above, the bells of Ålvundeid Church tolled for the Easter Vigil as the sun set on Holy Saturday. Below, Solveig danced, clothed in the smells of earth and salt and copper, her shadow twisting into the songs.

Songs not sung when the priest comes calling on Sundays.

She is still dancing.

In the underworld beneath the mountain peaks they now call Trollheimen.

Some say that they saw the lambs that spring carrying tiny black crowns on their skulls. Some of them were born with budding antlers. Some say birch sap ran red as wine. And if you listen under the hill on Easter morning, they say you can hear her laugh and sing while she is dancing, half with joy, and half with something better left below the ground.

Have you ever heard, O best beloved, the pipes that play before the spring?

The elders of Lefka say it is only the wind. But they know better.

They warn the girls, every year, as sure as the violets bloom. Do not stray beyond the village on the first warm night. Do not listen to music that no one else can hear. But the pipes play anyway.

And some always listen.

That night, Evdokia did not mean to walk so far. But the air was soft, the fields filled with sweet smells of spring. She thought of nothing. Until she heard the tune.

Light, breathless, calling.

A flute, or something older than a flute, trilling like laughter through the valley. The sound brushed her skin, ran its fingers through her hair, slipped under her breath like the scent of spting blossoms.

She knew she should turn back. And Evdokia did not.

She followed the sound past the old olive grove, up the narrow path where the stones stood  pale in the moonlight. And there, in the hollow between two hills, the circle waited.

Mushrooms would grow here come autumn, grow in a perfect ring, but the grass inside was already unnaturally green, too fresh for March.

The pipes paused.

And in the hush, she stepped forward.

No one in Lefka spoke of Evdokia the next morning.

No one went looking for her.

The elders only watched the hills and crossed themselves.

The villagers had seen it before. They would see it again. The first warm night always takes one.

For Pan still walks these hills, his shadow slipping through the pines. His pipes still play, when spring is near.

And the girls of Lefka still answer, just as Chloris once did, and Daphne, Elpida, Marika, Fotini and others before her, too many to name.

The circle will grow wider.

The old year fades, O best beloved, and the new year is born in fire and light today. Nowruz, the Persian New Year, comes with the Spring Equinox, when the world turns to warmth again.

Ever since Cyrus the Great of the House of Achaemenes ruled the world from Persepolis. Or maybe longer.

Now, the Haft-Sin table is set with seven symbolic things whose names all begin with the letter “S”, Hafez is read, hyacinths bloom, and the fires leap high, for winter must be burned away before the new year may begin.

And when the fires are lit, so too comes the fool.

The world turns and when it turns towards the sun, he comes dancing through the streets.

Hajji Firuz.

The fire-jester. The fool of Nowruz. The one who sings, capers, and twirls, his tambourine clashing, his voice rising above the market square:

"Haji Firuz-e, sali ye ruz-e!"

"Hajji Firuz comes but once a year!"

They laugh at him, they throw coins, they tease and call, but he only grins wider, his red robes swirling like embers, his feet kicking up the last of winter’s dust.

The children know him best, the old women know him longest, the sceptics call him a nonsense.

And yet.

Some say he was once a servant of Anahita, the goddess of the rivers, her messenger on Nowruz, calling the people to celebrate.

Others whisper that he is older still, a shadow of Siyâvash, the prince burned on false charges, returned every spring to remind the world that light cannot be destroyed.

Wasn’t it in the last days of Esfand that the fire consumed him? And wasn’t it at Nowruz that his name was sung?

Perhaps that is why Hajji Firuz dances wildly, why his laughter rings sharp. The world tried to burn him once, but the fire only carried him forward.

Perhaps that is why he sings fiercely, because once, he was a man who refused to be silenced.

And so, he dances on, year after year, grinning, singing, leaping through firelit streets as winter falls away, and the new year begins.

For fire does not burn its own.

On the sixth of March, O best beloved, Thaddeus Blythe returned to Knaresborough. Eleven years gone this Spring. Eleven years of London fog, unfinished sonatas, and silence.

Nothing he brought with him. Not a sound. Nothing to show for a decade of life. Or what passes for it.

And no one waited for him. Up here. In the Far North.

No one but the Vicar’s widow.

The Vicar’s Widow, still pale-eyed and steady-handed, who remembered him. The misfit.

She had bones.

After the churchyard flooded in ’52, she had found them. Another misfit’s. Kept them. Out of pity. Or spite.

“Here is what is waiting for you,” she’d said, and handed him the linen-wrapped box.

The insides held a skull. Margery Holt’s skull. And a pressed daffodil, crisp as ash.

Now, on the sixth of March, he sits again in the chapel’s shadow. A candle’s flame moves, though there is no wind. But she is there.

As she is every year.

On the sixth of March.

All those years.

In the ruined window, Margery stands. Pale as moonlight and silent as prayer. Her candle raised. Her eyes turned not on him, but through him. Daffodils bloom around her feet, unplanted, untended. Always the same. Always too early.

Thaddeus does not speak. He never does. Not anymore.

He remembers her songs. Not the words, but their pulse, their rhythm. The way her breath used to catch before the final line. The way her fingers always smelled of “Violette” eau de toilette. That she always had secretly applied when she made the beds of the vicar and his wife. The unfinished melody she’d hummed as he left, still ringing in his chest like a dissonant bell.

He places the skull on the chapel step. The box beneath it.

He lights his own candle.

He waits.

For what, he doesn’t know. Absolution? Recognition?

An ending?

The chapel is all silence.

But Margery turns her head. Just a little. Just enough.

And the wax on his candle begins to weep.

At dawn, the daffodils are gone.

The skull remains, cradled in linen.

And Thaddeus Blythe, composer, coward, penitent, sits alone in the pew, a single line of music scrawled across his cuff.

Her melody.

O best beloved, in the spring of 1775, the smoke of the last witch trial still lingered over Kempten.

They said Anna Schwegelin had been the last.

The villagers nodded, crossed themselves, and let the Walpurgis fires burn higher towards Kreuzthal and the Adelegg Mountains, just to be sure.

But the witches were gone.

Their witchy ways were dead.

The priests said so.

Only the goat remained.

He was a rough-coated beast, black as the soot from the trial fires, with a scarred horn and yellow eyes that caught the light strangely.

No one claimed him, yet he was always there, perched on Kempten’s stone walls, watching.

The baker’s loaves would not rise if he was seen at the crossroads.

The cows gave sour milk if he lingered near the pasture gates.

And once, a child's new shoes turned up full of nettles overnight, after the goat had stared too long at the cottage door.

They blamed Anna’s ghost.

They muttered about leftover curses.

They prayed harder.

But it was not Anna.

It was the goat.

On the last night of April, the villagers built the Walpurgis fires, singing the old hymns with failing voices.

The goat watched from the ridge.

And when the flames leapt highest, when the bells tolled most bravely, he threw back his head and laughed.

Not a bleat.

Not a bray.

But a laugh.

Down in the valley, old doors banged open.

Barns groaned on their hinges.

The mist from the Adelegg Mountains rolled thicker. And some say the saw sparks in the mist, sparks brighter than the fires that had raged across Europe.

And far beyond the reach of hymns and bells, the goat walked into the folds of the night, where the forgotten ones danced.

He had not been left behind, after all.

He had simply been waiting.

There is no dancing on Good Friday, O best beloved. Not where German is spoken. A silent holiday. Anciently, to remind us of our lord’s suffering on this day.

But once, when the Reformation came to the lands of Anhalt and the monasteries were dissolved, an old monk lost his wits and found a fiddle. Fiddling as he walked, the greybeard came to the village of Preußlitz on the Friday of the Passion of the Lord, just as they gathered for mass.

“Ich fiedel‘ euch zum Frieden, ich fiedel‘ euch zur Qual,

ich fiedel‘ euch in Gottes ewigen Saal.

Come, join me, and dance! Dance!”

Three men and three women came and followed his fiddle, dancing, to the Preußlitzer Flur, where the graves of the old people stood in the woods, and there, the curse hit them and the Seven were turned to stone.

She had no name, or perhaps too many. That odd, orphan girl of Preußlitz. The villagers called her verloren, half-shadow, a girl who dreamt too much and kept odd hours. But on Good Friday, she walked barefoot to the Preußlitzer Flur with a rhythm pulsing in her ribs.

There she danced.

And the seventh stone moved first — just a tilt, like a head inclining to music.

The sounds of a fiddle were heard by those who had ears to listen.

“Ich fiedel‘ euch zum Frieden, ich fiedel‘ euch zur Qual,

ich fiedel‘ euch in Gottes ewigen Saal.“

Then another moved. And another.

One by one, the stones cracked. And from them stepped not corpses, but dancers.

Laughing. Reeling. Eyes full of ancient spring, dresses tattered, hair braided with lichen.

They did not speak. They danced. With her. Around her.

Until the light changed — and all that was left was the debris of seven cold stones in a ring, and a girl in their centre, spinning sheer joy into the stillness of the world.

The woods of Preußlitzer Flur were cut down soon after, burial mounds of old ploughed under, but the debris of the seven stones they brought back to their village.

And the nameless one was never seen again. But on full moon nights in Spring, on the fields around Preußlitz, you might still hear

“Ich fiedel‘ euch zum Frieden, ich fiedel‘ euch zur Qual,

ich fiedel‘ euch in Gottes ewigen Saal.“

if you have ears to hear.

Far beyond the mist of Northlands,

Where the lakes lie vast and silent,

Lay the land of roaring waters,

Valley deep and hills forbidding.

There did Oskari, valiant vintner,

Turn the stone and tame the forest,

Planted vine where frost had slumbered,

Warmed the roots with fire and labour.

"Laugh they did in far Ontario,

Mocked they did in old Niagara,

‘Fool, who grows the grape in winter?

Frost shall eat your harvest early!’”

Yet the vines took root and prospered,

Softened by the sun of springtime,

Bore the fruit like red Aurora,

Draped in gold approached the autumn.

Oskari of vine and valley,

Tilled his land with steady labour,

Pressed the grapes and sang the stories,

Passed on down from old Suomi.

Then one spring the winds grew silent,

Came no song of finch nor swallow,

Only whirr of restless hunger,

Wings that darkened all the heavens.

Hoppers leapt and gnawed the tendrils,

Stripped the vines till roots lay naked,

Not a leaf to shade the berries,

Not a branch to hold the bounty.

Oskari wept, his hands hung helpless,

Raised his voice in lamentation,

"Lo, the curse of dark Louhitar!

Pest of Northland, bane of plenty!"

Then upon the hill there sounded,

Soft as waves on silent waters,

Pluck of string of the kantele,

Winding like the dawn through vineyard.

Tall he stood, with eyes like sunlight,

Cloak of green and voice of thunder,

"Saint I am, and Urho called me,

Grasshoppers my foes of old!"

Strings did ring and notes resounding,

Urho sang with voice unyielding,

"Shoo! Away, ye beasts of famine,

Take cursed wings to other pastures!"

Hoppers fled with raising terror,

Blown upon the northern tempest,

Scattered far to lands unyielding,

Never more to mar the harvest.

Thus the vines in joy did blossom,

Suckled by the earth and sunlight,

And Oskari knelt in wonder,

At the saint with kantele singing.

Happy St Urho’s Day, O best beloved!