Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
Jan Beveridge’s Children into Swans opens the door on some of the most extraordinary worlds ever portrayed in literature – worlds that are both starkly beautiful and full of horrors.
From a recent review in Library Journal:
In this captivating book, independent researcher Beveridge successfully provides readers with a lively discussion of common concepts and themes found in ancient myths, legends, folk, and fairy tales. (…)
The text is well researched and accessible, sprinkled with short fairy and folk tales, myths, and additionally often referencing well-known or seminal poems, stories, and manuscripts such as Walter Wangerin Jr.’s The Book of the Dun Cow, the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, Beowulf, etc. An exhaustive bibliography and helpful notes are included. Full review >
In October, we posted a Children into Swans excerpt on the celtic roots of Hallowe’en. It seems only fitting that we share a new excerpt this month on the [rather dark and sinister] pagan roots of Christmas. Enjoy!
From Children into Swans, by Jan Beveridge:
The solstice days of ancient Europe continued to be observed as Midwinter and Midsummer festivals, and the winter solstice is still celebrated in Scandinavia with a festival of light at the beginning of the Christmas season. Familiar Christmas customs of decorating with candles, evergreen boughs, and holly and ivy wreaths, as well as trees hung with candles or lights all have origins in the old Germanic celebration of Yule, the pre-Christian Midwinter festival that was simply advanced along a few days to fall on the same day as Christmas. In the early days of Christianity in Europe church authorities spoke out against decorating with evergreen boughs, which were associated with pagan observance. Nevertheless, the custom persisted, and the ease with which so many Midwinter traditions were assimilated into Christmas celebrations indicates how deeply rooted they were.
We find a sense of an old pagan festival in the Christmas stories of folk literature. In the imagery of folk and fairy tales, Christmas is associated, not with the Christ child and with angels, but with elves, dwarfs, household spirits, and trolls. The Norwegian fairy tale at the end of this book describes a Christmas celebration enjoyed by dwarfs and giants. A great number of Icelandic tales are Christmas stories. Here people clung to their cherished folk tales, and these particularly seem filled with old folklore. In Icelandic tales, elves were on the move at Christmas travelling to their own Yuletide celebrations, where they feasted and danced until dawn. Trolls emerged from their dark caves to hold their own strange revelries, and some hidden folk chose Christmas Eve to come among humans for a time.
(…)
Stories of Christmas time, whether folk tales, fairy tales, or the older medieval stories, have a Samain quality to them. Similar to the other ancient spirit nights, when supernatural beings could move between the worlds, Christmas Eve appears as a potent time replete with giants, trolls, elves, and ghosts, and it is a dangerous time for humans. Mainly, these stories have a theme of Christmas Eve visitors. In one fairy tale, a troll comes at Christmas to steal princesses – one princess every year. In another, a fierce and ugly troll wife comes to the same farm every Christmas Eve and captures the farmer’s shepherd. One elf-queen is under a curse that demands that she take the life of a human every Christmas. There are many folk tales of elves and trolls overrunning farmsteads on Christmas Eve. In one Swedish tale, a man puts a Bible over one doorway and a hymnal over the other and makes a cross on the chimney; that night the trolls can’t get in, but they still make a racket on the roof.
(…)
More welcome Christmas visitors were the elf-figures that first appeared as part of Christmas folklore traditions during the nineteenth century. The Swedish Jultomte, and in Norway and Denmark the Christmas Jule-Nisse, don’t come down the chimney, but bring Christmas presents for children right through the front door and then enjoy the gift of a bowl of porridge that is left out for them. In Finland, the Christmas elf comes from Lapland where he lives, and so, of course, his sleigh is drawn by reindeer. In other regions it is pulled by a goat or a horse. It is only the American Santa Claus, based on the Dutch Saint Nicholas, or Sinter Klaas, who uses flying reindeer when he visits every home at Christmas. All of these Christmas Eve visitors derive from the ancient idea of sacred nights as spirit nights – when supernatural beings enter into our world.
To learn more about Children into Swans, or order a copy online, click here.
For media requests, please contact Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.