The first Nativity Scene, by Giotto, from the upper basilica at Assisi.

In 1223, Francis of Assisi (not yet a saint) worried that Christmas was becoming too materialistic, too much about giving and getting gifts and not enough about the birth of Christ. His solution was to invent the first crèche, a live action nativity scene (with real cows, donkeys and sheep playing the cows, donkeys and sheep, as well as people playing the people) staged in a cave near Greccio. A Mass was preached in front of it, and the faithful came from miles around to experience the wonder of the Nativity. Within a century, the crèche had become traditional in Italy, and by the early modern period Naples in particular was exporting beautiful figurines all over Europe. The puritans, of course, protested that this was idolatry, but today the Christmas crèche is as popular among mainstream Protestants as among Catholics.

For the past seven years, Flavigny-sur-Ozerain has hosted an exposition des crèches from late November until the beginning of January. Some are outdoors, some are set up in the windows of houses, illuminated by little spotlights. Each is individual, invented by the home owner, the business, or (and these two are significant) the seminary or monastery. They take all forms. Some are very traditional, some are whimsical, and some have turned out to be controversial.

  My first crèche (which, like an idiot, I did not photograph) was pretty conventional: I borrowed my friend Wendy’s Italian santots, and set up a classic scene with shepherds and wisemen adoring the Christ child– and also a hedgehog, my totem animal. It was pretty enough, but unremarkable. Last year I got into trouble. At wits end about how to do something new, I decided to do a Toy’s Crèche: a pretty doll as Mary, a teddy bear as Baby Jesus, a wooden Pinocchio doll as Joseph, old fashioned toys playing the roles of the Holy Family. I thought it was a cute idea.

This is reconstructed; it originally sat in my living room window.

I hadn’t counted on the ultra-Catholic reaction (we don’t have many of these, outside of the monastery and the seminary, but it only takes one, it turns out). Pinocchio, you see, was a liar, and by casting him as Joseph, I was insulting the earthly father of Our Lord. My crèche was blasphemous, and some person or persons unknown kept coming by at night and shutting my shutters, making the crèche invisible. I wasn’t in town for Christmas that year myself, which meant that my friend Genest (who is the mastermind of the whole crèche idea) had to keep coming to the defense of my poor toys and opening the shutters again. I think he was actually very proud of me for stirring the pot.

This year I decided to play it safe–I don’t want my windows broken, after all– but also to make a subtle commentary. Last summer Lucy and I found the world’s tiniest crèche in Auxerre. Each figure is a centimeter tall, and they all fit in a little silver shell. It sits on a piece of velvet draped over some boxes with a spotlight on it, and it’s labelled crèche minuscule. I think it makes a point about the way that censorship reduces creativity, although perhaps it’s too subtle. Anyway, when people come through town to see the crèches, they lift their children up to peek in the window, and the kids exclaim “Oh! c’est tout petit!” in delighted tones, so I guess it’s a success.

The birth of Christ, according to the Koran; I don’t have a photo of the crèche, because it was taken down.

This year’s award for most controversial crèche goes to one put up by a young man who lives across the street from the Church. His crèche depicted the Islamic tradition of the birth of Jesus: Mary, alone in the desert with her baby, like Hagar and Ishmael. No wise men, no shepherds. He was making a statement about interfaith peace and amity, but the person or persons unknown took offense at the crèche musulmane. What’s more, the POPU was canny enough not to protest on religious grounds, but instead protested because it was in the window of a building owned by the town, not a private dwelling, and thus violated France’s laws on secularism; indeed, it’s a rental property. So down it came, to the great chagrin of its creator, and plenty of other people.

It’s such a pity, because in the aftermath of the Paris attacks and the waves of Islamophobia that followed, it was a generous, openhearted idea. I’m certain Francis, who thought the Crusades were a dreadful idea, would have sided with the creator of the crèche, and not the person or persons unknown.

[Disclaimer: any readers who are philologists will find much of what follows obvious, so please feel free to skip it and just look at the pictures]

When Lucy graduated from high school, we went horseback riding in Wales. To celebrate her graduation from Dickinson (with more honours than you can shake a stick at) we decided to go riding in Iceland. Now, Welsh is famous for having the world’s longest word (Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch, actually a totally made up word to attract tourists–I wonder if it does?), I have never heard anyone say, in Wales or elsewhere, that you couldn’t learn Welsh if you tried; indeed, I stayed in a B and B run by an English woman who was very proud of the fact that her two young daughters had learned very good Welsh at school. Icelandic, on the other hand, has a reputation as a completely impossible language. I thought this was only among English speakers, and maybe especially among Americans, who are notoriously bad at learning languages. But to my surprise, the other members of our group (Norwegians, Germans, Dutch) as well as our Guides (Swedish and German) also believed in the impossibility of learning Icelandic. It wasn’t like anything else, they insisted. Too much grammar! Too many rules! And the endings changed depending on whether the noun was masculine or feminine! And the spelling had nothing to do with the pronounciation! Impossible!

Icelanders, I might add, encourage this view of their language; more on this later. But for the moment, let’s consider it a bit, starting with the name of the place where we went riding.

Eldhestar (and click here to check it out, it’s a fabulous place, and you can book your own riding tour). On the glamourous orange rain gear you wear to keep yourself from freezing to death while on a ride, Eldhestar is glossed as Volcano Horses, which isn’t quite right. Eld means fire and hestur is horse. Apparently, when the company was founded a quarter of a century ago, they called themselves eldfjall hestar. Since fjall means mountain, this would have meant fire mountain horses, or volcano horses.  But fjall (pronounced fyee-uh-tull, more or less) was too much for the tourists, so Eldhestar they became. Part of the problem here was simply pronunciation– remember when no non-Icelandic reporter on the planet could say Eyjafjallajökull?

If the relationship between spelling and pronunciation were the only problem, surely Welsh would still win– see above, one more time. But Anna, our Swedish guide who had been studying Icelandic for a couple of years, was far more concerned by the fact that words kept changing their shape… Aha! The big problem is that, unlike the other Germanic languages (including English), Icelandic retains a fully developed case system: like in Latin or Greek or Russian, or Anglo-Saxon, different endings indicate the function of the word in a sentence.

In other words, a horse, if it is the subject of the sentence, is hestur. If it is the object of the sentence, it is hesta. And if you are giving something to a horse, it is hesti. This only seems peculiar to us because we’ve dropped such endings from modern English (except for the possessive  ‘s). But we retain them in our pronouns. We use I for the subject, me for the object and indirect object, my for the possessive. Now just imagine that all nouns functioned the same way and you have an inflected language– like Icelandic, or Old English.

Best proof that Icelandic isn’t really all that weird: the indication on a map of Reykjavik that says

 þú ert her

Looks funky, doesn’t it? But the first letter is just a th sound, so squint a bit and you get… thou art here.

Not so different from English after all. We could all learn Icelandic if we tried, and we English speakers, well, we have an advantage (so do other germanic language speakers, but don’t tell them).

Given that the Icelandic government is worried that the language may fade away (there are only 325,000 Icelanders, and a handful of Icelandic speakers elsewhere) perhaps they should start insisting on its kinship to English, rather than on the language’s supreme difficulty? Or would that be uncool?

So there we were, crouching in the warm river, embracing the warm banks where hot water burst from the earth, our butts resting on sometimes surprisingly hot stones, and with freezing rain pelting our faces. I don’t think there are many places where you can ride for two hours up a mountain side in 40 degree weather (that’s +4 Celsius) and then have a warm outdoor bath. And then again, it’s probably not most people’s cup of tea anyway.

Did I mention that we ate our sandwiches in the river, at our guide Anna’s suggestion, in order to enjoy everything at once? Or kill two birds with one stone, or something like that?

The tricky part was getting out of the nice warm water in the freezing rain and then struggling into our clothes again. We had had the wit to cover them up with our rain jackets, but it’s hard to put on damp clothes over damp skin at the best of times, and harder when you’re freezing and slipping on the mud and there are people with cameras roaming around. Fortunately, there is also a lot of steam from the hot pools, so eventually we just decided modesty be damned, dropped our towels (into the mud), fought our way into our trousers (slightly muddy) and then our raingear (very muddy, because we had been using it to preserve the rest of our clothing from the … mud).

The good thing is that dressing is so energetic, you don’t have time to get cold again.

Then two more hours back down the mountain on death-defying tracks, and finally, back at the barn, cake and tea. And two beamish little boys, having just experienced their first riding lesson: “Do I have stuff on my butt? Because I was sitting on a saddle!” “I didn’t even fall off!!”

Well, we didn’t fall off either, although we had stuff all over the place.

If you participate in a CSA (short for Community Supported Agriculture, also known as a Farm Share) you are almost certainly eating more like your ancestors would have, because you are eating foods that grow locally, and that come to you only when they are in season. Only very recently have human beings been able to enjoy strawberries in December, or romaine lettuce in January, thanks to refrigeration that preserves food, the internal combustion engines that transport it and, in many cases, chemicals that produce an effect of ripeness that mimics what you get if you actually leave a fruit or vegetable in the garden long enough. In the United States, for instance, tomatoes are usually picked green and firm (firmness makes them easy to transport) and then exposed to a gas called ethylene, which makes them turn red. This is why your average supermarket tomato tastes nothing like a tomato you grow yourself, according to my friends who eat tomatoes.

Why don’t I eat tomatoes? Well, in this regard, I am truly a throwback to my medieval forebears: I suffer from an intolerance to tomatoes, one that was probably more common centuries ago. Tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, and indeed some early Europeans labelled them as poisonous (see, for instance, John Gerarde’s Herbal, published in London in 1597). They make me get dizzy and blotchy and have to lie down. A biologist friend once suggested to me that tomato intolerance among Europeans is like lactose intolerance among Asians: something that a few generations of exposure often eliminates– except, apparently, in throwbacks like me who lack the enzymes to digest tomatoes, unless they are cooked.

But this is a digression, because of course there are no tomatoes in my farmshare in January. Instead, I have lots of lovely root vegetables: potatoes, rutabaga, beets and Jerusalem artichokes. Beets and turnips (the rutabaga is really just a giant turnip) are authentic medieval vegetables; along with beans, they kept people alive through the long, Northern European winters. And by the way, if you haven’t already read it, here is a link to Umberto Eco’s marvellous “How the Bean Saved Civilization“. Like cabbage, another winter staple, turnip greens helped fight off scurvy, and you could also feed turnips (assuming you had any left over) to your livestock. When I was a child, in fact, living in Burgundy, my neighbours still fed turnips to their cows in winter. Sometimes, if I was very lucky, I was allowed to watch the turnips being put into a turnip mill and come out as a sort of pulp which was made into cow-cakes. The machine looked a lot like this one, only French, of course.

Your Jerusalem Artichoke, however, is an oddity. To begin with, it’s not an artichoke, but rather the tuber of a kind of sunflower. I’m not sure what kind of confusion produced that part of the name– do they taste like artichokes? I certainly don’t think so. Nor are they from Jerusalem; they are a new world vegetable that reached Europe in the 17th century. A semi-convincing explanation for the Jerusalem moniker is that the word is a corruption of the Italian girasole, or “turn to the sun”, sunflower. The impulse to connect the exotic and the wonderful with Jerusalem, though, that’s really quite Medieval, when you think about it.

There is nothing authentically Medieval about the recipe that follows, except the turnips and brussel sprouts (unlike the Jerusalem Artichoke, they really do come from Belgium, originally). Lamb in the wintertime? You’d be lucky to get a bit of aged mutton or some bacon, but it’s Australia day and my husband is Australian. It’s tasty, though. And if I make the stew I’m meditating for tomorrow, that will be more authentic. I promise.

Rack of Lamb Roasted with Winter Vegetables
There are no measurements, because really, you’re going to cook as much as you think whoever you’re cooking for will eat.

• Jerusalem artichokes, scrubbed and halved..
• Rutabaga, cubed.
• Garlic cloves in their skins.
• Rack of lamb (you want 2 chops per person, or maybe 3 if they’re small)
• Brussel sprouts, halved
• Rosemary, salt, pepper.
• Beer (just a splash or so, you get to drink the rest)

Preheat oven to 400F.
All the vegetables should be about the same sized. Toss with a bit of olive oil and spread in a pan in a single layer. Roast for about 20 minutes, or until they’re just starting to soften.
Meanwhile, let your lamb sit out and come to room temperature. Salt it– this helps it crisp up later.
When the vegetables are starting to soften, add the brussel sprouts (because you should never overcook these fellows) and lay the rack of lamb on top of the veggies and sprinkle with rosemary and a grind of pepper.
Roast until the lamb is done to your liking (about 20 minutes for rare). The lamb drippings drip down into the veggies… when the lamb is done, remove it and let it rest under a tinfoil tent for 5 minutes. Give the veggies a stir around and add a splash of dark beer to loosen up the dripping. Let that simmer a bit while the lamb rests.
Carve the lamb, serve with the veggies, drizzled with the sauce.

In addition to being the site of one of the most remarkable monasteries anywhere, the Skelligs are also a bird sanctuary. On Skellig Michael, thousands and thousands of puffins build their nests each summer. Puffins, it turns out, are long lived birds; they aren’t mature until the age of five, which is when their beaks take on the characteristic colours. They mate for life, but spend much of each year separated from their mates, charging around the seas solo. They reunite annually to nest and raise their young. They can sleep on the water. And when they fly, they look like they’re falling (falling with style, as Buzz Lightyear would have it).

Puffins

They are also ridiculously cute. They look a bit like small people dressed up in puffin suits.
Little Skellig is home to some 60,000 gannets, large gull-like birds with lemon-coloured heads. I don’t know much about their domestic arrangements, but here is a little video of where they live. Gannett

Whose insane idea was it anyway? Apparently, one morning around 750 AD an Irish monk, or perhaps hermit or anchorite, looked West across the sea from the rocky cliffs of Kerry and saw a pair of pyramidal rocks rising from the deep. Evidently the life he was living in some stone oratory or beehive hut was not sufficiently uncomfortable for him, so he went down to the beach, dragged a curragh (a canoe-like boat made of hide) into the surf and paddled out to the Skelligs, a trip that, powered only by human strength, would have taken some five or six hours, depending on how heavy the seas were that day. No trace of this visionary or madman is left to us, but the larger of the two islands, Skellig Michael, provided a precarious home to a community of perhaps a dozen monks for the next five centuries.

In the first Christian centuries, suffering for God took the form of martyrdom; devout Christians refused to sacrifice to the emperor and died (albeit not in numbers as great as once was claimed) in the Roman arenas, often in the wild beast shows. Once the Empire itself became Christian, other avenues to salvation had to be found. In the deserts of Egypt, holy men began living lives of extreme asceticism, dwelling in caves or huts far from other human beings, surviving on the bare minimum of food necessary to sustain life. These were the first hermits or anchorites; when some of them decided to live their lives of extraordinary privation in small communities, they became the first monks. The monks who removed themselves to the Skelligs were the spiritual descendants of those early desert fathers, albeit in a very different geographical context. In fact, they were more hermits than monks since they did not live according a particular Rule (like the Rule of St Benedict, which laid out the details of monastic life for its followers). They simply sought the most extreme environment imaginable in which to live and pray.

Today, getting from the mainland to the Skelligs is not terribly difficult. You go to the little town of Portmagee in the morning. Assuming that the weather is not impossible, someone will approach you on the dock, asking if you want passage out to the islands; this all happens in a typically Irish haphazard fashion: there are no tickets, you don’t have to book ahead, the boats leave sometime after 10, but that might be 10:30 or 11:15. The boat we took carried 10 passengers, and the trip took 45 minutes, during which everyone was thoroughly soaked by the salt spray that broke over the boat as it forged through a bit of chop to get out of the long harbour and onto the sea. No one was seasick. The fog was so thick that the islands were entirely invisible from the mainland; you wondered how it ever occurred to anyone to row out there in the first place. And then, after half an hour or so, there they were, looming out of the grey, looking for all the world like something from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The climb begins immediately, from the jetty. I can’t imagine how the first monks made it to the top, but their successors built a staircase, and it’s still in use, all 700 or so steps of it. You climb right up into the clouds, sometimes with a vertical drop down to the pounding waves right next to you. Any monk who fell, one imagines, went directly to heaven.
Finally, up on top of the rock, you come to the monastery, a cluster of beehive huts and stone crosses. There a guide awaits to explain the mysteries of the place to those who make it. There are those who don’t– some people give up after a hundred steps because their knees or hearts can’t take it, and we encountered one poor German fellow crawling back down from the first terrace, paralysed with fear. The monks, he tells us, spent their days in prayer and in finding ways to survive. They ate puffin meat and puffin eggs (for puffins, see my next post), and grew a few vegetables, cabbage and the like. There’s no scriptorium– not for these hard-core ascetics the aesthetic pleasure of illumination. The Vikings tried to raid the Skelligs a few times, but evidently gave up; there wasn’t much there, after all, and it must have been easy for the monks to drop rocks on their heads from above.
Century after century unrolled like this: prayer, fog, a diet of sea birds and air. And then, in the twelfth century, the Church intervened, calling the Skellig monks back to the mainland; evidently their radical spirituality, individualistic and essentially ungoverned, didn’t fit Rome’s program. The Skelligs were left to the birds, who are the only permanent inhabitants these days; even the guides and archaeologists are only temporary visitors. There are no modern buildings on the island except a disused lighthouse. There is no café, no gift shop, no toilets. It belongs to the sea.

So after a few hours we stagger back down the stair, legs shaking from the climb, pile back into our waiting boat, and return to the 21st century and a well deserved pint.

Last summer, Welsh cobs. Now Icelandic horses (don’t ever call them ponies, small though they may be!). Perhaps I should make it a life ambition to ride every surviving Medieval breed…
Icelandic horses came with the earliest settlers; although they are not large, the idea of loading one into a longboat is daunting. They must have chosen not only the sturdiest but also the calmest animals to make the crossing. For the past thousand years, the descendants of those brave, sea-faring horses have been bred for strength and good sense, but never size. Still, small though he may be, the Icelandic horse can carry a 200 lb, 6′ tall man (although his feet will all but drag on the ground). It looks absurd to Modern eyes, accustomed to tall thoroughbreds, but you get used to it. In Iceland, if you’re a horse, it’s good to have short sturdy legs, because the terrain varies from lava fields to rocky scree to ice sheets. And it’s good to be shaggy when the winter winds come down across the treeless heaths. It’s also very good to have a smooth and steady pace to eat up the miles, and they do: from birth, Icelandic horses walk, trot, canter and tölt. This last is smoother than either trot or canter. Some rare and particularly gifted Icelandic horses have a fifth gait, the “flying gait”, in which all four feet leave the ground at once.

Isabella at the tölt. Look at her little hooves go!

Our guide, Begga, who owns Islenski Hesturinn (The Icelandic Horse), told us the following story, about an exhibition of different breeds of horse in Germany. Big German horses doing elaborate dressage routines, elegant Arabs beautifully groomed with flowing manes, showing their speed. And then in come the Icelandic horses, short and shaggy, with their manes in their eyes or sticking straight up, their riders’ feet nearly brushing the ground. A ripple of laughter, politely suppressed, goes around the audience. What are these funny looking ponies going to do? The head of the Icelandic delegation pops a champagne cork, pours each of his companions a glass, and off they go at full speed tölt, three times around the ring, before stopping in front of the judges to drink a toast without having spilled a drop. The crowd goes wild.
Begga also has a theory about a link between Icelandic horses and the Icelandic language. She points out that Iceland has very difficult terrain and no dialects, just the same Icelandic everywhere, pretty much unchanged from Old Norse, while Denmark, with less difficult terrain, has several different dialects. She thinks Icelandic horses kept the language moving freely around the island, so that no little pockets of people developed their own way of saying things. It’s a lovely notion, though I suspect that Danish dialectical variants are probably influenced more by linguistic contacts Iceland simply didn’t have, with the other Scandinavian languages, with Dutch, with German.

I rode Isabella. I don’t normally much care for mares, but she was brilliant (although I needed to keep her at the back because she kicks). She loved to run, picking up the tölt easily from a fast walk. No need to trot if you can do this! I’m a convert. I entirely understand why those great tall Norsemen loved their little shaggy horses and still do. I’m already planning a return to Iceland, with a longer ride, maybe several days.

When Ingólfur Arnarson first approached the coast of Iceland in 874, he threw two carved pieces of wood overboard and followed them to their landing place southwest of the place he named Reykjavik, the Cove of Smoke, because of the steam rising from the hot springs all around. This is the beginning of Icelandic history because before Ingólfur’s arrival the island had been uninhabited except for the visits of Irish monks considered by some to be hypothetical, escaping from the world. Before the arrival of humankind, the only land mammal living on Iceland was the Arctic fox who probably arrived during the Ice Age. And please don’t ask me what he ate, since apparently even mice were introduced at a later period.

I arrived in Iceland by air and not by sea, at Keflavik which is somewhat south of Ingólfur’s landing site. Landing at Keflavik is a bit like landing on the moon. You come in over dark and brooding waves which merge almost imperceptibly with dark and brooding lava flow on which almost nothing seems to grow. It looks, in fact, as though it had been frozen in the moment of boiling, rocks belched up like great bubbles on the land.

Since the  collapse of its banking industry–a collapse so traumatic that Iceland is considering adopting the Canadian dollar as its national currency, although that’s a tale for another day–Iceland is doing everything it can to attract tourists. My Boston-Keflavik-Amsterdam flight was several hundred dollars less expensive than anything I could find this summer, and allowed me to break my journey for as many days as I liked between legs, so I decided to spend two days in Reykjavik. I’ve wanted to visit Iceland ever since reading Njal’s Saga, and I found a ridiculously inexpensive room, and besides I wanted to visit the Blue Lagoon and go horseback riding. There were no academic pretenses or excuses to my initial plan; I just felt I’d earned it (an academic excuse evolved later, but that’s for another post).

So at ten o’clock this morning I stepped out of a warm spa building into bracing 40F weather, wearing only a bathing suit. I only had to suffer the chilly wind for the ten steps it took me to lower myself into the weird robin’s egg blue waters of the lagoon, waters that seem even bluer because of the harsh black basalt that surrounds them. I’m not going to go into detail about the chemical composition of that water, or how it’s related to the lava beds below or the near by geothermal plant, because frankly I don’t really understand any of that, but I will say that early in the morning, with only a handful of other people in the water paddling silently about, it was a remarkable experience, eerie and yet strangely meditative. The steam above the water was so heavy, because of the difference between water and air temperature, that all you had to do was move about 20 feet away from another person and you were screened away by the mist, in your own private universe. Sometimes, to make things even stranger, a human figure would surge out of the swirling fog face entirely painted white with silica from the bottom of the pool. It’s supposed to do miracles for your skin (though it wreaks havoc on your hair!).

Ok, it’s not ancient. Maybe it’s not even “real”, whatever that means, since the pool was created as a by-product of the abovementioned geothermal plant. And it’s too expensive, and they pressure you pretty hard to buy Blue Lagoon skin care.  But after 4 hours of unsleep on the plane, and for that first half hour in particular, when I sat in the hot water at the edge of the pool and looked out over the black lava fields towards the snowcapped fells, feeling that no one in the world existed but me, it was entirely worth it.

St Patrick’s Day is not normally a holiday I celebrate, in spite of my name. Oh, maybe I’ll make a loaf of soda bread, but I refuse to wear Kelly green, which I think is just an awful colour and I am deeply horrified by the sight of drunken young men in leprechaun hats and by all the blatherskite associated with the worst North American celebrations of the day. In Philadelphia the drunken pub crawls around the University of Pennsylvania actually start the weekend before St Patrick’s Day, in Chicago they dye the river green. And this nonsense has actually now migrated back across the Atlantic to Ireland itself, where I understand that towns compete to see who can get more people to dress up like leprechauns (I’m not fond of leprechauns, as you may have guessed by now!). My inclination is to skip all of this tasteless absurdity and stay home with a pint of Guiness and perhaps watch Michael Collins again because, really, isn’t it always a good thing to spend an evening with Liam Neeson?

So when James pointed out that I’d be in Halifax over St Patrick’s day and suggested that we do something to celebrate, I was initially dubious, until I realized that my son has, at least in this respect, inherited my own good sense and was determined to avoid the pubs. We decided instead to cook a large meal for the band of his friends who congregate at his house on weekends. The menu would consist of a vat of Irish stew, a mountain of colcannon (potatoes mashed with leeks) and a Guiness cake (I used Nigella Lawson’s recipe— the picture is of her cake, not mine, but mine looked just as nice). Tanya, who writes her own blog, wanted to know about St Patrick’s Day and food traditions, and this got me thinking a bit.

St Patrick himself is not especially associated with food, as far as I know. He was Welsh, actually, and was kidnapped by Irish raiders when he was a boy and taken to Ireland as a slave. Eventually escaping, he returned to Wales and was ordained as a priest and eventually a bishop, and finally went back to Ireland to evangelize the island. None of the miracles I know of concerning him (banishing all snakes from Ireland, speaking with Oisin the son of Fionn MacCumhall who had returned to Ireland after 300 years in Tír na nÓg) have anything to do with food. Still, hospitality, and especially the sharing of food and drink, is an integral part both of ancient Irish culture and of Irish culture today.
More important than food or drink, however, is craic, which means something like companionship or fun, but of a sort involving the telling of tales and the singing of songs rather more than running around hitting a ball with a stick or anything of that sort. And my Saint Patrick’s Day was full of good craic, beginning with my conversation with my landlady Joan, of the Marigold B and B. Joan has lived in the same house all her life, and it belonged to her parents and grandparents before her; she is a veritable compendium of all things Haligonian. At breakfast that morning, she was telling me, I can’t quite remember why, about her grandfather who was a stone-carver and whose workshop, in fact, carved the headstones for the 150 unclaimed victims of the Titanic who were buried in Halifax. This is craic not because it’s fun in any kind of obvious way, but because it’s deeply fascinating. Then at James’ house, after dinner and quite a lot of beer, there was another kind of craic, which began with listening to the Dropkick Murphys, but quickly evolved into singing along enthusiastically (James and his friend Mike’s rendition of the duet in “The Dirty Glass” will live long in my memory, and on Facebook). We sang “Follow me up to Carlow“, which memorializes the massacre of an English army at Glenmalure; it has wonderful bloody lyrics (“From Tassagart to Clonmore/There flows a stream of Saxon gore”) and encourages footstomping. We also roared out “Come out ye Black and Tans“:

Come out ye Black and Tans
Come out and fight me like a man
Show your wives how you won medals down in Flanders
And how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra.

Sounds a bit Fenian, I know, but the best songs are the fighting songs. We finished the evening with “The Last of Barrett’s Privateers“, singing the line about Barrett being “smashed like a bowl of eggs” with particular gusto.

No parades. No green beer. No goddamn leprechauns. Good food, good drink, good craic, good friends. Possibly the best Saint Patrick’s Day ever.

The Travelling Medievalist will post again from Iceland…

It turned out that I wasn’t quite capable of six full days on horseback; surprisingly, it wasn’t the gimpy knee that betrayed me, but an ankle, which I managed to sprain on day four during a series of canters along a woodland trail. I was riding a rather slower horse than Hank, an elder statesman by the name of Morgan, and we got along just fine. But somehow, in the last of these long woodland breakaways, I got my right foot too far forward in the stirrup and something went pop. I took the next day off, but when we set out to ride on our final day, I knew after the second trot that I wasn’t going to be able to keep it up all day, never mind the 400mg of ibuprofen I’d already taken just in case. So I turned back, with tears in my eyes, 20 minutes into the ride and returned to the barn on my own (causing a bit of consternation in those who saw me walk up the lane, as they assumed that I’d been thrown.

Once I recovered from my disappointment in missing the trek to the mountain top, I actually had a lovely day, walking up to see the foals, one of them only a day old, with little Ruby, the daughter of our guide. And I’m sure the rest could go faster without me to hold them back. So it’s off to the International Arthurian Congress with my pride more or less intact (I still didn’t fall off!) and a swollen purple ankle.