The Victorian fascination with death is well-documented. From funeral customs to mourning rituals, people of the late nineteenth century influenced and built upon many of the trappings of death we take for granted in western culture. But Christmas cards depicting death? That would appear to be uniquely Victorian, and — so it would seem — a strange mix of beliefs both pagan and Christian.

Artist J.C. Horsley, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole — the man who, in 1843, set up the “Public Records Office” (what we would know as a Post Office) and wondered how to attract ordinary people to his “Penny Post” — is credited with creating the first modern, mass-produced Christmas card. At its center, a family toasts the holiday. Flanking them are scenes of charity among the poor. It’s a heart-warming scene and one we would expect of the season.

Yet the darker side of Victorian culture — which inherited hundreds of years of Celtic and Christian folklore and tradition — is also readily apparent in many cards from the period.

Much has been written about such cards. Google “odd Victorian Christmas Cards” and not only will you ideally find this article, but many over the years devoted to the topic. Some will even contain the cards noted here. But few will provide you with what I believe are the reasons behind such bizarre cards. Or at least two in particular.

Dead birds can be found on more than one Victorian Christmas card, and most bear sentiments like “A Loving Christmas Greeting.” The meaning behind this grotesque imagery? Probably has its origins in Celtic traditions associated with December 26 — the day after Christmas — also known as St. Stephen’s Day.

In Ireland, this feast day for the first century martyr is called Lá Fhéile Stiofáin or Lá an Dreoilín, which translates as the Day of the Wren or Wren’s Day.  Up until about a century ago when the practice started to wane, groups of small boys would hunt for a wren, then chase the bird until they either caught it or it died from exhaustion. The dead bird was then tied to ta pole or holly bush.

Some scholars have posited a theory that this hunt for the wren finds its origins in anti-pagan customs. As discussed in Birds in Legend, Fable and Folklore, men and boys on the hunt for the wren on the Isle of Man in and around the 10th century shouted “draoi-en” — which translates as “Druid Bird.” Druids were believed to have used wrens in acts of divination. It is likely that hunting the wren was a Christian rejection of heathen practice attributed to Druids. Though not practiced like it was a century ago, Wren’s Day with its wrenboys and mummers is still practiced in some areas of the British Isles.

Thus a dead wren on a Christmas card might seem a perfectly normal image to some Victorians whose Celtic roots would signal to them that this anti-pagan symbol was an appropriate way to celebrate Christ’s birth.

Few could argue the same, however, for a card depicting a murderous frog who, upon stabbing his companion, steals away with a sack marked “2000.” Unless, of course, we are instead meant to think of Christ’s death, and not his birth. Or more precisely, Christ’s death and resurrection as a promise of salvation made possible by his birth.

Anthropomorphic frogs on Victorian cards of all kinds are many. For Christmas, there are frogs playing instruments; frogs skating across ice; even frogs carrying umbrellas.

Anthropomorphized animals having fun at Christmas is nothing new — not for a modern audience nor for the Victorians for whom frogs, dogs, cats, horses and chickens were all fair game (or foul as the case may be).

Still, the frog holds a unique place among animals in western culture. For centuries, Europeans regarded the frog as a harbinger of death or doom — some would say because of the poison carried by some species, and others due to the belief that witches often took frogs or toads as familiars. They were associated with heretics and sinners in the Middle Ages by such notable figures as Dante and Martin Luther. Yet frogs were also seen as Christ symbols.

Scholar Simona Cohen in Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art explains that Pliny the Elder in his Natural History believed frogs died in winter and were born again in the spring. She goes on to explain how emblem books of the Renaissance included images of frogs as symbolic of Christ’s resurrection. Other forms of western art also embraced the idea of the frog’s transformation from a tadpole as a sort of death and rebirth.

If anthropomorphized frogs can be both saints and sinners, then is it too far a stretch that they could be stand-ins for Christ and his betrayer? Could we be seeing a Judas-frog carrying away coin after literally back-stabbing the Jesus-frog? Is the distinctive cross shape of the dagger significant? How about the number 2,000 on the sack being carried away?

That number may be a key. While some time can be spent trying to figure out if 30 pieces of silver in any way amount to the equivalent of 2,000 drachmas or denarii or shekels (they don’t, by the way), it is not beyond reason that the illustrator of the card may have been aware of the Talmud — where the days of the Messiah were to be 2,000 years (in a 6,000 year cycle of mankind).

The message to the Victorian audience may have been more clear. Its true symbolism may be lost to time.

If, however, this anthropomorphic morality play is indeed related to Christ, then a reminder of the resurrection would not be too far afield of the message of Christmas. Christ is born. He will die. He will rise again. The frog that murdered him will surely hang. And don’t forget that the wren the druids once held in high esteem will be hunted down in the name of God and St. Stephen.

Amen.

 

 

 

No one really knows where the word autumn comes from. Some say it can be traced to the ancient Etruscan root “autu” — meaning the passing of the year or the drying season — but there aren’t many ancient Etruscans around to confirm that.

Chaucer may have been the first (Middle) English author to use “autumn.” In his translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (c. 1380), the Latin “autumnus” morphs into Old-French “autumpne” in a line about Boreas, the Greek God of the North Wind. Boreas is said to be blowing out leaves that Zephyrus (the West Wind) had blown in during the Spring.

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A few years later (c. 1400), John Trevisa, a Cornish writer, in his translation of Bartholomew de Grenville (there will be a quiz) uses autumnus as an equivalent to “harvest.” The word “harvest” (from Old Norse “haust”) had been used for centuries to refer to that time of year after summer and before winter when, well, as the term would suggest, the crops got harvested.

“Harvest” would seem to be the oldest reference to the season. Translations of the Bible from as early as 382 A.D. (St. Jerome’s work that led to the Latin Vulgate) use the word “messueritis” (reap) which comes from “messis” (harvest). But somewhere along the way between the fourth century and the fourteenth, someone took a really old Italian / Etruscan word (from before the time of Christ) and merged its meaning with a relatively old Italian / Roman term. Then Chaucer came along and officially used the word that would only really be legitimized in the late sixteenth century.

The common man, however, seems to have liked the more simple, straight-forward terms for the season:  FALL. Indeed, the use of fall to denote the season after summer appears to have been more widely in use during the Middle Ages. It comes from the Old English fiæll or Old Norse feallan — both meaning literally to fall.

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“Fall of the leaf” —popular through to the mid-sixteenth century —was the English phrase that got shortened to “fall” and served as a complement to its opposite “spring.” Makes sense. Right? Sense enough to one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Sir Walter Raleigh, who referred to the season as such in his Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd (1596). Though, to be fair, it looks like Raleigh just needed the rhyme:

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

As for Shakespeare, writing at about the same time, it looks like he preferred “autumn.”

According to at least one online concordance of Shakespeare, the Bard used the word “autumn” a total of 7 times in 9 speeches in 8 works. It is in Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595) when Titania, queen of the fairies, refers to the cycle of the year as “The spring, the summer, the childing autumn [and] angry winter.” Then, in 1609, Shakespeare goes on to use the word in Sonnets 97 and 104 (as well as imagery of the season in Sonnet 73). It could even be argued that the latter is the first unequivocal association of autumn with darkness, old age, twilight, death and dying.

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold. 
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

“Autumn” would go on to become a useful metaphor for many poets.  John Donne has an Elegy that’s entitled “Autumnall.”  Among Americans of the same period, Puritan Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) wrote a poem simply entitled “Autumn.”

But its among the British that autumn really takes hold — in or around the middle of the eighteenth century. Scottish author James Thomson would publish a cycle of seasonal poems — including Autumn in 1730 — that were so influential that Johnson’s dictionary (1755) almost exclusively refers to the season as such (citing Thomson). Later, into the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Romantics William Blake and John Keats would get in on the odes-to-autumn-action. As for Emily Bronte, she can’t seem to make up her mind to commit to one or the other.  But who can blame her? By the middle of nineteenth century, the use of one term over the other got downright confusing.

Some would say the dividing line is definitely one of geography — with the British preferring autumn while Americans use fall. Indeed, lexicographer John Pickering, writing in his  A Vocabulary, or Collection of Words Which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States of America (1816) noted that “A friend has pointed out to me the following remark on this word [autumn]: ‘In North America the season in which this [the fall of the leaf] takes place, derives its name from that circumstance, and instead of autumn is universally called the fall.'”

A matter of circumstance? More a matter of taste. English is funny that way.  Certainly into the twentieth century, American poets seem to have settled on using “fall.”  In works like Robert Frost’s October, Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour, and Richard Wilbur’s The Beautiful Changes, fall comes into is literary own.

Poetry is just one barometer we have for determining which name was more popular in any given century. There are almanacs, letters and the aforementioned dictionary. What’s in a name? Certainly, fall and autumn each carry similar connotations. One is not necessarily better than another.

At the end of the day, one season can certainly have two names. I for one propose we call winter “hoar”; spring “the greening”; and summer “mosquito-time.”