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Chapter 5. The Underworld 123
to their Midgard homes, or if they did, their sanity would not come with them.
Winternights later became Halloween or “Hallowed Evening,” now, long associated
with the grave, and Júl became Christmas. Although modern culture does not
normally link the latter with a Feast for the Dead, modern Saamí as well as many
Scandinavians continue the older belief that it is the night when “the Dead walk” and
still consider Christmas Eve to be ”the most dangerous evening” of the year. 17 For
those living on Middle-earth, winter was the time of rest and travel was kept to an
extreme minimum out of necessity due to severe weather conditions and the hazards
of travel by either foot or horseback, but for the teeming dead it was “summer,” when
activity level was at its peak, the time of travel.
The period between mid-October and mid-January was important to the Germanic
peoples for a variety of reasons. In the rural community, it was the time when
the final harvests were put into storage, when animals were butchered and the meat
was prepared and hung. Life and activity within the home increased; weaving new
cloth and the mending of winter clothes were common daily activities along with
making ready for the upcoming festive holidays.
For these people, the winter festivals were the high points of the year.
“They met to renew their contract with the supernatural world, and to
ensure luck for the coming season, and this was something for the whole
community to share in not just selected guests.” 18
Luck and prosperity were brought forth from the Underworld through proper observance
of ritual during the winter months so they could be enjoyed throughout the
summer, only to have a part of the harvest returned back to the Land of the Dead at
the turning of the year at Winternights to start the cycle anew. Reciprocity, a cycle
of give-and-take, for the ancients was the concept of the Underworld feeding into
Middle-earth, and Middle-earth then feeding back into the Underworld in a never
ending circle of events periodically marked by holidays.
Holidays were the temporal markers of the cycle of the ancient year, but it was
necessary for these events to be combined with physical-spatial markers as well. The
local graveyard was a family’s link to the Underworld. For luck, ancestors were kept
placated through sacrifice on certain holidays particularly during the winter months
when the spirits of the dead were most active, and these sacrifices were placed within
both temporal and physical frameworks. Often these annual celebrations, or at least
part of them, were carried out near or in cemeteries, burial mounds, etc. There are
many folktales which tell of aspiring poets or musicians who go to the graves of
“past-masters” on these nights when the temporal-spatial doorways stood ajar, and
17 Holmberg, Finno-Ugric Mythology, p. 66.
18 Ellis-Davidson, Myth and Symbol in Pagan Europe, 1988, p. 40.