This week’s entry: Mari Lwyd
What it’s about: The incredibly festive combination of two very terrifying things: a horse skull and sing-alongs. Yes, it’s all part of a completely normal Welsh Christmas, as wassailing with a horse skull on a pole has been a holiday tradition for at least 200 years in the land of song. A Mari Lwyd party generally includes four to seven people, one of whom holds a skeletal horse’s head on a pole (the Mari Lwyd in question), while wrapped in a sheet that covers both pole and bearer and serves as the body of the horse. They’re usually accompanied by a Leader, a musician (called the Merryman), and a few other people dressed in character, often that of Punch and Judy, the central characters in the traditional British puppet show that bears their name.
Biggest controversy: No one’s exactly sure how this horse-head-on-a-stick thing began. For starters, folklorists disagree over the name, which doesn’t have a literal translation in modern Welsh. Some think it translates to “Holy Mary”; others think it means “Grey Mare.” Along similar lines, there’s debate as to whether the tradition has pre-Christian religious origins (although the first published account of Mari Lwyd dates to 1800) and either was or wasn’t Christianized later, or grew out of the medieval Christian Feast of the Ass. (No, that’s not about what you might think; the Feast of the Ass celebrated the donkey that carried Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus into Egypt.)
Strangest fact: Traditionally, one is supposed to not be a gracious host when a skeletal horse head appears through your peephole. Mari Lwyd tradition holds that before the party of wassailers enters a house, they sing a song requesting admittance. Their neighbors have to come up with an excuse why the party can’t or shouldn’t enter. They sing another verse, the neighbors come up with another excuse, and this continues until the excuse-makers run out of ideas. (Some Welsh communities skip this back-and-forth and simply let the wassailers in after the first verse.) Once inside, the Merryman entertains the household with songs, while Mari Lwyd neighs and snaps its jaws, attempting to frighten children and adults alike, while the group’s Leader pretends to restrain it. Then onto the next house for more mayhem.
Thing we were happiest to learn: After a 19th-century decline, Mari Lwyd has made a comeback. During the Welsh Methodist revival of the late 1700s, Mari Lwyd and other folk traditions were attacked for being sinful. In fact, nearly as soon as Mari Lwyd was first mentioned in print, some writers were lamenting the effect Christian scolds were having on it and other folk traditions, with the harpist Edward Jones writing that Wales, “formerly one of the merriest and happiest countries in the World, is now becoming one of the dullest.”
However, while Mari Lwyd largely died out in the early 20th century, a few tradition-minded Welsh kept the tradition alive, until it began to make a comeback in the 1960s. By 1980, there was such a resurgence in Mari Lwyd sightings that “there [were] complaints if she [missed] any of her regular calls.” In recent decades, it’s become a point of Welsh pride to keep the tradition alive.
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Surprisingly, not all horse-skull-related traditions are as wholesome as Mari Lwyd. In the late 1800s, North Wales practiced “giving a skull,” in which a horse or donkey skull was placed over a woman’s front door on May Day “as a sign of contempt.” Along similar lines, charivari was a folk tradition in which a community would stage a parade with discordant music, designed to publicly shame people for transgressions including adultery, domestic abuse, giving birth to a child while out of wedlock, and even May-December romances. In these parades, people would sometimes burn someone in effigy, sometimes use a mocking impersonator, and sometimes even drag the wrongdoers out of their homes to be paraded through town against their will. Charivaris were held across Europe; the Welsh variation included a horse skull, sometimes with horns attached, as part of the procession.
Also noteworthy: Mari Lwyd has broken through to popular culture a few times. Vernon Watkins’ 1941 poem “Ballad Of The Mari Lwyd” was called “one of the outstanding poems of the century” by former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. In Silver On The Tree, the final book in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, Mari Lwyd makes an appearance during the book’s final confrontation between good and evil (Wikipedia does not reveal on which side).
Further down the Wormhole: Mari Lwyd celebrations don’t have a fixed date, but are usually held in the vicinity of Christmas and New Year’s. (Side note: Wikipedia’s New Year’s page has a GIF of fireworks as its topmost image, the first use of GIFs we’ve seen on the site.) We’re taking next week off for the holidays, so Wiki Wormhole will return in 2020, and while the year will no doubt be dominated by an extremely tedious debate over whether The Rise Of Skywalker was the best or worst movie ever made, and of course by America’s 59th and final presidential election, we choose to start the year with something uplifting, literally and figuratively. We’ll start getting psyched up for Mars 2020, a mission scheduled for July that will put another rover on the red planet, this one looking for past life on Mars, and one that takes another crucial step toward humans visiting another planet. Until then, have a Happy New Year!
38 Comments
“Feast of the ass,” you say…
I read a Cosmo article that said Millennials are really into it. I don’t know much about it but I know that Christmas and my Birthday are the two times a year my wife participates in the “Feast of the Cock” if I’m lucky and also not a total asshole over the holidays
Interesting. I’m guessing “Feast of the Cock” refers to Mark 14:72: “Immediately a rooster crowed a second time, and Peter remembered when Jesus had spoken the word to him, ‘Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times.’ When he thought about it, he began to weep.”That must be very solemn observance. What denomination does your wife belong to?
It should really be called “Feast on the ass”.
This must have inspired Terry Gilliam for Time Bandits.
good memory, bra!
America needs a Christmas monster to frighten the children. So many European cultures have rich traditions with Christmas monsters, and all America has is the fear of uncomfortable political discussions around the Yule meal. It’s time for a Christmas ogress!
It’s not Elf On The Shelf?
https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/c_crop,d_placeholder_euli9k,h_1440,w_2559,x_0,y_0/dpr_1.5/c_limit,w_1044/fl_lossy,q_auto/v1513981807/171222-swin-trump-tease_vkenmh
It has a butt where its mouth should be!
It also has a toilet where his brain should be.And this toilet ain’t being flushed 10 or 15 times either.
I take wassailing to basically mean Christmas drinking? I am in favor of wassailing. The singing skeleton horse is fine too I guess
One very old practice was to get into a group, go to an orchard and sing to the trees. I’m sure there was plenty of grog (possibly shrooms?).
Yeah, the cidery I went to had a wassail for the apple trees, which includes threatening the trees in song if they don’t produce good apples.
“Threatening.” Hahaha haaaa!And why not? “Pomona (goddess of trees) made you, but we have axes!!
There’s two kinds. This frightening horse is the other kind of wassailing. Where groups of people go from house to house drinking and singing. At the earliest wassailing was a sort of social worker inversion. In the fudal period your peasants/serfs would wassail their way to the manor house where they’d be let in an basically have the run of the place. The lords would set a feast and provide drink, and the traditions were built around a sort of game where the nobles would act as servants and the servants and peasants would play act the nobles. It apparently had a tendency to devolve into rioting. Later it was basically drunk Christmas caroling meets trick or treating. Basically a door to door parade handing out booze with sometimes threatening call and response songs. With people joining up or handing out food and treats. And then the Victorians bowdlerized it as carolling. It was very similar to other European folk traditions like the Krampus runs in Alpine countries.
Their neighbors have to come up with an excuse why the party can’t or
shouldn’t enter.
You are waving around a horses skull on a stick.They sing another verse, the neighbors come up with
another excuseDo you still have that skull?
I don’t want that horse skull in my house. I have plenty.
“wait a minute.” (Goes to make sure the horse is ok.)
you aced it!
Yeah, that excuse would fall apart as soon as they see the miniature cow replica over my living room door… 🙂
It used to be a real literary feat: you had to respond in Welsh, in rhyme. I knew someone whose grandfather was quite good at it.
If you don’t respond, you open yourself to a party of drunken carolers clacking a horse skull on a hinge outside your window until 2 in the morning.
isn’t there something like this in the parade at the end of “wicker man” or am i misremembering?
Yeah, one of the main celebrants in that batshit procession is dressed as a hobby horse, but it’s a full body costume, not just the skull. And most of the villagers have on animal masks.
that’s it. might be related, though.
I think you might be thinking about the beesNOT THE BEES!!!
NOT THE BEES!!!!
Oh sure, the Welsh puppet a corpse around on Christmas and it’s all traditional good fun. I do it and get arrested.
Thr nightmare would truly be complete if it was me doing the singing.
We have one of these in Bridgend, South Wales. It is a sight to behold.
Apparently that’s more a Hwntw thing than a Gog thing.#things I learned form a Welshman this weekhttps://observationdeck.kinja.com/1840577036
“In Silver On The Tree, the final book in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, Mari Lwyd makes an appearance during the book’s final confrontation between good and evil”Hey nice, I was going to bring this up if you didn’t!
I thought this sounded vaguely familiar. Unfortunately, that book is pretty bad, in stark contrast to the four prior ones which are all good to very good.
I remember reading that series in my youth (seventh son of a seventh son, I think) but don’t recall that book. I feel like Grey Wolf was the last one I read. Maybe my library never got that one.
I’s rather have one of those chikdren’s skulls wearing a cap made from another child’s skull. Hell it doesn’t even have to be old. It can be new. In fact, we could make this a new Christmas craft tradition.
while the year will no doubt be dominated by an extremely tedious debate over whether The Rise Of Skywalker was the best or worst movie ever madeIt’s neither, really, by very wide margins on either side.