Nordic Medieval Era Festivals 1100 CE

Swedish Rok Runestone: Left Side View With Ogham Markings

Photo from Wikimedia Commons at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:R%C3%B6kstenen08.JPG

Swedish Rok Runestone: Left Side View With Celtic Ogham Markings Lists the Pagan Nature Festivals (1100 CE)

(December 13, 2024, updated April 12, 2025) The top part of the Celtic Ogham on the side of this Swedish runestone lists the Nordic festivals. The bottom part is also in ogham but it just repeats the words "anointed" 19 times. "Anointed" is a reference to emotion/motion magic rituals in which scented oils are used. This is in contrast to life power rituals which use waters for cleansing and purification.

List of Viking Festivals.

The top part is a listing of the nature quarter festivals in Druid Akkadian (read from top to bottom). The first half of the year is a time of settling accounts while the second half is a time of feasting.

ᚃ ᚇ = ṢaDu = Feastings:
ᚄ ᚈ = ŠeTu = Networking (Trading)
ᚁ ᚈ = ReTu = Settlements. (Spring Equinox, Celtic Ostara, Easter)
ᚃ ᚆ = ṢaḪu = Rendering (Produce)
ᚁ ᚈ = ReTu = Settlements. (Summer Solstice, Mid-Summer, Celtic Litha)
ᚅ ᚈ = NaTu = Nature's
ᚃ ᚆ = ṢaḪu = Rendering
ᚃ ᚇ = ṢaDu = Feast. (Fall Equinox, Thanksgiving, Celtic Mabon,)
ᚂ ᚇ = PaDu = Breeding
ᚃ ᚇ = ṢaDu = Feast. (Winter Solstice, Celtic Yule, Christmas)

This means the 4 nature festivals of the earlier Druid culture based upon its Celtic and Nordic derivatives can be summarized as:

Human Activity Settlements - Ostara (After Yule): March 21, Spring Equinox
Agricultural Settlements - Mid-Summer (Litha): June 22, Summer Solstice
Plant Production Thanksgiving - Thanksgiving (Before Yule): September 21, Autumn Equinox
Animal Production Thanksgiving - Yule, December 22, Winter Solstice

This is a reminder that food and shelter is a result of both human industry and nature's bounty.

These are the Pagan revival names given to the nature festivals. Pagan nature based festivals honor the Divine through nature's annual cycle which modern Pagans call the "Wheel of the Year." The main historical sources used to develop these festivals during the modern Pagan revival were an improperly translated 750 BCE poem in a medieval Irish commentary on the Psalter (Psalms) called Hibernica Minora and inferences made by Aiden Kelly based on old Pagan source material in 1974.

For Comparison: Kelly Aiden Finalizes the Names For the Pagan Revival Festivals in 1974

(November 8, 2024) The rest of the nature festivals need to be inferred with some historical detective work. Subsequent investigations confirms these Pagan festivals were widely observed although called by different names. This was done by Aidan Kelly in 1974. He recalls his thought process in these blog entries:

Back in 1974, I was putting together a “Pagan-Craft” calendar—the first of its kind, as far as I know—listing the holidays, astrological aspects, and other stuff of interest to Pagans. We have Gaelic names for the four Celtic holidays. It offended my aesthetic sensibilities that there seemed to be no Pagan names for the summer solstice or the fall equinox equivalent to Yule or Beltane—so I decided to supply them.
The spring equinox was almost a nonissue. The Venerable Bede says that it was sacred to a Saxon Goddess, Ostara or Eostre, from whom we get the name “Easter,” which, almost everywhere else, is called something like “Pasch,” derived, of course, from Pesach.
Summer was also rather easy. The Saxon calendar described by Bede was lunisolar. It usually had 12 months, but in the third, fifth, and last month of an 8-year cycle, a 13th month was added to keep it (more or less) in sync with the solar years. The last and first months in the calendar were named Foreyule and Afteryule, respectively, and obviously framed the holiday of Yule. The sixth and seventh months were named Forelitha and Afterlitha; furthermore, when the thirteenth month was added, it went in between them, and the year was then called a Threelitha. Obviously, by analogy with Yule, the summer solstice must have been called Litha. (I later discovered that Tolkien had figured this out also.)

The Fall equinox Mabon name comes from the Welsh Mabinogion version of the common Pagan myth in which the underworld god causes life on earth to sleep until his love is returned. In most Pagan myths his love is kidnapped (or rescued) in the fall.

In the Mabinogion collection, the story of Mabon ap Modron (which translates as “Son of the Mother,” just as Kore simply meant “girl”), whom Gwydion rescues from the underworld, much as Theseus rescued Helen. It would have been aesthetically better to have found a Saxon name, but . . . so I picked “Mabon” as the name for the holiday in my calendar. It was not an arbitrary choice. I sent a copy of the calendar to Oberon (then still Tim), who liked these new names and began using them in Green Egg, whence they passed into the national Pagan vocabulary.

The phrase "Mabon ap Modron" used above is actually the Akkadian phrase "Mu-A-Ba'u-Nu APu Ma'u-Du-Re'u-Mu." Mabon means: "The fertility-fluids resulting from the nest's revelations" in which "fertility-fluids" are the life powers which flow through the lift network to trigger life on earth. Thus this festival is celebrating the favorable divine attention to life on earth, on other words, Thanksgiving.

References

Kelly, Aiden (September 21, 2017) About Naming Ostara, Litha, and Mabon (Personal recollection of his naming of the Pagan celestial festivals). Online at: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/aidankelly/2017/05/naming-ostara-litha-mabon/

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