The Holy Days of Harvest

Centuries of agrarian experience by European peasants and yeoman farmers led to adroit adaptations to the typically harsh conditions of life on the land. They learned to survive during the long continental winters through hard work and carefully arranged field operations suited to local conditions. Changes in the winds, soil textures and available moisture, and myriad other aspects of nature informed their management decisions throughout the year. The earth’s fertility meant life, perpetuation of family, and community wellbeing. The center of existence came to be the village church where people gathered weekly in the presence of an altar representing the axis mundi of heaven, earth, and the underworld. Here priests and pastors mediated a secure grace-filled dimension from past to future with hallowed reference to good soil and sowers, gleaners and reapers, and “fields white for harvest.”

Archibald Hartruck, A Harvest Festival in the Cotswolds
Boxwell Church on a manor formerly owned by Sir Walter Raleigh
The Sphere (London, September 21, 1901)

Medieval literature is rich with subjects of agricultural association derived from biblical texts, early church documentary accounts, and regional folklore. St. John the Baptist has been venerated at various times of the year as Herald of the Harvest, and since the Middle Ages on Midsummer Day—June 24, in part because of the metaphorical significance of his prophetic call for repentance before the baptism of Jesus: “His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). The holy days of the medieval harvest season reaffirmed the cycle of the Jewish agrarian calendar although these commemorations typically took place three to four months later with the cooler climates and later harvests of northern Europe.

The patron saint of harvesters and peasants, St. Isidore the Farmer (c. 1070-1130), was curiously honored less because of his agricultural diligence than his attention to prayer and worship even when interrupting field operations on his master’s estate in Spain. But St. Isidore, who is often portrayed in paintings and sculpture with a sickle fastened beneath his belt, remained steadfast in religious observations and his crops flourished. His wife, St. Maria Torriba (d. 1175), was also canonized for the miraculous provision of grain after she shared their few precious seeds with the needy and foraging birds.

Medieval European Harvest Holy Days and Festivals

June 24: St. John the Baptist’s Day—Feast of St. John, Herald of the Harvest (Midsummer Day)

August 1: Lammas Day (Loaf Mass)—Feast of First Fruits and Blessing of the Fields, ceremonial beginning of harvest

September 24: St. Rusticus Day—Feast of the Ingathering, traditional “Harvest-Home” celebrations (Autumnal Equinox)

September 29: Michaelmas—Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, ceremonial end of harvest and the farm year

November 11: Martinmas—Feast of St. Martin, general thanksgiving, end of fall wheat seeding, beginning of winter

Western European Folklore — Oat Goats and Rye Hounds

Scandinavian farmers customarily saved the last harvest cuttings for the ceremonial “Yule Sheaf” (Norwegian Julenek, Swedish Julkarve) of oats or other grain. The sheaf was suspended from a pole or barn roof during Christmas week as a blessing to the birds and goodwill offering for a favorable growing season in the coming year. This tradition continued among some families in eighteenth century America as described in verse by Ohio poet Phoebe Cary’s “The Christmas Sheaf”: 

“And bid the children fetch,” he said,
“The last ripe sheaf of wheat,
And set it on the roof o’erhead
That the birds may come and eat.

And this we do for His dear sake,
The Master kind and good,
Who of the loaves He blest and brake
Fed all the multitude.”

Adolph Tidermand (1814-1876), Traditions—The Christmas Sheaf (1846)

Oil on canvas, 14 ¼ x 16 ½ inches

National Gallery, Oslo

Upon completion of harvest in some parts of Germany during medieval times, farmers preserved the last remaining grain as “Wödin’s Share” (Vergodendeel, Vergodenstruss), an offering to the ancient pagan Allfather (Norse Odin, Slavic Volos). To solicit Wödin’s favor for the coming year, the cuttings were left for his thundering herd of horses sometimes glimpsed swirling aloft as heaps of roiling clouds. Four-wheeled “Wödin’s Wagon” was known in some German traditions as the four stars of Ursa Major with the three that descend from the corner forming the wain’s tongue. German folklorist-philologist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) found evidence of these traditions persisting well into the nineteenth century. After the ceremonial final reaping, some Saxon and Hessian farmers then struck the sides of their scythes three times with the strop, spilled a small amount of their beer, brandy, or milk on the ground, and waved their hats and beat their scythes three more times. Grimm further described a custom among some farmers to then parade home to the cry of “Wôld, Wôld, Wôld!/haven hüne weit schüt/jümm hei van haven süt….” British antiquarian John Symonds Udal (1848-1925) found vestiges of these beliefs in the celebratory end-of-harvest “crying of the neck whooping” of some Wessex descendants of Anglo-Saxon farmers in southern England. (“The neck,” in some places pronounced “knack,” was a small tied bundle of large heads gathered from the last cuttings.) Udal supposed their shouting “We hav’en” three times was “a survival of the old invocation to the great god Woden” that had remained through the centuries.

German farmers also contended with a malevolent menagerie of imaginary creatures—die Feldgeister (field spirits), including the Kornkuh (Grain Cow), Gerstenwolf (Barley Wolf), Haferbock (Oat Goat), Roggenhund (Rye Hound), and Aprilochs (April Ox). Folklore in Slavic Eastern Europe prescribed sparing the last few stalks of uncut grain for the field’s wild goat-like spirit, or for Baba Yagá (“Grandmother Witch”), though Christian influence confronted tradition in the words of a Russian folksong:

Let’s go girls, let’s go girls,

Out to the grain, out to the grain.

In our grain, in our grain,

Sits a witch, sits a witch.

Get out, witch; get out, witch,

Get out of our grain.

Our grain, our grain,

Has been consecrated, has been consecrated!

Go away witch, go away witch.

To Sen’kovo, to Sen’kovo—

There the grain there the grain,

Has not been consecrated.

Lodewijk Toeput (c. 1550-c.1605), Summer Harvest (c. 1590)

Black ink and gray wash over graphite, 10 ⅝ x 16 ⅝ inches

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Harvest Folklore — Mysteries from the East

In Eastern Europe, cutting the last sheaf (Russian dozhinochnym, Ukrainian didukh) was often accompanied by an elder’s petitional prayer so widows and orphans, rich and poor, would all be blessed with a plentiful harvest. (The Russian word for harvest, urozhaí, and Ukrainian zhnýva, derive from a shared root meaning “to cut.”) Fieldworkers festooned the sheaf with flowers and ribbons and honored members of the landlord’s family carried it home with bread and salt in a joyous procession accompanied by the singing of ritual harvest songs. Workers also fashioned colorful wreaths to be worn by unmarried youth. The host ceremoniously placed the sheaf on a peg in the ritual corner of the house (krásni úgol/pokuttia) which held icons, censer, and candles. A festive harvest dinner followed and the sheaf, known in some traditions as the “Grandfather Sheaf,” remained in the sacred niche until Christmas Eve. At that time some grain from the sheaf was used to make traditional kutya cereal dessert while other kernels were ritually scattered outside for the fertility of the fields and blessing upon the household.

In Slavic folklore, decrepit Baba Yagá might be a maternal effigy fashioned from straw that was also identified in some traditions with the summertime Pleiades star cluster. The constellation’s bright appearance portended favorable harvests. Baba Yagá appears ambiguously in agrarian folklore as both guardian of crops and as ogress who could withhold humanity’s bounty from the earth. For this reason the “Old Woman” existed in the fearsome twilight between nature and culture, said to dwell in the unfenced borderlands separating field and forest. Parents warned their children not to wander through the countryside or trample crops lest they be taken by Baba Yagá, though such beings existed as much as pedagogical fictions to prevent wanderers from damaging the grain.

The Russian rural landscape might also be inhabited by frightful polevoi (“field spirits”)—the rural “demons” of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fictional fourth century Lesniks. These misshapen, clumsy beings tended to appear at midday and bore the color of an area’s soil with hair of wild grass. A polevyk’s appearance usually foreshadowed misfortune. These beings were similar to the more diabolical leshii (“forest spirits”) and vodianoi (“water spirits”). Slavic millers of grain appeased the latter by regular streamside offerings of bread and salt—origin of the Russian word for hospitality.