I recently read a letter written by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1937, when The Hobbit had just been published. Tolkien wrote to his publishers to comment on the description on the dustjacket, which compares his book with the work of Lewis Carroll. As Carroll the mathematician amused himself in Wonderland, the blurb suggests, so Tolkien the medievalist took inspiration from his specialism to write his children's book. 'Here again a professor of an abstruse subject is at play,' it trills.
With patient precision, Tolkien takes issue with the use of the word 'abstruse' to describe his academic work. 'I do not profess an "abstruse" subject,' he protests. 'Some folk may think so, but I do not like encouraging them. Old English and Icelandic literature are no more remote from human concerns, or difficult to acquire cheaply, than commercial Spanish (say). I have tried both.' He also objects to the publishers' description of him as 'a professor at play' – 'a professor at play rather suggests an elephant in its bath,' he remarks wryly.
On the fifteenth day of the month is the feast which is St Mary's feast. On this day she departed from the world to Christ, and now she shines in the heavenly host among the crowd of holy virgins, as the sun shines upon this middle-earth. Angels rejoice there, and archangels exult, and all the saints are glad with St Mary. St Mary was sixty-four years old when she went to Christ. St Mary is daughter-in-law of God the Father and the mother of God's son, and mother-in-law of the holy souls and the noble queen of the citizens of heaven; she stands upon the right side of the great Father and High King.
Today is the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, the first of the two great Marian feasts of the harvest. In medieval England both the Assumption and the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, on September 8th, were known as 'Our Lady Day in harvest', to distinguish them from 'Lady Day in Lent' (the Annunciation, March 25 - 'Lent' meaning 'spring' here) and 'Lady Day in December (the Feast of the Conception, December 8). The different seasons of the year had their different Lady Days, though today the term usually refers only to the springtime feast. The Assumption was also called 'Marymass', especially in Scotland. The September feast was sometimes referred to as 'the latter Lady Day' - a name which appears as early as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - to distinguish it from the Assumption, and this period of slightly less than a month between the harvest feasts was a season too, when something might be said to have happened 'between Our Lady's days'.
All these feasts grew out of a wealth of ancient traditions about the life of the Virgin, part scriptural, part apocryphal, part popular legend. Over the course of a thousand years or so a rich narrative developed which traced Mary's life from the very beginning to the very end, from the joy of her parents at her conception to the moment when, surrounded by apostles on earth and angels in heaven, she was tenderly taken out of her earthly body. In between the story of her life was mapped out in a pattern which would have been familiar to many medieval women, through domestic, everyday scenes: parents rejoicing in the birth of a longed-for baby; a little girl learning to read with her mother, or climbing the steps to the temple like a child on her first day at school; a teenage Mary with her female friends, singing to her baby, at her churching, or in the last days of her life. These were familiar rituals of childhood and motherhood which resonated with medieval audiences, and there's something profoundly beautiful about elevating such ordinary family relationships to the dignity of high art. Though Mary is unique and peerless, in these stories she is every medieval woman, not an unapproachably distant figure but a woman imagined in relationship to others: a daughter, wife, mother, friend.
In particular, the story of her Assumption is full of other people and their love for her - the apostles and her friends gathering around her bedside, Christ cradling her soul in his arms like a child. The Bible gives no information about the end of Mary's life, but numerous traditions and narratives on the subject had developed by the fifth and sixth centuries, telling how Christ received his mother's soul and/or body into heaven at the end of her life on earth. The details of these stories vary (see this book for details), but today I thought I'd post a few extracts from an anonymous Anglo-Saxon homily for the Assumption. This is a translation of a text known as the Transitus Mariae, a widely-known apocryphal account of Mary's life which circulated in several different versions and in multiple languages in the Middle Ages. The English translation comes from the tenth-century Blicking Homilies; it's too long to give in full, but the whole text can be found at part 1 and part 2. Here are three short extracts.
The text then tells how the apostles gather around Mary, having been told that the end of her life is near, and she gives them instructions for her burial.
There's some lovely language here. Christ calls Mary min eorclanstan, my arkenstone - more properly translated as 'my precious jewel' - a word with a long and fascinating history. She calls herself the goldhord of his commandments, his 'treasure-house'. Such tender speeches between Mary and her son are the most appealing part of texts about the Assumption - I posted some later medieval English examples here.
The above series of images comes from an illustration of the story in a 14th-century Book of Hours, BL Yates Thompson 13. It's four centuries later than the Old English text, but you can see that many of the details of the Transitus Mariae story are also present here - it continued to be popular throughout Europe during the medieval period, though is hardly known today. There are several versions in Middle English, including a lovely verse homily, as well as depictions in art. One of the most memororable of those depictions is found in the church of St Mary's, Chalgrove, Oxfordshire. This beautiful village church has an exquisite painted chancel, decorated in the first half of the fourteenth century, which shows scenes from the life of Mary and Christ, together with saints and angels, against a background of flowers.
The north side of the chancel depicts the life of Christ, from a blossoming Jesse tree at one end to the Crucifixion and Resurrection at the other. On the south side is the narrative of Mary's passing. The paintings were covered in limewash at the Reformation and so one or two later monuments have intruded into the series, but it's still remarkably complete. The first glimpse of it is breathtaking - no picture can do it justice.
Christ is the central figure, with angels behind him, and Mary's little soul is visible just next to him, being raised up from her body by angels.
Below are two almost lost scenes, then on the adjacent wall, beside the east window, are the Assumption and Coronation.
They parallel the upward movement on the other side of the window, of Christ's Resurrection and Ascension.
Chalgrove is a treasure of a church, and the chancel has the kind of air about it that Lady Chapels often have - a feeling of lightness and delicacy in the decoration, as of sunlight caught in spiderwebs. It sounds silly to say it, but it feels ladylike. For this reason I'm always particularly moved by the destruction of these scenes, such as you can see in the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral, where a whole carved sequence of scenes from Mary's life was systematically vandalised - exquisite scenes like this, of a little girl and her tenderly watchful parents, with their heads cut away.
All the apocryphal stories about Mary's life, because of their uncertain authority, have long attracted criticism, and - like all but one of the 'Lady Days' - their place in British culture did not survive the Reformation. Almost all the stories they tell about Mary's life are unfamiliar now, even to many Christians. (I clearly remember my own surprise when I learned, on an August visit to Germany as a teenager, why the shops were closed for a public holiday; I don't think I had ever heard of the Feast of the Assumption, or knew what it celebrated.) But it's not difficult to see why these stories were so popular in the Middle Ages, and our understanding of medieval Christianity is impoverished unless we recognise just how prevalent and how popular they were - how much imaginative and artistic space the medieval church dedicated to Mary's story. Though these legends contain plenty of miracles and marvels and angels, they're also very human and ordinary; they are the medieval church at its most 'homely' (to use Julian of Norwich's word), where the everyday, the domestic, the familiar is sanctified and honoured. Full of mothers and daughters and Mary's friends, these stories celebrate a sacred version of female community and female relationships; they are completely relatable, not only for mothers like Margery Kempe but for anyone who has ever had a mother, ever been a child. (And perhaps this is, in fact, one reason why they have historically attracted such virulent objections.) When these stories were forgotten, when the paintings were whitewashed and the statues were broken, something important and beautiful was lost.