#medieval folklore

Embroidery of a traditional Sorbian Easter egg, made by me as an Easter gift for family members.

Feat: Blown-out sorbian eggs my aunt brought us years ago.

Although English isn’t my first language, I’ll try to explain the symbolism:

In Lusatia/ the Spreewald - more specifically, in Sorbian Culture - before every Easter we are meant to decorate the Easter eggs with the special technique, called Bossiertechnik, which requires wax, feathers, needle pens and natural dye. The decorated eggs are a gift from Godmothers and godfathers to their Godchild, as well as the Patensemmel, which is some kind of a bread roll.

Even though me and my sister don’t have godparents, every year, our aunt brought us her beautifully hand painted eggs. So this year, I also have a special gift for her and my uncle!

Historically, the tradition of Sorbian Eastereggs comes both from Christianity and Paganism, as well as medieval Folklore. Each symbol and color has it’s own meaning. After they’ve been gifted to the godchildren, they were rolled over a field for fertility and a good harvest. Another fertility spell was to ride a horse around the field. Both traditions were varied over the centuries - today, the Osterreiter are riding from one village to the other, to proclaim the resurrection of the Lord, and kids are playing Eierrollen as game (you and your friends are rolling your eggs down a hill - to win the game, your egg has to be the farthest or beat other eggs).

As I said, these colorful eggs don’t come without a special meaning. Of course, everything can be interpreted different from town to town, but overall, they just bring you good fortune.

So here’s how to interpret mine:

The suns you can see (in the middle, on the sides and on the top and the bottom) will bring you health and growth - they also symbolize, well, a sun. Putting three triangles into an ornament, is one of the strongest protections spells - the circles made of single triangles are there for protection too. In this egg, they not only protect the ones I’ll give this embroidery to, but also my wish for health and growth. The “V"s - called Crow’s foot - are used to boost the other symbols. The four single white flowers are meant to ensure a good future and more growth.

I used different tones of green for health and luck. White is like a basic color you’ll find in nearly every egg - some might say it stands for the holy spirit or Purity. Yellow is the color of the sun (I just used it for the aesthetic you know XD). Blue is meant to symbolise things like healing, peace or harmony.

So, long story short, the embroidery I did for my family members can be interpreted as a lucky charm for health, growth and peace.

In January I followed an online lecture by celticist Dr. Nike Stam, who is working on a 16th century Irish manuscript that is anticlimactically called VLQ7, but that contains two veryexciting pieces of Irish Mythology:

• The only prose version of a Finn MacCool tale that was later called “Finn and the Phantoms”.

This is cool because we only have two manuscript versions of this story: the poetic version from the Book of Leister and this prose version. The beginning seems to be missing (the first page of the text is damaged), but it features Finn and his Fianna get their asses kicked by a household of strange figures who all disappear at sunrise. (There is a note at the end of the story by the scribe, saying: what a wondrous story this is.)

• A version of Fled Bricrenn (Bricriu ’s Feast), which is present in 5 other manuscripts.

Thisis cool because Fled Bricrenn is the first mention of “the beheading game” that the Green Knight plays with Gawain and because this particular version of the text might have an ending that doesn’t exist anywhere else. 

This lost ending is primarily what they’re studying this manuscript for at the moment and it’s very tragic:

This manuscript used to have no cover, so the first and last pages got very worn and dirty. Fled Bricrenn is told at the end of the manuscript. It’s a whacky story about how Bricriu Poison Tongue makes fools out of the Lords and Ladies of Ulster by playing pranks and pitting them against each other.

All other known versions of the tale end rather abruptly, but in the 19th century a German scholar looked at this manuscript and made a note that even though the last page was too dirty to read properly, he suspected this version of Fled Bricrenn might actually continue there. (The celticist lamented that 19th century German in cursive is much harder to read than any medieval script.)

No one managed to decipher it however, and when an American scholar came to look at it in the 1990’s someone at the library of Leiden where it is held made the mistake of giving it to “a nun in the country who does these sorts of things”. She tried to washthe last page and thereby also washed away most of the ink, leaving the page clean, but completely illegible.

The researchers hope that they will be able to find remnants of the text using multi-spectral imaging. If all goes well they’ll be trying that this summer and I really really really hope it will turn up something interesting!