The songs
Bold Orion on the Rise – 3:30 – Leo Kretzner
Newgrange – 3:08 – Tim O’Brian and Heritage (aka Newgrange)
Bold Orion on the Rise was written and is performed here by Leo Kretzner. He is an amateur singer-songwriter: His day job is Adjunct Professor of Biology at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. This recording is the title song from his 1982 vinyl record album. I don’t have that album but I found that he has posted the song on YouTube with an interesting slideshow. I suggest that you check it out (click on this image):
As I mentioned in my December 4 essay Enjoying winter stargazing, Orion is one of my favourite constellations. For one thing, it is large, attractive and is made up of bright stars so it is as easy to find as the Big Dipper on the other side of the night sky. As shown in the above slideshow it is also easy to envision the character it represents.
Orion has two very bright stars that are relatively red and blue giants. If they were where our sun is, our Earth would be inside of them! In the scabbard below his belt is a nebula that is visible to the naked eye if the sky is dark, and looks even better with binoculars, let alone my small telescope. In late winter and early spring I can see it in the evening from my west-facing balcony.
The earliest known depiction of the constellation is a cave painting in Germany that is estimated to be between 32,000 and 38,000 years old. The constellation’s name and its image come from Babylonian sky catalogues which probably were derived from the much earlier Sumerian sky charts that identified the Zodiac constellations. It is even mentioned three times in the Hebrew Bible, aka the Christian Old Testament, in Job 9:9, Job 38:31 and Amos 5:8.
Here are all of the lyrics and chords for the song, with a third verse added by Jon Bell (found in the Mudcat discussion forum):
Bold Orion on the Rise
by Leo Kretzner; verse 3 by Jon BellEm D
When the days are gettin' shorter, and the nights are growin' long,
C D Em
And the north wind puts a tear into your eye,
D
If you're out about 'round midnight and you look off to the east,
C D Em
There you may see bold Orion on the rise.
G Em
You may know him by his stance or the starry shield he holds,
G Em
As he rises silent in a clear cold sky.
D Em
Young Jack Frost and Old Man Winter, they both beckon to the call
D C Em
Of their master bold Orion on the rise.
C Em D Em
Chorus: Bold Orion, mighty hunter, rising in a clear cold sky,
C Em D C Em
See the summer fall before him. Bold Orion's on the rise.2. For seven starry ages, he has ruled the winter skies
With the fires of lost eons in his eyes.
He has seen the rise and fall of kings and continents and all,
Rising silent, bold Orion on the rise.
When he ascends, no hesitation; when he moves, no turnin' round,
Like a soul been called to glory, earthly born but heavenly bound.
Now the bird is on the wing, and it's southward that she flies,
Hastened on by bold Orion on the rise.
Chorus3. Orion had a lover. She's the goddess of the hunt,
And of the forest and the golden moon.
Artemis they called her, the fair sister of the sun,
But their time together ended all too soon.
Apollo took his vengeance on the man his sister loved.
An arrow sped him to a painful death;
But once a month she visits him, a moon among the stars,
Looking down with whispered love upon her breath.
Chorus4. Summer comes on all too slowly, and it passes far too fast,
And you wonder, is there nothin' that can last?
Here today and gone tomorrow as the green leaves turn to red,
As the present quickly turns into the past.
Cut the wood and stack it high now. Stoke the fires in your home.
Burnin' nightly send the smoke up to the sky.
Keep the winter at your door and keep the summer in your heart.
Drink a toast to bold Orion on the rise.
Chorus x 2
Newgrange I don’t know of any songs about Stonehenge except for one by parody heavy-metal band Spinal Tap. That song, as you might expect, includes historical inaccuracies. For that reason, and the fact that I am not a heavy-metal fan anyway, I am not including it in this midwinter music series. However the huge and beautiful burial structure of Newgrange in Ireland was built about the same time as Stonehenge, and was also designed to align with the Winter Solstice. It is also an important UNESCO World Heritage Site
This song was written in 1998 by Grammy-winning professional singer-songwriter Tim O’Brien with Kit Swaggert, for Tim’s former group Heritage’s album A Christmas Heritage. The band, comprised of top-level Compass Records session musicians, later changed their name to Newgrange and re-released this album under the same title but under their new band name.
Here is what Tim says about the Newgrange site and the song in his liner notes:
There’s an ancient burial chamber in County Meath, Ireland, called Newgrange. It’s 5000 years old, and like the slightly younger pyramids, is a remarkable feat of engineering. Scientists suppose that moving the large stones into place alone would take three successive generations’ effort.
One of Newgrange’s most salient features is a window that aligns with the sunrise on the winter solstice. At that time of the year, sunlight enters the cross-shaped chamber and lights it for several minutes early in the morning. The Neolithic people there knew and cared enough about the planets and the seasons to mark the shortest day of the year in a special way. In writing this song my wife Kit and I tried to imagine the perspective of the people who built it and witnessed the solstice every year at its sight.
For a brief (2:36) National Geographic YouTube video about Newgrange click on the following image:
The lyrics to the song are:
Newgrange
by Tim Obrien and Kit Swaggert, 1998Late in the fall in the dawn so still
We see first frost on the highest hill
In our way of life it’s one of the signs
The people of the village train their eyes
On the place where the sun comes over the rise
And the spot on the hill where the light aligns
The days get shorter and shorter and then
A window in the stone lets the light shine in
On the darkest day it brightens the tomb
It pushes the old year into the newWhen the cave of the sun takes the light of the dawn
We know another year has come and gone
And the longer days bring the promise of Spring
The river is life and the river it flows
It swells and it floods with the melting snows
And we plant our fields when the robins sing
ChorusWe know dying is a part of life
And a brighter day always follows the strife
Even though sometimes it’s hard to see
We watch the signs to calm our fears
We pray to the gods for a fruitful year
Let the planets sing in harmony
Chorus
Essay: The story of a big Neolithic timepiece [word count 1068]
When pre-agricultural people first migrated north they began to experience harsh winters. They must have noticed the relationship between the sun rising less high in the sky, bringing shorter days and longer nights. They probably figured out pretty quickly that meant winter was coming.
Some time later, perhaps in the Neolithic (late stone age) people would have noticed the small arc the sun traveled above the horizon as it rose less high, rising and setting further towards the south. Then, in the dead of winter, it didn’t appear to be rising and setting any further south for a while, and eventually they could see that it was rising and falling was bit further to the north again. That, plus changes to the length of the shadow from a tall rock, a tree, or a spear firmly stuck into the ground, told them that Summer was going to come back.
In one place, newly arrived agriculturalists in southern Britain decided to build a tool to measure that phenomenon more accurately. Perhaps they also thought that making the tool more flamboyant would please the spirits or deities and help ensure that the return of summer would happen. We don’t know what they thought when they built it but we can still see that tool. We call it Stonehenge.
Note that Stonehenge was not built by the Celts. The Celts did not arrive on the island until about 1000 BCE, when they probably drove the former inhabitants to the less desirable lands. They may have been the ancestors of the Picts, about whom we know very little.
The large stones we now see at Stonehenge were erected in three major phases. First, in 3400 to 3200 BCE a ring of large blue stones was created further to the northwest nearer to the ocean, in what we now call Wales. Three to four hundred years later the bluestones that made up that ring were moved to the present Stonehenge site on the what we now call the Salisbury plains in Wiltshire, England, where they were re-erected in a similar ring. Perhaps the new site was considered to be more auspicious: Archaeological studies have found apparently ritually placed wood-posts, mounds and burials centred there dating as far back to 5000 years earlier.
Beginning circa 2600 BCE and continuing for about 1000 years the stone monument was redesigned and expanded. The bluestones in the original ring were moved to other places, and a smaller but taller horseshoe of massive 20-40 ton sarsen stones that came from about 150 miles (240 km) away, and their large lintel stones were added. Besides the stones we now see, there were ritual roadways cut into the white chalk landscape and another large-log post circle built about two miles (3 km) away where people camped that archaeologists call Woodhenge.
Archaeological evidence proves that Stonehenge was built by people who were agriculturalists, and that the stones were shaped entirely using stone tools. Britain was far from the hotbed of the new technologies and culture in Asia Minor, where the Bronze Age had already begun. The new technologies from there, as well as the new methods of governance by kings and new formats of controlling people in government hierarchies, had not made it to Britain yet. So Stonehenge was not built by a controlling central dynasty, as were the Pyramids of Egypt that were built at about the same time.
From Archeology we know that the stone shaping, moving and construction took place during the summer (after planting, before harvest) and involved people from all over the British Isles from as far away as northern Scotland. Then after the harvest as midwinter approached, people came bringing crops and herding livestock with them. According to archaeological evidence they held a big feast while they used their big astronomical tool to confirm that the winter solstice had indeed passed and the Sun was rising in the sky again.
We have no idea how the builders of Stonehenge organized all of this construction and its logistics. But to design, let alone build, such a huge undertaking suggests that a lot of people shared a common vision, and they were willing to work together for a common cause. It seems to have been a populist undertaking that brought diverse people together. As with the much-later Gothic medieval cathedrals, I very much doubt that our society could undertake such a project today.
But as to the beliefs of the Neolithic people who built we know nothing. We don’t know why over such a long period of time people travelled great distances to build it with great effort during the summer, and they came again in the winter to hold rituals there. One fact is clear; This huge monument is too perfectly aligned to the sunset of the winter solstice and the opposing sunrise of the summer solstice (at the time it was built – those locations have moved a bit with changes in the angle of the Earth’s tilt) to be a coincidence. Identifying the occurrence of the solstices must have been important to them.
When archeologists encounter a carefully made complex object for which they can think of now practical use they are inclined to tentatively identify it as being for ritual use. I know from experience that even archaeologists joke about that inclination.
To buck that trend, there is a part of me that wants to believe Stonehenge was just a fun thing that a bunch of ancient hippies built to make an impressive setting for their Midwinter party. Perhaps it was an attempt to make it into the record books as the world’s longest-running, biggest and best-ever midwinter music festival. (For this to work, their idea of “fun” would have to have been different from mine.)
But I must admit that the archaeologists probably have it right in this case: It is a ritual, and hence religious, object that relates to the Sun. That would seem to link it to being a high point for old-fashioned animism.
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