Sun, Stand Still
One Winter Solstice, lying on a comfy sofa in front of an open fire in France I was reading aloud to my soul sister of all-sorts, Joanne.
We were engrossed in a Nordic myth recounting the death of Balder, the sun-beautiful, at the hands of his blind brother, Hod.
I was upset. Hod is tricked into killing his brother by the God, Loki. The weapon – a seemingly innocent branch of mistletoe – the only thing in all creation that had not sworn an oath to protect Balder, which, of course, is something Loki knew. Hod had no intention of hurting his brother, let alone killing him. But the mistletoe hit its mark. Balder died and his spirit was hurled into the realm beyond Hel’s gates. The sun was swallowed by endless dark and the chaos that followed led to Ragnarok and the end of the Northern Gods.
The death of Balder is a terrible story. Powerful, unsettling and unjust. A trickster story about who you should trust and who you should not. A perfect story for a long winter night in front of a fire, but not one to calm your heart or soul.
The word Solstice comes from the Latin Sol Stetit and means sun stands still. It referred to a period around 21 December each year when the sun stopped crawling along the horizon and for six days seemed to rise and set in exactly the same spot. Our ancestors must have watched it and worried – what if the sun never moves again? What if the dark never becomes light? What if Spring never comes and we are forced to live in perpetual Winter?
I had read our ancestors would tell stories the night before the Solstice in an attempt to distract Darkness from the return of the Light – as if they could divert the attention of a diurnal force the way Scheherazade distracts the King in One Thousand and One Nights by leaving the stories she tells on a cliffhanger so she must continue them and, in this way, survive another day.
It was in front of that fire, my head full of Loki’s treachery and a blind brother extinguishing the sun, that the idea for my teen novel The Twelve Courts of Midnight was born. Tallian is one of twelve Tellers round a table on the night of the Winter Solstice, charged with distracting the Winter Lady from devouring the new sun before he is born. Tallian takes her storytelling inspiration from the richly perfumed flower of midsummer, the Honeysuckle. Her nemesis takes his inspiration from Hod’s mistletoe. The Twelve Courts of Midnight is the echo of a story in another story – and carries still another story inside. It is a place where myth and magic collide with the sun and stars of our own world.
The Winter Solstice is a turning point in the calendar of the year: from this moment on the nights get shorter and the days get slowly longer. It is a time potent with the symbolism of hope and new beginnings. In the spirit of new beginnings I harness the returning light this Solstice to launch a new website. May my words grow with the Sun’s journey round the course of the year to claim their full strength come mid-summer.