(Traditional. Source)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVuZXrt2ZdU
Or around 13:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDREWMdU8Rg for a more ‘historical’ reenactment of the procession (although with a variation of lyrics).
So, from yesterday’s exploration of the relationship between God, humans and the natural world, today we have a song about a dead boar. There’s certainly a lot of variety in the canon of carols sung at Christmas!
While most of the lyrics are in English, the chorus and ends of the verses dip into Latin, the language of the educated and the church for much of Western history. Quite a few carols do this (Ding Dong Merrily we’ve already looked at but the worst offender is probably In Dulci Jubilo which goes back and forth so many times it’s almost impossible to follow).
This is another of the carols that’s not directly about Christmas. There is a suggestion that the custom it describes of serving a boar’s head at midwinter may date back to Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian yule traditions involving sacrificing a boar, perhaps to mark the solstice, or guarantee an auspicious new year. There’s some evidence of an association with the goddess Freya. Many midwinter traditions got tacked on to Christmas and had Christian meaning attributed to them- either cynically retconning those traditions, or more sympathetically using symbols that people already knew to help them remember the beliefs and practices of their new religion.
Possibly a descendent of this custom (or possibly not), a medieval custom seems to have grown up of processing into the lord’s hall with a boar’s head. The carol is often used in such processions, which still take place in several places today. At Queen’s College, Oxford, probably the Reginensi atrio or ‘Queen’s hall’ referred to in the song, their website claims: “This carol has long been associated with the College; it is sung at the annual Boar’s Head Ceremony...just before Christmas. The ceremony is steeped in tradition: legend has it that a fourteenth-century student of the College, John Copcot, was reading Aristotle in Shotover Forest when he was attacked by a wild boar. ‘Swallow that if you can,’ he cried, thrusting the volume down the boar’s throat. ‘Græcum est,’ (it’s all Greek to me) cried the boar, which found Aristotle too hard to digest. The ceremony commemorates this event.” (1)
Some might find that story itself a bit much to swallow.
Wikipedia lists a number of examples of where the procession tradition still takes place, one of which in a boarding school near Harrogate I found rather amusing: “As of 2019, the same boar's head has been used since 2005, constantly kept frozen in the freezer of the school's kitchen when not in use.”
Let’s hope there isn’t a power cut before the end of term!
(1) https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/news-40
