Lughnasadh - John Barleycorn

But John Barleycorn proved the stoutest man
Though they did all that they could
So raise up your horn and praise John Barleycorn
And we shall drink his blood
Yes, we shall drink his blood!

- Heather Alexander's version of old English folk song "John Barleycorn"

John Barleycorn is one of my favorite versions of a god archetype that is particularly relevant at this time of year: the god of vegetation who dies and is reborn. There are innumerable versions of the poem and folk song that tell his story, including one by Robert Burns. [1] The story is a metaphor for the agricultural cycle of barley, and by extension nearly any grain crop, personified in "little Sir John." [2]

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Sabbat at the start of August is called either Lammas or Lughnasadh, and under either name it is a celebration of the first fruits of the harvest, and especially the beginning of the grain harvest. The consistent theme at these celebrations is thanksgiving that there is a harvest to be gotten in, and that communities come together to do the hard and vitally necessary work of harvesting. While the Northern Hemisphere is turning towards winter, the Southern Hemisphere is emerging from the cold, and so this date in the Southern Hemisphere is usually celebrated as Imbolc, which is also a festival of change, but in a different way, focusing on poetry and inspiration.

Lammas comes from the Old English for loaf-mass, the offering and blessing of the first symbolic loaves made from the newly-reaped grain, representing the whole harvest to come. Lughnasadh is the festival of the Celtic god Lugh; he is said to have instituted the celebration in honor of his foster-mother after her death. [3] As far as we can tell from surviving information, in old Celtic cultures this was a time for communities to gather and engage in games and contests of skill, especially martial skill, but it was also a celebration of the harvest.

The Lughnasadh festival was considered a good time for people to come together in more ways than one. Because the harvest assured people that they could plan for the winter to come, this time of year was appropriate for finalizing all kinds of arrangements, including living situations from renting lodgings to setting up marriages and handfastings. A handfasting, according to some sources, may have been a kind of trial marriage that lasted for "a year and a day" and could be dissolved without prejudice at the end of that time. [4] In a largely agricultural society, the gold that made a marriage possible was not the gold of a ring, but of the grain.

The song of John Barleycorn - a story of violence and death - may seem like an odd tune for these festivals of fresh bread and marriage feasts. The conflict is resolved when we realize the story is not just about death, but death and rebirth. Little Sir John comes back in many forms, none of which are exactly the same as the life he lost. He is reborn, not resurrected.

John Barleycorn is another face worn by the Green Man, the god of living things that are green and growing, things that live and die and live again, year in and year out, around the Wheel. The Green Man or the vegetation god often appears in art, especially carvings, as a face made of leaves, sometimes with vines and grasses growing from his mouth or flowing as his hair. As I have found common in Paganism, he "speaks in leaves," that is, in complex symbols without a single, simple allegorical meaning, so there is not just one story but many going on simultaneously as we try to read his story in the leaves and in his songs. [5]

In the song, John Barleycorn, the seed, is planted and buried, by men who are vain enough to assure themselves that he is dead. But because Barleycorn knows that the tomb is also the womb of the earth, he sprouts and begins to grow. As the grain begins to ripen, it is described in some versions as the figure growing a beard. This is a literal description of ripening grain, which grows long thin protrusions called the beard or awns, but it could also be a symbol of puberty, with all the attendant metaphors between sexual and agricultural fertility. In Burns' version, though, he describes this growth as "pointed spears" that are Barleycorn's defense, until he ages and becomes weak in autumn. In either telling, Barleycorn's ripening marks the point that he has become useful to others, and by the same token, it is the time that he is beginning to be ready for his next death.

Then in great detail the story and song describe the cruelties inflicted on Barleycorn, all of which refer to the activities of preparing grain for human use: cutting the stalks, binding the sheaves, loading the grain, threshing, and milling. But here the song departs from the Lammas theme of the importance of bread. Burns' version gives away the difference by including the step of malting the barley over a fire before it is ground, which makes it ready for brewing beer, which will be the ultimate rebirth of the barley. Some versions insist that Sir John was not only made into the everyday beer, but also into stronger stuff such as uisge beatha, the "water of life," better known today as whisk(e)y.

The song ends with a verse or two about how everyone partakes of Barleycorn's reborn "spirit," pun very much intended. This is why I describe Barleycorn's process as a rebirth, rather than a resurrection; the parts of the grain that are used, whether for bread or for brewing, are completely transformed. Only the small portion reserved as seed will give birth to new grain next year. Even then, it will be cut down in turn, in the repeating cycle that closes the circle of the song and of the Wheel of the Year.

Now, I don't focus on this song to imply that everyone ought to drink alcohol; although alcoholic drinks may have been healthier than plain water in the past, today that is (thankfully) no longer the case for most people in the developed world. And although beer, sometimes called "liquid bread," may once have been an important source of calories, grain-based foods are seldom in short supply these days.

The important point is that the song ends with examples of people doing work together and celebrating as they share "little Sir John in the nut brown bowl," or as Heather Alexander puts it, "raise up their horns." This beer is more than a health measure, a source of calories, or an intoxicant. Its importance comes from its place in shared celebration. This sharing in the harvest is more than just a source of sustenance. It symbolizes the way we also need hilarity and opportunities to socialize, to join with other people in feast and festival.

From start to finish, the song subtly reminds us that we need each other. It's not just one man fighting against John Barleycorn; it's three men who plow him, and then all the different people involved in the processing of the grain. And at the end, when the singer or poet addresses the audience directly, it is an acknowledgment that we are all human together. Just as these festivals weren't instances of individual and private devotion, none of the harvest tasks could be done by one individual alone. The cooperation of the entire community was necessary to have enough to eat, let alone extra to brew into celebratory beer!

We'll see these themes of work, life, and rebirth played out over the next few Sabbats, culminating in Samhain and Yule, but this is the start of that process, and a clear sign that the Wheel is turning to such matters as the harvest and the very heart of some of the most human Mysteries of all. As we go into them, it is important to note that what matters is not that John Barleycorn is resurrected in some perfected, idealized, changeless form that will exist forever. What we find is rebirth, like the rebirth of John Barleycorn, the irrepressible spirit of life that continues to renew itself in myriad forms and through myriad generations.

That is what I worship about the vegetation god, and it is the starting point that helps carry us through the darkening part of the year. As Laiima said, she knows that when she dies, "Parts of me will get to be a turtle, a slime mold, a squidworm, a paper birch, a lichen. Wherever 'my' parts go, I will remain a child of Earth."

The deepest meaning of the song, to me, is that when John Barleycorn rises again, his spirit rises within each of us. When we eat bread and whether we drink beer, or tea, or juice, we are partaking of that spirit of irrepressible life, which flows into each of us to make our own lives possible. It is the very interconnections in which we live our lives, both in relationships with others and in relationship with the world around us, from which we draw sustenance and to which we will return. On this Sabbat, we come together in celebration to acknowledge that cycle and to reaffirm our role in the shared work and shared rewards of the harvest.

--Literata

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[1] Versions of the lyrics may be found at http://goireland.about.com/od/irishtradandfolkmusic/qt/irishfolkbarley.htm and http://www.lipwalklyrics.com/lyrics/176347-heatheralexander-johnbarleycorn.html.

This site gives a useful comparison of Burns' version and a conflated version of the usual song lyrics.

This video has a good performance of the song with reasonable sound quality; you may want to listen while you read.

An Ulster variant speaks from the point of view of the barley itself in some verses, a good reminder that at times we are the harvester, and at times we are the harvest itself.

This Morris dance to the song has additional Pagan symbolism. The character in the center wearing mixed colors is Barleycorn and the four around the edges are the Elements. Yellow, in the East, is Air, red in the South is Fire, blue in the West is Water, and the brown-green in the North is Earth. (The video is taken from the south side of the circle, facing north.) At the beginning, the central character clacks sticks with each Element, invoking its power, and they all interweave in the dance, finishing together, centering on Barleycorn, to show the way all living things (and all things, really) partake of all four Elements. ↩

[2] Note that throughout this article and the tales of John Barleycorn, "corn" means grain in general, not specifically maize as it does in the US. ↩

[3] The god and festival are respectively spelled Lu (with accent) and Lunasa in modern Irish, and pronounced "loo" and "LOO-na-sah." The tales of Lugh are many and complex. He's a Slacktiverse kind of figure who is Usually More Complicated Than That. ↩

[4] Handfasting was also a marriage contracted by agreement between the couple themselves, rather than their families, with or without a specified length attached, and without the need for clergy. This type of marriage has a long and contested history in Europe. Contemporary Pagans have adopted the term for any relationship commitment ceremony. ↩

[5] King, Laurie R. The God of the Hive. New York: Bantam, 2010, p 48. ↩

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Comments

[rejiquar]

First encountered this song via the Traffic version. Wow, that took me back....

[Laiima]

Literata, that was amazing, and taught me lots of things I didn't know about Lughnasadh. Thank you!

[Brin]

Let's see, where can I post this...religion as relating to fiction, almost-dead, almost-dead, politics. None of those really seem right.
Oh! A holiday post! Perfect!

*reads post*

I was going to wish my fellow Canadians a happy We Don't Need an Excuse Day (aka Civic Holiday). Turns out there's actually quite a lot of reason behind celebrating the beginning of August, even if nobody involved in starting Civic Holiday knew it.

[Rowen]

I had no idea Heather Alexander had done more then that album with music from Mercedes Lackey books that I have. I'll need to check out more of her stuff.

[Lonespark]

Yeah, Heather Alexander had a lot of great recordings.

And her heir, Alexander James Adams has great stuff too. I am partial to both for various reasons, mostly including OMGFiddleomnomnomsqueeeee!!! but since I was never very aware of Heather's work back when she was performing it, I guess I lean toward being more of an Alec fan...

[Lonespark]

Good harvest, y'all.

At The Wild Hunt, Star Foster wishes folks "Most of what we need, and a good portion of what we want." Sounds very good to me.

[Mmy]

And I would like to thank Literata for doing such a good job explaining a Morris dance in a few sentences. I had seen that clip already and really didn't get what it was about till she explained it.

BTW, you can lose many an hour if you want to venture out into the wilds of Youtube and look for versions of John Barleycorn. I have a personal fondness for both the Traffic version (which I first heard many a year ago) and Jethro Tull's version. Because it really is a very old folk tune there are many different takes on it.

[Rowen]

Mmy, if you're in a city with a Revels, they usually have some Morris dancing involved. I just joined this year, and was apart of the Abbots Bromley dance, and it was a lot of fun!

[little pink beast]

I grew up listening to Steeleye Span's version of John Barleycorn. There's another version I've heard and liked very much, which I seem to remember being told was by Ian Corrigan of Ar nDraiocht Fein, but I've never been able to find it since.

[Sixwing]

Literata, thank you!

I keep trying to type up something longer and it keeps looking ridiculous written down, so I'm going to have a crack at something else and come back later. This has made me think a whole bunch, though. :D

[Literata]

Wow, thanks everybody for the great compliments! I'm glad you enjoyed. Thanks to Mmy for finding the videos in the first place. I'll second both Brin and Lonespark's wishes, too. Sixwing, I can't wait to see what you come up with eventually. (That pun on spirit looks ridiculous written down, too, but it does make sense, and apparently nobody felt the need to pelt me with veggies for it yet. I'll duck if need be.)

[Dragoness Eclectic]

I really love Heather Alexander's songs; she brought to very rich life many an old folk ballad. I was introduced to Heather's music by my spouse, who found it by way of John Ringo's books. Apparently Ringo is a big fan of a number of her songs, and particularly likes "March of Cambreadth", which he mentioned in his stories and included in CDs of his books (presumably with permission).

Alexander James, I'm not so fond of, yet. As of the last time I heard him sing one of Heather's songs (a year or so ago), he hadn't really found his own tonal range quite yet, and couldn't do them justice. Perhaps some of his own songs might be better, when he's not trying to make his voice fit the tonal range Heather used in the songs she sang. I don't know, this is all just my opinion. (And yes, I do know about the "heirship").

[Literata]

Heather Alexander's music also gets used liberally in S. M. Stirling's Dies the Fire series, and one of his characters is apparently pretty much based on her.

[Amaryllis]

Typepad, did you eat my post?

Sigh.

Um, I think I said...
Happy Lughnasa/Lammas/August Civic Holiday to everyone.

I regret to say that I'm so superficial that my first reaction to the headline was, "Lughnasa? August already? Another summer tow-thirds gone already?"

But I suppose that's what these holidays are for, to encourage us to pay attention.

----
Just because you all are the type to appreciate it, I quote my niece describing her next semester at college: "Aunt Amaryllis, I'll be taking Philosophy of Religion, Ethnography of the Vikings, Classical Greek Drama and Turkish Literature...It's gonna be Nerd Heaven!"

[Froborr]

August strikes me as weirdly early to be celebrating harvest, but that's because, as a USian, I'm used to Thanksgiving in late November.

Actually, August strikes me as a weird time to be celebrating *anything*; in this part of the world, it is the month when nature is most blatantly trying to torture and kill us.

Anyway, the paragraph about the Green Man has made me realize I was missing a HUGE aspect of one of my favorite books, Desolation Road. There is a character in it called the Green Man, and he has many of the features you ascribe to the god (who I had not previously heard of). And the novel itself is many stories interwoven. Now I have an excuse to re-read it. Thanks!

[MercuryBlue]

Sounds more fun than my semester, Amaryllis. Family law, criminal law, legal research and writing, and photography. Not that I don't expect to enjoy myself, when I'm not losing my mind over my class schedule (four evening classes plus full-time job what possessed me? ...oh yeah, I like having health insurance), but...directly related to my career plans x3 plus directly related to my business.

Speaking of college, my tentative plan for after I've got my paralegal degree is to move to college town up north where the big state university is, get a job with a law firm there, and study political science with sides in at least two of women's studies, sexualities and gender studies, sociology, and economics. I am informed that that's a good way to become an academic, but not a good way to become a politician.

HEATHER ALEXANDER omg I love. "Sound the horn and call the cry, how many of them can we make die?"

Star Foster wishes folks "Most of what we need, and a good portion of what we want." Sounds very good to me.

Except for the only 'most' of what we need.

Good article, Literata.

[MercuryBlue]

in this part of the world, it is the month when nature is most blatantly trying to torture and kill us.

Really? I thought that was July. *frowns at heat index that was topping a hundred Fahrenheit all damn month* Not that I expect August to be any better.

[Mmy]

@Froborr: August strikes me as a weird time to be celebrating *anything*; in this part of the world, it is the month when nature is most blatantly trying to torture and kill us.

I take it that you have never been in a city in Ontario that has lost all power for more than 2 weeks due to a ice storm that brought down every power line for kilometers. Yes, the heat has been known to kill people (usually in large cities where the heat doesn't dissipate at night and people are afraid to leave their windows open) but an ice storm can basically call a halt to all power for millions of people for weeks at a time.

Having endured two such storms (including one during which my elderly grandmother was living with us), having had to crawl out of window to shovel snow away from the door before we could even get out of our house and having driving in 1st gear for over an hour on the 401 (for Americans think of a major interstate) because of the black ice that covered the entire landscape, having watched emergency crews deliver food to stranded people in the middle of a large city ---- I'll take summer any day.

[When my father was stationed in a particular secret (not on any map) Army base the winter visibility conditions were so bad that ropes were tied between all the buildings. If you didn't hold onto the rope you were liable to get lost in the zero-visibility snow and not be found until the next thaw.]

[Froborr]

@MercuryBlue: My experience of living here for almost thirty years: August is generally worse than July.

@Mmy: Let's not get into shitty weather Olympics, okay? I specified "around here" for a reason. D.C. summer can also cause power outages and deaths. Is it as bad as Ontario winter? I don't know, and honestly I'm not interested in competing over it.

[Mmy]

@Froborr: Didn't want to get into a shitty weather Olympics either. I am somewhat bemused by the responses to summer now though. Washington was almost unlivable in the summer 200 years ago. It is a much healthier place now.

Just speaking as someone who experienced the extremes of cold and warmth in this area of North America and knows that historically far more people have died from the cold than the heat.

[Mary Kaye]

Some of our heat misery is (collectively) self-inflicted. I am currently teaching in a workshop at Colorado State, and it has been in the 90's every day except today (thunderstorm). I have a pretty long set of walks among the hotel, cafeteria, and teaching building several times a day and they are no fun at all.

But. It's painful in large part because the campus is covered with green lawns with occasional shade trees. It could easily be covered with shade trees--given the green lawns, there must be sufficient water for that--and that would have a huge impact on livability. (I haven't been here in winter, but trees usually mitigate winter pain too, reducing wind speed and providing shelter.) The parking lots could be *hugely* improved with a shade-tree border and perhaps a few islands, at the cost of only a few parking spaces at most.

It's also painful because some parts are concrete canyons, though it's not as bad in that regard as other campuses I've visited. And it's painful because of the car-culture esthetic, which has pushed the buildings really far apart. (As I walk to the hotel or cafeteria, I see bikes but few pedestrians; the campus is too spread out for walking.) There are large, grassy, unused spacers around the buildings. It looks nice, but as soon as you have to do work here, you realize the layout is not practical at all.

One tactic I can pass along in the hopes that other towns will adopt it: Most people don't want to lose all the trees in a construction site (of course you must lose some, but often many could remain). But construction workers tend to kill trees anyway, because they are inconvenient to work around and need some attention to save.

Seattle has started putting large signs on each publicly-owned tree in a construction zone. They lay out the rules for how to protect the tree (no machines in the drip zone, etc) and, perhaps most important, they clearly state a rather large dollar penalty if the tree is killed--I've seen them up to about $7000. It seems to vary by size of tree.

Lo and behold, we just had a large street renovation and did not lose a single large tree along the route--and there were a lot of trees involved. I don't think I've seen that happen before. It certainly hadn't been the norm. There are some quite nice lindens and tulip trees who probably owe their lives to those signs, and one truly magnificent elm in an adjacent building site.

[sarah]

Philly's been in the mid-90s for the past few weeks. And it's a frickin' concrete jungle, so it rarely cools down, even at night. My room's kind of a sauna these days.

[J. Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

Am I too late to join the shitty weather Olympics? I'm a troll, from the LP, surrounded by four of the largest inland bodies of water on the planet. Lake effect snow? Oh my yes; you get that in the lakest of the Great Lake states. See, I know these things. ;P

In all seriousness, I hope that the heat tamps down in August, though, for the sake of for the sake of the south and west (who have been going for close to a month with everyday capping 100 degrees). A celebration in August makes sense to me - after all, when nature *is* trying to kill you with heat, it's always good to have something to take your mind off of it. Celebrations like Christmas are the only thing that give winter a purpose for existing here in the LP, and even then, winter sticks around twice as long as it needs to (two and half times if you're one of the what, five Yoopers up there in the UP? It's okay, we trolls love you guys anyway; their glorious accents remind us we're a lot closer to Canada than we are to the United States. Sometimes, that's a good thing). Miserable weather makes for excellent celebrations, until the celebrations go away and then you're stuck with just the miserable weather.

[J. Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

Wait... did I type that three times? I could've sworn I deleted one of those "for the sake of"s.

[reverie]

[/lurk]

Speaking just to personal experience, August is easily the worst month for heat in the part of TX I live in. Especially this year; we're breaking all sorts of records. The forecasts for the highs are hovering around 110 (112 on Wed.!) and we're being asked to use minimal electricity during the afternoon or face rolling black outs again...

Right in time for marching practice, of course. *Sighs*

[lurk]

[reverie]

*those temperatures being heat index. I believe the actual temps are a few degrees lower, but it doesn't actually help much.

[Amaryllis]

MercuryBlue: four evening classes plus full-time job what possessed me?
Ambition and energy, I suppose: I'm impressed! Have a good semester.

Weather: I don't know anything about northern winters. But I've lived in the Mid-Atlantic all year round, and even here, I'll take summer over winter any day.

An August harvest poem:

Soon the allotments will be deserted.
Ray from Bow has made his special salad,
the Cypriot Hassim has sliced his spuds,
nurtured them with salt. In the work shed
they've laid out the last of the harvest,
grapes and olives, leeks, cabbages, parsnips.
Along with the carrots and beets, from
the damp earth they've pulled up their thoughts,
dreams of better lives, the thrill of putting down
a deposit, inheritance; the days that a square
patch of London would breed dates, callaloo,
sweet potatoes the size of your head,
things not seen since childhood, homeland,
the family hearth, some long forgotten feast.
from "The Lammas Lands", Michael McKimm

[Lonespark]

I actually messed up the Star Foster quote, d'oh!

It's "All of what we need, and a good portion of what we want." Makes more sense that way, yes.

[Coleslaw]

We've actually had cool weather here up until this week, cool being 89 to 92 or so instead of upper 90's. Now were back to the upper 90's.

I've never understood this "heat index" thing. When it's 99 here, they'll say it "feels like" 102 or something silly like that. No, it "feels like" 99 always feels in SE Louisiana. I don't care if 99 "feels like" something different in Arizona or California. I've experienced enough 99 degree days in my life to know what they feel like. They feel hot.

[Mmy]

@Coleslaw: I've never understood this "heat index" thing. When it's 99 here, they'll say it "feels like" 102 or something silly like that

I get it but then I have had a lot of personal experience with the same heat and different heat indices.

Not too long ago it was 37°C [98.6°F) around here and with the heat index it "felt like" 40°C [104°F] or more. When the humidity is high your body has more difficulty regulating your temperature -- sweating isn't as effective in cooling you down.

On one of the days that week I remember opening our side door just after 8 in the morning and although it was a clear cloud free day without a hint of rain feeling like I had stepped out into a mist. My clothes were actually damp from the air.

Just the other day we had another day that was in the high 30s and I remember thinking that it felt "cool" compared to the weather we had been having.

[Literata]

Speaking of the DC area, we really get a tradeoff: it's a teensy bit cooler here than further inland sometimes, because the water can have a cooling effect, but at the same time, the humidity can negate that in terms of heat index. When the water is hot too, in late summer, it's even worse. I'm not at all trying to play Lousy Weather Olympics, just sharing in the complaining, especially since the ability to be outside has religious significance for me.

I help lead rituals for a local Pagan shop, and they/we try to have rituals outside in summer. I decided to do Ostara outside, which was a bad decision because it was too chilly for everybody else. Beltane was inside due to rain, Litha due to heat and thunderstorms combined, and now Lughnasadh was inside due to heat. I'm wondering if we'll have even one nice Sabbat outdoors this year.

Right now, the extreme heat scares me more because I fear it will be a portent of things to come, (along with worse winter storms, I know) but there's less I can do to cope with being outside in it. While we've gotten some pretty nifty insulating materials developed, there are only so many layers of clothes to take off.

[Brin]

Enigma: their glorious accents remind us we're a lot closer to Canada than we are to the United States.

What accents? Maybe other parts of Canada have accents, but not the parts close to Michigan. Your average Southern Ontarian speaks newscaster American, or so it seems to me*.

I just learned the hard way about another negative of summer: chiggers. At least, that's what we think they are. Whatever they are, they're like hyper-mosquitoes that follow you home and sleep in your bed. Yesterday morning I woke up with two bumps on my right arm, and today I got a bump on the bottom of my foot. It hurts to walk. It hurts to stand. Pretty soon it will probably start to itch like my arm does.
Right now I'm wishing for that glorious part of autumn where the biting bugs have all died off for the winter, but it's not too cold yet.

*I once met a friend-of-a-friend who could tell by our voices that "You must be J's American friends!", even though she didn't sound different to me.
There was also our realtor, who sounded to me (but nobody else) as if he'd just stepped off the proverbial boat from Ireland. (He's lived in this county region his whole life.)
Maybe I'm just bad at accents?

[J. Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

@Brin: It's a complicated in-joke and cultural thing. We pick on the Yoopers because they say "eh" and have a nasally accent, and they're from the north, therefore they're from Canada. If they were from the south, they'd be Ontarian, or worse, Ohioan (but if they were Buckeyes, we wouldn't take them - just like the Buckeyes wouldn't take any Wolverines.) If you've heard "da Yoopers" Christmas carol, "Rusty Chevrolet," you'll see what we mean. No, it doesn't sound remotely like a real Canadian I've ever met (having been to Toronto and London). That's why they're Yoopers and not real Canadians. Honestly, their accent is probably closer to Minnesotan. I often wonder why, given that the U.P. should be part of Wisconsin and not Minnesota (and Toledo should be part of the Michigan, but the Toledo War is a totally different subject and the reason why we have the U.P. to begin with).

[J. Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

Oh! Here's a pretty map and the Wikipedia page on it. I didn't know they had either:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.jpg

The majority of Yoopers are German and Finnish, and that's impacted the accent (btw: I love maps. The more colorful, the better.)

Here's the Wikipedia page - they explain the Yooper dialect/accent a lot better than I can:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yooper_dialect

This, however, is why joke about them being Canadian:

"Ending of sentences in "Eh." Used at end of sentences with the expectation of receiving an affirmative response or as another word for "huh." ("So, you're /jɛr/ goin' out t'nide, eh?"), or to add emphasis to a statement, "That's a pretty dress, eh." "Eh" is often associated with Canadian English. "Heh" is used interchangeably and perhaps more often among younger speakers."

[Mmy]

@Brin: Maybe other parts of Canada have accents, but not the parts close to Michigan. Your average Southern Ontarian speaks newscaster American, or so it seems to me

Beg to differ greatly. Every single person who speaks does so with an accent. There is not "platonic ideal" version of English from which people's speech differs by degrees of accent. One tends not to "hear" the accent that is quite similar to one's own. But we all speak with accent.

Maybe I'm just bad at accents?

That would be my guess.

There is a difference in the accents between people who live around Windsor (Ontario) and people from Toronto. There are different accents within Toronto. People in Windsor speak, by and large, with quite a different accent that do those in Detroit just across the river.

BTW, many American newscasters speak with an Ontario accent because a) they are actually from Ontario* or b) they learned to use that accent because it doesn't register to American ears as a regional accent (and therefore is more acceptable across the board.)

*Peter Jennings, long time ABC newsanchor was born in Toronto. He worked in Canadian journalism until he was hired away by an American network.

John D. Roberts, now on Fox was CNN's morning co-anchor. Not only was he born in Toronto but he was for many years (under the name JD Roberts) one of the vjs on Much Music (Canada's version of MTV).

Robert McNeil of the long running McNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS was born in Montreal, raised in Halifax, went to boarding school in Upper Canada College (Ontario) and graduated from Carleton (Ottawa).

Morley Safer was born in Toronto and educated in Ontario.

[Ross]

August strikes me as a weird time to be celebrating *anything*; in this part of the world, it is the month when nature is most blatantly trying to torture and kill us

Good reason to celebrate its continuing failure. A celebration of "Fuck you, August! I'm still here!"

Two weeks ago, there was a day when the high temperature was 102 with a heat index of 139. At 7 PM, I thought it had been raining because the driveway was wet. I was mistaken; the driveway was damp because the dew point was 97. It was literally so humid that a stiff breeze could knock the water out of the air.

Yesterday, though it was cooler and less humid, there was a 10 minute rainstorm which left the asphalt of my street steaming for an hour afterward.

I will resist the urge to attribute this to global warming, because I know that weather != climate and just because the correlation exists this time, it's no more right for me to do it now than for Fox to do it the other way when it snows a lot in the winter.

[aravind]

I'm not going to even try and play weather oppression olympics, because we're having an unusually cool summer out here.

I will say, I'm leaning towards a more Imbolc-style Lammas (sorry, I can't even try and spell it the archaic way) since it's basically our dead season. I'm off to add some more trimmings to the compost, which is now dry as a bone, while staring at our tomatoes, which are now shriveling into nothing. It's definitely a more Imbolc-type time to reflect on death and rebirth (although, like all high holidays, Lammas too has a bit of that it seems). Our harvest is over, and it's our down-season, when the earth rests.

[Lonespark]

Isn't Lammas the right way to spell it, Anglo-Saxonly speaking? Heathens celebrate Lammas, not...that Celtic thing...

[J. Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

Lonespark:

It's not. the Old English/Anglo-Saxon spelling is hlāfmæsse. Lammas is the Middle English spelling.

[Lonespark]

Middle English. Well, yeah, I knew what it was based on, which is what I was getting at, but I mucked it up and probably misunderstood aravind to boot.

[aravind]

I think I'm pretty much as in the dark as anyone here. I thought Lammas (and... celtic thing that will remain unmisspelled for now) originated as harvest celebrations in the British Isles (ostensibly in pre-Roman times, but definitely pre-Christianity), but were appropriated by Christians into a more secular harvest festival? Maybe I'm making all of that up though...

[J. Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

I can only speak for the name, but I'm willing to bet anything that the selection of it (loaf-mass) by the Early Church if/when it was a appropriated was a conscious choice to invoke Christ's "breaking of the bread" in the gospels, which fit rather nicely into the whole "pre-harvesty" feel of it all.

[aravind]

Ah, I think I can clarify now that I've reread the exchange - Lughnasadh is theoretically more archaic than Lammas, since Lughnasadh is Old Irish (6th to 10th Centuries) and Lammas is Middle English (11th to 15th Centuries). That's why I tried to obliquely refer to Lughnasadh as "the archaic way" of referring to these festivals. That said, Lonespark is right in that Lughnasadh was the Celtic-y-er one.

Since all of this is now confusing me and I've now memorized how to Lughnasadh but still can't quite say it (I'm learning Welsh not this impish Irish Gaelic!) I'm going to triangulate between modernization and perhaps slight appropriation of Celtic terminology and refer to all modern celebrations of this holiday in shorthand as permutations on Lúnasa, and ignore the fact that that translates as August as easily as Main Summer Festival.

[Literata]

I'm trending towards the modern spelling as well.

I'd love to learn more about historical and contemporary Irish Gaelic, but sadly that's so far down my priorities list right now that it's not even visible from here. Anybody here who knows more about it and wants to suggest revisions to the Wiccan usages I've adopted, please do.

[Will Wildman]

"...Used at end of sentences with the expectation of receiving an affirmative response or as another word for "huh."..."

It's misinformation like this that will allow us to use 'eh' as a shibboleth when the US next tries to invade. I am pleased to see that CSIS has thought ahead and engaged wikipedia as a resource. (Or Yoopers just use 'eh' differently.)

[Will Wildman]

Hm. That last post was supposed to start with

Used at end of sentences with the expectation of receiving an affirmative response or as another word for "huh."

It was there but there was a small coding typo that we have fixed.

[Mmy]

@Will Wildman: It's misinformation like this that will allow us to use 'eh' as a shibboleth when the US next tries to invade.

Quoted for truth. Lots of it.

Canadians do say "eh." (Noticed it a lot when I was living in the US and was back in Canada.) What we don't do is simply put "eh" at the end of sentences or instead of "huh."

Unless, of course, the Canadians involved are comedians who are taking the mickey out of Americans by doing a sketch in which Canadians talk the way Americans stereotype them -- which is just another Canadian way of making fun of Americans.

The rules as to when a Canadian says "eh" vary by region, age and formality/informality of the situation. I would love to see a really good analysis of it done. Although, of course, we would never allow it to be published because one of the ways we can detect non-Canadians wishing to pass themselves off as Canadian is to listen for their failed attempts to use the word "eh" as we would.

BTW, you made a small typo in the coding of the your first comment on this subject -- I fixed it as a slackmod.

[Brin]

Will: when the US next tries to invade.

*waves* We're already invading. It's just not the government that's doing it.
Personally, I'm already planning how to fake Canadian when the time comes. It involves giving up on that excuse for communication called speech, a laptop, a notebook, and telling people I was born in Stratford but not which. Mwahahahaha!

[J. Enigma (the Transhumanist)]

(Or Yoopers just use 'eh' differently.)

This. Yoopers are strange little people with their swampers and their choppers and their Rusty Chevrolets. I'm told it's better than being a troll because they've had a bearable summer up there this year. I disagree. I'm proud to live under the Mackinac Bridge.

On a partially unrelated note: I had a friend who thought that the best thing Yoopers ever gave us was Euchre. I'm still not sure why he thought Cornwall was in the U.P., but hey, we don't question these things.

Re Irish Gaelic
I'm slightly more familiar with Irish Gaelic than I am with other Celtic Languages, and by that I man not remotely familiar, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway: LOOH-NAS-SEE. I base this entirely off the pronounciation of "sidhe" (shee) and a couple of Irish names, including my favorite Irish name, Niamh.

[Lonespark]

Whoever gave us Euchre deserves hearty thanks.

[Literata]

I appreciate the attempt, J, but the vowel in the end is "a", not "e", as in "sidhe," so that part and the modernized spelling I'm pretty confident about.

On the other hand, LitSpouse was convulsed in giggles the first time I said something about the god Lu (Lugh), because it sounded to him like "somebody's Uncle Lou, hey, Louiee!" complete with bad Italian accent.

[Laiima]

re: Irish Gaelic, finally something I know something about!

Before Literata's post, I always spelled this festival Lughnasa, which I believe is the modern Irish spelling.

Sometime around the 1920s, the Irish people modernized their alphabet, and either removed or simplified the spellings of various diphthongs that are so odd-looking to people used to English spellings. So when they did that, they took away the "dh" at the end of Lughnasa, because it was silent anyway.

If I remember my old Irish correctly, "dh" has a sound only when it's in the middle of a word, not at the end or the beginning. And the sound it has is a hard 'g'.

When I was looking to change my surname, I used an old Irish dictionary (pre-1920) that I found in a library, because I liked the old diphthongs: I liked that most people would have no idea how to pronounce them, but I also liked that they *look* Irish.

Both my first name and my last name are long. Before I changed my names, they were 19 letters plus one space in between. That is already too long for many official capacities, so I decided to limit my new surname to 10 letters. However the surname I developed, including all the right meanings, was 13 letters. I was already changing the spelling of my first name to add a letter, so I didn't have any wiggle room. What I decided to do was drop three letters in the middle of the surname, but keep part of the pronunciation they would've had. Making them "seen and unseen".

So the 'fiadhi-' part of Fiadhiglas is pronounced as if it were "fiadhaidh", which is "fee-uh-GAY".

Two hard g's in close proximity didn't sound good, so I dropped the sound of the second 'g', the one in -glas. So altogether it's "fee-uh-GAY-liss".

It sounds Irish, and it looks Irish, but unless you are Irish, you have no idea how to pronounce it until I tell you. I like that. :)

[Ross]

The 'eh' thing reminds me of the late 80s-early 90s UK children's game show 'Knightmare', which was aired in the US on Nickelodeon.

The game was notoriously hard, and from watching it, it seems like half the difficulty was that if you were a british schoolboy of the late 80s-early 90s, you were physically incapable of saying an imperative sentence without concluding it with ", right?". The game format consisted of one player with his eyes covered, navigating a greenscreen maze while the others shouted instructions. About 90% of the time, the game ended in failure like this:

"Go left, right?"
"You want me to go right?"
"No, left, right?"
"So left?"
"Left, right."
"Okay, going right."
"Stop, right?"
"Aieee!"

[The Board Administration Team]

NEWS FLASH

Fred has just posted (Waiting Room) that he is the waiting room of the hospital waiting for news of the latest tests on his wife.

The very good doctors here say it’s probably nothing. The easy, uncomplicated tests let them rule out most of the Big Scary Possibilities and they say I’ll likely be able to take my wife home tomorrow with a clean bill of health. But that “probably” is enough of a worry that they wanted to do one more test to rule out the last of the BSPs.

[Literata]

Laiima, that's interesting. You went for a much more interesting approach than I did when changing your name.

Praying for Slacktivixen and Fred.

[Izzy]

@Will: I lack the energy to invade, but...y'know, if you know of any Canadians interested in a marriage of convenience with a small and bitchy romance author...

...well, I do dishes and laundry, and I hear I make a decent pork chop.

I mean, I still have a job and all. But CNN is looking Ominous.