Solstice

SOLSTICE, I had always thought, was in some way related to the word solace – linguistically one imagines their sol-’s to be the same, both words orbiting the same solar root. Like so much amateur etymology my intuition in this case has been informed by nothing more than a kind-of apophenic mysticism – an image (if not an experience) of the sense of assurance which arrives with a regular solar event, brought about by some basic pattern recognition (for example, the two words sound the same). However, like so much amateur or ‘folk-etymology’, this connection is a misconception, paronomasic. It transpires – etymologically speaking – that solstice and solace have nothing to do with one another: the latter derived from the hypothesised PIE root *selh, giving the Latin sōlor, meaning ‘to console’ or ‘to sooth’; and the former, from the Proto-Italic *s(u)wōl, giving sōl or ‘sun’. In other words: two systems, not one.

To further my amateurish credentials, it appears such intuition could not, in fact, have been further from the truth. For, in what appears to be a rather brief moment during the 1600’s (one which resonates with the interplanetary discoveries of Kepler and Galileo), solstice came to signify not so much a caesura (a pause) as a ‘turning point’, a ‘furthest limit’; indeed, a ‘crisis’. In his 1638 book, The Discovery of a New World, the bishop and natural philosopher John Wilkins argues: ‘tis probable there may be another habitable World in the Moone’, part of a broader treatise supporting the Copernican work of Johann Kepler and Galileo Galilei. In doing so – as part of his proposition that there may be some ‘means of conveyance’ to this world – he writes:

…if we do but Conſider by what Steps and Leaſure all Arts do uſually riſe to their Growth; we ſhall have no cauſe to Doubt why this alſo may not hereafter be found out amongſt other Secrets. [...] Time, who hath always been the Father of new Truths, and hath revealed unto us many things which our Anceſtors were Ignorant of, will alſo Manifeſt to our Poſterity, that which we now deſire, but cannot know. [...] Time will come, when the Indeavours of after Ages ſhall bring ſuch things to Light as now lie hid in Obſcurity. Arts are not yet come to their Solſtice.

Here we see the commingling of two teleologies – that of the Bishop and the astronaut – presaging the enlightened manner in which Truths are understood to reveal themselves not so much through God as Time itself. Arts here does not, of course, mean just the ‘fine arts’ but also those of astronomy, telescopy, rocketry, philosophy, &c – and their ‘Solſtice’ a kind of culmination, a climax. 1969. The moon!

In more standard uses however, solstice has always meant the midway between the two equinoxes, the point at which the sun – in summer at least – appears to stand still in the sky. Derived from the aforementioned sōl we therefore have the Latin sōlstitium, where sōl = sun, and sistō= ‘to stand’. And from this we see solstice in Old French (a ‘learned borrowing’ from Latin) and later Middle English (sometimes styled as solsticium). One of the earliest recorded uses of the term in Middle English can be found in The Middle English Genesis and Exodus, an anonymous English vernacular poem written around 1250 in Norfolk, in which we read:

ðe mones ligt is moneð met, ðor-after iſ ðe ſunne ſet; In geuelengðhe worn it mad, In Reke-fille, on ſunder ſhad; Two geuelengðhes timen her, And two ſolſtices in ðe ger.

[The moon's light is measured in a month, After which the sun sets; At the equinoxes it is made warm, In the constellation Aries, on a separate shadow; Two equinoxes occur here, And two solstices in the year.]

However, through some kind of (cosmic?) happenstance sōlstitium also mimics very closely the Old English (OE) word for solstice, in its case being sunnstede – made up from sunne (the OE word for ‘sun’) and stede (meaning ‘place’). Here we see uses emerge from the work of Byrhtferth a priest and monk who lived at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire at the turn of first millennium:

On xii kalendas Iulius byð sunstede, þæt ys on Lyden solstitium and on Englisc midsumor. On 20 June is the sunstead, which in Latin is called solstice and in English midsummer.

And yet, maybe neither of these words are needed to – or possibly could – capture the full spectacle of the event itself. Here we read another famous Anglo-saxon poem, The Menologium, also known as the Old English Metrical Calendar, composed in the late 10th-century:

Þænne monað bringð ymb twa and feower tiida lange ærra Liða us to tune, Iunius on geard, on þam gim astihð on heofenas up hyhst on geare, tungla torhtust, and of tille agrynt, to sete sigeð. Wyle syððan leng grund behealdan and gangan lator ofer foldan wang fægerust leohta, woruldgesceafta. Þænne wuldres þegn ymb þreotyne, þeodnes dyrling, Iohannes in geardagan wearð acenned, tyn nihtum eac; we þa tiid healdað on midne sumor mycles on æþelum.

Which tranlsates into Modern English roughly:

Then after two and four long days the month brings ærra Liða to town for us, June into the dwellings, in which the jewel climbs up highest in the year into the heavens, brightest of stars, and descends from its place, sinking to its setting. It likes then to gaze longer upon the earth, the fairest of lights to move more slowly across the fields of the world, the created globe. Then after thirteen and ten nights the thegn of glory, the Prince's darling, John, was born in days of old; we keep that feast at Midsummer, with great honour.

… and I suppose I can at least take some solace in that.