We are today (21st December 2022) at the darkest part of the year for the Northern Hemisphere: the winter solstice. The shadows are long and the golden days of Summer seem a long time ago. Now is the perfect time to push your stool a little closer to the fire, and warm your hands on a mug of tea the colour of creosote. Beatrice Groves, Research Lecturer and tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, and author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, has written a Hogwarts Professor Guest Post: The Winter Solstice and Beira, Queen of Winter.
The Winter Solstice and Beira, Queen of Winter
Today is the shortest day of the year, the day when – according to Scottish legend (as retold by Donald A. Mackenzie in his Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend [1917] – Beira, Queen of Winter, sits waiting beside the Well of Youth. The Well’s waters will be at their most powerful on the dawn of the first lengthening day, and so she waits all night to be first to taste them:
The waters of the Well of Youth are most potent when the days begin to grow longer, and most potent of all on the first of the lengthening days of spring. Beira always visited the island on the night before the first lengthening day–that is, on the last night of her reign as Queen of Winter. All alone in the darkness she sat beside the Well of Youth, waiting for the dawn. When the first faint beam of light appeared in the/ eastern sky, she drank the water as it bubbled fresh from a crevice in the rock. It was necessary that she should drink of this magic water before any bird visited the well and before any dog barked. If a bird drank first, or a dog barked ere she began to drink, dark old Beira would crumble into dust. (Mackenzie, Wonder Tales, 23-24)
JK Rowling opened Beira’s Place in Scotland in the depths of winter and the name is apposite for both the timing & location, as well as for the sense in which the women who seek shelter there will be enduring a harsh period in their own lives. If Harry Potter has taught us anything, however, it is that Rowling does not choose names lightly, and ‘Beira’ embodies not simply winteriness but female strength and endurance. Beira is the ‘fierce Queen of Winter’ – a version of the Divine Hag and a feminine embodiment of the wilderness – but she is also a goddess of renewal. She drinks from the Well of Youth as the year turns and survives, and thrives, another year:
As soon as Beira tasted the magic water, in silence and alone, she began to grow young again. She left the island and, returning to Scotland, fell into a magic sleep. When, at length, she awoke, in bright sunshine, she rose up as a beautiful girl with long hair yellow as buds of broom, cheeks red as rowan berries, and blue eyes that sparkled like the summer sea in sunshine. Then she went to and fro through Scotland, clad in a robe of green and crowned with a chaplet of bright flowers of many hues. (Mackenzie, Wonder Tales, 24)
Beira is, therefore, a brilliant choice of name, encapsulating as it does both the power of endurance and the promise of renewal.
It is a name which fits particularly well with one of the names in Harry Potter, for Rowling likewise chose the name of a Celtic goddess as the patroness of a rather different establishment: Rosmerta’s place aka The Three Broomsticks. In one of my favourite early Potter-jottings Rowling notes ‘Rosmerta “Good purveyor”’ – providing evidence for her fascination with the etymology of names.
Rosmerta takes her moniker from the Celtic goddess of abundance – “‘ro-’ is an intensifying prefix, ‘smert-’ means ‘looking after, providing’” – and her name evokes not only her job as a provider of food and drink but also her warm, open nature.
Another aspect of Beira’s story resonates with another of Rowling’s Celtic names – that of her hero Cormoran Strike. As Christian Fisher notes Cormoran is a Cornish, mountain-dwelling giant: ‘didn’t he live in St Michael’s Mount, the giant Cormoran?’ (Silkworm, 29). Cormoran’s story derives from explanatory myths about the Cornish landscape and Beira, likewise, is a shaper of landscape – a creator of lochs, looser of rivers and a builder of mountains. When she sits on Ben Nevis as her throne, she seems connected with larger myths and the numinous power with which religions throughout the world have perceived in mountains, but at other times she seems to derive from the local topography like Cormoran: ‘all the hills in Ross-shire are said to have been made by Beira’ (Mackenzie, Wonder Tales, 27). In folklore studies this is known as a ‘geotechtonic role’ and it may well be the oldest aspect of her legend (in Scotland she is associated more with mountains, in Ireland with rivers – it is even possible that the rivers of the Shannon and the Boyne are named after her Irish incarnation, Cailleach Bhéarra).
In particular, just like Cormoran living within St Michel’s Mount, Beira builds Scottish mountains as homes for her sons:
Beira set herself to build the mountains of Scotland… One of the reasons why Beira made the mountains was to use them as stepping stones; another was to provide houses for her giant sons. Many of her sons were very quarrelsome; they fought continually one against another. To punish those of them who disobeyed her, Beira shut the offenders up in mountain houses, and from these they could not escape without her permission. But this did not keep them from fighting. Every morning they climbed to the tops of their mountain houses and threw great boulders at one another. That is why so many big grey boulders now lie on steep slopes and are scattered through the valleys. (Mackenzie, Wonder Tales, 28)
Cormoran – like Beira’s sons – is a belligerent mountain-dwelling giant, although he is bested, as Strike mentions in Silkworm, by Jack ‘of beanstalk fame’ (29). A story published in Glasgow a hundred years before Mackenzie’s Wonder Tales – Jack the Giant-Killer; being the History of all His Wonderful Exploits Against the Giants (1820) – tells of how:
In the reign of King Arthur, there lived near the Land’s-end of England, a worthy farmer, who had an only son, named Jack… In those days there lived on St. Michael’s Mount of Cornwall, which rises out of the sea, at some distance from the main land, a huge giant. He was eighteen feet high, and three yards round; and his fierce and savage looks were the terror of all his neighbours.
The use of folktales – such as Beira’s or Cormoran’s – to explain geographical features is at once a universal aspect of myth, and something that ties those stories intimately to specific regions. Jack o’ Kent, for example (a folkloric bogeyman after whom one of the characters in Lethal White is named) is a Welsh version of the same character type as the Cornish Jack – though he goes one further as it is the devil, rather than a giant, whom he regularly bests. Jack o’ Kent hails from Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, and – just as with Cormoran and Beira’s myths – his legends are origin stories for local geological formations:
Jack is said to have bet the Devil that the Sugar Loaf Mountain was higher than the Malvern Hills. When Jack proved the Devil wrong, the Devil tried to put more soil on top of the Malvern Hills, but his carrier broke and dropped at the end of the island forming a lump.
The cleft in the western part of Skirrid is said to have been caused by Jack’s heel as he jumped onto it from the Sugar Loaf Mountain.
The standing stones at Trelleck are said to have been thrown there by Jack, the result of a stone-throwing competition held on Trelleck Beacon between him and the Devil.
Beira, Cormoran and Jack o’ Kent are all Celtic legends to which Rowling has referred in her post-Potter work – but I think all three have some overlap with aspects of Harry Potter suggesting that they may have been myths that have been part of Rowling’s imaginative furniture for a while.
Firstly, one of the Jack o’ Kent stories connects with the most folkloric moment in Harry Potter: ‘The Tale of the Three Brothers.’ As I’ve discussed in detail in Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, this evocative story draws mainly on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. But there is an aspect of a traditional trickster tale underlying it likewise – in which the trickster bests the supernatural force – something which is not present in Chaucer’s story. In ‘The Tale of the Three Brothers’ Death feels ‘cheated out of three new victims’ (Deathly Hallows, Chap 21) when they use their magical skill to build a bridge, but the youngest brother also cheats him a second time, having sufficient skill to outwit Death’s own tricksy gifts. Jack o’ Kent (like Ignotus Peverell) is sometimes said to be wizard, and he likewise beats ‘Death’ (or, in his case the Devil) who expects to kill him after they have made a deal about building a bridge: ‘Jack asks the Devil to help him build a bridge, promising him the first soul that crosses it. They build the bridge and then Jack tosses a bone over the bridge and a hungry dog runs across’. Ignotus, like Jack builds a bridge in despite of Death and outwits Death of the soul he thought he was owed.
The Cornish trickster figure of Jack likewise runs rings round much stronger opponents – and one of his stories has particularly Potterish overtones. Jack lies to a three-headed giant, telling him that a vast army is coming and so tricks the giant into allowing Jack to lock the giant in the giant’s own cellar (during which time Jack carouses to his heart’s content and steals all the giant’s food). The giant is so grateful for his escape that he asks Jack to take anything he desires – and Jack tells him that he wants nothing in recompense but the old coat and cap, rusty sword and slippers hanging by his bed. The giant tells him: ‘the coat will keep you invisible; the cap will give you knowledge; the sword cut through any thing; and the shoes are of vast swiftness.’ Jack attacks the next giant he meets while wearing this invisibility coat, and the violent farce that results has some of the same slapstick comedy as Harry throwing mud at Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle while under the invisibility cloak: ‘[the giant] could not see who had given him the blow; yet he took up his iron club, and began to lay about him like mad with pain and fury’ (Jack the Giant-Killer, 20).
The coat of invisibility has the clearest connection with Harry Potter but a number of the magical objects Jack receives from the giant have a particular affinity with Rowling’s Horcruxes and Hallows – her most important magical objects. There is not only a coat which bestows invisibility, but also an unbeatable sword (like the unbeatable wand) and a cap that conveys knowledge (just as the Diadem of Ravenclaw, a headdress which ‘bestows wisdom’ [Deathly Hallows, 495]). Three-quarters of Jack’s fabulous objects, in fact, recall the magical objects at the centre of Harry Potter.
Rowling has cited a number of traditional mythic and literary sources for her Hallows and Horcruxes, such as the late medieval Welsh tradition of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain and the medieval Irish myth of the Four Jewels. There is an interesting overlap here because the invisibility cloak in the Thirteen Treasures of Britain is likewise a Cornish treasure: the Cornish Mantle of Arthur. And the Cornish folk tale of Jack the Giant Killer has, likewise, been infolded into an Arthurian narrative. Jack uses his coat of invisibility to save a lady who then marries King Arthur’s son and Arthur, in gratitude, makes Jack ‘a knight of the round table’ (Jack the Giant-Killer, 18). It seems possible that the Cornish Mantle of Arthur and Jack’s coat of invisibility have a common folk ancestry – and either way it seems likely that Harry’s invisibility cloak has a Cornish ancestry.
I am always interested in finding possible new literary sources – such as Jack the Giant Killer – for Rowling’s work and her recent reference to Beira makes it plausible that she is aware of Mackenzie’s Wonder Tales. (Certainly there seems little else easily available on Beira – I’d be interested if any Hogwarts Professor readers had a prior knowledge of her!). Her choice of Beira also strengthens evidence, already present in her writing, that she is interested in Celtic mythology. It is also evocative for the possible use of the symbolism of the winter solstice in Harry Potter – a topic I shall cover in the future – for this is an important day in Beira’s story. It is turn of the year from shortening to lengthening days when Beira ‘renews her youth, so that she may live through the summer and autumn and begin to reign once again’ (Mackenzie, Wonder Tales, 31).
All of Dr Groves’ on line Rowling scholarship can be found in the Beatrice Groves Pillar Post.
A wonderful read for a grey morning. Thank-you.
What a delightful surprise — a link between the Hogwarts Saga and the Cormoran Strike novels in the Jack the Giant Killer’s four stolen objects and the Deathly Hallows, something found in a book that details the Beira myth!
It would be hard to overstate the importance of this find, especially in light of the presence of Strike’s favorite nephew Jack in the first and fourth books and Lethal White’s Jack o’ Kent. Just as the Deathly Hallows are the point of the seventh book in the Potter series, I think, even if the seventh Strike novel may not be the conclusion of the series, we have to expect because of the seven book ring structure and correspondence with her first series that Strike7 will feature Jack and other elements of the Cornish mythology Prof Groves details here.
Another landmark discovery from our friend Over There! Thank you for sharing this find here at HogwartsProfessor.
Thank you Sue! So glad you enjoyed it.
And thank you John! Delighted by your response. And agreed, I’ll be looking out for Jack’s return in Book 7.
And also perhaps a reversal of Jack/Cormoran myth in the use of the original giant-killing story (which we had the slightest of echoes of in John’s murder of his brother in Cuckoo’s calling) reappearing for Strike’s tricking and capturing of the ‘giant’ (in this case the ‘big bad’ of the story: Leda’s killer). I’d like to see a classic trickster act by Strike – of the kind the murderer pulled on Robin in Book 4 – played by Strike to trap Leda’s murderer. I, too, was expecting this in Book 7, but it also seems possible that we may be looking at a stretching out of the second half of the series as the original 7 book structure becomes 10 – and so the big reveal of Leda’s murderer (and Strike & Robin’s wedding?) will not happen till then. I am still expecting a Strike & Robin kiss and some crucial info from Rokeby about Leda’s death in 7 even if things are not resolved….
Prof. Groves,
More than well done. This has to be something of a great masterclass in close reading. Thank you also for bringing up “The Tales of Beedle the Bard”. If I’m being honest, all this talk of Beira makes me wonder if Rowling might one day turn her hand to another Yuletide fable. I don’t mean a sequel to “The Christmas Pig”, but rather another standalone novel, this time centered around the mythical goddess figure herself.
It is even possible to kind of map a rough outline for what the plot of such a book could be. All Ms. Rowling would have to do is to take the “Beedle” tale of “The Fountain of Fair Fortune” and expand it to a reasonable book-length. Some of the narrative details might have to be re-written to accommodate the nature of the myth, however even this shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. That’s because of the remarkable number of parallels that are already there (to my thinking, anyway) between the “Beedle Fountain” story, and the legend of Beira’s Well. It would all be within Rowling’s narrative wheelhouse.
Aside from all this errant Holiday wish fulfillment, I would be curious to know of any other thematic parallels there might be between the Beira myth and the Fair Fountain Fable. Great work, all the same. And thanks for this generous seasonal offering.
Thank you for this Chris – so pleased you enjoyed it! And yes, I thought I should probably stop there (as I was at the magic three!), but I also thought there might be more work to be done with Beedle – I’d love to see what you can come up with the Fountain of Fair Fortune!
I suppose that (consciously) Beedle is a response to rather later stories (in which gender roles are rather differently fixed than they are in these older myths) but the form of Beedle fits so well with these kind of stories that its likely they are influencing her – wittingly or un!
Thank you again for your kind comment – I love to hear people have enjoyed reading!
Prof. Groves,
After giving it some thought, the best way I can describe this recourse to the myth of Beira is that it amounts to has to be called the latest stage of development, or expansion upon a familiar literary image, or topos in the writer’s repertoire. It helps if a bit of historical charting is done here. Rowling’s use of well imagery has been discussed on this site before. This includes how she grew up in a house with the remains of medieval well in it. This appears to have been the inspiration point for all the uses she’s made of it in her fiction. Its appearances include the trap door in “Philosopher’s Stone” and quite possibly (per your own guess, professor) the tunnel that leads to the chamber of secrets. And now the clearest use that Rowling makes of the well image (at least what I can recall from plain memory) is that of the Archer Well in “Troubled Blood”. And Beira’s myth brings it up to a quadrivial number.
Now, the place of the “Fountain of Fair Fortune” in all this is interesting. A fountain is obviously not the same thing as a well, whether in fiction or real life. Yet it does seem as if the writer is drawing on at least aspects of her “Beedle” story when it comes to crafting her latest real-life narrative. It wouldn’t surprise me, for instance, to learn that the Beira legend from the book of Scottish folklore has acted as part of the compost heap that she drew on to fashion the story of the Knight and Three Witches. In other words, it sounds like the author has taken a folklore trope, and put her own, initial spin on it.
The key difference, of course, is that in the “Fortune” story, the characters don’t really need an enchanted water source to help solve their problems, because it’s moral, and hence its narrative purpose, appears to have been summed up by Travis Prinzi long ago, when he quoted a saying by Plutarch: “What we achieve inwardly will change our reality”. The source for the quote is here:
https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/the-esoteric-meaning-of-fountain-of-fair-fortune/
If we’re going with the theory that the Beira myth is the unspoken inspiration for the “Fountain” story, then it means that Rowling’s latest iteration in her use of the Well trope finds the writer doing an almost about-face. Once more, we find her using the image of a woman hunting down a magical water source in order to cure her ills. This time, however, instead of the goal being an empty McGuffin vessel, it is left as the real deal. The water source now goes back to its older symbology, that being an external source of strength that is needed to recall the main character to life. This could be a significant development in Rowling’s use of the trope. It could be the vaguest hint that she’s gone back to the metaphorical well because of where her mind, and hence, a lot of her imagination is at the present moment in time. And her use of Beira and her trials could be meant to serve as a reflection on all of this.
Just recently, I’ve managed to run across an interview the author gave with an online journalist named Suzanne Moore. In it, she goes into a bit more detail about why she has chosen to set up the Beira Women’s Shelter. What strikes a longtime reader about the piece is her candid admission about how much her thinking has changed, at least on topics related to feminism and her ongoing theme of the abuse against women. The key quote in that interview, I’d argue, is where she says that she originally envisioned a future that would be easier for her daughters than it was for her, and instead, none of that has come to pass. Rather than things getting easier, she believes they have gotten worse. There’s been a step back, rather than forward, and all of it is what prompted her latest use of the Beira myth.
The second most interesting takeaway from the conversation is the timeline the writer gives the close reader for how long her thoughts on the matter have been gestating. Rowling claims she started giving these problems a lot of thought for about ten years now. That would mean she started re-evaluating the nature of women’s rights at about 2012, around the time she was composing “The Casual Vacancy”, this would have been. It means her reconsideration about questions of gender and relations between the sexes would have started some time before the inspiration point that led to the creation of Cormoran Strike, and the depiction of the plight of women as detailed in all of those books. What this says to me is that it’s not out of court to believe that Rowling started to notice how things just weren’t really working out the way she’d hoped back in 2008, when she published “Beedle the Bard”.
My theory going forward is that not long after her “Fountain” story, she began to notice how nothing was really improving on a front that mattered a lot to her, and the worst of it was that even the feminist aspects of things that she originally considered to be an ally was instead taking a lot of backward steps as well. This, in turn, might have served as part of the inspiration for the content of “Casual Vacancy”. It would mean that book is the first, unsung, opening salvo in the author’s current literary transfiguration. What this could mean is that she has given a longer time of thought to how she presents herself to the public now than has been previously realized. It may also mean that she has had time to reassess one of the other key ideas hidden behind “The Fountain of Fair Fortune”, especially in relation to its inspirational source material. It could be that this “Beedle” tale was the work of a woman with a greater sense of confidence in the future of her gender. Beira’s Place, meanwhile, is the work of a woman who has seen a lot of the hopes expressed in the earlier “Fountain” story turned into broken fragment scattered on the shoreline, to borrow an Eliotic phrase.
Therefore, all she can do is to gather those scattered fragments and try and use them as both a bulwark, and foundation on which to try and start all over again, at least in terms of women’s rights. In doing so, the author appears to be going back to basics with her use of the enchanted water source. Rather than being empty, she now treats it in its original, Mythopoeic context, as a life-giving source from which all, yet especially women, need to draw on. In this light, Rowling’s use of the enchanted well/fountain/stream/ or water source image has more or less returned to where it started, this time with an added emphasis. It becomes, if you will, a plea (or perhaps a flat-out prayer) to the Maker (perhaps even Our Lady?) of the Well to provide a better shelter for women. In other terms, Rowling appears to have reached a point at which the idea of asking the world’s Father to both remember and help out the mothers, daughters, and sisters who are victims in the world is not out of court.
I’ll admit that’s a hell of a lot to unpack from just a simple usage or history of just a single literary image, and yet I’m willing to bet a lot of this has grounds for consideration, both on and off the page. Just for the record, the interview with Suzanne Moore can be found in the link provided below:
https://suzannemoore.substack.com/p/an-exclusive-interview-with-jk-rowling
At this late date, I’m beginning to think it’s best if an expert like Dr. Louise Freeman took over. She’s bound to know at least more about this subject matter than someone like me, that’s for certain.
Many thanks for this Chris! I really like the idea of going back to an earlier myth as a psychological regrouping from the optimistic reading of the Fountain of Fair Fortune. I have written a bit about medieval fountains in my forthcoming piece for Lana Whited’s collection The Ivory Tower, Harry Potter, and Beyond – and I like the idea that Beira is a return to those efficacious fountains of romance (which I’m sure will have turned up in Rowling’s French degree).
Incidentally, I think it is Otto Rank rather than Plutarch who originally said that now-famous saying. When writing Literary Allusion in HP I thought it didn’t sound very Plutarchan and after classicist friends had failed to find it, I asked the wonderful resource ‘Quote Investigator’ – who note the source of the original confusion, and in doing so note that John Granger found it first in 2008!
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/14/inward/#more-15043