Walpurgisnacht 2012

Here's hoping everyone had a wonderful Walpurgisnacht/ Freyjablot/ Frowe's Night! Hail the Lady of Cats! Hail the Mistress of Seiðr! Hail Vanadís! Hail Freyja!

Hearth Cooking: An Ancient Cooking Technique Revisited

National Park Service

As this is the time when some honor the Hearth Wights and Goddesses, this seemed an appropriate link to post.

"Hearth cooking is an ancient and wonderful craft. It is the craft that stands at the center of European cuisine. With few exceptions, all recipes that originated in Europe were first created on an open hearth and only adapted comparatively recently to the modern kitchen."

Read more at Mother Earth News.

Lady of the Elves: The Great Germanic Goddess

Frau Holle, or Berchta, and her train.
Harper's New Monthly, December 1873,
artist unknown. Wikimedia  Commons.

Courtesy of Medievalists.net:

"The prominent goddess of Europe was known in Germany as Berchta and Holda, who appear as goddesses of the bright and the gloomy. These pairings might be represented as Berchta and Holda, Frigg and Hel, and Freyia and Hyndla. The bright goddess arose as a goddess of the sun and sky and the gloomy one appeared as representative of the earth and underworld, but with Berchta and Holda they encompass both aspects and were largely interchangeable. She received the souls of the dead who rode along the path of the Milky Way in a wagon to the underworld. As ‘lady of the elves’ or ‘queen of the fairies’ the huldren, elves, and dwarfs, thought to be spirits of the dead, would appear with her on earth from time to time."  The full article by Timothy J. Stephany may be read on the Rochester Institute of Technology's website.