These having been witnessed in UK this winter, have the Northern Lights ever become part of folklore, tales or song here - or indeed anywhere else.... (Even of 'Hark the Herald angels,' sort.) And what of weeks of rain and floods? Hereabouts, occasional flooding is reflected in place names - this, of course, being ignored when planning permission allows building.

I'm sorry.

As, indeed you should be.

The Aurora Borealis figures in various folk cycles, the vast majority of these from amongst people who live far north enough to see it regularly. The Saami or Lapp people who live in Northern Scandinavia believed the lights to be the souls of the dead and culturally awarded them great respect. It was considered unlucky and even socially contemptible to behave frivolously or disrespectfully in their presence. Likewise the Algonquin tribes in North America associated them with a fire lit by a creator to reassure them that they were loved and looked after. Further south on both continents the folklore becomes less reverential and more fairy-taleish. In Finland children were told that they were caused by a "fire-fox" whose tail as it brushed through the snow made these magical sparks. In Norway it was said that they were old women dancing (magic women, not earthly ones with very high heels) and this concept is paralleled in Northern Scotland where they are also sometimes called "merry dancers" (making ferval's contribution a little relevant actually).

The most poignant folklore variation comes from Eastern Greenland where Eskimos attributed them to the souls of infants who died at birth, dancing in their spiritual freedom and innocent ecstacy. Other Eskimo peoples however more conventionally assigned them to animal spirits or dead relatives of any age. All associated them though with the activity of dancing.

Pliny the Elder reported that it was believed they were fallen warriors battling in the heavens, though it is unsure whether he was indirectly citing Germanic traditions as reported at the time or was harking back to Greek references which also associate them with heavenly warfare (probably also having received reports from Northern Europe). In North America the Wisconsin-based Meskwaki tribes took this one stage further and reckoned they were enemy slain coming to wreak revenge on them, which probably explains more about Meskwaki guilty consciences due to past misdemeanours than it does about their religious beliefs.

I have never found them to be regarded as a portent or precursor to something bad that later happened (even the Meskwaki never got stuffed in the end by their slain enemies - it was the French what done for them in the end).

Interesting, thank you. How far south have been or could the Northern lights be witnessed? My google search was unhelpful.
(and my verb use/word order needs sorting too)

What's interesting is how the nature of their ascribed character changes the further south one travels, or at least the way in which they are regarded. Where they are a very frequent phenomenon the regard is reverential in tone. The more incidental they become the more frivolous the regard. Then, when they are so infrequent as to be known mainly through repute they acquire more sinister tones in their role in folklore. However along the way there seem to be sufficient deviations from this norm to make it not really a norm at all and I wouldn't want to be deducing much from it as a theory.

The Boreali during "normal" magnetic activity can theoretically be observed as far south as North Africa (and as far north from the South Pole as South Africa) but in practical terms involving the naked eye and the most common atmospheric conditions for viewing them are rarely seen outside 30 degrees from either pole. Contrary to popular misunderstanding they are not really a polar phenomenon but one that manifests itself to the naked eye as overhead between 10 and 30 degrees from the poles (potentially worldwide during periods of magnetic storms) and are detectable on a 24 hour basis.

Priscilla wrote:

And what of weeks of rain and floods?

The Biblical story of the Deluge was the subject of a paper delivered to the Royal Society in 1694 by astronomer Edmund Halley. He calculated that if it rained over the whole globe for 40 days and 40 nights, at a rate of 40 inches a day (a figure he took from ‘the most rainy Counties of England’) then the resulting flood would be 22 fathoms in depth. Sea levels would rise by 40 metres or 132 feet. This he noted ‘would only drown the low Lands next the Sea, but the much greater Part would escape’. Halley suggested that a flood affecting the whole planet would require something akin to the ‘Choc of a Comet’ either passing very close to Earth or even impacting it, so as to change the planet’s centre of gravity. Even then he noted that there is simply not enough water on Earth to flood the whole planet at once – ‘there is not Water sufficient of itself to cover any more of the Earth than now it doth’.  A comet, therefore, ‘could not drown the whole Globe, but only that Part thereof towards which the Center of Gravity was translated, leaving the other Hemisphere all dry’. Furthermore, he pondered how following such a cataclysm with all vegetation and soil destroyed, with huge climatic changes and even ‘a differing Length of the Day and Year’ that ‘it will be much more difficult to shew how Noah and the Animals should be preserved’. In short it was a scientifically devastating refutation of those who would take the Bible story literally.

By co-incidence Halley not only wrote about the Deluge but also about the Northern Lights. This was prompted by a spectacular display in March 1716 which was visible as far south as Kent. Halley surmised that the phenomenon was caused by particles being affected by the Earth’s magnetic field - a hypothesis which still holds to this day. That display took place around the time of the execution of James Radclyffe, a grandson of Charles II, who had taken part in the Jacobite bid for the throne in 1715. Radclyffe was Earl of Derwentwater and in parts of Cumberland and Northumberland the northern lights would henceforth be known as ‘Lord Derwentwater’s Lights’ in the belief that the red flashes in the sky signified displeasure in the heavens at the earl’s death. However, James had a younger brother Charles who escaped to France and remained in exile for 30 years until the Jacobite rising of 1745. He was, however, picked up immediately by the British navy as he tried to make his way from Dunkirk to join up with Bonnie Prince Charlie’s forces. He was taken to the Tower of London where he was tried under the original warrant from 1716 and executed in December. It’s not recorded if there was a display of the lights that winter of 1746-7 but Charles’ death is noteworthy in that he was one of the very last people in England to be executed by beheading.

The "Deluge" was reported in a number of versions from Mesopotamia (which, at least in written form pre-date the Noah version). Since the area was logically prone to flooding at least on a local scale (hence Wooley's discovery of a 10-foot silt layer at Ur) that's not surprising, but the Greek story of Deucalion is less explicable to my mind.

If one takes the story of Deucalion at face value (albeit that it is essentially just another creation myth) and so it was Zeus's 'Great Flood' that ended the classic Bronze Age and so wiped away all the existing corrupt civillisations - at least according to Hesiod's rather fanciful and mythological 'Five Ages of Man' - then might it perhaps actually be related to the rapidly changing climatic conditions that contributed, if not indeed initiated, the real and non-mythological Bronze Age collapse?

The 'Bronze Age Collapse' was the very real, sudden, rapid, violent and culturally disruptive change in the societies around the Eastern Mediterranean - in Greece, Crete, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt - that occured in the half-century between c. 1200 and 1150 BCE. It ultimately saw the collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Kassites in Babylonia, the Hittite Empire and many other ancient city states. Only a few powerful states, particularly Assyria, the New Kingdom of Egypt (albeit badly weakened), Phoenicia and Elam survived. This period seems to have been marked by a prolongued and intense drought, during which the tree cover around the Mediterranean dwindled, significantly, due to a changing climate rather than to an increase in clearing the land for agricultural purposes because the region's population was also sharply declining at this time. Generally rainfall in the Mediterranean region is thought to have decreased (while it increased further north in Central Europe) but summer storms may have become more intense, and with deforestation flash flooding would have been more destructive. And these dramatic climatic changes were occurring alongside a more general, region-wide, collapse in civillisation, as Greece and indeed the whole known-world, descended into a century-long, if not longer, cultural dark age.

The climatic changes of this time may have been caused by volcanic eruptions of the Hecla 3 volcano in Iceland. Maybe - the dates don't entirely stack up. Alternatively I wonder if the widespread flooding of the Deucalion story might be a cultural memory of the Thera (Santorini) eruption of around 1600 BCE which ended the Minoan civillisation. This violent eruption certainly produced widespread falls of tephra ash "rain" around the Eastern Mediterranean, earthquakes and coastal flooding due to tsunamis, which completely destoyed Akrotiri on Santorini, as well as communities on other nearby islands and along the coast of Crete, and may also, given the violence of the eruption, have caused coastal flooding in the Peleponnese and Attica.

Or is the flooding in Deucalion an even more distant memory of the Late Quaternary, post-glacial, Black Sea deluge, which was when the Mediterranean broke through the Bosphorus valley to rapidly flood the Black Sea basin?

Thundersnow

First time I've heard of this. Reported overnight in Edinburgh.

nordmann wrote:

What's interesting is how the nature of their ascribed character changes the further south one travels, or at least the way in which they are regarded. Where they are a very frequent phenomenon the regard is reverential in tone. The more incidental they become the more frivolous the regard. Then, when they are so infrequent as to be known mainly through repute they acquire more sinister tones in their role in folklore. However along the way there seem to be sufficient deviations from this norm to make it not really a norm at all and I wouldn't want to be deducing much from it as a theory.

My mother went on a winter trip to Lapland and hardly saw the lights.  A couple of years later she saw a brilliant display in South Ayrshire which she still talks about.

 I had never seen them till I went to live in Shetland in November 79.  At first I went onto the balcony of our pub to watch every night.

 After a week or so it was a case of, " Northern lights again, do you fancy a game of pool?"