Customer Reviews

The Return of the Light: Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What a wonderful collection of short stories - really great to read and put down, come back later for more. The stories are from around the world which I particularly liked. All are very well written, easy to get into, leave you with things to think about. Here are the titles of the stories:
Part 1: Theft
- Why Hummingbird has a red throat
- The golden earring
- Raven steals the light
- The sun cow and the theif

Part 2: Surrender
- How Maui snared the sun
- How the cock got his crown
- Loki and the death of light
- The pull-together morning

Part 3: The Grace
- Grandfather mantis and his thinking strings
- The girl who married the sun
- The light keepers box
- La Befana and the Royal Child of Light

For each story we're told what country its from and a little background for contect. Excellent!!

The last part of the book has rites (e.g. tree offering, give away) and games for winter solstice nights and solstice songs (e.g. deck the halls, joy to the world etc - different lyrics from the traditional christian songs)

There's also a great bibliography to check out more books

Highly recommended.

I love this little volume of Winter Solstice tales from diverse cultures around the world. I believe that exploring the rich symbolism of the Yuletide season helps to make this joyful time of year come more fully to life. These clever stories are sure to further your understanding of the meanings of the holiday celebrations you have enjoyed all your life, adding new dimension to your future celebrations. They offer an opportunity to increase your sense of oneness with others who may worship and believe differently from yourself but who are none-the-less your sisters and brothers. There are tables at the back of this book which have short ritual ideas to use in your own celebrations and revels as well as some clever lyric revisions to well-known carols that put a Winter Solstice spin on them. I am a Wiccan Priestess and have used this book in crafting an annual public, ecumenical Yule ritual with great success. I recommend it for fireside reading as you wait up to greet the new born light.

In The Return of the Light Carolyn McVickar Edwards assembles twelve legends, folktales and fairy tales told about the "return of light" that occurs at the winter solstice. I wanted to know more about the roots of the older traditions surrounding the Winter Solstice before it was taken over by the Church. I didn't really find that, but I did find several different takes from around the world on just what happens during the solstice, the shortest day of the year, and their explanations for why the sun goes away, and more importantly why it comes back after.

The book is divided into three parts, each part containing four stories of a particular way in which the sun is lost at the solstice: the first through theft, the second through surrender and the third by grace. Each part is preceded with a short discussion about the method of reacquiring the sun, and each story is additionally given an introduction explaining the society it came from and where the story originated.

I thought that the introductions to the book and the sections in particular were by turns overly analytical, and then bizarrely whimsical. They could have perhaps been written in a more user friendly way. I am used to reading sociological and historical texts with a lot of technical terms in them and even I found myself lost and re-reading passages trying to get the gist of the great deal of knowledge the author attempted to cram into very little space. This also resulted in a bit of reader's whiplash when you switched to reading the story.

The stories were simplified and written in a very easy to understand and casual manner, particularly the dialogue which was written in a very believable modern day cadence and made the stories easy to read aloud and easy for listeners of any age to relate to. With the skill exhibited here, the stories were very much the book's strong point. I wish the introductions were similarly written, it would have made for a powerful book.

The ending includes several songs and games to be done on the winter solstice. To me these seemed like very much an after thought. The publisher might have insisted they add them, or an editor tacked them on. They were not well thought out, they were sometimes cheesy, even for families with children, and didn't add anything to the book at all.

The stories though were well written, and powerful, reminders of the other cultures that make up this world and of the people of the past and their varying reactions to the, probably at that time terrifying, sight of the sun showing up less and less each day. These stories explained for them what was happening and reassured them that the sun would come back and light would return once again.

These stories are beautifully written and crafted. For those of us who love celestial creation stories, it's gratifying to see so many fine tales brought together in one book. However, I question if this is really for children (it was catalogued as a juvenile book in my library) with sentences such as the following from the introduction: "In each tale, the status quo, represented respectively by grudging community, powerful magician, innocent girl, or oblivious community, is like the personality entrenched in its habits and defenses, blind to spacious possibility."

Ellen Jackson, author

THE WINTER SOLSTICE

www.ellenjackson.net

We purchased this book along with "The Shortest Day" with the intentions of celebrating the solstice with our children- ages 3 and 5. While this book is not a children's book, it does have a collection of unique stories that all offer the promise of the sun's return. I would love to see this author create a more kid friendly version of this book.

Book arrived in good condition. Contains a lot of interesting tales of winter solstice practices and celebrations from different cultures. I plan to use the book for a winter solstice celebration next year at the park where I work. The book is perfect for my needs!

The introduction to this book is one of the best explanations of Solstice customs and celebrations I've ever come across. The stories themselves are an acquired taste imho, but that is the nature of these old stories.

I bought this book for a St Nicholas Day gift for my son and daughter this year. Since they were 18 months old and 2 weeks old respectively at the time, it might have been more of a gift for my husband and me, but either way it was the beginning of a new family tradition for us. On each of the 12 days of Christmas we read a new story, each one short enough (and colorful enough) to keep the interest of my toddler... and me! In fact my son brought this one to me over his pictures books on many occasions this Yuletide season.

I read the twelfth tale for our library solstice celebration; people said they had never known the tale and liked it very much. I enjoyed performing the dramatic bits of this tale to the delight of the "children" in the audience.