One for Sorrow (17 page)

As way markers in the agricultural year go, the point at which a farmer's field was a sea of green barley was one to welcome. After all the worries of whether too warm a winter or too changeable a spring might mean they lost their corn to late frosts, there was satisfaction to be had in seeing the crop reach its full height. But as this proverb warns, green barley is only worth anything if it has the chance to ripen.
    The saying, which was first recorded in 1721, is one of a number of proverbs popular with those who prefer to err on the side of caution (see also
'Don't count your chickens before they've hatched'
, and
'There's many a slip between cup and lip'
,) which warn against rejoicing prematurely. Ripe barley could make a farmer a substantial mound of money if it was of the best quality as it was used in the production of whisky, which was a luxury beyond the pockets of all but the wealthiest of country folk. But a field full of green barley didn't guarantee a good harvest and farmers were still at the mercy of the weather. Thunderstorms that brought heavy rain could lay the barley flat, making it impossible to cut, so barley should only be prized once it had turned the warm golden colour that showed it was fully ripe.
    It's the sort of phrase that comes in handy in the modern age for chastising arrogant young upstarts who brag about their business credentials and claim success for enterprises that have yet to prove themselves viable.

When the moon lies on her back,

Then the sou'-west wind will crack;

When she rises up and nods,

Then north-easters dry the sod.

If the moon show a silver shield,

Be not afraid to reap your field;

But if she rises haloed round,

Soon will tread on deluged ground.

The moon and her influence over the earth have always loomed large in folklore and there
is
in fact a connection between moon, sun and wind. Since the moon shines by reflecting sunlight, what it looks like to us depends on the angle at which the sun's light hits the moon. The sun's effects on different parts of the earth also cause the wind, which is simply the movement of air from areas of high to low pressure produced by different temperatures. However, these relationships are too complicated to make accurate weather predictions from the shape, or phase, of the moon.
    Instead this ancient rhyme reflects old beliefs based on individual observations passed down the centuries in writings on weather lore (the rhyme appeared in
Symons's Meteorological Magazine
of September 1867), together with more poetic and fanciful notions about both the moon and the weather.
It's sure to be a dry moon if it lies on its back
is a saying from the Welsh borders: the upturned crescent looks as if it can hold water, so the month will be dry. A downturned crescent surely can't hold water, so wet days will follow, although it seems many sailors believe the opposite. Hunters in some parts of the world are said to have stayed at home if they could hang their powderhorns on the upturned crescent of the moon because it's hard to stalk game in a dry forest with footsteps cracking on brittle undergrowth. The haloed moon though has a more direct connection with wet weather. The halo is caused by refraction of light by ice crystals in clouds in the earth's atmosphere, so as a warning of a deluge it seems to make good sense.

When a similar phrase to this one was first used in Ancient Rome it featured a wolf rather than the devil. Some records of the phrase in Latin call it ‘
lupus in fabula
' which has given rise to the belief that the saying came from a fable (
fabula
) about a wolf who always appeared when his name was mentioned. But
fabula
can also be translated as ‘common talk', and the version used by the Roman comic dramatist Plautus was ‘
lupus in sermon'
or ‘wolf in the conversation', which suggests that it may simply have originated as an expression with the same meaning as our own version.
    In England the devil appeared in the proverb from around the sixteenth century, when belief in his cunning wiles meant that the phrase was taken literally as a warning against uttering his name.
    Nowadays we use the first part of the phrase – ‘talk of the devil' in those uncanny instances where a person unexpectedly enters the room when their name is hot on our lips. Often it's delivered jovially to the person themselves and is simply a way of expressing surprise at their arrival. Sometimes though, when we're talking about someone we don't think so highly of, a little of the old association with the devil lingers in our meaning as we whisper the phrase.

Onion skins very thin

Mild winter coming in;

Onion skins thick and tough

Coming winter cold and rough.

This is one of many traditional folklore verses which attempts to predict long-range weather conditions. In a similar way, according to the
Dictionary of Plant Lore
by Donald Watts, the thickness of hazelnut shells is said to be an indication of the weather to come. Thicker shells predict harder winters, as though the hazel nut had on its winter coat.
    Another useful indicator to rural dwellers who would have lived close to woodland are acorns. All over Europe a large crop of acorns is said to presage a severe winter. Other plant predictors are less ambitious (and perhaps more reliable) in their range. ‘A blackthorn winter' describes the period of cold weather in springtime that often follows warm March days which bring the blackthorn (
Prunus spinosa
) into early flower. It may be tempting to think that traditional predictions such as onion skin thickness have stood the test of time only because they rely on selective memory: people remember when they predict correctly and forget when they're wrong. However, increasing scientific understanding of long-term weather patterns (drought cycles, the El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation, and other global climate systems in which variations in ocean temperature produce consistent weather changes in the year ahead), may add some credence to ancient folklore wisdom. Plant and animal populations can be sensitive to subtle meteorological and climatic conditions that go unnoticed by human observers, until their subsequent, more obvious effects are manifest. These kind of biological indicators may be responsible for some of the truths preserved through long centuries of observation and experience.

This sage piece of advice comes from
Æ
sop's fable about a farmer who loses everything through greed. In the story the farmer realizes that his goose is laying golden eggs. One golden egg a day for the foreseeable future would have meant the farmer would never want for anything again, but the farmer wanted instant access to the gold, which he believed must be stored up inside the goose, so he killed the goose only to find that there was no store of gold, and with the goose dead, there would be no more golden eggs.
    It's a tale that is popular with children, who empathize with the farmer's puzzlement that the goose's insides aren't full of gold but simultaneously enjoy occupying the moral high ground because they would never have killed the goose to try to get at it. Sadly the moral lesson often seems to fade with age and most of us are guilty of at least day dreaming about ways in which we might get rich quick. Interestingly, though, this isn't a straightforward ‘greed is wrong' morality tale, since what it teaches is how to preserve the slow but steady acquisition of wealth.
    We still use the phrase today as a warning against making rash decisions that endanger our livelihoods and also use the term ‘goose that laid the golden egg' to describe business schemes that seem to be guaranteed money spinners.

This saying advocating moderation in all things appeared for the first time in print in 1470 in William Caxton's publication of Sir Thomas Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur
:

Inowghe is as good as a feste.

In his introduction Caxton instructed readers to use the tales as a source of moral guidance, saying: ‘Doo after the good and leve the evyl, and it shal brynge you to good fame and renommee.' The legends of King Arthur captured the medieval imagination and stories of the knights of the round table were read aloud and passed on through word of mouth so their influence spread far beyond the literate population.
    It was clearly well established by the time Heywood published his
Dialogue of Proverbs
in 1546:

For folke say, enough is as good as a

feast.

This particular proverb must have appealed to those for whom a feast was beyond the realms of possibility and who probably took from it some reassurance that having enough to eat was more important than having a surplus. But the phrase was applied to other subject matters too.

Sir Walter Scott showed how it might be used to quell the young man's appetite for battle by using it in his celebrated novel
Waverly
in 1814:

‘. . . If you saw war on the grand
scale – sixty or a hundred thousand men
in the field on each side!'

‘I am not at all curious, Colonel –
Enough, say, our homely proverb,
is as good as a feast.'

The phrase is still used today, metaphorically and literally – as at the dinner table when we've had enough to eat or when showing restraint by declining the offer of seconds. In fact, in the modern age with obesity levels rising unstoppably, enough might in fact be said to be infinitely better than a feast.