Woolgathering

Last week I went to the John Arbon spinning mill in South Molton, as they were having an open day. John talked us through the surprisingly complex process of turning raw sheep fleece in to thread for knitting and weaving. Most of his machines are rescued or reclaimed and each one is named, which gives the mill a certain atmosphere and the feel of a working museum.

At one point in the tour John had to put a fresh set of bobbins on a machine before he could demonstrate it. Whilst talking us through the process he said “I’ll just doff the thread, that is, undo it or take it off…” then he paused before musing “It’s all ways ‘doff’ when you remove a thread, I don’t know why.” Various suggestions were put forward without any certain knowledge and I made a mental note to look it up when I got home.

Doff is, unsurprisingly, a contraction of “do off”. In much the same way, when you get dressed, you “do on” your clothes, though we rarely use “don” for anything except hats these days.
That this mostly archaic term should be preserved in the textile trade is interesting, well it is to me anyway. This is partly because so much of the terminology for storytelling comes from the textile business.

Further back in history than the invention of Mr Arbon’s assorted combing, cleaning, stretching and twisting devices, back when ordinary people still manufactured their own clothes, everybody could spin wool. When work in the fields was done for the day and the evening meal had been eaten but not yet digested, everyone took out a spindle and some fleece. There they would sit, setting the spindles turning and pulling out the fleece, stretching it and letting the spindle twist the fibres together. It was common for someone to tell a tale, so common in fact that the acts of telling a story and creating thread became synonymous, and so we get both “spinning a story” and “telling a yarn”.

The action of pulling the fleece to make it ready for spinning is known as drafting, which is the same as drawing, from “to draw” which means to drag or pull. If you draft your wool a lot then you get a fine thread and a longer thread from the same amount of fleece. Making finer thread will also take more time so your story might get a bit “long and drawn out”.

Whilst all women, men and children could and did spin, it took a little more skill to operate a loom. Nevertheless, once all the threads had been set up an experienced user could still work one and entertain, so “weaving a tale of wonder” entered the language as well.

Some of the old tales were collected and have come down to us in books such as the famous Grimm’s Household and Children’s Stories. Our lexical connection to cloth does not end here though. Before you commit your words to a page, it pays to draw out your yarn in a “first draft”. To weave in Latin is “texere” and it is from this that we get our name not only for textiles but for the written word: text.

So what you are reading is the final draft of a yarn that has been spun and woven in to a cloth of words. Finally it is worth noting that both the textile and the story process often start in the same place, with a bit of woolgathering.

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24/7 Hydrogen Bomb

The Sun is the one from whom nothing is hidden, the all seeing eye in the sky. Despite their late arrival in many mythologies, once the daily trip from east to west is established the Sun is the indispensable one without whom all life comes to a halt. Thus, if the Sun goes down and does not come up again something must be done. A great deal of solar mythology involves the incarceration of the Sun and its subsequent rescue. There isn’t time for a Tolkienesque quest, the first to notice get straight on the case, usually part of the support team of morning star, horses or attendant sky gods, the cause of the problem is dealt with in short order and the Sun is out of their prison and back in the sky before you can say Winter Solstice.

Sometimes the Sun actually dies and has to be brought back from the underworld. This may seem more drastic but is rarely as big a story since, metaphorically, the death of the Sun is a daily occurrence. There are stories in which the dead Sun does not get resuscitated but simply replaces itself with its own child who, going by the same name come elevenses, grows up, surreptitiously has its own child, grows old before teatime, then dies in their turn. It’s a lot to pack into a day.

Hunter gatherers and tribal societies seem content to let their Sun goddesses amble gently over the sky carrying a torch and don’t expect any more from them than that. Agricultural societies with cities and the like, who have more riding on the Sun showing up for work each day, are more likely to indulge in that curious act of mass delusional sycophancy known as Sun worship. There are advantages: these are the people who will give the Sun a chariot to ride in and equip them with a bow and arrows, but they never seem to run out of things they expect the Sun to do as well as shine down benevolently upon them. Now the Sun must organise agriculture, irrigation, all growing things, hunting… sometimes medicine, music, textiles and half a dozen other areas of life. In hotter climes the Sun will often preside over plagues and sudden death as well.

Not content with filling their days the priests find even more work for the Sun to do at night: They have to negotiate the return from west to east, usually by way of the underworld. This is likely to involve one or more battles with serpents, snake bodied gods and other demons of darkness. Which rather puts doing the washing up and falling asleep in front of Gogglebox in to perspective.

Somehow though, the Sun finds time to be a lover as well as a fighter. Filled with fiery passion the Sun takes partners from amongst gods and humans alike becoming parent to the earth, moon, sky, night, day, light, stars, assorted heroes, and in Japan the entire dynastic royal line of the empire. These solar love affairs are often explosive and short lived. Pretty much all of Apollo’s paramours end up dead and most of the children he sires come a cropper along the way too, some he even does in himself, whilst two greek Sun children are blown to pieces with thunderbolts by their grandfather, Zeus.

So if a hot and fiery lover claiming to be the Sun comes wooing you, my advice is to make your excuses and sidle quietly away. The sex might be hot but, being a fertility deity, pregnancy is pretty much guaranteed and the child will be more trouble than it is worth. However much they appear to care the Sun won’t stay with you… and if they do then it won’t be long before a couple of golden horses turn up with an irate star, kick your house to pieces and drag your sweetheart back to their 24/7 job.