From the Vault: Saint Swithin's Revenge

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the legendary saint whose feast day is July 15, the folkloric weather prophecies associated with the day and what modern meteorology has to say about it. (originally published 8/12/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have a
vault episode for you. This is going to be one
that originally published eight twelve, twenty twenty five. It is
Saint Swithin's Revenge. This one gets into folklore, it gets
into weather in meteorology, it's it's a pretty fun one,
so we hope you enjoy.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on the show,
we are going to be doing a holiday episode, but
not on the holiday itself. Today we are talking about
Saint Swithin's Day and its namesake, Saint Swithin.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
That's right. We were originally going to put this episode
out on July fifteenth to correspond with Saint Swithin's Day,
but some stuff came up. I had to take a
week off, so we were we had We realized, well,
we could sit on this episode and just finish it
and record it later on the next time Saint Swiftin'sday
happens to fall on the Tuesday or Thursday, or we

(01:17):
could just simply push on and do it, assuming that
most of you are going to forgive us for being
several weeks late to the punch on this I perhaps
obscure Saints Day.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, this is a holiday. I would bet most of
our American and international listeners will not be familiar with
UK listeners. I'm maybe more likely. I'm not exactly sure
how what consciousness of Saint Swithin is like today, but
I guess if anybody out there is going to be
wired in on Swithin it is it's probably like Catholics
in England. But I don't know. So why are we

(01:50):
talking about this? Why is this somewhat obscure medieval saint
and his holiday even on our radar? The main reason,
perhaps the only reason that I personally had any previous
consciousness of Saint Swithin and his feast day was from
a quite unlikely source, and that is the lyrics of

(02:11):
a song by the late great psychedelic rock pioneer Rocky Ericsson,
one of my personal favorite musical artists of all time.
The song in which this lyric appears is called The
Night of the Vampire, and it actually appears on multiple albums,
including The Evil One from nineteen eighty that's one of
my favorite Rocky albums. Actually just got that on vinyl,

(02:32):
and my daughter has become obsessed with it, like, she
asks for it by name one here, two Headed Dog.
She begs us to put it on.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Oh Man, wonderful. I would play that in the car sometimes,
and my kiddo would sometimes ask me to skip Bloody Hammer.
They're like, I don't know about this song.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Well, it might be different once she recognizes what all
the lyrics are. I don't know, but right now she
just thinks he's a funny Halloween guy. He just a
Halloween guy.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
That is also true.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, but so she asks for Rocky but anyway, so
it's on The Evil One.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Though.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
My favorite version of this song is actually the first
track on Rocky's nineteen eighty six compilation album Grimlins Have Pictures.
The title of that album, by the way, is taken
from the lyrics of his song Anthem, and the full
line there is Grimlins Have Pictures of the Anniversary of Christ.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yeah, that one's a real head scratcher. There are a
lot of there's a lot of the lyrics to Rocky
Erickson songs will drift into head, scratch your territory.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
But they're wonderful. I mean, they will make you scratch
your head, but they'll also stay in your head, or
at least in my head. I you know, after I
listen to Rocky, even if I'm sort of in a
rocky way, and I guess you know, there are periods
where I'm listening to him constantly and somewhere I listen less.
But and the ones when I listen less, sometimes something
just comes, like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere,

(03:50):
and my brain is thinking, you know, if it's raining
and you're running, don't slip in mud, because if you do,
you'll slip in blood. That is also from Night of
the Vampire.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, his lyrics have a real stream of consciousness vibe
to them, and amid the horror movie references, he'll also
invoke words, ideas and connections that were you know, unique
to his own mind and worldview. Might be difficult for
the rest of us to understand. But that's the tantalizing
part of that. It's like a puzzle and you're trying
to interpret it the interpreter. Where is he now?

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Oh? Another one? Another good one? But anyway, So in
the middle of the song Night of the Vampire, which is,
as my kid would say, a Halloween guy song. It's
a song about vampires. It's a song about raining and running,
slipping in mud, slipping in blood. There is a bridge
to the song where Rocky sings me Castle Brand Transylvania

(04:43):
on Saint Swithin's Day he was born, eyes stare through
the darkness with no form maidens his bite harms. That's
a good slant rhyme, by the way, with you know
born form harm, but on Saint Swithin's Day he was born.
That's a strange connection to make. I want to come
back in a minute to figure out what's going on

(05:05):
with that now, if you're wondering, was it normal for
this guy to sing rock songs about vampires. Yes, as
we've established, he's a Halloween guy. Rocky's career had two
main stages. In the nineteen sixties, he sang and performed
with a Texas based garage psych band called the Thirteenth

(05:25):
Floor Elevators, I think one of the best psychedelic rock
bands of the sixties, really awesome. So he had a
period with them where they released a couple of great albums.
So one is the Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
Their second album is my favorite. It's called Easter Everywhere.
After that, he had a more difficult period where he
had some legal issues and where he was he had

(05:47):
a period of involuntary commitment at some statemental hospitals in Texas.
After his eventual release, instead of going back to psychedelic
sounds like he did with the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, he
instead focused on others genres. He did folk, blues, and
particularly a kind of hard rock idea that he called

(06:08):
horror rock, which was fueled by his longtime obsession with
monster movies, especially old monster movies, like many of the
things we cover on Weird House Cinema. In fact, we've
done some very rocky centric movies on Weird House, like
Creature with the Adam Brain has its own rocky ericson song,
which is fabulous.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't necessarily picking really well known films
or the films that connected with him.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
So it's one of the charms because sometimes you might
not even realize he's referring to a movie until you
dig a little deeper.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah. Rocky described this genre at one point by saying
I'm trying to horrify them, demonize them, and possessionize them,
and he's doing it. So Night of the Vampire is
a core horror rock song. So I've been listening to
this song for years. I first got into this, I
think one summer when I was in college, So Saint

(06:57):
Swithin's has been also banging around in my head as
a phrase for that long, but I had never much
looked into it until Rob this summer. You flagged it
on our show calendar saying, Hey, Saint Swithin's Day is
a real day. Let's figure out what's going on here,
And oh boy, that was really music to my ears.

(07:19):
So we very much got into the spirit of Saint Swithin,
and especially the question what does Saint Swithin have to
do with vampires? Well, I did some fairly extensive digging
on this question, and I've come to the conclusion that
there is no connection at all outside this song. I
can't find any records of a famous vampire from movies

(07:41):
or literature who was born on Saint Swithin's Day, nor
any pre existing connection between the historical character of Saint
Swithin and any vampire lore, though maybe we can get
halfway there by connecting Saint Swithin to some ambiguous witches
or hags or valkyries some other kind of scary female creature.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
However, the one real connection I could find is that
one person who was born on Saint Swithin's day was
Rocky Erickson himself born July fifteenth, nineteen forty seven. Rocky's
lyrics about movie monsters sometimes do shift back and forth
between third person and first person. I think there is
a good degree of when I'm talking about the monster,

(08:24):
I am talking about myself. You know, I'm a demon
and I love rock and roll. That's another one of
his songs. So I think that probably is the main connection.
That Saint Swithin's Day is Rocky's birthday, and so the
night of the Vampire is his night. It's you know,
the vampire is me to paraphrase Flaubert. However, to bring

(08:46):
things back to Saint Swithin. While again I can't find
any evidence of a vampire character born on Saint Swithin's
celebration day, I do think there's an interesting connection in
the lyrics of the song, and I already quoted this part.
In the first verse of Night of the Vampire, Rocky
offers the advice, if it's raining and you're running, don't

(09:07):
slip in mud, because if you do, you'll slip in blood.
Tonight is the Night of the Vampire, So Rocky's head
was stuck on the idea of trying to escape a
vampire in a heavy rainstorm. And it turns out. One
of the most famous things about Swithen is that his day,
July fifteenth, is associated with a seasonal proverb for predicting

(09:31):
the weather, specifically for predicting rain patterns in Great Britain.
There are many versions of this saying, but here's one
I came across. Goes like this, Saint Swithin's day, If
thou dost rain for forty days, it will remain Saint
Swithin's day. If thou be fair for forty days, twill

(09:51):
rain ney mare. So that's sinking in you. Basically, whatever
you get on Saint Swithin's day, you're going to get
that again for forty days.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
I've been reading this over in the notes, though I've
gone ahead and read this in my head in Rocky
Erickson's voice as well.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
Yeah, twell rain naymare, Yeah, I can hear it. He
had a wonderful like a Texan accent to yowl.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
But again, according to this proverb, if it rains on
July fifteenth, it's going to keep raining for the next
forty days. If it's dry, it will be dry the
next forty days. So if that proverb actually holds true,
Saint Swithin's day is a good tool for planning your
upcoming vampire survival strategies. If it's raining on the fifteenth,
you should invest in some boots with grippy souls to

(10:37):
avoid slipping in mud and therefore slipping in blood. But
is there anything to this kind of weather predicting doggerel
other than superstition and the fact that it rhymes. It
does rhyme. You gotta admit that rope. Yeah, And what
was the deal with this Saint Swithin guy? What does
he have to do with whether whether it rains or not?

(10:59):
These questions are what we'll be exploring for the rest
of today's episode.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah, We'll leave it to you to ultimately decide how
closely aligned the lyrics of Rocky ericson are with this
historic individual and legendary English saint.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
I guess we got to say this near the top
because we keep calling him Saint Swiin. Uh, Rob, did
you come across the fact that even though he is
widely known as Saint Swithin, he was never officially canonized
by the Catholic Church. So he's not actually a saint
on paper, only a street saint, a saint by reputation.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
That's right, He's uh, he was never canonized as a
saint by the Catholic Church. So yeah, he's a He's
not a saint saint, just a street saint.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
As you say, now, I think what we could start
off by doing is dividing the historical Saint Swithin from
the legendary Saint Swin. And I think that will be
a reasonably easy, uh division to make because from what
I can tell, Rob, I think you did more of
the historical research. But is it correct that very little

(12:02):
is known about the real historical Saint Swien and that
much of his biography, maybe almost all of his biography
is understood by historians to be legend probably fabricated long
after his death.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Correct, Yeah, most of we know very little about the
historic individual. That then ends up being built out into
this saint of legend. Now historians do agree that there
was definitely unhistoric Swiven. You know, sometimes you peel away
the layers of legend and you discover there's perhaps nobody

(12:37):
at the bottom, or there's just sort of a hypothetical
real person at the bottom of things. But there was
an individual by the name of Swiven. He would have
been born around eight hundred CE. He was consecrated by Selnoth,
Archbishop of Canterbury, on October thirtieth, eight fifty two, and
he died on July Tewod eight sixty two. He served

(12:58):
as the Bishop of Winchester, England, and also served as
counselor to Kings Egbert and Athel Wolf of Wessex. This
is the Kingdom of the West Saxons in the south
of Great Britain. All that definitely true, No layers of legend.
You know, these are just some of the basics. This
is some of the basic information that we have about him.

(13:18):
And when it comes down to it, it's like just
the basics that we really have. After his death, or
perhaps more accurately, after the popularity of an account following
his death, he was popularly venerated as a saint, but
again was never officially canonized as a saint by the
Catholic Church. And this will make you know, and it
all makes sense as we get into how he becomes

(13:39):
a saint and so forth. But as far as other
details about the real life of the historic Swien, yeah,
we actually have very little to go on. There are
a few mentions of him from contemporary sources, and the
problem with saints in general is that their lives are
often constructed long after their deaths by much later writers.
So I was turned to a couple of mains horses here.

(14:00):
There's a two thousand and three book, The Cult of
Saint Swithin by Michael Lappage, and that's certainly a great
book to look to if you want to deeper dive
into the questions and mysteries and legends surrounding this individual.
I also referred to Winchester Cathedral historian Tom Watson's shorter
work an article by the same name, The Cult of

(14:21):
Saint Swiftin from two thousand and eight, and that one
also cites Lappage's work, singling it out as a major
work of modern scholarship about Swiven.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
All right, So, we know that the real Swithen died
around the middle of the ninth century. You said the
year eight sixty two CE, So when do the writings
about him first start to appear? When does his reputation
begin to boom?

Speaker 1 (14:46):
The cult of Swiften doesn't really begin in earnest until
around nine thirty seven, So yeah, many decades after his death.
The first known writings of his miracles came out three
years after that. Another history emerges twenty years after that
with new tributed miracles, and another comes out two hundred
and thirty years after his death.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
So one of these cases where more detail is added
the longer time goes on, that's always the suspicious pattern.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
Yeah, yeah, but of course it makes sense when again
we're talking about legends and stories. We're not talking about
things that objectively actually happened. We're talking about myth making.
And I mean that's part of of what's that's the
huge part of what's going on here. And as Watson explains,
and in this he was citing the work of Susan
Richard English Saint Colts, they didn't simply develop, they were developed.

(15:36):
It was a matter of branding, and then eventually rebranding
and of advertising. Quote, the most successful, that is, most
popular cults had shrines visited by many pilgrims. The popularity
of shrines also rose and fell. They were actively promoted
and across the entire medieval period, relaunched in response to competition.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
Oh okay, So the accretion of stories around popular saint
wouldn't necessarily be driven just by organic folklore and word
of mouth and people adding on, you know, things happening
out amongst the people. That there could be a kind
of top down effort by people whose livelihoods or whose

(16:17):
missions were associated with this saint to beef up what
was known about them and to make them appear and
come off a certain way.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
Yeah. I like this comparison to any kind of like
branding and rebranding effort you have today. You think of
like any long lasting fast food chain. A lot of
things are going to be the same, maybe like the
central mascot and the logo, but things may shift, and
they're gonna shift in response to what the public wants

(16:47):
or things they want, or in response to what more
powerful entities decide that the people should want and so forth.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
Man, you ever get nostalgic for the architecture of taco
bells and pizza huts from the nineties. Now they just
all look like banks.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, it's the little things like that are ancient McDonald's
playgrounds times when they had the full pantheon before it
went monotheistic. Seeah, I think there are a lot of
comparisons to be made here between these cults and enterprises
like that. So, as these various authors point out, the

(17:24):
formation of the Cult of Saint Switten itself came about
in nine thirty seven, evidently due to the pressure of
reform movements active in the church at the time, and
perhaps even more to the point, due to the efforts
of a youthful new king, King Edgar, who is attempting
to assert his power over the nation and making use

(17:44):
of the church as part of his strategy. So the
reform movement here was aimed at making English churches more
religiously rigorous and also more monastic, and entailed on Edgar's part,
the forced removal of secular clerics. Secular clerics would be
clerics that they were not monks, they could even marry,

(18:05):
and so he's having them forcibly removed and replacing them
with monks and Swiften just happened to be the right
local name to take up in this campaign for power,
even though it's ironic that the actual Swiften was a
secular cleric and was not a monk.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
Wait does that mean Swithin was married or do we
not know?

Speaker 1 (18:26):
I don't As far as I could tell, he wasn't married,
or if he was married, we don't know anything of it.
But yeah, he was not himself a monk, and you know,
there were these stories that said he was. You know,
there's just because we have all these legends, it's very
possible that he was a very pious and humble man.
We just don't know. We just have all these layers
of legends built upon it, and very little is known

(18:46):
about the historic Swiften, But we can put together that
he was close to the ruling Anglo Saxon royal family.
He tutored the future King ethel Wolf, and this very
king promoted him to the Bishop of Winchester in eight
fifty two. We also know from you know, scant mentions,
that he seemed to have been involved in the repair
of several churches, and if we were to believe a

(19:09):
tenth century poem, he also had a bridge built. These
are pretty far from miracles, but these are the actual
things that he probably had a hand in.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
You know, a lot of medieval sources we've been looking
at recently really emphasized the church building or church repair
career of people. What this just came up in our
Cats episode. Yeah, we were talking about the mystical Cats
of Great Britain, where what like the guy who's doing
unspeakable cat crimes in order to get a message from

(19:38):
the other world about you know what, what have I
got to do to make things right? And the King
of Cats comes and tells him you got to build
seven churches?

Speaker 1 (19:45):
Yeah, well, what a kind of public works are you
going to build? I mean, basically, comes, you're gonna build
a church? Are you're gonna build a bridge? What else?
You're not going to build a water treatment plan? So
might as well build that church, Okay, but so known
as a supporter of church and possibly also some secular infrastructure. Yeah,

(20:06):
but basically, you know, he this is a man who
had a career and we only know just a few
bullet points about his career, and as far as we
can tell, he was he was not considered saintly during
his own lifespan. You know, people I guess liked him,
and you know, being reasonable, there are probably some people
who didn't like him because he was a human being

(20:27):
in a position of some power. But and he also
wasn't considered saintly in the hundred years that fought or
so were roughly one hundred years that followed his his
his death. All of it was built up on after
that point.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Okay, so where's the first jumping off point. When do
we start getting stories?

Speaker 1 (20:56):
Well, you know, they basically with the creation of the cult,
but certainly by the time we see the tenth century
work life of Saint Swiftin according to Lappage, this is
just like pure fiction, just he says, the creation of
a scholar who had few historical resources at his disposal.
He stresses that there's there's a lot of conjecture. There's

(21:16):
you know, there are things you can point to in
these legends and say, well, okay, something in that could
have been true maybe. But one of the things that
factors into like a key story that we're going to
be talking about concerning Swiften concerns his humble burial requests,
And according according to Lapage, like this is just complete

(21:38):
legend making here. So basically the idea and we'll tell
the story a little more detail here shortly, But the
idea is that when he died, he's like, don't bury
me in a fancy tomb, bury me like out here
in the dirt, out in front of the church. I
want to be where people can walk over my grave.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
It's some of them phrase it in a more aggressive way,
and he's like, bury me in a nasty place, bury
me in a violent, gross, gross place.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, But the lappage says that now he would have
been buried in a sarcophagus within a prominent tomb outside
of the old Minster Church, and then later he's moved
inside the church. And this has everything to do with
the creation of the of the Saint, the cult of
the Saint around him, and then the church was eventually
expanded to encompass the grounds he was originally buried on.

(22:28):
And I think there's something kind of poetic to that.
You know, here's an historic individual sort of consumed by
the church or the workings of the church, in the
hands of kingly authority, and the original historic individual becomes
kind of redundant via the waves of all of this
legend making.

Speaker 3 (22:47):
Interesting, all right, So that is what we know about Swithin,
the historic ninth century cleric of the Catholic Church. But
what do we know about the the character, the character
that blooms from the grave of this figure.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
Well, a lot of it, I think is summed up
in that in this legend, this story that he says,
you know, bury me, bury me in the dirt, don't
bury me in the tomb. Give me a common nasty grave,
if you will, so that the rain's going to fall
in my grave. Common people can visit my grave, walk
over it, and so forth. And the idea that the

(23:26):
idea here is that they initially honor it, but then
they reverse the decision a century later and his remains
are moved into the new church building, and then forty
days of rain follow Ah.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
Okay, so here's where we start getting the tie into
the rain. Now. I was trying to find more information
about the legends of Saint Swithin's life and his connection
to the weather proverb that I mentioned earlier, and I
came across an article from the journal Weather from the
year nineteen forty seven by an author Anthony Klein. It's

(23:57):
called Saint Swithin's forty days. Again, that's in the journal Weather.
So Klein, the author here talks about how weather lower
tends to come and go over time, but he says
that the predictive proverb associated with Swithin's day has really
stuck around. It has a tenacity, and he said, at

(24:19):
the time of his writing many still believe it. This
would have been in the nineteen forties. He says, of course,
meteorologists have superior tools to work with now in predicting
the weather, and yet quote still many harbor some minute
and shadowy faith. However, despite the popularity and tenacity of
the proverb, one thing that seems quite clear is that,

(24:41):
or at least this is one of these things like
you can't rule out conclusively. But it really does not
seem to go back to Saint Swidin himself. In fact,
at the time of Klein's writing, the earliest evidence he
knew of knew of for the prediction that forty days
of rain would follow if it rained on Saint Swithin's

(25:02):
day was dated to Ben Johnson around the year sixteen hundred,
more than seven hundred years after Saint Swithin's death. He
quotes a version. So I'll read from Klin here quote
at the end of the century, Poor Robin's Almanac included
in its dog roll for July these lines in this
month is Saint Swithin's day, on which if that it rained,

(25:26):
they say full forty days after it will or more
or less some rain distill. Which is interesting because that's
it's a similar rhyme pattern, and it's like four lines,
and it has the same meaning as the rhyme I
read earlier, but is totally different words.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah, yeah, a little more awkward. Yeah, it's construction at
least by our standards.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
I agree. The earlier one scanned a little better. After this,
Klein talks about some other legends of Saint Swithin', So
I did want to go go abroad a little bit
and look at a few other legends about his life.
There's one good one where there's an old lady carrying
a basket of eggs and then a klutzy guy passes
by her. I think maybe this is happening on a
bridge or something, But a klutzy guy walks by the

(26:10):
lady with her eggs, and he breaks all the eggs,
and the old lady is distraught. She cries out for
her eggs, and then Saint Swithin comes along. He sees
the situation, he gives a quick blessing and her eggs
are repaired. Wow. Okay, so that's a miracle. But then
I was thinking, how are you actually supposed to picture that?
You picture it happening the eggs break and the goop

(26:32):
comes out? Does the group go back inside the eggs?
Are you supposed to picture the goop slithering inside like
one half of the shell and then the eggs like
close back over it?

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Hmmm? Oh yea, yeah, you're I think you're picturing it
like he's reversing the footage. Yeah, And I guess I'm
trying to imagine it more like a sleight of hand trick,
like he passes his palm over the cracked eggs, and
then in his palm's wake he leaves behind uncracked.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
Eg missing footage. Yeah, okay, reversing the footage versus just
a hard cut.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah. By the way, according to Lappage, this one story, apparently,
this one swift and miracle may have been reported off
him during his lifetime, but it still wasn't written down
until one hundred and twenty years after his death. So
he contends that it's it's very dubious, but he at
least that he does acknowledge that it's possible this story

(27:28):
was told about him during his lifetime.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
It's one of the stories I see mentioned in multiple
sources about Swift, and so it seems to be a
popular one that he repaired broken eggs.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, and it's it also seems humble enough, you know,
for an individual who wasn't necessarily on the track for
local sainthood, just because he may have helped an old
lady with some broken eggs, you know, and we can
easily imagine what the like real world version of that
could have been, like maybe he saw somebody with a
broken egg and he's like, hey, I've got some extra eggs,

(27:59):
have some, you know, and act kindness gets, you know,
magically translated into miracle.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
I was wondering if it could have anything to do
with him as the repairer of broken churches, because he,
you know, did the restorations and repairs there anyway. So
a one source that a lot of writers on this
topic end up going back to is a nineteenth century
Oxford professor of Anglo Saxon named John Earl, who wrote

(28:26):
an essay in the eighteen sixties called on the Life
and Times of Swithin, which you can find collected in
a book called Gloucester Fragments. That's where I was reading it.
So Earle talks about how in the tenth and eleventh
century biographies of Swithin quote, the historical part was very,

(28:47):
very meager, being little more than a frame to support
the medallions of popular tradition. And Earle claims that during
this period of history, a lot of the stories that
were told about Christian sayints, actually have analogues in stories
about pre Christian gods and heroes. So he argues that

(29:08):
it's possible in some cases the deeds attributed to saints
and Christian figures like Swithin are actually pieces of older
pagan folklore being transferred onto an acceptable Catholic host.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Hmmmm, that's interesting. You know, this reminds me. It's it's
kind of like the the darker version of perhaps the
same thing, but with urban legends. Sometimes you encounter this
where you'll have like urban legends, like generally scandalous things
that are said about celebrities of old, and then they'll

(29:43):
eventually get passed on to new celebrities, often with the
new tale tellers maybe not even being not even realizing
that these same stories were told about previous rock stars
or actors or what have you. But you need a
place to hang them, thank you, to use this analogy
of the medallions hanging on the framework.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Have we been hearing about how Bruno Mars bit the
head off a bat?

Speaker 1 (30:04):
Not yet, but that's exactly the sort of thing you
can you can imagine.

Speaker 3 (30:08):
I guess, but that one really happened, though.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, yeah, or some version of it, right, yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
Yeah, not about Bruno Mars, I mean I actually did.
Sorry anyway. But from here, Earl goes on to tell
a pretty weird story from one of these Swithin legends
that I just wanted to recount here, so he says,
quote among the stories narrated of Swithin is the following.

(30:34):
A certain nobleman was walking by the side of a
river at noontide, and he became suddenly aware of three
female figures of more than human stature, which rapidly and
furiously bore down upon him. He could not escape. They
seized him and maltreated him and left him as dead.
He was brought to Swithen and presently restored. In this

(30:56):
narrative we may confidently recognize the three fates of Scandinavian mythology,
the past, the present and the future. They make their
appearance again in the form of the three witches who
meet Macbeth and Banquo on the heath the weird sisters
hand in hand posters of the sea and land. And
then he also goes on to say a well known

(31:18):
chromlck on the verge of Dartmoor near Drewstenton, has three
tall uprights. The name of the Kromlic among the people
of the country is the Spinster's Rock. Still the same
three weird or fatal sisters. And here I looked up
this monument by the way, Spinster's Rock near Dartmoor, which
is in southwest England. It's a neolithic chambered tomb or

(31:42):
the modern remains of which what's left of it are
actually a reconstruction now of three upright stones balancing a
large capstone between them. What we're looking at in this
picture of is a modern reconstruction after this thing collapsed,
I believe during a storm in the eighteen sixties.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
A storm.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
Yeah, but I've got an illustration of the original monument
from eighteen forty eight for you to look at here,
and it does look a little bit haunting. So yeah,
three upright stones and a big multi ton capstone balance
between them obviously has some wonderful associations with this kind
of legend of like three you know, three dangerous witches
or weird sisters, or figures of you know, female monstrous

(32:24):
figures of some kind. I'm not sure what modern folklore
scholars would make of these connections that Earle is drawing.
I think now there is a tendency to look back
on some of the folklore scholarship of the nineteenth and
early twentieth century with a little more critical of a lens.
Like a lot of the Soldier scholarship was probably a
little too enthusiastic in finding parallels between different stories and

(32:47):
practices and then asserting with too little evidence that it
was actually that, actually one of these is the direct
ancestor of the other. I mean, in some cases, of
course it is, but in other cases we don't know.
Though in this case it seems interesting and Rob, I
think you even did you come across another version of
a story like this about swiften or the same story.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
I think it is the same story. So a Lappage
includes a section here where I think he's including the
actual text from it. So this would have been from
Lanford of Fleury, who wrote a tenth or eleventh century work,
The Life of Saint Swiften, which again is this is
very much in the tradition of legendary Saint Swifton. This
is not historic at all. But yeah, this bit where

(33:31):
he tells the tale of a local man of Winchester
who happens to be traveling along, takes a nap, and
when he wakes up he sees two grotesque female creatures.
These are two of the witches, two of the weird sisters.
Quote not decked out in any finery, nor covered up
with any clothing, but rather naked to their foul skin
and terrifying with their swarthy hair, blackened with faces like

(33:54):
to Sephanie, and armed with hellish wickedness and poison. And
here in name referring to one of the names of
the furies, and this is referred to once more in
the text as well, saying like these are like two
of the three Furies. But Lappage notes that when we
get into some of the terms used. Yeah, these may
be hags or witches. There's this word hag, hag sessen

(34:19):
and this is sometimes Lappage notes associated with the word valkyrie.
So in a way you could think of these certainly
as hags or witches, but also you could probably think
of them as valkyries to a certain extent, or at
least the stories that these are based on, like the
original spirit of this medallion that's now hung on the

(34:40):
frame of Saint Swithin, you know, may go back to
stories of the valkyries and in Scandinavian traditions.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
Okay, So in this case, the kind of connection that
Earl is making to earlier pre Christian stories uh Lappage
seems to be at least partially endorsing. More modern scholar
is also saying that there seems to be some real
connective tissue here.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
Yeah. Yeah, And the full story boy goes on along ways.
But basically, these two witches try to speak to this
man of Winchester, and he is frightened and he runs
away from them, and they chase after him, and they
taunt him about how he's doomed and he's gonna die
when they catch him, and so he prays to God
for protection. Meanwhile, the third sister, who is dressed all

(35:21):
in white, she calls out to the other two and
she's like, stop chasing him, loop around over here with me.
I'm gonna ambush him. I'm going to get him real good.
And then thanks to God's interference, her attack is like
partially blocked and it only wounds like the man on
one side of his body. But he's pretty wounded, so
he has to be taken to the nearest church where
he is healed by none other than Bishop swython.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
Sw with unto the rescue, he just treats him like
a big egg. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
By the way, on the subject of hags and witches
in Saint Swithin, Sir Walter Scott in his eighteen fourteen
novel Waverley, has this fragment of a ballad that is
included that Scott can put together for the for use
in the fiction here called Saint Swithin's Chair, and you
can you can look this up. It's it's on your

(36:10):
main poetry websites. But I just want to read just
a bit from it where he's he's taking this connection
between Swithen and hags and like taking it in a
darker direction. And he says he that dar sit on
Saint Swithm's chair when the night hag wings the troubled
air questions three. When he speaks the spell, he may
ask and she must tell. So in this, you know,

(36:34):
Scott would seem to be like taking these ideas about
about Swithen and like taking them to the next darker step.
Not just one that not one that controls or has
influence over the weather, or even one that can can
can heal the damage rot by hags, but perhaps one
that can control the creatures of the night as well.

Speaker 3 (36:54):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
You know.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
To continue with Earl's theme of decorating the lives of
Christian saints with material from other sources, hanging the medallions
on the frame, so to speak, he mentions stories based
on wonders of nature. And I just wanted to throw
this out there quick, because this relates to something we
just discussed in our Cats of Cyprus episode. So he says,

(37:27):
quote any phenomenon, whether constant or casual, that had arrested
popular attention was fit matter for these amusing and edifying narratives.
The ammonites of Whitby became coiled serpents that Saint Hilda
had charmed. Another geological curiosity became the beads of Saint Cuthbert,

(37:47):
and to Saint Patrick was attributed the absence of venomous
serpents in Ireland. But yeah, that first example, we were
just talking about the ammonites, the shells of these now
extinct cephalopods, these creatures that died out in the KPg extinction.
You know, we find these fossils everywhere, certainly in England.

(38:07):
But yeah, these are actually now the coiled serpents of
Saint Hilda. I think we were talking about them as
coiled serpents of something else.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
No, no, no, it was Hilda.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
Oh it was Hild out Okay, okay, but you people
were like trying to help out the connection by carving
snake faces into them.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yeah they're a little too cute. Yeah you can look
up images of these. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
Anyway, but coming back to Klein's discussion of the weather
related stories, so those are some other stories. You know,
he fixes broken eggs, he heals people who have been
attacked by witches or weird sisters or valkyries or whatever.
But another story from the legend of Saint swithin which
actually connects thematically to the weather. So this is what

(38:48):
you were alluding to earlier. Rob story goes that Saint
Swiin was so humble and so pious that he asked
that at the time of his death his body be
buried outside the church. And I assume this is referring
to Winchester Cathedral, or at least the version of that
cathedral that existed at the time. The Winchester Cathedral that

(39:08):
exists today was built centuries after Swin's death, but so
it was the earlier version of that church. He wanted
to be outside so that, as we were talking about,
rain would fall upon his grave, and so that the
feet of people passing by the church would trample on
top of it. And the clergy initially honored his wishes.
They put him where he asked. But about one hundred

(39:29):
years after his death, some churchmen got squeamish and they
were like, Saint Swiin was really holy, isn't it wrong
that people should be walking around on top of his grave?
So they made preparations to dig up his remains and
move them on the date of July fifteenth. But when
the day came, a mighty storm broke out, forcing the

(39:52):
church to delay their plans. Only the storm did not stop.
It kept raining for forty days and forty nights straight,
and this was interpreted as Saint Swidin's revenge from beyond
the grave, or at least him issuing a stern warning
to them do not disobey his wishes. So instead they
just built a chapel over his existing grave, and many

(40:14):
miracles were performed there. It seems like still a violation
of what he was asking for. Yeah, I don't know,
but client says this story is not the origin of
the weather prophecy, and this version of the story does
not show up until the eighteenth century, and it contradicts

(40:34):
the claims of his earlier biographies, which are again are
probably also legendary, but were at least earlier. These earlier biographies,
you know, they they're the ones that talk about the
things I was bringing up earlier, about him being a
real work beast when it came to infrastructure projects, restoring
old churches, building new ones. Apparently he, you know, he

(40:55):
really impressed the King ethel Wolf by doing all this
work and eventually granted the church ten percent of its
royal lands as a gift. According to these stories, and
also at Winchester's it is said that he had a
stone bridge built over the river Itchin, and he was
known for being deeply humble and even ascetic, Like he

(41:15):
traveled through his diocese on foot, and he threw banquets
where only the poor and the outcast were invited, the
rich were not allowed in.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
And like that's one of the details where I think
you can make the argument, and that could be true,
absolutely could be true. It doesn't break anything else that
we understand about the man or the time.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
According to these earlier stories, when he died, he left
instructions that he was to be buried outside the church
in Oh, here's the source of what I was saying earlier,
buried outside the church in quote a vile and unworthy place.
And then this earlier biography also tells that in the
year nine to seventy one, more than one hundred years
after his death on July fifteenth, in fact, his remains

(41:56):
were actually successfully moved from their original rest place, from
the vile and unworthy place and taken to a new church.
And so this contradicts the forty days of rain revenge
story and really has nothing to do with weather. Now here.
Client actually brings it back to the figure of John Earle,
the Anglo Saxon professor I was talking about earlier, who,

(42:18):
he says quote in the middle of last century discovered
and translated a fragmentary chronicle concerning the transference. According to this,
Bishop Swen appeared in a dream to an aged smith
at Winchester, bidding him communicate to the monks the saints
wish that his bones should be brought within the church.

(42:38):
Asking for a sign to convince the monks of the
authenticity of the message, he was told to pull an
iron ring embedded in Swithin's stone coffin and it would
come away. So it did, but the smith still hesitated
until Swyin had appeared to him three times. Then he obeyed.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
It's interesting that part of the confirmation here is you
dig up my grave and then pull on parts of
my coffin. So at that point you've aready done, like
what a third of the work anyway, maybe half the work.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
But he had to appear three times like this smith
took some convincing. But it's also the exact opposite of
the earlier story. So in this version of the story,
the transfer of the remains was not contrary to Swidin's wishes,
It was his direct request. And then you've got additional
legendary explanations for the transfer. Let's see, there were stories

(43:33):
of like I think one of them goes basically like
there were stories that went far and wide of miracles
worked at the grave of Swien. The blind came to
it and recovered their sight. There's the story of a
humped man losing his hump. So the king at the time,
King Edgar, heard of these wonder works, and he thus
ordered that Swiin's remains be moved from his grave into

(43:55):
a gold shrine covered in jewels. Seems to befitting of
such a hump man as Swyen. And there was a
great ceremony in the feast. And in this version of
the story, there's like nothing at all about weather. So
what's the origin of the connection to whether As of
Klein's article, he says the answer is not really known,

(44:17):
But of course Earl speculates that it may have to
do with a pre existing tradition, possibly going back to
pre Christian times, throughout many different local European pagan mythologies
of weather predicting proverbs that were rooted in some kind
of local god or hero. There are other local saints

(44:42):
around the world associated with weather prediction heuristics. For example,
the legend of Saint Medard's Day June eighth, known in France.
So Madard or medardas was a Christian bishop who lived
in the fifth through the sixth century in modern day France,
and the legend about him goes that one day, when

(45:03):
Madarda's child, he was out walking in the country with
a bunch of other people. They were out and it
was nice weather, but then a terrible thunderstorm broke out,
and the people all around him were soaked in the rain.
But Madard himself was bone dry because he was sheltered
from above by a giant eagle that hovered over his

(45:24):
head with wings unfolded for the entirety of his journey home.
So an eagle umbrella.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
All right, all right, one that hovers, yes.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
And so in France there was a weather prediction proverb
or weather prophecy about Saint Medard's day that is almost
identical to the Swien proverb. It's basically, if it rains
on Saint Medard's day, there will be forty more days
of rain. If it's dry, the next forty days will
be dry. And then Earl has a footnote where he
also mentions a couple of other figures like this, Apparently

(45:55):
there's a weather predicting proverb for a saint protee in France,
pierro Ais. And then he also says, quote, the reigning
saint in Flanders is a saint a Godoliev and in
Germany there are three reigning saints or saints days. One
of the days is that of the Seven Sleepers. I

(46:17):
think we've talked about the Seven Sleepers on the show,
haven't we.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
I believe so. I'm a little foggy off the top
of my head who they were while they were sleeping,
but I do believe we've talked about them.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
I think the story is they were early Christian saints
in the Roman Empire who went into a cave to
escape persecution by the Romans, and then they fell asleep,
and then they woke up. I don't know. It's a
kind of a rip van Winkle thing. They woke up
many many years later.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
We talked about them in our episode on time travel
fiction and what are some of the arguments for early
precursors to science fiction time travel stories. It's, in my opinion,
a pretty cool episode. So I would recommend folks go
back and listen to it. Yeah, because it's like the
idea of time travel, like where not only where does

(47:03):
it come from, but how far back were we thinking
about things like it? How far back did we think
about time in the same way. Because nowadays, with via
time travel fiction, we think about this sort of thing
all the time. If I could go back and change this,
if I could go into the future and see what
this will look like.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
I have fun memories of that episode.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
Yeah, and now you can actually go back in time
and listen to it. That's the crazy thing about podcasts.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
So there's another quick literary connection I wanted to discuss
that I thought was interesting. This one I came across
in a post by the Royal Meteorological Society of Great Britain.
The post is called behind the Folklore Saint Swithin's Day?
Does reign today really mean a ruined summer? This is

(48:02):
from July fifteenth, twenty nineteen. This post includes a quote
from a poem called Trivia or the Art of Walking
the Streets of London by the British writer John Gay,
published in seventeen sixteen. I knew nothing of this work beforehand,
but I looked it up and it had some very
funny parts. It's a satirical poem giving advice about how

(48:26):
to go for walks around the city, including everything from
what to where, to strategies for avoiding common dangers and
obstacles in the streets. You know, how not to get
a chamber pot port on your head or whatever. And
here's one couplet from it. When suffocating mists obscure the
morn let thy worst wig long used to storms be worn. Ah,

(48:48):
and it rhymes too, Yeah, no rhymes, that's just good advice.

Speaker 1 (48:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:53):
But there is a passage that directly addresses the weather
predicting proverb of Saint Swithin, and also one that is
about the Festival of Saint Paul as well, So there
are multiple weather predicting proverbs. So John Gay's poem goes
like this, all superstition from thy breast repel let, credulous

(49:14):
boys and prattling nurses tell how if the Festival of
Paul be clear, plenty from liberal horns shall strow the
ear when the dark skies dissolve in snow or rain,
the laboring hind shall yoke the steer in vain. But
if the threatening winds in tempest roar, then war shall
bathe her wasteful sword and gore. And then here's the

(49:37):
relevant part with Swien. This is the other half here.
How if on Swithin's feast the welkin lowers, I was like, what,
I had to look that up, so that meaning dark
clouds gather. Basically, welkin is the sky lowers, I think
means like lowers, like it grows dark. If the sky
grows dark, If on Swithin's feast the welkin lowers and

(49:58):
every penthouse with hasty showers twice twenty days, shall clouds
their fleeces drain and wash the pavements with incessant rain.
Let not such vulgar tales debase thy mind, nor Paul
nor Swithen rules the clouds and wind? Oh sad to
end on that that kind of rhyme. That doesn't really

(50:19):
work anymore. It mind and paper, it kind of works
mind and wind. I wonder, did did mind sound like
wind then? Or did wind sound like mind?

Speaker 1 (50:29):
I mean, that's that's always the question, right, are you
gonna are you gonna actually try and make something like
this rhyme when you pronounce it and potentially sound foolish.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
But so even in seventeen sixteen, this guy's well aware
of this. This proverb as like a common saying, but
he's saying, pay no attention, it's hogwash. In fact, I
couldn't find any older sources where people are saying this
is a good. Yeah, this is good, it really works.
Every source I was finding on it was just people
hundreds of years ago saying this is stupid. It doesn't

(50:58):
make any sense.

Speaker 1 (50:59):
Yeah, because all you have to do is observe and
you don't need It's not one of these things where
you can just say, well, if you have the benefit
of long term record keeping, like no, it's like if
you've just tried it out more than once or even once,
you'd realize, you know, that didn't work, that actually wasn't
helpful advice.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
That's right. So here we come to the question does
it actually predict the weather? The short answer is no.
It is not a reliable guide, and you can easily
find lots of cases where it's wrong. In fact, if
you're strict about it, it is always wrong. The Royal
Meteorological Society post points out quote since records began, not
a single forty day drought has occurred anywhere in the

(51:37):
UK during the summer months, and there has not been
one instance at any time of the year of forty
consecutive days of rainfall sunshine on Saint Swithin's day. In
Miami may well auger forty days of unbroken sunshine, but
in Blackpool it most assuredly does not. So the if
you're very strict about interpreting it, this never ever has happened,

(52:00):
never will happen. I mean maybe in a million years,
but never happens.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
Yeah, once they build the dome or something.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
You know. Now, if you're not as strict in interpreting it,
if you take it more as an indicator of general trends,
it often does hold true, though you can still find
lots of years where it does not.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
So.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
John Earl investigated this in the eighteen hundreds. In his
piece on it, he's like looking at almanacs, and he says,
quote in Hone's Everyday Book for July fifteenth, some observations
are quoted, tending to prove that though it will not
bear rigid examination, yet it is not totally unfounded. Among
other instances, these occur. In eighteen oh seven it proved wrong.

(52:42):
A rainy July fifteenth was followed by a dry time.
In eighteen oh eight it was wet, and the rule
came partially true. In eighteen eighteen and eighteen nineteen, July
fifteenth was dry and followed by dry weather. Of the
series eighteen oh seven to eighteen nineteen, it was generally
true enough, but in the wet summer of eighteen sixteen,
though the adage was literally verified. Yet the heaviest wet

(53:05):
fell before the fifteenth And Earl has a friend who
studies meteorology who tells him that, you know, really, the
only way people can believe this prognostication has predictive value
is by quote attention being given to the instances wherein
it fell true and neglect of the cases in which
the reverse occurred.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
Ah, so sint that always the case?

Speaker 3 (53:28):
Yeah, this would be once again our old friend confirmation bias,
where you count the hits and you ignore the misses.
And you know, I think a lot of even outside
of weather prediction, just a lot of common sayings and
proverbs are regarded as wisdom in part on the basis
of confirmation bias. They're not actually true in all cases,

(53:52):
or sometimes even in most cases, but because we're already
familiar with a proverb propounding a rule or a pattern,
we notice events that conform to the rule and associate
them with the rule, and we tend to ignore events
that contradict the rule, or at least we don't mentally
associate them with the saying. So I was just thinking

(54:13):
of common sayings. One that came to mind for me
is absence makes the heart grow fonder. Seems very true, right,
seems very true?

Speaker 1 (54:21):
Why people keep saying it?

Speaker 3 (54:22):
Right? Yeah, being away from something or someone makes you
yearn for that thing or that person. But there's also
a counter saying, out of sight out of mind. This
also seems true, even though it basically means exactly the opposite.
And I think the reality is that sometimes absence makes
the heart grow fonder, and sometimes it doesn't. And in

(54:42):
the cases where it does, it seems like it proves
the saying true, and in cases where it doesn't, it
just doesn't occur to us to count it against the proverb.
So maybe instead it just counts as confirmation of an
opposing proverb. Oh, out of sight, out of mind confirmed.
So like both are true even though they contradict.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
Yeah, Like, it's you're you're summoning a saying to make
sense of things that are happening in your life, or
maybe even serve as kind of a predictive model of
what might happen, you know, feeding the the the the
ever turning gears of the mind with these things. So yeah,
it's only important to you to whatever extent it backs
up your existing machinations. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
So, I think sayings like this are often they're not
really useful for predictive power. What they're actually used for
is a mental classification system for events in our lives.
They're more kind of like a filing system for our
own mental biography. You know, I can remember this event

(55:46):
that happened here under the kind of salience tag of
absence makes the heart grow fonder, and this other event
I can remember under the salience tag of out of sight,
out of mind. Yeah. But anyway, back to the weather. So,
while it's certainly not true all of the time, maybe
not even most of the time, when taken as a

(56:06):
predictor of trends on average, I think you could argue
the sw within proverb has a little bit of truth
to it, and there is interestingly actually a mechanism, a
scientific mechanism we can point to that would explain why
it sometimes has a little truth to it, and that
is the jet stream. This is a point made by

(56:27):
that post by the Royal Meteorological Society. So the post
concludes quote the middle of July tends to be around
the time that the jet stream settles into a relatively
consistent pattern. If the jet stream lies north of the
UK throughout the summer, continental high pressure is able to
move in, bringing warmth and sunshine. If it sticks further south,

(56:50):
Arctic air and Atlantic weather systems are likely to predominate,
bringing colder, wetter weather. So to explain that a little
bit more so, the jet stream is this fast moving
current of air in the upper atmosphere above like nine
thousand meters that typically flows from west to east. There

(57:10):
are four main jet streams on Earth. You've got two
at the boundary of each polar region, in the North
Pole and the South Pole, and then you've got two
subtropical jet streams. The specific current that has the most
influence on European weather is the northern polar jet stream.
Jet streams are formed because of the temperature difference between

(57:32):
two big masses of air, in this case, the cold
polar air and the warmer air of the northern mid latitudes.
So you've got warmer air at lower latitudes colder air
at higher latitudes, and there's a boundary point where they meet,
and this boundary point creates strong horizontal pressure gradients in

(57:52):
the upper atmosphere, in short, big differences in pressure between
over here and over there. And these big differences in
pressure mean there's a lot of moving air in the
upper atmosphere. The moving air at this boundary gets deflected
to the right in the northern hemisphere because of our
old friend, the Coriolis effect. Because the Earth is spinning

(58:13):
west to east, it deflects these movements to the right,
which creates this powerful, fast moving river of air flowing
west to east in the upper atmosphere and is going
fast at speeds of several hundred miles per hour, and
this is the northern polar jet stream. It often tends

(58:34):
to flow right over or right around the British Isles.
So the position of this jet stream is largely determinative
of Europe's weather If the jet stream is flowing in
a relatively straight line across roughly the same latitude, it
can mean somewhat erratic weather actually, because what that means

(58:55):
is it will be pulling regular storms in from the
Atlantic on a repeating basis, and then they'll be punctuated
by periods of calm in between. However, if it's a
more squiggly line, think of like a meandering river, kind
of looping up and down. If it's shaped more like that,
which it sometimes is, Britain's weather will depend more on

(59:16):
which side of the squiggly line it ends up lassoed into.
So if it is trapped in part of a bend
reaching up from the south, this will tend to mean warm,
dry weather, kind of a more Mediterranean weather system, and
if it is part of a bend curling down from
the north, this will usually mean Britain gets cool, rainy

(59:38):
weather driven by the polar air mass coming in from
the sea. And these wavy patterns can sometimes park over
an area like Britain for several weeks at a time,
leading to somewhat stable patterns which, while not exactly conforming
to Swien's forty days prediction, they can approximate it. So

(59:59):
there it is a little bit of something going on
here based in real weather patterns.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
Yeah, I mean, you can imagine somebody setting out in
the weeks following July fifteenth, it's raining, they're wearing their
old wig, and yeah, it's conforming to the legend enough
that they might summon the legend in their mind as
they look up at the rainy.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
Sky, right, And that could well be because at that
time Britain is trapped in one of these polar troughs
where the jet stream loops down under it, so they're
getting a lot of northern air coming in, bringing in
the you know, cool wet stuff off the sea.

Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
And you know, it's one of those things where I
mean not to analyze it too deeply because I think
in many cases we're probably dealing with a very casual
association with the legend like that. But still little things
like that can make it seem like there's something or
somebody in control, like there is some level of control
in a life and in a world that seems chaotic

(01:00:57):
at times and can be quite scary, and it's unpartict
to build nature, but you can sort of even just
casually think, oh, it's just like that legend. Then it
feels like there's some month there's some bumpers on the lane,
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
Yeah, yeah, totally. So this RMS post they end with
a revised version of the Swithin poem that's even clunkier.
Not even trying really to scan at this point, but
this is what they come up with. They say, Saint
Swithin's Day, if thou dost rain for forty days relatively unsettled,
there's a fair chance it will remain. That sounds almost

(01:01:32):
kind of Yoda issue. And then Saint Swithin's Day, if
that'll be fair for forty days a northerly jet stream
might result in some fairly decent spells, but then again
it might not.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
You know who could have made this work Rocky ericson
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Yes, he could cram so many words into a line
like yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Yeah, you think of the lyrics to if you have
ghosts that. Yeah, this could totally work within the context of.

Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
That objects move without wind blowing from the newspaper to
the door.

Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:03):
Okay, well that's all I've got on Swithin, Saint Swithin's
Day and the weather.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):
Yeah, and you know, to bring it back to Rocky Erickson.
I definitely check out his music if you were at
all interested in anything we've said about him. The thing
is you've probably heard his music before and you just
hadn't realized it. I was watching The Wednesday Show about
Wednsday Adams on Netflix with the Family recently, and in
season two there's an episode where they drop Rocky Ericson's

(01:02:30):
I Walked with the Zombie's. It's a pretty well known
track of his, even if you're not aware of Rocky
Ericson like that one's been used in a number of things,
and like a number of his songs, he's kind of
a I think he's one of those artists that is
often kind of a musician's musician, you know. So his
his songs have been covered a lot by folks that
were inspired by his music.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
I'd say his best to known song is probably the
one he did with the thirteenth thirteenth Floor Elevators, is
the first track off their first album called You're Gonna
Miss Me. A lot of people have heard that one.

Speaker 1 (01:03:01):
Yeah, that's a really good one, and I think it
was that the tie also the title of the documentary
about him. Yes, yes, it was Yeah, solid track, but
not as I mean, not as rocking and not and
certainly not horror tame like the later Many.

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Of the later songs were I'm tempted to talk about
May ninth, nineteen seventy six, when I looked up and
nothing significant happened that day.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
All right, Well, we're going to go and close it
out here, but we just like to remind everyone that
Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily the Science and
Culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
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(01:03:46):
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Speaker 3 (01:03:59):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello.
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
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