Ronald Hutton's "Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain"

Merna B.: Ich habe so einige Taschenbücher von Amazon gekauft, manche sind so schlecht hergestellt, dass die Seiten von alleine rausfallen. Hier war das nicht der Fall. Alles in Ordnung

Germany on Apr 25, 2023

Marilyn Allan: Interestingly, all the people who have give them this five stars have all said it wasn’t what they wanted, which was information about pre-Christian traditions. This book should be called the stations of the son rather than sun as it seems to only begin with Christianity and regurgitate a lot of truths, which we will know about that religion, and all the stories that are made up about it. Also, most of the book is a negation of anything that might have been considered informative about the traditions and festivals of pre-Christian Britain. If you want to know anything about pre-Christian beliefs, do not buy this book.

Spain on Dec 03, 2022

Sven D.: A great resource to the holy days of the pagan year. Stations of the Sun is well research and provides a much deeper and accurate understanding of the important days in the year's cycle.

United States on Nov 24, 2022

BL: This is a very interesting and well researched book, if a bit dry at times. Even so, I'm really enjoying it. Definitely offers a window into times gone by

United States on Jan 06, 2022

lkhedley: Hutton is both rich with professional detail and yet easily reachable by the lay person. The book is a compendium and therefore it is full of details and alternative interpretations - but this is as designed. I bought it for historical research - not entertainment. I have never known Hutton to disappoint and he certainly did not with this book. Exactly what I have been searching for.

United States on Sep 15, 2017

Book Gannet: I really love this book. I bought it in the hopes that it would cover pagan and pre-Christian religious rituals, but was sadly disappointed. However, what I found instead was a well-written, excellently researched treasure trove of information about the social festivals of Britain (mainly England, but there are some Scottish and Welsh celebrations too) dating from around the thirteenth century right into the twentieth.

Largely using parish records, Hutton does an excellent job of dating and locating the many feasts and festivals that used to fill up the British year. Starting with Christmas, the first eleven chapters alone deal with the many ways in which people celebrated over Christmas Week and into early January, from there the rest of the book moves through the year, taking a chapter for each major festival or manner of celebration, through Easter and May Day, on to Midsummer and the harvest, passing through Samhain to end with Bonfire Night in November, but stopping off along the way to explore lesser defined traditions such as mummer’s plays, hobby-horses, morris dancing and revels.

At times it can become a bit dry with the straightforward recounting of which...

United Kingdom on Mar 18, 2015

Rachel: The most exciting insight I received from this book is just how quickly traditions change from generation to generation. This insight has been helpful to me in reading primary documents in other areas of research.

I am a Neopagan, and I'm always interested to know where the sources of commonly held beliefs really lie. What I find is that a large percentage of the practices and meanings associated with the Neopagan holiday cycle are Medieval in origin, or later, and changed rapidly thenceforward.

I'm okay with this knowledge. Wicca, my religion, definitely evolved in an Abrahamic environment and is compatible with Medieval material. I can understand why some modern Pagans would be frustrated to learn how little can really be discerned about their parent cultures, though.

The most useful element to this work is the fact that Hutton details the source material available to readers, AND provides his assessment of their reliability. He gives good reasons for these assessments. The reader isn't obligated to accept his line of reasoning, and the great thing is that one can go back and read those other sources and get a more detailed picture.

I think the Pagan...

United States on Aug 02, 2013

Annika: This book was definitely an eye opener, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in celebrating the seasons in Britain. I was hoping for more information about pre-Christian practices, but he explains that there is very little evidence of what people did back then, but the practices of the Middle Ages give some hints as to how the seasons may have been celebrated before Christianity. Most of all this book helps us understand modern holidays and how they developed. He explains that Midsummer was the biggest festival of the year, that Christmas was at one time banned and reinvented, and that Samhain was never a "Celtic New Year". Most importantly, he explains that the neopagan "Wheel of the Year" is a modern invention and does not accurately reflect the practices of pre-Christian people in Britain. This book takes you through the year, from Christmas to Halloween, and is jam packed with interesting traditions. Well worth a read, and I shall be going back to it to read again and again!

United Kingdom on Jul 23, 2013

Titus L: As a dozen good reviews could not begin to provide a fair account of this book, I shall offer a few key points which caught my attention as introduction only.

At the outset I had hoped for a more 'traditionally' pagan account of the ancient seasonal festivals, their origins and meanings.
I was initially surprised and eventually delighted to find however that although this work is more of an Academic compote of facts and dates and included ongoing assessment of earlier authors often unfounded but sometimes inspirational conjecture than I had anticipated (of Sir James Frazer et al) nevertheless this is a very enjoyable, remarkably researched and admirably objective book-collection of essays.

That much of this morass concerns the developments and impacts of constantly changing traditions due to Christian Reformation and Counter Reformation (certainly comedic at this distance in time), the ongoing process a seminal crucible (reminding me of both grail and cauldron) proved revealing, as the general view of folk traditions and their origins seems to usually favor the more arcane sources, this book by contrast documents only definite evidence, largely that of written...

United Kingdom on Oct 04, 2011

Alison: This book is not for a casual reader. It is, instead, a compendium of primary source information for those curious about the calendar year in Britain. It's fascinating scholarship and absolutely authoratative in its research, but not for "just reading"! At some points, the paragraphs are so thick with citations and details that my eyes began to gloss. In general, though, the prose remains readable, even when detailing minutia.

I do want to address one criticism from an earlier reviewer, who said this about the book:

"Hutton debunks everything he presents; after a while it kind of got on my nerves. Virtually every description and explanation is followed by some sort of 'but this probably didn't happen' or 'this probably wasn't really the way it was' disclaimer. fter reading several chapters, my attitude morphed into 'why are you wasting my time telling me about stuff that didn't happen? Can't you tell me about anything that probably DID happen?'"

I'm not sure if this reviewer and I were reading the same book. Yes, Hutton debunks many myths surrounding these customs, but to say that he provides no information on what DID happen, or how it happened, is bunk. The...

United States on Nov 19, 2005