Good Friday

Friday is Frigg's day; and Frigg, wife of Odin, was the goddess of married love. So Good Friday would therefore be the day of good married loving.

Incidentally, this crosses over to the romance languages where Friday is sacred to the Roman goddess of love, Venus. Thus vendredi in French.

Which brings us round to remembering embryo chickens, which we should all do at this time of year (explanation in the lines from Auden below):

It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens,
Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond,
Watching traffic of magnificent cloud
Moving without anxiety on open sky—
Season when lovers and writers find
An altering speech for altering things,
An emphasis on new names, on the arm
A fresh hand with fresh power.
But thinking so I came at once
Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench,
Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted
Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken.


So I remember all of those whose death
Is necessary condition of the season’s putting forth,
Who, sorry in this time, look only back
To Christmas intimacy, a winter dialogue
Fading in silence, leaving them in tears.

Some more Auden lines