"shack" wrote in message
...

Thank you for any help you can provide! I would love to identify the
plant described in the following novel - if it is a real plant - and to
know anything about the lore that might attach to the plant and its
flower.

The novel _The Graveyard Book_, by Neil Gaiman, is set in a graveyard
in an unidentified town in England. In a chapter entitled "Danse
Macabre", the residents of the graveyard and of The Old Town engage in
"a local tradition" that is triggered by the flowers blossoming in
winter for the first time in eighty years. The Lady Mayoress is
assisted in cutting enough flowers to fill four baskets, and she and
others distribute the flowers to all residents of the Old Town, pinning
each flower to the lapel of a passer-by.

More clues:
Neil Gaiman is very interested in Norse and Celtic mythology, and he
uses themes, characters and incidents from those traditions throughout
his books.

Gaiman's version of The Danse Macabre follows the distribution of the
flowers. He seems to base it on the Camille Saint-Saëns version which
is apparently based on an old French superstition: According to the
superstition, "Death" appears at midnight every year on Halloween.
Death has the power to call forth the dead from their graves to dance
for him while he plays his fiddle. His skeletons dance for him until
the first break of dawn, when they must return to their graves until
the next year.

I'm not an expert on the Celtic calendar, but it may be that the "local
tradition" in the book combines Yule and Halloween (Samhain) elements.


The narrator mentions that the Danse Macabre is taking place in
midwinter, and snow begins to fall the following day.


Here are the relevant passages from the book:
There was a strange scent in the air, sharp and floral. Bod followed
it up the hill to the Egyptian Walk, where the winter ivy hung in green
tumbles, an evergreen tangle . . .
The perfume was heaviest there, and for a moment Bod wondered if snow
might have fallen, for there were white clusters on the greenery. Bod
examined a cluster more closely. It was made of small five-petaled
flowers, and he had just put his head in to sniff the perfume when he
heard footsteps coming up the path. . .
[The lady mayoress] began to cut the clumps of blossoms, and she and
the three men started to fill the baskets with flowers. . .
"It's not surprising that the previous Lord Mayor did not know about
this tradition," said the chubby man, whose basket was almost full.
"It's the first time the winter blossoms have bloomed in eighty
years."



I strongly suspect that the plant is Mistletoe (Viscum album) which, though
it is not perceived by us as a flower, *is* referred to as a flower in a
variety of references. It would appear at the right time of year, growing
with ivy in the branches of trees. It has strong pagan and ancient
folklore-ish associations as a powerful medicine to aid virility and cure
tumours. It would almost certainly have been perceived - and used - as a
herb to drive away evil spirits. People have always collected it and
revered it. It is, to this day, used in european medicine, and I have
certainly seen it as an ingredient in scented candles and other aromatherapy
products. It can also be shy to 'flower'.

The fact that Gaiman refers to it as a 5-petalled flower may simply be an
indication of his ignorance of the detail of mistletoe. It *does* have a
greenish insignicant flower but, because it has often been likened to snow
(in fiction as well as more learned writings), he may have felt the creative
need to embellish his description. His work is fiction, after all!

Spider