Stormcrow - John Barleycorn Reborn - Information - Stormcrow

Extract from the John Barleycorn Reborn Website (no longer active)

The traditional song ‘John Barleycorn’ has been sung by almost all folk artists and on village greens for hundreds of years. On the surface it tells of the processing of barley to make ale.

At a deeper level it tells the story through symbolic imagery of the British peoples’ founding beliefs. The character broadly represents belief in the ancient Vanir spirits (possibly Freyr who ruled over the rain, sun and the produce from the fields).

The story of the seasons and the significance of barley is told in symbolic form in Beowulf, a key British text set in Saxon Denmark. Denmark was the origin of the British peoples many thousands of years before with strong cultural correlation between their early societies. The Danish came over in boats and settled in the British Isles after the Ice Age when the isles were newly separated from the European land mass. Beowulf may be read both literally and also symbolically as representing the founding beliefs of the British-Danish peoples.

The title of Beowulf itself is symbolic of the seasons, Beow means barley in Anglo-Saxon English and the transformation of the 'wulf' also is indirectly symbolic of the seasonal changes. The characters within the text mean sheaf and shield themselves and figuratively tell a story handed down even then across thousands of years concerning seasonal fertility, death and renewal. It is likely the story goes even further back to the founding of civilisation itself. For example the death and rebirth of the god Osiris in Egypt is deeply connected with the seasons and he is even seen represented within the crops themselves growing in the fields, the gods reborn in the summer crops. Similarly death and renewal are one of the key spiritual transformations at the root of religion and morality societies such as Freemasonry. It is likely the roots of this are linked into the seasonal changes with John Barleycorn coming to personify this informally for the British peoples.