After a few asks of "Is Junie a Mari Lwyd?" I feel like I need to protect the good name of the Welsh, because Mari Lwyd is a beautiful, powerful mare, and carries with her an incredible Welsh-language folk tradition which has been a big part of how Welsh culture has kept the Welsh language sacred and alive despite constant persecution by English speakers. It feels like it's really rude and cruel to Welsh people to act as if Mari Lwyd is just any old mast-beast (the collective name for the various head-on-a-pole animals mostly found in the East Atlantic Archipelago) rather than a specific Christmas tradition that happens to include the very famous horse skull animal.
(And, as someone who plays in other horse skull traditions that are NOT Mari Lwyd, I feel like it is my responsibility to make that clear - Which I have apparently not being doing as well as I hoped! - because I don't want to continue the trend of either a) Treating Wales as Magical Ye Olde Wizardland or b) Taking Welsh stuff and saying "Close enough, it's English now")
Junie is more closely related to Poor Old Horse, the Yorkshire manifestation of a mostly English tradition of the old horse as a character in mummers' plays, where the horse has reached the end of his days and is slaughtered and brought back to life (And depending on the telling this is either "And he stood up from under the pole axe, miraculously restored to youth" or it's "And after the axe struck home, and the saddler had his hide, and the hounds had his flesh, and the scrap man had his shoes, and the upholsterer had his hair, and the cutler had his bones, the man who held the bridle took the whip to his soul and said 'Get up Dobbin, your job's not done...") - It's definitely a tradition that survives because it draws the parallel between the worn-out old workhorse and the way that the bosses treat the human worker (I must admit, my favourite version of the song is the one where after "Get up Dobbin, your job's not done!" The rider sits astride Dobbin's soul, and Dobbin rides him straight to hell). Traditionally, Old Horse's skull is painted black or red: This below is the Old Horse of Hootton Pagnell, the first photo collected in 1976 by Ruairidh Greig, and the second from a Bonhams catalogue in 2015 when the horse was sold into private hands:
From Mr Greig's own website:
"Mrs Ward-Norbury confirmed the story that she outlined in her letter. The skull was retrieved by her family from the pond where it had been dumped by the band of mummers, who had been regular annual visitors but who broke up after a final performance in the village. She was told this by her Grandmother, who died in 1931.
The performance was most probably of the Old Horse play, in which a comic horse goes lame and is treated by a blacksmith and a farrier, a local version of which was described in 1903 (Wilson, 1903). I discovered a near complete version of the play a few miles away at Elsecar. This can be seen, together with further details about the custom, in my online thesis (Greig, 1989)."
Junie herself is gold for two reasons, 1) Because I wanted her to look like a catacomb-saint or a holy relic 2) Because I enjoy gilding things.
She also has a couple of siblings: The Old Tup who comes with a full set of organs, and two more horse skulls (December and Dobbin) Because apparently I now run some kind of Dead Horse Sanctuary and people keep finding old horse skulls and giving them to me. They're all beloved and live in a herd in my living room where they have plentiful access to brandy, fire, human souls, and space to perform their natural behaviours.
Peace and love on planet horse ❤️
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