We all enjoy celebrations, so of course we will go out for dinner with our love any day. Monday is Valentine’s day, so this weekend you’ll find a lot of good deals at restaurants and get-away hotels. But why February 14th? Isn’t April or May more typical for affectionate love and Valentine’s gifts?
Curious about the origin of this romantic holiday, I set out with the Swedish “Nationalencyklopedin”, Wikipedia and some google searches to get a trustworthy basis for a blog post. But bah, what a mess! Just like the Swedish Lucia, Valentine’s day seems to be a coincidence between one or even several pagan traditions and the name in the (old) Roman Catholic Saint’s Calender on that day.
Theories about Valentine’s Day
One, and probably the most popular, legend is about the priest Valentine who was martyred about AD 270. He had befriended and fallen in love with his jailer’s daughter and left her a letter signed “from your Valentine”. However, there are several saints named Valentine connected with this day. In 1969, they were removed from the Roman Catholic saints calendar. There was too little known about their deeds and lives.
Another theory is that the traditions of Valentine’s day come from the Roman celebration of Juno, Queen of the Roman Gods and Goddesses, which was followed by the Festival of Lupercalia. By drawing names from a jar, girls and boys were randomly paired to be partners during the festival and or course some partnership turned into love affairs. Later on, the church tried to tone down the tradition by using saints’ instead of the girls’ names to be drawn.
“Nationalencyklopedin” states that today’s celebrations stem from a pagan belief that the birds started to mate on this day. However, reading in wikipedia make me think that the pagan belief might have originated from a poem written in 1382 by Geoffrey Chaucer. Parlement of Foules was written to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia and not really about mating birds. In more modern English line 309-310 would be
“For this was Saint Valentine’s Day,
when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.”
After quite some digging around, the only conclusions seems to be that no one really knows. Without big parades and serious speeches, this day is for you and your loved one to do something special. So just enjoy it your way!
Elisabeth