There is an hour on the shortest day when the light simply gives up.
The window goes blue, then grey, then nothing at all. Frost sets on the glass in small feathers. Outside, the oak stands stripped to its black bones, every leaf it grew spent and gone to leaf-mould at its foot.
Beneath it, low and unbothered, the holly keeps everything it owns. Dark leaves, waxed and spined. Berries the colour of a struck match.
One tree has surrendered all of it. The other has surrendered nothing.
Stand at that window long enough and the story tells itself before anyone speaks a word of it.
Two Kings and One Crown
The tale, as witches keep it now, is small enough to hold in one hand.
The year has two halves, and each half belongs to a king. The Oak King holds the light half, from the deep of winter up to the height of summer. The Holly King holds the dark half, from that height back down into the cold.
Twice in the turning they meet. Twice one falls, and the other takes the crown from him.
They are not strangers. In most tellings they are brothers, or twins, or a single king turning like a coin in the palm. Neither is wicked. Neither wins for long.
What is fought over is not a kingdom. It is the length of a day.
The Oak King and the Waxing Half
The Oak King is the green surge.
He belongs to sap rising in cold wood, to the first stubborn crocus splitting frozen ground, to hedges going from bare twig to hedge-of-leaves in the space of a fortnight. He is the smell of rain on warm stone. He is the evening that refuses to end.
His tree is the oak: slow, thick-barked, lightning-marked, the tree that takes a century to grow and stands another five hundred years being ignored by everything around it.
Under his rule the days lengthen. Seed goes in. Lambs steady on their legs. The world spends itself outward without counting the cost.
He is generous, and he is a little reckless, and he does not know how to stop. That is precisely his weakness, and it is what undoes him.
The Holly King and the Waning Half
The Holly King is what comes after the spending.
He belongs to shortening afternoons, to the smell of the first fire of autumn, to apples going soft in a bowl and rime standing on the grass at eight in the morning. He is the pause at the end of the out-breath.
His tree keeps its leaf when every other tree has let go. That is the whole of his argument. In the black months, when the wood is bare and the ground is iron, the holly is still green, still glossy, still hung with red.
He is often drawn as an old man in a red robe trimmed with fur, crowned with holly, carrying a staff of it, driving a sleigh through a wood full of snow. That likeness is a modern one, and the resemblance to a certain midwinter gift-giver is not an accident.
He is not death. He is keeping.
The Battle at Midsummer
At the top of the year the light is at full stretch, and it cannot hold.
The fields are heavy. The evenings run on until the small hours. Everything green has grown as far as green can go, and there is a strange thinness to the air at the height of it, as though the whole day were a held note beginning to shake.
In the story, the Holly King comes out of the shade at the wood’s edge and meets his brother in the open field, and the Oak King goes down among the grasses at the very moment of his greatest strength.
Nothing looks different the next morning. The heat stays. The harvest is not yet in.
But the days have started to shorten, one grain at a time, and the crown has already changed hands. Midsummer is the anniversary of this. The rite of the day is kept at Litha.
The Battle at Midwinter
At the bottom of the year the dark is total and the cold has teeth.
The sun crawls along the roofline and gives up before the afternoon is finished. Candles are lit at four. The holly on the mantel is dropping berries onto the wood.
Here the story turns again. The Oak King comes back through the frost, young and unreasonable, and takes the crown from the old king in the hour when the night is longest.
The dark does not lift for weeks. The cold, in most places, is only beginning. And still the light has turned, and a person standing at that same window in a month will notice the blue lasting a few minutes longer than it did.
That turning is the whole of Yule.
Where the Story Comes From
Honesty is owed here, because the tale feels ancient and is not.
No surviving Irish, Welsh or Norse manuscript names an Oak King and a Holly King and sets them fighting at the solstices. Go looking through the medieval cycles for the pair under those names and the pages stay quiet.
The two kings as they are now used were drawn together by the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess, a book of the middle of the twentieth century that argued for one single poetic myth lying beneath the old literatures. It is a work of vision and argument rather than of evidence, and its central case has not been accepted by scholars of those literatures.
From there the pair passed into practice. Janet and Stewart Farrar gave the two kings a working place in their writing on the eight sabbats, and the story settled into ritual across the tradition that grew out of the Wiccan revival.
That is a short lineage. It is not a worthless one.
A myth does not need a long beard to do honest work. But you ought to know the age of the thing you are holding, and you ought not to hand it to a beginner as something the druids taught.
The Older Threads Beneath It
Graves did not spin the two kings out of nothing. He gathered threads that were already lying about in the folklore of these islands.
In the Middle English poem of Sir Gawain, written in the fourteenth century, a green giant rides into a midwinter hall with an axe in one hand and a bough of holly in the other. He is beheaded at the feast. He does not stay dead.
In the folk plays carried from door to door in the cold months — written down in any detail only in recent centuries — a champion is struck down by a rival and raised again by a doctor, and the room laughs, and the year goes on.
Old songs set holly against ivy and let them quarrel, though the quarrel in those songs runs between man and woman far more often than between summer and winter.
The wren was hunted in the days after midwinter while the robin kept the bare hedges. Later writers dressed those two small birds as the two kings. Older sources do not.
The threads are genuinely old. The garment woven from them is new.
The Two Trees Themselves
Set the story aside for a moment and look at the wood.
Oak is heavy, open-grained, slow to season and slower to rot. It builds ships and roof beams and barrels that outlive the cooper. It draws lightning. It drops acorns by the bucket and feeds half a hedgerow doing it.
Holly is the opposite in every way. Hard, white, fine-grained, small. It grows in the shade of larger trees and waits. Its leaves are armoured low down where the deer can reach and go smooth and unarmed higher up, which is the plainest lesson in patience any tree offers.
If you gather either for the altar, take a little and leave most, cut cleanly, and check what is permitted where you live before taking anything from any ground that is not yours.
Holly berries are not food. Keep them away from children and from animals.
Brothers, Not Enemies
The most common mistake made with this story is to read it as good against evil.
It is not. There is no villain in the field. The Holly King is not a thief and the Oak King is not a saviour, and the day you find yourself cheering for one of them is the day the story has stopped teaching you anything.
Each king is necessary and each is temporary. The light half without the dark is a field burned out by August. The dark half without the light is a winter with no end to it.
They are usually understood as two faces of one figure, closely bound up with the Horned God in his rising and his going down.
One brother is always kneeling. One brother is always crowned. Neither state is a punishment.
Where the Kings Sit on the Wheel
The two kings do not replace the sabbats. They run underneath them, like a bass line under a tune.
Their combat belongs to the solstices, and the six festivals between are the reign of whichever king currently holds the crown: sowing and greening and the first cutting under the oak, the gathered harvest and the thinning veil and the long keeping under the holly.
The full shape of that circle, festival by festival, is set out in the Wheel of the Year.
The solstices themselves wander by a day or so from year to year, which surprises people who expect a fixed date. What actually falls where, and why, is handled in when the sabbats fall.
A Rite for the Turning of the Half
This rite is used when you wish to mark the passing of the crown at either solstice, and to feel the turn in the body rather than only in the head.
You will need:
- A sprig of holly or another dark evergreen — or a leaf drawn on paper, which serves perfectly well
- An acorn, an oak leaf, an oak gall or a short piece of oak twig
- Two candles: a gold or yellow one for the waxing king, a deep red or dark green one for the waning. These colours are a modern convention, not an old law, and you may choose otherwise
- Two heatproof holders or saucers
- A dark cloth
Keep dry greenery well back from any flame. Stand each candle in its own heatproof holder, on a surface that will not scorch, and do not leave either one burning unattended.
- Lay the cloth. Set the oak token to your left and the holly to your right, a hand’s width apart.
- Light the candle of the king whose half is ending. Sit with that flame until your breathing has slowed and the room has gone quiet around it.
- Name aloud, plainly, three things his half of the year gave you. Small things count. Most of them are small things.
- Light the second candle from the first. The crown is passed, never seized.
- Speak the turning. Then put out the first flame and move its token to sit behind the other, so that one waits and one stands forward.
- Sit while the new candle burns down a little. Then extinguish it, and return the greenery to the earth, the compost or the hedge it came from.
The words at the fifth step are best when they are your own. If none come, these will do:
One goes down that the other may rise. Neither is lost. Neither is finished. The crown is only lent.
Keeping the Two Kings Through the Year
The story is more useful lived slowly than performed twice and forgotten.
Some keep a single token on the altar for the reigning king and swap it at the solstice — an acorn through the light half, a holly leaf through the dark — so that a glance at the shelf tells you which way the year is leaning.
Some mark the reign in the ordinary business of the house. Windows open and seeds in trays under the Oak King. Jars filled, wool taken up and the fire laid earlier under the Holly King.
And some keep it as a simple discipline of attention: noticing, once a week, whether the evening is arriving sooner or later than it did.
That noticing is the practice. The candles are only a way of remembering to do it.
What the Story Will Not Do
No king in this tale grants an outcome. The Oak King does not deliver a good summer and the Holly King does not owe you a quiet winter, and no rite performed at a solstice obliges either of them to arrange anything on your behalf.
What the pair offer is a shape to lay over a year, so that a dark stretch reads as a season with an end to it rather than a permanent condition.
That shape is genuinely steadying. It is not treatment. If the dark half brings a heaviness that does not lift with the light, that belongs with a doctor, and no wheel and no crowned brother is a substitute for one.
The oak will lose every leaf again. The holly will keep every leaf again.
Neither tree is arguing with you. They are only standing there, in the frost, changing places.