Wishing Thorn – What’s in a Name?

The Song of the Blackthorn Fairy

The wind is cold, the Spring seems long
a-waking;
The woods are brown and bare;
Yet this is March, soon April
will be making
All things most sweet and fair.

See, even now, in hedge
and thicket tangled,
One brave and cheering sight,
The leafless branches of the Blackthorn,
spangled
With starry blossoms white!

My wife is extremely artistic and creative.  She can take the most unlikely of materials and create something both quite beautiful and unique. So, when she expressed a desire to create an online outlet for her love of all things stitching I innocently asked her what she would call her store.  Her reply, “The Wishing Thorn”, took me a little bit by surprise because I couldn’t make a connection to it.  I didn’t understand the meaning.

   

Blackthorn Fairy by Cicely Mary Barker

    What I knew about the Blackthorn & Hawthorn tree could fit into one paragraph, but what I discovered was a rabbit hole so deep and full of ageless regional lore that I now really want to plant one when we retire to our new home.  Blackthorns are also called Sloe and are known in modern times for their musky scented flowers and fruit that is used to make Sloe Gin and Sloe Jam. Its gnarled woody and thorny branches are also the preferred source of wood for the Irish cudgel called a shillelagh. None of this explains The Wishing Thorn though.

According to folklore, a hawthorn tree was the home of fairies and stood at the threshold of the Otherworld. The rules were quite clear: anyone who cut down a fairy tree was doomed to perish. Although branches were gathered on May Day, they were never brought inside a house at any other time. At the festival of Beltane, young women would hold a twig of Hawthorn blossom to attract a husband.

Young girls rose at dawn to bathe in dew gathered from hawthorn flowers to ensure their beauty in the coming year, as the old rhyme goes:

The fair maid who, the first of May,
Goes to the fields at break of day
And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree,
Will ever after handsome be. 

Hawthorn Tree

Christianity played a part in preserving the reverence of the hawthorn tree. As Christ was given a crown of thorns at his crucifixion, the tradition of the tree’s magical associations has continued in Christian legend. Sir John Mandeville wrote:

Then was our Lord ylad into a Gardyn…and there the Jews scorned him, and maden him a Crowne of the Braunches of Albespyne, that is White Thorn, that grew in the same Gardyn, and setten yt on hys Heved…..And therefore hathe the White Thorn many Vertues. For he that berethe a Braunche on him thereoffe, no Thondre ne no maner of Tempest may dere (hurt)him; ne in the Hows that it is inne may no evylle Gost entre.

   Deeper down the rabbit hole I tumbled…

    Blackthorns are intertwined with the ancient lore of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and pre-Roman Britain.  In fact, in the ancient Ogham script of Ireland, the tree was known as Straif, from which our modern word Strife originates.  They were known to be medicinal, a tree of ill omen, associated with witchcraft and curses.  Conversely these trees were the friends of heroes, used in spells of protections, the briar that protected Sleeping Beauty, woven into wreaths for luck, gives warriors the strength to persevere in the face of adversity, and so on.

Blackthorn Tree

 

    What on earth is a wishing thorn anyway?

    Finally reaching the bottom of the rabbit hole slide I discovered that Blackthorns were often planted near sacred sites, wells and waterways.  They were to guard the entrances to the faerie world and as guardians, held magical properties of their own. The ribbon was fastened to a thorn on the tree in the hopes that the wish would come true.  Red for love, blue for peace, green for money and wealth, because of course, faeries really don’t like the color yellow!  Of course!  Blackthorn thorns were used to hang one’s wishes from, so they were called wishing thorns.

 

Below an old BBC news report: A major controversy has shaken the rural tranquility of Annacloy in County Down. A Fairy Tree was cut down!