So -- I went back to find the passage in question.
"Did they say how they were going to [pay the teind/sacrifice you] -- on All Hallows' Eve?"
[...]
"When I was a boy at home in Norfolk," said Christopher, "we young folk always lit a great fire in the fields on All Hallows' Eve, and then threw in a figure of a man made of the last harvest's straw... We called it 'burning the payer.' None of us thought that in the old days the man might not have been made out of straw."
There was another long pause, and then Kate said, with her voice sticking in her throat: "Not -- not -- made out of --"
"As for the burning: well, it seems to have been the customary manner of offering a sacrifice to the gods among the heathen British that the Romans found here when they first came to England. I remember reading about it in school. It's in Caesar somewhere."
"But that --" said Kate numbly, "that was almost sixteen hundred years ago."
So, well, both. The focus is on the pagan sacrifice of it all. And what Kate herself is principally shocked by is that this will be the method for disposing of Christopher, this person that she knows (and may be in the process of falling in love with), and she might well have reacted that way to any death method Christopher had told her about. But then of course you could reasonably think that Christopher's response might be along the lines of "well, the burning part of it does happen quite a bit now as well as sixteen hundred years ago..." (although at this point he too is probably a bit fixated on "welp, this is the thing that's going to happen to me!") And certainly there is an undercurrent here of burning alive being a terrible thing that doesn't happen every day!
On the other hand I'm going to give this a big out because I believe this was published as a kid's book, and I know it was published in 1974. (It won the Newbery Honor, which, selenak, is part of the big children's award in the US for the best children's book of the year -- it's the second place to the Newbery Award, which you may have heard of?) I can see why, given that, even if it occurred to Pope that there were a lot of other people getting burned, she might well have figured that she didn't really want to get into that.
(Same for the pregnancy aspect of Tam Lin -- to be fair, the whole book is about how the origins of stories and ballads can be very different from what the stories and ballads say, but I'm used to the pregnancy being kind of a big deal in most versions and retellings! But that would not have worked so well for a kid's book published in 1974...)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2022-12-30 06:41 am (UTC)"Did they say how they were going to [pay the teind/sacrifice you] -- on All Hallows' Eve?"
[...]
"When I was a boy at home in Norfolk," said Christopher, "we young folk always lit a great fire in the fields on All Hallows' Eve, and then threw in a figure of a man made of the last harvest's straw... We called it 'burning the payer.' None of us thought that in the old days the man might not have been made out of straw."
There was another long pause, and then Kate said, with her voice sticking in her throat: "Not -- not -- made out of --"
"As for the burning: well, it seems to have been the customary manner of offering a sacrifice to the gods among the heathen British that the Romans found here when they first came to England. I remember reading about it in school. It's in Caesar somewhere."
"But that --" said Kate numbly, "that was almost sixteen hundred years ago."
So, well, both. The focus is on the pagan sacrifice of it all. And what Kate herself is principally shocked by is that this will be the method for disposing of Christopher, this person that she knows (and may be in the process of falling in love with), and she might well have reacted that way to any death method Christopher had told her about. But then of course you could reasonably think that Christopher's response might be along the lines of "well, the burning part of it does happen quite a bit now as well as sixteen hundred years ago..." (although at this point he too is probably a bit fixated on "welp, this is the thing that's going to happen to me!") And certainly there is an undercurrent here of burning alive being a terrible thing that doesn't happen every day!
On the other hand I'm going to give this a big out because I believe this was published as a kid's book, and I know it was published in 1974. (It won the Newbery Honor, which,
(Same for the pregnancy aspect of Tam Lin -- to be fair, the whole book is about how the origins of stories and ballads can be very different from what the stories and ballads say, but I'm used to the pregnancy being kind of a big deal in most versions and retellings! But that would not have worked so well for a kid's book published in 1974...)