A Vernal Tradition
Noiselessly as the spring-time
Her crown of verdure weaves,
And all the trees on all the hills,
Open their thousand leaves.
- C.F. Alexander, Burial of Moses (1854)
Ridgeview’s annual Valborg event will take place on Saturday, March 29. Valborgsmässoafton is an event inspired by folklore, Christianity, and a seasonal celebration of spring.
Saint Walpurga was born around 710A.D. in Devonshire, then part of the Kingdom of Wessex (now part of England). She was educated at Wimborne Abbey and remained there for twenty-six years before travelling to Francia with her brothers to evangelize. She became a nun and lived at the monastery of Heidenheim am Hahnenkamm around 741. She eventually became abbess of this monastery when her brother Willibald died, and she herself passed away in either 777 or 779. While originally buried at Heidenheim, her remains were later transferred to Eichstätt in present-day Bavaria. Interestingly, while there is an abbey dedicated to her in Eichstätt, there is a second Benedictine Abbey of St. Walpurga located in Virginia Dale, Colorado. In Finland, Sweden, and Bavaria, her feast day is commemorated on May 1.
The choice of May links this veneration with an older tradition. The Irish and Scottish pagan traditions of Beltane marked the beginnings of spring. Herein, fires were lit in the fields to fend off witches, move cattle to summer pasturages, and encourage new growth. The new may seem like a bastardization of the old, but the whole holiday has even earlier roots in the Roman Floralia, which may have itself been a precursor of May Day. So, history proceeds—ex nihilo nihil fit. Today, Valborg, in its secular sense, is more likely to be celebrated by university students in Uppsala dousing one another with champagne than lighting fires on rural hilltops to frighten predators away from their livestock or deter menacing witches.
At Ridgeview, Valborg is a family gathering to herald spring, to steel us for the final stretch of the academic year, to form new connections between young and old, to strengthen our community, and achieve a bit of catharsis by an invigorating run through the hills at the entrance to the Big Thompson Canyon. If all goes well, it will be smokey, muddy, dirty, wet, and glorious. It will involve students with wild hair, faces painted blue, hollering boisterously, throwing axes, javelins, shooting arrows, eating, competing, and laughing. It culminates in an obstacle course and an off-track endurance run beginning at dusk and lit only by the fading sun and the participant’s headlamps. Everyone who wishes to can run the race, throw an axe, or simply enjoy a meal around the bonfire and laugh with friends. Most importantly though, it is an opportunity for us to come together again after a windy, if not reliably snowy, winter.
We look forward to seeing as many as many of you as possible this year, but sadly there is a final, more somber note. Ridgeview will be donating the entirety of its profits this year to our friends at Heritage Christian School. Over the break, they suffered a tremendous tragedy as one of their families, the Case family, lost a mother, father, and daughter in a motor vehicle accident while travelling in Arizona. Their daughter, Sophia, was just one day from celebrating her eighteenth birthday. She was the captain of the girls’ basketball team, and was by all accounts, an incredible person—indeed, the whole family can only be regarded as pillars of their community.
Ridgeview students have long been fortunate to play alongside people of such estimable quality as Sophia, and Heritage has been our own athlete’s home away from home for many years, and as such, we mourn alongside them. While offering up “thoughts and prayers” sounds trite and cliché, we offer them sincerely nevertheless, and hope that our event to welcome spring will generate sufficient funds to provide some relief to an extended community that has so often been a consolation to our own.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
