We have entered the dark side of the year with a vengeance now, so this post is to say Season's Greetings & a cosy & cuddly Yule. The illustration shows a sequence from the fourteenth-century Graduale Birminghamiensis. It was published by the Henry Bradshaw Society at the beginning of the twentieth century, but did not achieve wide use beyond St Agatha's Sparkbrook & St Alban's Highgate. My own translation (you see, I've got hidden depths, I can play Scrabble) of the first few lines is:
A reindeer there was, Rudolphus,
In possession of a bright red nose.
And if it should ever happen that you saw it,
You would say that it glowed.
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