Valentine’s Day - origin stories

Sketch for Copper Valentine (2021)

Despite a Catholic upbringing, i had no idea where Valentine’s Day came from. But this year I fell down a Google-hole and came across an account in National Geographic that outlines a whole host of different origin stories. Here’s a quick round-up for you:

The pagan festival

One version of the origin story has a pagan festival morphing into Valentine’s day:

“The earliest possible origin story of Valentine’s Day is the pagan holiday Lupercalia. Occurring for centuries in the middle of February, the holiday celebrates fertility. Men would strip naked and sacrifice a goat and dog. Young boys would then take strips of hide from the sacrificed animals and use it to whip young women, to promote fertility.”

(Doesn’t sound like my idea of a good Valentine’s day….)

“When Pope Gelasius came to power in the late fifth century he put an end to Lupercalia. Soon after, the Catholic church declared February 14 to be a day of feasts to celebrate the martyred Saint Valentine.”

The Chaucer / Shakespeare version

However there is an alternative history that says it all came form Chaucer, writing a thousand years later in the 14th century, and then cemented in literary tradition by Shakespeare:

“By some accounts… the poet Geoffrey Chaucer was the first person to link Valentine’s Day to romance in his poem The Parlement of Foules. Chaucer might have linked Valentine’s Day to romance more or less by chance—Valentine’s Day is approximately the time when European birds start mating. Later poets, including Shakespeare, followed Chaucer’s lead and helped create the romantic connotations we have today.”

The original Saint Valentines

Maybe the mystery will be solved if we looked at who the original St Valentine was. That must be doable, surely?

But apparently among the nearly 11,000 saints, over 30 are called Valentine. There are two top contenders (though their life accounts have several similarities, so they may be a single person). Both were priests who performed healing miracles, and were executed for refusing to convert to paganism. Both were said to have lived in the third century, during the reign of Emperor Claudius, and both are said to have died on 14 February. None of which is particularly romantic either.

And the cards?

“The first Valentine's Day card dates to 1415 when the Duke of Orléans sent a card to his wife while he was he was a prisoner in the Tower of London.”

Well it’s a bit grisly, but at least there’s an element of romance there.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.

(Here’s the 2019 National Geographic article for the full story)