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Ermintruder

The greatest risk is to risk nothing at all...
Joined
Jul 13, 2013
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This is one of those curious circumstances, in life so far, where I have been possessed of a vague foggy understanding of a funereal ritual, only through verse. Everyone of course knows the poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen, that memorable cry from the 1914-18 war.

Across the century since then, I have spent nearly half that time believing, misunderstanding, presuming, that a "Passing Bell" was just a literary device, a metaphorical tolling not of this real world. I had no idea it was an actual ceremonial observance, originally, for some Christian deaths.

Perhap's I'm unique in this ignorance. Maybe my later 20th century path through life, or my happenstance geographic stagger, has just insulated this matter-of-fact morbid reality from me....until now.

How well-known/universal or understood is this...tarrif? And is it still invoked, anywhere, in similar/identical style, in the world?

Ask not for whom the bell tolls.....

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Isn't the passing-bell mentioned in the novels of Thomas Hardy?
 
Quite possibly....I did read Hardy, including "Tess", but have no recollection of them
 
I am from a family of campanologists (I have a hunch someone might want to essay a humorous remark on that score), but I did not know of the passing bell. I did, however, know of the Nine Tailors: nine tolls of a bell to mark the passing of a male parishioner (6 for a woman, 3 for a child), followed by one toll for each year of the newly deceased person's age. But I only knew of that because of Lord Peter Wimsey. I have no idea how common a practice it was.
 
Does this refer specifically to the ringing of handbells, or church bells in general? I'd assumed this was an old world tradition, though this I'd only gleaned from movies, television and books. I've never personally heard bells at a funeral, in any amount (weddings, yes, but not funerals), not where we live.

I have heard church bells tolled for public personages, like the pope or the former governor. In fact, that's how I knew that John Paul II had died, because of the church bells. Getting the message the old-fashioned way, I suppose.

Sorry that doesn't answer your question. It is an interesting subject, though.
 
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...Across the century since then, I have spent nearly half that time believing, misunderstanding, presuming, that a "Passing Bell" was just a literary device, a metaphorical tolling not of this real world. I had no idea it was an actual ceremonial observance, originally, for some Christian deaths...

Sorry - here we go...M R James nerd-alert!

From The Residence at Whitminster:

When he left the chamber of death, it was to walk across the quadrangle of the residence to the sexton's house. A passing bell, the greatest of the minster bells, must be rung, a grave must be dug in the minster yard, and there was now no need to silence the chiming of the minster clock...

Born in a parsonage, brought up in a rectory, father and brother clergymen; James had a deep knowledge of religious theory, but also the day to day workings of the Anglican church. In the example above James appears to be referring to actual practicalities, rather than using a literary device.
 
Also, I seem to remember mention of passing bells in Laurie Lee's work, where the age and sex of the departed are signalled by the number of rings heard.
 
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I had always understood the passing bell to be the slow, repeated tolling of a single bell.

But surely the 'peal tarriff' doesn't preclude slow, singular, repeated punctuated tolling?

Therefore, does Owen's rhetorical unanswered question perhaps query the special toll/marker combination "for those that die as cattle"? As opposed to asking as to what/which physical bell will be rung? What an odd thought....for me, if correct, it adds an edge to poem I had been oblivious to, previously. But perhaps other readers, High Anglicans adherents or whatever, have always known, for the last century, what the poem was intended (perhaps?) to mean?

@Frideswide is this a formal Episcopalian / Catholic bell code observance that you're familiar with? Very interesting....
 
Well, someone has to mention this:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.


http://www.famousliteraryworks.com/donne_for_whom_the_bell_tolls.htm

...so I just did.
 
Owen does answer his own question with a series of jarring correspondences between the expected ritual and the reality of industrialized death. Part of the mockery he perceives is the speeding-up of the normal soundscape of solemn prayers and bells into the stuttering of the rifles and the demented choirs of the shells. Playing a record at the wrong speed would trivialize it much as mechanized warfare has stripped away any dignity or meaning from the sacrifice. Less explicitly, there is surely a reference to the bells worn by cattle and sheep. The rôle of the bellwether sheep is hard to exclude from the associations.

The noisy anger of the opening fades with the bugles' calls at the end of the octave. As we move into the sestet, the substitutes for ritual lose the bitterness of the battlefield and become gestures of quiet mourning, underlining the sense of absence. This careful separation of sonic and visual imagery serves to emphasise the distance between the routines of the grieving and what their fallen relatives have actually experienced. Though the ending is calm, it can never properly answer the cry of pain at the start.
 
I too didn't know it was an actual thing. Although the first thing that came to my mind was the line in Wishing You Where Somehow Here Again from The Phantom of the Opera. 'Passing bells and sculpted angels pale and momental.'
 
The term 'passing bell' seems to be used for two distinct things ...

First, it's a type of handbell rung in association with a death or funeral. In this sense it's synonymous with a 'dead bell'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_bell

Second, it's a category of bell ringing performed while someone is in the process of 'passing' (dying). This is distinct from a ringing or knelling to announce the death or to accompany the funeral. In this sense it's synonymous with a 'death knell' for imminent death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_knell
 
Wiki said:
The manner of ringing the Knell varied in different parishes. Sometimes the age of the departed was signified by the number of chimes (or strokes) of the bell, but the use of "tellers" to denote the sex was almost universal.
Did that UK and Ireland tradition survive in the extended era of creation for British North America, and beyond? Or not at all?
 
Is this the same thing as the 'requiem bell' mentioned in the Irish folk song 'The Foggy Dew'?

Their bravest fell and the requiem bell
rang mournfully and clear
For those who died that Eastertide in the
springing of the year.
 
I am from a family of campanologists.

It's almost indescribably poignant for me that this thread should be bumped just now: I'll take it as the sound of the passing bell for one of my relatives who, along with her husband, ran a successful bell-hanging business for many years. She's now terminally ill, in palliative care, and both too far away and too far gone for me to say my farewells.
 
Sympathies @Krepostnoi

Synchronicity has a span far in excess of its official reputation.

Although coincidences may only exist because we perceive them as such, the peal of a bell really does sometimes seem to carry across so much more than miles.
 
Is this the same thing as the 'requiem bell'
I don't think so. I'm unfamiliar with RC/High Kirk practise, but wouldn't this be for a full mass, in comemmoration? So a perhaps a special set of ringing tolls for that?
 
Odd that I should stumble on this thread almost immediately after ending a call discussing the memorial arrangements for a friend who has passed suddenly and way to young.

The Cosmic Joker is ever watchful.

I have heard Passing Bells tolled several times in my life so it is not a right that has completely died out (no pun intended - I can't find a more appropriate phrase right now).
 
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