Mount Hoar
The Mountain of the Lawgiving and the Rising
“And the Hoarfather descended upon Mount Hoar in cloud and killing frost, and the whole mountain was wrapped in white, and the people trembled at the foot of it.” — Book of Boren (Lawgiving) 19:18
Mount Hoar (anciently Glace) is the chief holy mountain of Frostianity, highest of The Hoarpeaks: the place where Borën received the Hundred Laws and the Ten Keepings, and (in the Latter Frost) where the Reforged Connor Frost ascended at the Rising. Two covenants meet on its summit.
Sacred Events
- The Lawgiving — the Hoarfather descended in cloud and frost; Borën went up forty days and brought down the tablets of ice (see Book of Boren (Lawgiving)).
- The Burning Frost — at the mountain’s foot Borën first met the Hoarfather in the ice-rimed bush that “blazed with cold light yet was not melted.”
- Elgar’s Stillness — the prophet Elgar the Stormcaller met the Hoarfather here not in the wind, the quake, or the fire, but in “a still small cold.”
- The Ascension — the Reforged Connor was taken up into the White from Hoar’s summit (The Rising (Holiday)).
- Some hold Connor’s Transfiguration (the Whitening-before-the-Whitening, when he shone “white as the unmelting snow” before Corin, Voss, and Bram) also took place on a spur of Hoar.
The Pilgrimage
The Climb of Hoar is one of the four great pilgrimages, peaking at the feast of the Rising and the Lawfeast. Pilgrims ascend in silence, fasting, halting at the Forty Stations (one for each of Borën’s forty days), and keep vigil on the summit for the dawn. The summit shrine, the Chapel of the Two Covenants, holds a relic-fragment said to be of the tablets of ice.
Significance
Mount Hoar is the meeting-place of earth and the White, where mortals come closest to the descending Cold. It joins the Old Covenant (the Law given) and the New (the Winter King enthroned), teaching that the Law and the gospel are one mountain seen from two sides.