It’s sometimes said that the bright planets don’t twinkle in the night sky, and especially Venus. This appears to be an oft-repeated truism among modern astronomers. Yet it’s also equally true that for naked eye observations Venus can sometimes appear to twinkle. Especially when very low in the sky and/or seen through the cold moist air of the British Isles…

“Look at Mercury always, Mars and Venus when small or thin, or any planet when low, to see how strongly they twinkle.” Fred Schaaf, Seeing the Sky: 100 Projects, Dover Children’s Science Books, 2013.

Recall that Venus was very low on the horizon when Tolkien made the evening observation which spurred his first successful journeyman poem.

I’ve seen Venus twinkling remarkably in the pre-dawn dark of the early nearly-frosty spring, in terms of sharply sparkling surrounding ‘shafts’. Tolkien appears to have seen something similar, since in LoTR he describes the light of a “frosty star” as “flickering”…

“… Nenya, the ring wrought of mithril, that bore a single white stone flickering like a frosty star.” (LoTR: Return of the King)

And I also found these examples from Tolkien’s Edwardian era, from places with less light pollution than today…

“… a sparking jewel in the sky. I thought I saw a firework when I first saw the planet glittering through a tree at night” (The Private Diaries of Alison Uttley: Author of Little Grey Rabbit) (talking of rural England).

“The majesty of the night brought me so much consolation [in wartime]. Venus, sparkling, is a friend to me” (Letters of a Soldier, 1914-1915) (talking of rural France during wartime blackout)

I see there are also instances in poetic convention…

“Let English dames shewe foorth their shyne, lyke Venus’ twinkling starre” (from The Harleian Miscellany, Vol. 9. page 364).

“And Venus twinkling bland her tremulous lids” (Hesiod, trans. C.A. Elton). (bland = flutter [her eye-] lids, in a flattering manner)

Brill’s Translations of Babylonian Planetary Omens, from the original texts in clay tablets, interestingly has it that ‘if Venus twinkles in the West, and her light (i.e. shafts) appears to touch the earth, she is deemed to have become male’ and this is an ill-omen. Such notions suggest the wider possibility that aspects of Venus (as deity) were mutable for ancient peoples depending on the observed appearance. What seems straightforward to us was perhaps more nuanced for them, by things such as elevation above the horizon, twinkling, compass direction, ‘house’ of the sky, visibility of a crescent, proximity to the Moon and to the tops of sacred trees/groves and suchlike. Possibly also colour, since one African desert observer suggests a low twinkling Venus can appear to have several colours.

A quick look at the literature further suggests that Venus may have appeared in the ancient British Isles when showing a ‘crescent’ visible to the naked eye…

“Venus and Mercury, which at times are observed as fairly narrow crescents, do occasionally twinkle quite appreciably”. Marcel Minnaert, Light and Color in the Outdoors, Springer, 1992, page 92.

… which may be significant when one considers that pre-Roman British coinage strongly suggests that a crescent in the night sky was an emblem of special significance.