No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time[955].’
The folk-lorist can only reply, ‘So have I heard, and do not in the least believe it.’
The wanderings of Odin in the winter nights must be at the bottom of the nursery myth that the Christian representatives of this divinity, Saints Martin and Nicholas (the Santa Claus of modern legend), are the nocturnal givers of strenae to children. In Italy, the fairy Befana (Epiphania), an equivalent of Diana, has a similar function[956]. It was but a step to the actual representation of such personages for the greater delight of the children. In Anspach the skin-clad Pelzmarten, in Holland St. Martin in bishop’s robes, make their rounds on St. Martin’s day with nuts, apples, and such-like[957]. St. Nicholas does the same on St. Nicholas’ day in Holland and Alsace-Lorraine, at Christmas in Germany[958]. The beneficent saints were incorporated into the Kalends processions already described, which in the sixteenth-century Germany included two distinct groups, a dark one of devils and beast-masks, terrible to children, and a white or kindly one, in which sometimes appeared the Jesus-Kind himself[959]. It is perhaps a relic of the same merging which gives the German and Flemish St. Nicholas a black Moor as companion in his nightly peregrinations[960].
Besides the customs which form part of the agricultural or the domestic observances of the winter feasts, there are others which belong to these in their quality as feasts of the New Year. To the primitive mind the first night and day of the year are full of omen for the nights and days that follow. Their events must be observed as foretelling, nay more, they must as far as possible be regulated as determining, those of the larger period. The eves and days of All Saints, Christmas, and the New Year itself, as well as in some degree the minor feasts, preserve in modern folk-lore this prophetic character. It is but an extension and systematization of the same notion that ascribes to each of the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany a special influence upon one of the twelve months of the year[961]. This group of customs I can only touch most cursorily. The most interesting are those which, as I have just said, attempt to go beyond foretelling and to determine the arrival of good fortune. Their method is symbolic. In order that the house may be prosperous during the year, wealth during the critical day must flow in and not flow out. Hence the taboos which forbid the carrying out in particular of those two central elements of early civilization, fire[962] and iron[963]. Hence too the belief that a job of work begun on the feast day will succeed, which conflicts rather curiously in practice with the universal rustic sentiment that to work or make others work on holidays is the act of a churl[964]. Nothing, again, is more important to the welfare of the household during the coming year than the character of the first visitor who may enter the house on New Year’s day. The precise requirements of a ‘first foot’ vary in different localities; but as a rule he must be a boy or man, and not a girl or woman, and he must be dark-haired and not splay-footed[965]. An ingenious conjecture has connected the latter requirements with the racial antagonism of the high-instepped dark pre-Aryan to the flat-footed blonde or red-haired invading Kelt[966]. A Bohemian parallel enables me to explain that of masculinity by the belief in the influence of the sex of the ‘first foot’ upon that of the cattle to be born during the year[967]. I regret to add that there are traces also of a requirement that the ‘first foot’ should not be a priest, possibly because in that event the shadow of celibacy would make any births at all improbable[968].
Some of the New Year observances are but prophetic by second intention, having been originally elements of cult. An example is afforded by the all-night table for the leaders of the dead, which, as has been pointed out, was regarded by the Fathers who condemned it as merely a device, with the festal banquet itself, to ensure carnal well-being. Another is the habit of giving presents. This, though widespread, is apparently of Italian and not Germano-Keltic origin[969]. It has gone through three phases. The original strena played a part in the cult of the wood-goddess. It was a twig from a sacred tree and the channel of the divine influence upon the personality of him who held or wore it. The later strena had clearly become an omen, as is shown by the tradition which required it to be honeyed or light-bearing or golden[970]. To-day even this notion may be said to have disappeared, and the Christmas-box or étrenne is merely a token of goodwill, an amusement for children, or a blackmail levied by satellites.
The number of minor omens by which the curiosity, chiefly of women, strives on the winter nights to get a peep into futurity is legion[971]. Many of them arise out of the ordinary incidents of the festivities, the baking of the Christmas cakes[972], the roasting of the nuts in the Hallow-e’en fire[973]. Some of them preserve ideas of extreme antiquity, as when a girl takes off her shift and sits naked in the belief that the vision of her future husband will restore it to her. Others are based upon the most naïve symbolism, as when the same girl pulls a stick out of the wood-pile to see if her husband will be straight or crooked[974]. But however diversified the methods, the objects of the omens are few and unvarying. What will be the weather and what his crops? How shall he fare in love and the begetting of children? What are his chances of escaping for yet another year the summons of the lord of shadows? Such are the simple questions to which the rustic claims from his gods an answer.
Finally, the instinct of play proved no less enduring in the Germano-Keltic winter feasts than in those of summer. The priestly protests against the invasion of the churches by folk-dance and folk-song apply just as much to Christmas as to any other festal period. It is, indeed, to Christmas that the monitory legend of the dancers of Kölbigk attaches itself. A similar pious narrative is that in the thirteenth-century Bonum Universale de Apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré, which tells how a devil made a famous song of St. Martin, and spread it abroad over France and Germany[975]. Yet a third is solemnly retailed by a fifteenth-century English theologian, who professes to have known a man who once heard an indecent song at Christmas, and not long after died of a melancholy[976]. During the seventeenth century folk still danced and cried ‘Yole’ in Yorkshire churches after the Christmas services[977]. Hopeless of abolishing such customs, the clergy tried to capture them. The Christmas crib was rocked to the rhythms of a dance, and such great Latin hymns as the Hic iacet in cunabulis and the Resonat in laudibus became the parents of a long series of festival songs, half sacred, half profane[978]. In Germany these were known as Wiegenlieder, in France as noëls, in England as carols; and the latter name makes it clear that they are but a specialized development of those caroles or rondes which of all mediaeval chansons came nearest to the type of Germano-Keltic folk-song. A single passage in a Byzantine writer gives a tantalizing glimpse of such a folk-revel or laiks at a much earlier stage. Constantine Porphyrogennetos describes amongst the New Year sports and ceremonies of the court of Byzantium in the tenth century one known as τὸ Γοτθικόν. In this the courtiers were led by two ‘Goths’ wearing skins and masks, and carrying staves and shields which they clashed together. An intricate dance took place about the hall, which naturally recalls the sword-dance of western Europe. A song followed, of which the words are preserved. They are only partly intelligible, and seem to contain allusions to the sacrificial boar and to the Gothic names of certain deities. From the fact that they are in Latin, the scholars who have studied them infer that the Γοτθικόν drifted to Byzantium from the court of the great sixth-century Ostrogoth, Theodoric[979].
CHAPTER XIII
THE FEAST OF FOOLS
[Bibliographical Note.—The best recent accounts of the Feast of Fools as a whole are those of G. M. Dreves in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (1894), xlvii. 571, and Heuser in Wetzer and Welte, Kirchenlexicon (ed. 2), iv. 1402, s. v. Feste (2), and an article in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und katholische Theologie (Bonn, 1850), N. F. xi. 2. 161. There is also a summary by F. Loliée in Revue des Revues, xxv (1898), 400. The articles by L. J. B. Bérenger-Féraud in Superstitions et Survivances (1896), vol. iv, and in La Tradition, viii. 153; ix. 1 are unscholarly compilations. A pamphlet by J. X. Carré de Busserolle, published in 1859, I have not been able to see; another, or a reprint of the same, was promised in his series of Usages singuliers de Touraine, but as far as I know never appeared. Of the older learning the interest is mainly polemical in J. Deslyons, Traitez singuliers et nouveaux contre le Paganisme du Roy-boit (1670); J. B. Thiers, De Festorum Dierum Imminutione (1668), c. 48; Traité des Jeux et des Divertissemens (1686), c. 33; and historical in Du Tilliot, Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire de la Fête des Foux (1741 and 1751); F. Douce, in Archaeologia, xv. 225; M. J. R[igollot] et C. L[eber], Monnaies inconnues des Évêques des Innocens, des Fous, &c. (1837). Vols. ix and x of C. Leber, Collection des meilleurs Dissertations, &c., relatifs à l’Histoire de France (1826 and 1838), contain various treatises on the subject, some of them, by the Abbé Lebeuf and others, from the Mercure de France. A. de Martonne, La Piété du Moyen Âge (1855), 202, gives a useful bibliographical list. The collection of material in Ducange’s Glossary, s.vv. Deposuit, Festum Asini, Kalendae, &c., is invaluable. Authorities of less general range are quoted in the footnotes to this chapter: the most important is A. Chérest’s account of the Sens feast in Bulletin de la Soc. des Sciences de l’Yonne (1853), vol. vii. Chérest used a collection of notes by E. Baluze (1630-1718) which are in MS. Bibl. Nat. 1351 (cf. Bibl. de l’École des Chartes, xxxv. 267). Dom. Grenier (1725-89) wrote an account of the Picardy feasts, in his Introduction à l’Histoire de Picardie (Soc. des Antiquaires de Picardie, Documens inédits (1856), iii. 352). But many of his probata remain in his MSS. Picardie in the Bibl. Nat. (cf. Bibl. de l’École des Chartes, xxxii. 275). Some of this material was used by Rigollot for the book named above.]