[973] H. O. F., St. George for England, p. 15.
[974] A Pilgrimage in Surrey, ii., 177.
[975] At Bristol is White Lady’s Road.
[976] The curious name Newlove occurs as one of the erstwhile owners of the Margate grotto: the Lovelace family, for whose name the authorities offer no suggestions except that it is a corruption of the depressing Loveless, probably either once worshipped or acted the Lovelass. This conjecture has in its favour the fact that “many of our surnames are undoubtedly derived from characters assumed in dramatic performances and popular festivities”.—Weekley, A. B., The Romance of Names, p. 197. “To this class belong many surnames which have the form of abstract nouns, e.g., charity, verity, virtue, vice. Of similar origin are perhaps, bliss, chance, luck, and goodluck.”—Ibid., p. 197.
[977] With the old English custom of burying the dead in roses, and with the tradition that at times a white lady with a red rose in her mouth used to appear at Pendeen cave (Courtney, Miss M. L., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 9), in Cornwall may be connoted the statement of Bunsen: “The Phœnicians had a grand flower show in which they hung chaplets and bunches of roses in their temples, and on the statue of the goddess Athena which is only a feminine form of Then or Thorn” (cf. Theta, The Thorn Tree, p. 40). The probability is that not only was the rose sacred to Athene but that Danes Elder (Sambucus ebulus), and Danes flower (Anemone pulsutilla) had no original reference to the Danes, but to the far older Dane, or donna, the white Lady. Both don and dan are used in English, as the equivalent of dominus, whence Shakespeare’s reference to Dan Cupid.
[978] Adams, W. H. D., Famous Caves and Catacombs, p. 177.
[979] Davidson, P., The Mistletoe and its Philosophy, p. 51.
[980] The term Christ is interpreted as “the anointed”.
[981] Akerman, J. Y., Ancient Coins, p. 25.
[982] We shall consider Robin Hood whom the authorities already equate with Odin in a subsequent chapter. In Robin Hood’s Cave have been discovered remains of paleolithic Art representing a horse’s head. In Kent the ceremony of the Hooden Horse used until recently to survive, and the same Hood or Odin may possibly be responsible for “Woodstock”.