[41] Schübeler, Die Pflanzenwelt Norwegens, Christiania, 1873-75, p. 439.
[42] Hibbert Lectures, p. 358.
[43] The Rowan had to be cut on Ascension Day, Golden Bough, III, p. 448.
[44] Pratt’s British Flowering Plants, vol. 2, p. 266.
[45] The word bonfire, according to the Century Dictionary, comes from the “early modern English, boonfire, bondfire, bounfire, later burnfire; Scotch, banefire; the earliest known instance is banefyre. ‘ignis ossium,’ in the Catholicon Anglicum, A.D. 1483; from bone (Scotch, bane, Middle English, bone, bon, bane, &c.) + fire.”
Hence the word seems formerly to have meant a fire of bones; a funeral pile, a pyre. And it has gradually developed into a fire out in the open, whatever its object.
[46] Celtic Folklore, vol. i. p. 308.
[47] Vol. ii. p. 691.
[48] Celtic Folklore, vol. i. p. 325.
[49] Second Edition, vol. iii. pp. 343 et seq.