If this translation be correct, the chorus would seem to have been sung when the Druids went in search of the sacred mistletoe, which they called the "heal all," or universal remedy.
There is an old Christmas carol which commences—
Nowell! Nowell! Nowell! Nowell!
This is the salutation of the Angel Gabriel.
Mr Halliwell, in his Archaic Dictionary, says "Nowell was a cry of joy, properly at Christmas, of joy for the birth of the Saviour." A political song in a manuscript of the time of King Henry the Sixth, concludes—
Let us all sing nowelle,
Nowelle, nowelle, nowelle, nowelle,
And Christ save merry England and spede it well.
The modern Gaelic and Celtic for Christmas is Nollaig—a corruption of the ancient Druidical name for holiday—from naomh, holy, and la, day, whence "Naola!" the burden of a Druidical hymn, announcing the fact that a day of religious rejoicing had arrived for the people.
A very remarkable example of the vitality of these Druidic chants is afforded by the well-known political song of "Lilli Burlero" of which Lord Macaulay gives the following account in his History of England:—
"Thomas Wharton, who, in the last Parliament had represented Buckinghamshire, and who was already conspicuous both as a libertine and as a Whig, had written a satirical ballad on the administration of Tyrconnel. In his little poem an Irishman congratulates a brother Irishman in a barbarous jargon on the approaching triumph of Popery and of the Milesian race. The Protestant heir will be excluded. The Protestant officers will be broken. The great charter and the praters who appeal to it will be hanged in one rope. The good Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English. These verses, which were in no respect above the ordinary standard of street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of England to the other all classes were constantly singing this idle rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More than seventy years after the Revolution a great writer delineated with exquisite skill a veteran who had fought at the Boyne and at Namur. One of the characteristics of the good old soldier is his trick of whistling Lilliburllero. Wharton afterwards boasted that he had sung a king out of three kingdoms. But, in truth, the success of Lilliburllero was the effect and not the cause of that excited state of public feeling which produced the Revolution."
The mysterious syllables which Lord Macaulay asserted to be gibberish, and which in this corrupt form were enough to puzzle a Celtic scholar, and more than enough to puzzle Lord Macaulay, who, like the still more ignorant Doctor Samuel Johnson, knew nothing of the venerable language of the first inhabitants of the British Isles, and of all Western Europe, resolve themselves into Li! Li Beur! Lear-a! Buille na la, which signify, "Light! Light! on the sea, beyond the promontory! 'Tis the stroke (or dawn) of the day!" Like all the choruses previously cited, these words are part of a hymn to the sun, and entirely astronomical and Druidical.