Note 28 — Chapter IV · Manx Folklore

Probably none of the practices which I have enumerated, or similar ones mentioned to me, are in any sense peculiar to the Isle of Man; but what interests me in them is the divided opinion as to the proper night for them in the year. I am sorry to say that I have very little information as to the blindman’s-buff ritual (No. 4); what information I have, to wit, the evidence of two persons in the south, fixes it on Hollantide Eve. But as to the others (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5), they are observed by some on that night, and by others on New Year’s Eve, sometimes according to the Old Style28 and sometimes the New. Further, those who are wont to practise the salt heap ritual, for instance, on Hollantide Eve, would be very indignant to hear that anybody should think New Year’s Eve the proper night, and vice versa. So by bringing women bred and born in different parishes to compare notes on this point, I have witnessed arguing hardly less earnest than that which characterized the ancient controversy between British and Italian ecclesiastics as to the proper time for keeping Easter. I have not been able to map the island according to the practices prevalent at Hollantide and the beginning of January, but local folklorists could probably do it without much difficulty. My impression, however, is that January is gradually acquiring the upper hand. In Wales this must have been decidedly helped by the influence of Roman rule and Roman ideas; but even there the adjuncts of the Winter Calends have never been wholly transferred to the Calends of January. Witness, for instance, the women who used to congregate in the parish church to discover who of the parishioners would die during the year29. That custom, in the neighbourhoods reported to have practised it, continued to attach itself to the last, so far as I know, to the beginning of November. In the Isle of Man the fact of the ancient Celtic year having so firmly held its own, seems to point to the probability that the year of the Pagan Norsemen pretty nearly coincided with that of the Celts30. For there are reasons to think, as I have endeavoured elsewhere to show, that the Norse Yule was originally at the end of summer or the commencement of winter, in other words, the days afterwards known as the Feast of the Winter Nights. This was the favourite date in Iceland for listening to soothsayers prophesying with regard to the winter then beginning. The late Dr. Vigfusson had much to say on this subject, and how the local sibyl, resuming her elevated seat at the opening of each successive winter, gave the author of the Volospá his plan of that remarkable poem, which has been described by the same authority as the highest spiritual effort of the heathen muse of the North.