Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/219

 CORRESPONDENCE.

Month-Names.

A LARGE number of Dutch popular month-names (now or formerly in use), partly derived from religious festivals held in those months and partly from nature and agriculture, are collected in JVoord en Ziiid, 1899, pp. 328 and following, by Mr. Leenclertz. Since he has been able to collect so large a number of such names in Holland I presume that Great Britain, which is a larger country, could furnish at least an equal quantity of them. Yet I cannot say that I know of any such names definitely attached to months of the Julian Calendar. We have, of course, representatives of the two classes of popular names in, e.g., Michaelmas on the one hand and Harvest-Moon on the other, but they are scarcely definite popular designations of the Julian months. I should be glad to hear of any such British popular month-names known to readers of this Journal.

The matter is of interest to me as throwing light on the mean- ing of ancient month-names. These, I believe to be all, except when the months were numbered, either of the Michaelmas or of the Harvest-Moon type ; and the preponderance of one type over the other is an important sociological fact. I believe that very nearly all the numerous ancient Greek month-names are of the Michaelmas type, derived from festivals, and so probably (but I have not yet been able to inquire fully) are the Semitic month- names and all the original Roman names, except those giving the number of the month in the calendar. In modern Greece (as in Holland) a good many month-names of the other Harvest-Moon type are in common use. We all know how the French Revolu- tion, which wished to be antique and conspicuously failed all round, banished the Michaelmas type and adopted exclusively the Harvest-Mooti type of month-name. The names given to the Revolutionary months were Latin, or Greek, or hybrid, but the principle was, it seems, not antique at all.

W. R. Baton.