Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/369

 Rh at Hollantide and the beginning of January, but local folk-lorists 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 in Wales 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 should die during the year. 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 probable fact that the year of the pagan Norsemen pretty nearly coincided with that of the Celts. 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 Sybil, 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 poetry of the North.