Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/448

 424 that may accompany the sports. If Guy Fawkes' Day superseded Hallow E'en, it superseded not only a festival of the Church, but an indefinitely ancient New Year celebration.

In the Island of Guernsey, Guy Fawkes was of course unknown. But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, on New Year's Eve, the boys were wont "to dress up a grotesque figure which they called "le vieux bout de l'an, and after parading it through the streets by torchlight, to end by burying it on the beach in some retired spot, or to make a bonfire and burn it. The practice fell into abeyance, but "some time in the second quarter of the nineteenth century an English family of small farmers started a Guy Fawkes celebration in the island. To the country people the name 'Guy Fawkes' meant nothing," but the resemblance to their ovv^n custom must have struck them forcibly, for they invariably called the "Guy" the "bout de l'an," or, as they spelt it, "budloe."

And now I want to launch a theory. The dates chosen for annual bonfire festivities are always on the eve of the festival, not on the day itself. We have the Beltane fires on May Eve, the St. John's fires on Midsummer Eve, the November fires on Allhallows Eve, the Yule-log on Christmas Eve: we also have the carrying of the Clavie or burning tar-barrel round the town of Burghead (in Morayshire) on New Year's Eve, and the similar fire-festival of Uphellya Night in Shetland on the same date. I should like to suggest that fire-festivals here and elsewhere mark the end of the old year or the end of a particular season,—according to the calendar observed,—just as the lighting or giving of new fire marks the beginning of a new one. The bonfire is a destruction of the bad luck and rubbish of the past, so that it shall never return to vex the future, something as the destruction of the property of a dead man by fire or water prevents his ghost from returning to haunt the