Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/330

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. XIL OCT. 24, 1903.

" hog," I cannot help entertaining a doubt on the point, especially when I recall "hog mouse " and " hog-manay." The actual Welsh equivalent of the latter custom is the calenig or the carrying round the houses of apple into which is stuck a tripodal arrangemen of wooden skewers, together with small sprig of evergreens. Sometimes four or five apple. are skewered on a single wooden stand, ir which case the gift is called a perllan, 01 "orchard." They are carried round in th< earliest hours of New Year's Day, with hearty greetings of " Blwyddyn Newydd dda i chwi ("A happy New Year to you"). Now, as i rule, Welsh orchards do not supply apple* that will keep to the end of the year, th most common being, in our part, the " Morgan Nik'las," i.e., Morganwg glas, the "green Glamorgan (apple)," which keeps till about the beginning of November. The^calenu has, therefore, most probably been shifted on from Nos Galan-gaeaf, or the " Night of th Winter Kalends." A good description of the Welsh customs on that occasion is to be founc in a notice of Jameson's ' Dictionary ' in the Literary Panorama for November, 1809 :

" We shall make no apology for adding a few words on this subject [Beltane] in reference to other pajts of the United Kingdom. In Wales this annua tire is kindled in autumn, on the first day of Novem ber, which being neither at the solstice nor equinox, deserves attention. We believe that it is accounted for by supposing that the lapse of ages has removed it from its ancient station, and that the observance is kept on the same day nominally, though that be now removed some weeks backward from its true station. However that may be, in North Wales especially, this fire is attended by many ceremonies, such as running through the fire and smoke, each participator casting a stone into the fire, and at the conclusion of this action all running off to escape from the black short-tailed sow. The food for supper must consist of parsnips, nuts, and apples ; then an apple is suspended by a string, and caught by the mouth alone ; or one is flung into a tub of water, and the mouth only is privileged to catch at it. Nor are the purposes of divination absent from the fire on this evening. Each person present throws a nut into it, and those which burn bright betoken prosperity to the owner through the follow- ing year ; misfortune is presaged by those that turn black and crackle. On the following morning the stones are searched for in the fire ; if any be missing, let their owners make up their minds to encounter mischief perhaps calamity. In Ireland the Bel-tein is lighted on Midsummer eve ; and this custom is not extinct in England ; for the writer of this article has witnessed it on Midsummer eve in the public streets of towns in the diocese of Durham."

This very valuable account seems to fur- nish a hint as to the derivation of the word Jleltfln, for the Irish word bel (mouth) appears in Irish mythology in connexion with Loch Crotta Cliach (Tipperary), also called Loch Bel Sead and Loch Bel Dragain (' Dragon-

mouth Loch) ; see Rhys, ' Celt. Myth.,' 171-3. In Scotland boys went to the moors, cut a table out of sods, sat round it, lit a fire, cooked and ate a custard, baked an oat- meal cake, divided it into equal segments, blackened one of these, drew lots, and then compelled the boy who drew out the blackened piece to leap three times through the fire, with the view of obtaining for the district a year of prosperity (see 'Encycl. Diet.,' s.v. 4 Beltane '). Nor is this appeasing, or expia- tory, or redemptional feature wholly absent from Welsh customs, as may be seen in Matthew Moggridge's account of a ceremony attending the village wake (2 October) at Devynnock, Breconshire, when a poor man, representing Cynog, the patron saint, would, for a reward of clothes or money, be thrown, at the end of the procession, into the river, amid the jeers of the crowd (see the report of the Cambrian Archaeological Society's meet- ing at Brecon in 1853, in the Gentleman's Magazine for that year, an account which seems to have escaped the notice of Mr. Frazer). In Ireland cattle were driven through the Beltein fire, and it is this aspect that I now wish to draw the reader's atten- tion to. I have already mentioned the " hog- mouse," for which see the quotation from Ellis, the agricultural writer, in the 'N.E.D.' Mice, rats, and shrews are all called llygod in Welsh, which is a plural or " collective " term whence the singular llygoden is formed, while the original only appears in compounds, as llyg-liw (" mouse - colour "). If the English word shrew originally meant the " biter," then "shrew -bitten" would be the meaning of shrew-struck " in the following quotation Prom Gilbert White in the 'Encycl. Diet.,' s.v. ' Shrew-struck ' :

" When a horse in the fields happened to be sud- denly seized with anything like a numbness in his egs, he was immediately judged by the old persons to be either planet-struck or shrew-struck. The mode of cure which they prescribed, and which they considered in all cases infallible, was to drag the animal through a piece of bramble that grew at >oth ends "

an exact description of a Welsh growth of nieri.

I would here remind the reader of the mssage in * Romeo and Juliet ' (I. iv.) where Borneo says,

The game was ne'er so fair, and I am done ; and Mercutio rejoins with, "ut ! dun 's the mouse, the constable's own word f thou art dun, we '11 draw thee from the mire )t this (sir-reverence) love, wherein thou stick'st Jp to the ears.

The "constables own word," as he perhaps atches the hindmost of a mob of unruly