Little Almanac

Lughnasadh

Lugnasad is the fourth of the Gaelic quarter-days, opening harvest, and it is the one station in the insular ritual year where the case for continuity from the medieval period to the modern has been assembled properly and taken seriously by historians.

What the medieval sources give

The station appears in the fourfold list of quarter-days, under the name Lugnasad and also as Brón Trogain, with a gloss on the opening of harvest 1. It is better served than the other three by the surrounding literature, because a specific institution is attached to it: the óenach at Tailtiu, in what is now County Meath, an assembly with games, contests and legal business, recorded in the annals over centuries. The place-name literature makes Lug the founder of the games, in honour of his foster-mother Tailtiu.

The assembly is a documented institution with a location and a date, which is more than any other quarter-day has. And the aetiology, the story about Lug founding the games, is a medieval literary explanation of an existing institution, which is the normal relationship between an origin story and a practice 2.

The continuity case, and why it is the strong one

The standard study of this festival collected and mapped documented Irish assembly sites and traditions, roughly 190 of them, and showed a robust and widely distributed pattern: hilltop and lakeside gatherings held on the last Sunday of July, under a variety of local names including Garland Sunday, Bilberry Sunday and Domhnach Chrom Dubh, with bilberry picking, climbing, and the sale and courtship that a large gathering brings 3.

That pattern is real, it is well evidenced, and it persists into the twentieth century in living memory. The argument that it descends from a pre-Christian harvest-opening festival is the argument the study makes, and it is found broadly persuasive for this festival specifically 4.

What makes it stronger than the parallel arguments for the other three stations is method. The claim was made by defining a class of evidence, collecting it exhaustively, mapping its distribution, and showing that the distribution is too widespread and too consistent to be explained by local invention or by literary influence. A claim built that way can be checked, and could have failed.

Correction

Commonly saidLughnasadh commemorates the sacrifice of the corn king, who dies with the harvest and is reborn.

The dying and returning vegetation god is not in the Irish sources. Nothing in the medieval material describes a corn king, a sacrificed harvest figure, or a death and rebirth at this station. The template comes from the comparative anthropology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and reached modern Pagan liturgy from there. The category itself did not survive twentieth century scrutiny: on close reading the cases assembled under it separate into gods who disappear and gods who die without returning.

Two things stand in its place, and both are better documented than the thing being withdrawn.

The first is the assembly. A recorded institution at a named place, with games, law and centuries of annalistic notice, is a more interesting fact about an Irish harvest festival than a borrowed myth.

The second is John Barleycorn. The ballad in which the grain is cut down, beaten and comes back is genuine English folk material with a traceable history in broadside from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Robert Burns’s version made it famous 4. It is a real song with a real lineage, and it does not need to be evidence of Iron Age sacrifice to be worth singing.

Lammas

English Lammas, 1 August, is a loaf-mass: the blessing of a loaf baked from the first of the new grain, documented in Anglo-Saxon England and in the later English calendar 4. It shares a date with Lugnasad and shares the harvest theme, which is what a harvest-opening festival in a northern European grain economy will tend to look like.

Sharing a date and a season falls short of sharing an origin. The two are best treated as two traditions arriving at the same point in the agricultural year, which leaves both with their own histories intact. Modern practice frequently uses the two names for the same station, which is a third thing again, and a recent one.

For the datings of this station in any given year, see Cross-Quarter Days; for the station that closes the season it opens, see Samhain.

Gap in the evidence

The continuity argument for this festival is the strongest available in the insular record and it is still an argument. What the collected assemblies demonstrate directly is a widespread and stable late July gathering custom in Ireland in the early modern and modern periods. Between that and the medieval notices of the óenach lies the same documentary thinness that affects everything in this domain. The proposition is plausible, is argued carefully, and is not demonstrated.

References

  1. A. G. van Hamel (ed.). Compert Con Culainn and Other Stories. Mediaeval and Modern Irish Series III. Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1933 (composed Old Irish, 8th-9th c.). https://archive.org/details/compertconculain03hame recordprimary source

    Contains the edition of Tochmarc Emire, the tale in which the four Gaelic quarter-days are named with a seasonal gloss each. Predates the ISBN system; reprinted by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

  2. Máire MacNeill. The Festival of Lughnasa: A Study of the Survival of the Celtic Festival of the Beginning of Harvest. London: Oxford University Press, 1962, 697 pp.. find a copy (catalogue search) recordpeer reviewed

    The survey of roughly 190 documented Irish assembly sites and traditions, and the strongest single continuity case in the insular seasonal record. Predates the ISBN system; the work page is a finding aid rather than an edition record. Publisher, place, year and extent are confirmed from the notice in Irish Historical Studies.

  3. Ronald Hutton. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain: Oxford University Press, 1996, xx + 542 pp.. ISBN 0198205708 recordpeer reviewed

    The indispensable single book on the British ritual year and its documented customs.

  4. Kim McCone. Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature. Maynooth Monographs 3. Maynooth: An Sagart, 1990. ISBN 9781870684101 recordpeer reviewed

    Argues that early Irish literature is the product of a monastic culture constructing a native past on biblical and patristic models, rather than a transcript of oral pre-Christian tradition.

  5. Ronald Hutton. Pagan Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. ISBN 9780300197716 recordpeer reviewed

    A survey of the archaeological and documentary evidence for pre-Christian religion in Britain, and of what each class of evidence can and cannot bear.