Samhain · Little Almanac

Samain is the first of the four quarter-days of the medieval Irish year and the best attested of them. It opens winter, it hosts the greatest assembly in the Irish calendar, and it is the favourite setting of the saga literature. It is also the station around which the largest quantity of confident modern claim has accumulated, most of it traceable to the nineteenth century rather than to the sources.

Provenance

First attested: Medieval Irish literature, in texts whose language is Old Irish and whose manuscripts are later. Samain is named as the first of the four quarter-days and glossed as the opening of winter.
Earliest evidence of the practice as now performed: The customs now called Halloween, including guising, souling, apple divination and lanterns cut from turnips, are documented from the later medieval and, mostly, the early modern period in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and northern England.
Name in current use: Samhain — The modern Irish spelling of Old Irish Samain; not a coinage, and in continuous written use, date not established
What is attested: A quarter-day at the opening of winter; the great royal assembly and feast; cattle brought in from summer pasture; and, in saga narrative, the opening of the sid mounds.
What is reconstruction: The characterisation as a festival of the dead, the thinning veil, and the account of All Saints as a Christian overwriting of it. All three are nineteenth and twentieth-century constructions rather than readings of the early sources.
Continuity: Plausible but undemonstrated
Evidence grade: C Insider writing from after a break in transmission
Grade C throughout for the Irish literary material: it is insider writing, transmitted by Christian monastic scribes, and the earliest manuscripts are of about 1100 although the texts they copy can be dated on linguistic grounds to the seventh to ninth centuries. The early modern Halloween customs are grade D, and they are well recorded.

What the medieval sources say

The fourfold division of the year is set out in a passage of the Old Irish tale literature in which the four stations are named and given a one-line seasonal gloss each ¹. For Samain the gloss is the opening of winter. That structure, four quarter-days opening four seasons, is the whole of the calendrical framework the early Irish material provides ^{2 chs. 35-37}.

Around it sit three further kinds of notice. The annals and the legal material record the great assembly, the feis, held at Samain, with its games, its contests and its legal business. The pastoral round puts cattle in from summer pasture at this point in the year, which is what makes a winter-opening station useful. And the sagas use Samain constantly as a setting, as the night on which the mounds of the síd stand open and the otherworld is close.

That third item carries most of the weight in popular retellings and it will bear the least. It is a literary convention in Christian-era narrative composed by monastic writers who were building a native past on biblical and patristic models, and it describes no liturgy ³. A story in which a hero meets the otherworld at Samain is evidence that Samain was a good setting for such a story. It is not evidence that anyone performed a rite.

Correction

Commonly saidSamhain was the Celtic festival of the dead, and the Church moved All Saints to 1 November to suppress it.

Both halves of that sentence run into the same difficulty, which is the chronology.

On the first half: the early Irish sources describe a harvest and winter-opening festival, and a royal assembly. They do not describe rites for the dead ^{2 chs. 35-37}. The reading of Samain as a festival of the dead is a scholarly construction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, built on the comparative method then in fashion, which passed from the scholarship into popular writing and has stayed there.

On the second half: the Irish church itself kept All Saints on 20 April, as the early ninth-century Irish martyrology shows ⁴. The 1 November observance was established in England and in the Frankish empire before it was Roman practice, and was made an obligation across the Frankish empire by Louis the Pious in 835. Choosing a date that the Irish church did not use for All Saints would be a strange way to overwrite an Irish festival. The argument that the 1 November date is Germanic in origin, belonging to the opening of the winter half-year and the month of slaughter, is the better-supported reading ^{2 chs. 35-37}.

The part usually left out is more interesting than the version it replaces. The mass observance of praying for the dead in early November is real, is enormous, and is Christian. All Souls on 2 November was promoted from Cluny at the end of the tenth century and spread across Latin Europe; the whole of Allhallowtide grew from it. Nearly everything in modern practice that honours the dead at this season descends from that development, which is documented in detail, rather than from a rite in Ireland for which there is no description at all.

Halloween

The customs are genuine, well recorded, and later than the sagas. Guising and souling, apple divination and nut divination, bonfires, and lanterns cut from turnips are documented from the later medieval and, in the bulk of the record, the early modern period across Scotland, Ireland, Wales and northern England ^{2 chs. 35-37}. Robert Burns’s poem Halloween, of the 1780s, is a rich early literary account of the divination games in a Scottish setting. The transfer of the lantern from the turnip to the pumpkin is a nineteenth-century Irish-American development, which is to say that the most recognisable object in the modern festival is the newest thing in it.

None of that is diminished by not being Iron Age. A custom recorded in seventeenth-century Scotland is a custom with a place, a date and witnesses, which is more than can be said for most of what is claimed for the pre-Christian period.

Samhain and the Celtic new year

The claim that Samain opened the Celtic year has a structural argument behind it and no direct evidence. Structurally it is coherent: in a scheme where seasons begin at the cross-quarters and winter comes first, the winter-opening station is a plausible place for a year to start.

The evidence usually produced for it is the Gaulish month name Samonios on the Coligny calendar, which is said to be the same word as Irish Samain. That identification is disputed, and it runs against the etymology: the Gaulish name contains the Celtic root for summer, and the month named from the root for winter sits six months away from it. Serious reconstructions of the calendar place Samonios at midsummer. See The Coligny Calendar.

Gap in the evidence

Whether anything in the recorded Samain descends from pre-Christian practice cannot be settled from the material. The name is old, the season it opens is old, and the assembly is recorded early. Between that and the customs recorded from about 1500 onward lies a documentary silence that positive evidence would be needed to cross, and it has not been produced. The comparable case where such evidence has been assembled is the harvest station: see Lughnasadh.

For the three defensible datings of this station in any given year, see Cross-Quarter Days.

What the medieval sources say

Halloween

Samhain and the Celtic new year

References