Gaelic
- Where
- Ireland and Gaelic-speaking Scotland
- When
- early medieval, with the fullest descriptions collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- What survives
- Early Irish law and narrative texts, glossaries, and much later folklore collection.
7 entries
Every entry here carries an evidence grade, because the distance between the evidence and the subject is the first thing to know about this material.
- Beltane
The opening of summer in medieval Ireland, the one described rite among the four quarter-days, and why the maypole belongs to a different tradition.
- Cross-Quarter Days
Three defensible answers to when a cross-quarter day falls: the fixed calendar date, the solar-longitude midpoint, and the temporal midpoint of the season.
- Imbolc
The thinnest attested of the four Gaelic quarter-days: a name, a season, ewes coming into milk, and no described rite anywhere in the early sources.
- Lughnasadh
The opening of harvest, the assembly at Tailtiu, and the one festival in Britain and Ireland with a serious documented case for long-term continuity.
- Samhain
The opening of winter in medieval Ireland, the royal assembly that met at it, and why the usual Halloween and All Saints story gets the chronology backwards.
- Solstices and Equinoxes
Four instants whose calendar dates move. What they are, why the date shifts between years, and what pre-Christian Europe is recorded as having marked.
- The Wheel of the Year
The eight-festival cycle has three separate provenances, no historical community kept all eight, and it was assembled in Hertfordshire around 1958.