It was a delayed flight in an American airport. I don’t remember which one, because they all look the same, an aisle with a Hudsons, a Starbucks, a Burger King, a Mac for makeup, a Dufry and a so-called Irish bar.
And there she was, long eye lashes, big hair, dyed blonde, crushed into a top two sizes too small for her, reasonably well irrigated before my arrival and telling me with great certitude how she was joining her friends for the weekend for “Sam Hain.”
Much is been done since to enhance Ireland’s ownership of the festival of the supernatural, and more importantly the commercial benefit that goes with it. Ireland’s ownership of Sam-hain is becoming big business. The current Tourism Ireland campaign in the USA is delivering the message “Home of Hallowe’en.”
Sam Hain, as readers will recognise, is the gloriously mispronounced version of Halloween that you find nowadays on streaming services and late night satellite horror films. So mispronounced, so often, that the original is now unrecognisable to international ears.
Samhain, for readers not of an Irish heritage, is pronounced sow-an, with sow pronounced as in female pig. It is our autumn festival, our time for communication with the dead.
Tour guides and internet desktop research bloggers will assure you it is when the dead wander around between dusk and dawn, so people dress up to fool them or play tricks on them. But, as tends to happen after dark, the tradition is not as clear cut as that.
Southern Belle may be closer to the correct pronunciation than she knows. Samain could be Samh-Shuan (Sav-hooan) of Samh-Fuin, the resting period of Samh, or the sun.
Samm survives in Samh-raídhe, old Irish samrad, from the original Celtic samos, the realm or season of Samm the sun, as opposed to Gamh-raídhe, the kingdom of Gamm. Bel-tine, the beginning of summer, was also called Céidseamhin.
We can trace both the old word and the new word for sun back to the original language that spread westward from India, samm /samonios from sehwōl, and grían from grēnā (hot), although the detail of this process is often educated guesswork. Samm is also, helpfully, a Viking word for summer.
There is also support for a recent theory that Samhain is based on an ancient Indo-European word for togetherness or assembly, evident in Sanskrit samaná or old German saman.
If it had a pre-Christian religious element at all, Samhain switched early from matters sacred to matters secular. While, for most recorded history it was the Christian festival of all souls, the Hallow of Hallow evening, it was also time to pay the rent.
In Lebor na Cert, the Book of Rights, Samhain was the period when food dues were paid to the overking, as the harvest had been gathered and the provisioning for the winter needed to be done.
Where food dues were collected, there was feasting. Acallamh Senórach described how, every third year, a parliament was held at Samhain, with three days of sacred rites and banqueting.
And, this being Ireland, the fairies were on the guest list.
Most of the early history of Samhain is based on one or two contemporary pieces of propaganda and a prodigious amount of plagiarism.
Everything we know about our pre-Christian Irish culture was written down so long AFTER the arrival of Christianity that it should be treated with caution.
It was in Castledermot that Cormac’s glossary, Sanas Cormaic, was written in the 800s, a gather-me-uppum of leftovers from pre-Christian times, written a long time after they had been superseded.
Amongst other references to pre-Christian Samhain, MS 1336, preserved in the Library of Trinity College, proposes an exact location for a Samhain festival, the Hill of Ward in Meath.
Tlachtga near Athboy, it tells us, was where and when a great Druidic fire was lit, “from whence all the hearths in Ireland were to be lighted, the hearths of the previous year having been extinguished.”
The rest of MS 1336 gives the game away. It suggests that food dues were to be paid to the King of Munster (this, on a location only 20km from the Hill of Tara), indicating this is nothing more than a cunning plan to backdate a Viking Age tribute, allegedly due to the rulers of the southern half of the country, the House of Eoghan based at Cashel, rather than the House of Niall, based at Tara.
The fairy hill of Croghan, Cruachán Bríg Éle, is where we find the fairy connection. It was specified by Laud 610 as the hill where a particularly beautiful maiden was hidden.
This femme fatale, quite literally, that the men of Ireland attempted to woo every Samhain for many years, had an annoying habit of slaying any man to which she was not attracted.
One eventually succeeded (I, for one, am proud of that).
Manuscript Laud 610, the Boyhood Deeds of Finn, written in the 1100s, is best known today as the source of the “salmon of knowledge” wonder tale taught to schoolchildren. It says the fairy-forts of Ireland opened at this time; “for on Hallowe’en nothing could ever be hidden in the fairy-forts.”
From this comes the tradition that fairy fort Ireland acts as a portal into the otherworld, in the manner of Stephanie Meyer, for one night only. This single reference in a fragment of an incomplete manuscript was enough to send a lot of otherwise sensible people to this day in chase of the bobbing apples of Samhain’s mysterious past.
Ireland’s romantic and heroic literature suggests that sundown Samhain doubled up as a time for divining the fortunes of the year to come.
The Book of the Dun Cow includes some dramatic divination at Hallowe’en by otherworld creatures, including dead horsemen giving ominous warnings. Other parts of the Ulster Cycle suggests Samhain began the new Celtic year, although recent scholarship is less convinced.
The combination of folk memory of food dues, open fairy fort portals and magical divination created the Hallowe’en we know today.
Folklorists, from O’Donovan to Ó Duilearga to Ó hOgáin, suggest that the games of our childhood, with their bobbing apples, and the threepenny bit in the barm brack, were a legacy from ancient magical attempts to predict the future.
We have no idea how any of this evolved. Although there are some disapproving references to the customs of the people, it was the 1830s before anyone turned up on the doorstep to ask the country people themselves what was happening. They found enough peculiar customs to keep six generations of folklorists busy.
In the heroic literature, at a time the overking collected his oats, apples and nuts, supernatural creatures were expected to demand food-dues of their own.
Food-dues are important, so why should the otherworld be left out? Gorier parts of the story, that tell us that Samhain dues could include children sacrificed to the dreaded Fomorians, appear to have been added later, around 1634.
Children dressing up as the aos sí, going door to door to collect the food dues for the supernatural, was presumably less traumatising for all concerned than an appearance by the souls of the dead themselves.
Albeit only marginally, it must be said.
