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774 SUMMEB AND WINTEK.
in most places, Laetare is the festive day, and is there called
Summer day.
There is no getting over this unanimity as to the time of the
festival. To the ancient Slavs, whose new year began in March,
it marked the commencement of the year, and likewise of the
summer half-year, i.e. of their leto; to Germans the arrival of
summer or spring, for in March their stork and swallow come
home, and the first violet blows. But then the impersonal leto
of the Slavs fights no battle with their Smrt : this departing
driven-out god has the play nearly all to himself. To our an
cestors the contest between the two giants was the essential
thing in the festival ; vanquished Winter has indeed his parallel
in Smrt, but with victorious Summer there is no living personality
to compare. And, beside this considerable difference between
the Slav ceremony and our own, as performed on the Rhine or
Neckar, it is also difficult to conceive how a native Slav custom
should have pushed itself all the way to the Odenwald and the
Palatinate beyond Rhine, accountable as it might be on the upper
Main, in the Fulda country, Meissen or Thuringia. What is still
more decisive, we observe that the custom is known, not to all
the Slavs, but just to those in Silesia, Lausitz, Bohemia and,
with a marked difference, in Poland ; not to the South Slavs at
all, nor apparently to those settled in Pomerania, Mecklenburg
and Liineburg. Like our Bavarians and Tyrolese, the Carniolans,
Styrians and Slovaks have it not ;
and Low Saxons. 1
neither have the Pomeranians
Only a central belt of territory has preserved
it, alike among Slavs and Germans, and doubtless from a like
cause. I do not deny that in very early times it may have been
common to all Slav and all Teutonic races, indeed for Germany
I consider it scarcely doubtful, because for one thing the old
songs of Nithart and others are sufficient proof for Austria, and
secondly because in Scandinavia, England, and here and there
in N. Germany, appears the custom of May -riding, which is quite
the same thing as the Rhenish summer-day in March.
Olaus Magnus 15, 4 says: The Swedes and Goths have a
custom, that on the first day of May the magistrates in every
1 The Holstein custom of going round (omgaan) with the fox, p. 764, took
place in summer (says Schiitze 3, 165), therefore not on Laetare ; and the words
they sing have no explicit reference to summer and winter.