Untitled - Centrostudirpinia.it

SUMMEE AND WINTER.
streets, some with saws, some with billets of wood, and some
with napkins in which people deposit their gifts. They declare
m a song, that they are looking for the very oldest woman in the
town, to saw her through the body ; at last they pretend they
have found her, and begin sawing something, and afterwards
burn it. 1 But the same custom is also found among the South
Slavs. In Lent time the Croats tell their children, that at the
hour of noon an old woman is sawn in 2
pieces outside the gates ;
in Carniola it is at Mid Lent again that the old wife is led out of
the village and sawn through the middle. 3 The North Slavs call
it labu rezati, sawing old granny, i.e. keeping Mid Lent (Jungm.
1, 56). Now this sawing up and burning of the old wife (as of
the devil, p. 606) seems identical with the carrying out and
drowning of Death, and if this represented Winter, a giant, may
not the Romance and South Slav nations have pictured their
hiems, their zima, as a goddess or old woman (SI. baba) ? 4 Add
to this, that in
villages even of Meissen and Silesia the straw
figure that is borne out is sometimes in the shape of an old woman
(p. 768), which may perhaps have meant Marzana (p. 773) ? I
should not be surprised if some districts of Bavaria, Tyrol and
Switzerland were yet to reveal a similar sawing of the old wife. 5
The Scotch Highlanders throw the auld wife into the fire at
Christmas (Stewart s Pop. superst, p. 236 seq.).
But Lower Germany itself presents an approximation no less
worthy of attention. On p. 190 we mentioned that it was the
custom at Hildesheim, on the Saturday after Laetare, to set forth
the triumph of Christianity over the heathen gods by knocking
down logs of wood. The agreement in point of time would of
itself invite a comparison of this solemnity with that Old-Polish
one, and further with the carrying-out of Death; one need not
even connect the expulsion of the old gods with the banishment
Anton s Versuch fiber die Slaven 2, 66.
de 1>Es P a gne * 57-8; conf. Doblados briep.
3 Linhart s Geschichte von Krain 2, , 274. .
4 The Ital. inverno, Span, invierno, is however masc.
5 In Swabia and Switz., fronfasten (Lord s fast = Ember days, Scheffer s
Haltaus; p. 53) has been corrupted into a frau Faste, as if it were the fast-time
personified (Staid. 1, 394. Hebel sub v.). Can cutting Mid Lent in two have sig
nified a break in the fast ? I think not. What means the phrase and the act of
breaking the neck of the fast, in an essay on Gath. superst. in the 16th cent. ? see
Forstemann s Records of Augsburg Diet, Halle 1833, d. 101 (see Suppl.).