180 WHITETHORN. BLACKTHORN. and it is a common saying in modern Germany, that the oak and the hazel dislike each other, and cannot agree together any more than the haw and the sloe (whitethorn and blackthorn). This looks as if the oak and the hazel were rivals for supremacy, like those old competitors for kingship, the eagle and the wren, and upon similar grounds. As for the white and the black thorn, theirs was a family quarrel, most probably provoked in the first instance by the circumstance of their being both of them European representatives of the sacred thorntree of India, the Mimosa catechu (p. 167), and endowed like it with supernatural properties. The wood of the thorn (ramnos) was used by the Greeks for the drilling-stick of their pyreia, and it was held by them to be prophylactic against magic, as the whitethorn was by the Romans,* among whom it was used for marriage torches. Both trees have enjoyed a similar repute among the German nations, and wishing-rods have been made of the white as well as of the black thorn.† In Germany the Easter fire was anciently called "buckthorn,"‡ simply, because that was the fuel of which it always consisted, as it * Sic fatus, spinam, qua tristes pellere posset A foribus noxas, hæc erat alba, dedit. Ov. Fast. vi., 130. + Leoprechting, Lechrain, p. 29. M. 583 u. does to this day at Dassel, in Westphalia. It is probable that the tree itself (bocksdorn) was so called from the sacrificial buck goat which was burned upon its wood in heathen times. A paschal buck goat for the baptism of the first infant continued to be a church offering in Schillingen, near Trêves, until the year 1712.* Thorn-trees are reverenced also by the Celts. "The whitethorn is one of the trees most in favour with the small people; and both in Brittany and in some parts of Ireland it is held unsafe to gather even a leaf from certain old and solitary thorns, which grow in sheltered hollows of the moorland, and are the fairies' trysting places. But no 'evil ghost' dares to approach the whitethorn." The author of this passage derives the supposed virtues of the whitethorn from the general belief of the Middle Ages that our Lord's crown of thorns was made of its branches, though, as he observes, "we now know that it cannot have been so." More than that, we know that the whitethorn was a sacred tree before Christianity existed, so that we must needs invert the statement of the writer in the Quarterly, and conclude that the * Kuhn, Westf. ii., 135. +"Sacred Trees and Flowers," Quarterly Review, July, 1863, pp. 231-2. 182 WHITETHORN. HAZEL. ancient sanctity of the aubépine or whitethorn was what rise to the medieval belief. The passage gave which the reviewer himself has quoted from Sir John Mandeville bears on its front the unmistakable impress of pagan tradition : "Then was our Lord ylad into a gardyn. and there the Jewes scorned hym, and maden hym a croune of the braunches of Albespyne, that is whitethorn, that grew in the same gardyn, and setten yt on hys heved. . . . And therefore hath the whitethorn many virtues. For he that beareth a braunche on hym thereof, no thondre, ne no maner of tempest may dere (hurt) hym; ne in the hows that yt is ynne may non evil ghost entre." The old traveller is here an unconscious witness to the enduring vitality of the Aryan tradition, that invested the hawthorn with the virtues of a tree sprung from the lightning. To return to the hazel. Its relation to the clouds and the lightning explains its supposed virtue as a promoter of fruitfulness, and its consequent use in divinations relating to love and marriage. When Loki, transformed into a falcon, rescued Idhunn, the goddess of youthful life, from the power of the frostgiants, it was in the shape of a hazel nut that he carried her off in his beak. In Altmark, nuts are scattered at marriages, as they were in Rome. In the Black Forest the leader of a marriage procession carries a hazel wand in his hand, and in Westphalia and other parts of Germany a few nuts are mingled with the seedcorn to make it prolific. Peas, another of Thor's fruits, are also used for the same purpose.* In Hertfordshire and other parts of England, as well as in Germany, a certain relation is believed to exist between the produce of the hazel bushes and the increase of the population, a good nut year always bringing-tant bien que mal-an abundance of babies. Among the sports of Allhallow-e'en, as described in Brockett's Glossary, and by Burns in his poem on that night, the burning of nuts is of great importance as affording omens concerning marriage. The persons engaged in the ceremony give the name of a lad and a lass to each pair of nuts as they lay them in the fire; and as the nuts burn quietly together, or start away from each other, so will be the course and issue of the courtship. The custom, as practised in England, is thus described by Gay in his "Spell" Two hazel nuts I threw into the flame, And to each nut I gave a sweetheart's name. * Mannhardt, p. 199. As blazed the nut so may thy passion grow, "It is a custom in Ireland, when the young women would know if their lovers are faithful, to put three nuts upon the bars of the grate, naming the nuts after the lovers. If a nut cracks or jumps, the lover will prove unfaithful; if it begins to blaze or burn, he has a regard for the person making the trial. If the nuts named after the girl and her lover burn together, they will be married."* In Bohemia, on Christmas Eve, girls fix coloured waxlights in the shells of the first parcel of nuts they have opened that day, light them all at the same time, and set them floating on water, after mentally giving to each the name of a wooer. He whose lighted bark first approaches the girl will be her future husband. If an unwelcome suitor seems likely to be first in, a head wind is directed against his vessel from the fair one's lips, until the favourite has won the race. But woe to him whose light is extinguished, for it portends his death.† Hazel nuts are believed in Sweden to have the power of making invisible. What that implies will be seen in the next chapter. The preceding data will enable the reader to conReinsberg-Düringsfeld, p. 550. * Brand, "Pop. Antiq." |