Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folk-lore

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Chapman & Hall, 1863 - Folklore - 308 pages

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Page 95 - Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home, Your house is on fire, your children will burn.
Page 152 - ... and threatened with the loss of the use of the limb.* Against this accident, to which they were continually liable, our provident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew-ash was made thus : — Into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew-mouse was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt, with several quaint incantations long since forgotten.
Page 101 - When first the Year, I heard the Cuckoo sing, And call with welcome Note the budding Spring, I straightway set a running with such Haste, Deb'rah, that won the Smock, scarce ran so fast. 'Till spent for lack of Breath, quite weary grown, Upon a rising Bank I sat adown...
Page 154 - ... that in former times they have been cleft asunder. These trees, when young and flexible, were severed and held open by wedges, while ruptured children stripped naked were pushed through the apertures, under a persuasion that by such a process, the poor babes would be cured of their infirmity.
Page 157 - For the purpose of regeneration, it is directed to make an image of pure gold of the female power of nature ; in the shape either of a woman or of a cow. In this statue the person to be regenerated is enclosed and dragged through the usual channel. As a statue of pure gold and of proper dimensions would be too expensive, it is sufficient to make an image of the sacred Yoni, through which the person to be regenerated .is to pass.
Page 97 - This lady-fly I take from off the grass, Whose spotted back might scarlet red surpass, " Fly, lady-bird, north, south, or east, or west, Fly where the man is found that I love best.
Page 283 - To wake the bounding stag, or guilty wolf, There oft is heard, at midnight, or at noon, Beginning faint, but rising still more loud, And nearer, voice of hunters, and of hounds, And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen :— Forthwith the hubbub multiplies ; the gale Labours with wilder...
Page 151 - At the south corner of the Plestor, or area, near the church, there stood, about twenty years ago, a very old grotesque hollow pollard-ash, which for ages had been looked on with no small veneration as a shrew-ash.
Page 68 - They kindle a fire, and dress a repast of eggs and milk in the consistence of a custard. They knead a cake of oatmeal, which is toasted at the embers against a stone.
Page 52 - ... their fire, they then sacrificed a heifer, cutting in pieces and burning, while yet alive, the diseased part, they then lighted their own hearths from the pile and ended by feasting on the remains, words of incantation were repeated by an old man from Morven, who came over as master of the ceremonies, and who continued speaking all the time the fire was being raised. This man was living a beggar at Bellochroy. asked to repeat the spell, he said, the sin of repeating it once had brought him to...

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