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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Lammas-tide cometh this weekend. In the Western Christian liturgical calendar Lammas Day, a feast of first fruits, falls on August 1. The name of the feast comes from the Anglo-Saxon “loaf-massâ€â€“Lammas Day was the day that a loaf of bread made with newly-harvested wheat was brought to the altar and consecrated.
In these secular days Lammas is perhaps best known for the U. K. Lammas Fairs. Folks in Canada get a holiday this weekend. We must be one of the last Western nations to (sort of) celebrate the day. We don’t exactly call it Lammas Day. It goes by the name of “August Civic Holiday†or “August Long Weekend.†The official holiday falls on the first Monday in August, so it only coincides with Lammas Day on one-seventh of the years. The next year that Lammas Day and Canada’s August Long Weekend both occur on the same day is 2011.
A glance at the OED citations for “Lammas†shows that the word “lammas†was corrupted to “lambmass†at least as early as the sixteenth century. Palmer in Folk-etymologies (p. 205-6) explains: “Lamb-mass [is] an old misunderstanding of Lammas (Day), the first of August, ‘because the Priests used to get in their Tithe-Lambs on that Day’.... Lam is the ancient form of lamb. A mass said on that day was accordingly esteemed very beneficial to lambs….†The ancient error may also have arisen because August 1 was also one of the feasts associated with St. Peter, whom Jesus commissioned at the end of the Gospel of John to “feed my lambs.â€
Doug and Sandy Kopf have a good writeup about the ins and outs and ups and downs of Lammas Day. In their article they also provide the text for Robert Burns’s well-known love poem “The Rigs o’ Barley,†which begins “It was upon a Lammas Night.†The refrain is:
Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs,
An’ corn rigs are bonie:
I’ll ne’er forget that happy night,
Among the rigs wi’ Annie.
Now we know what Annie Lehman does on Lammas Night.
Burns’s “Rigs o’ Barley†has been set to music, more than once. The best-known tune is the one sung by Ed Miller on his Lyrics of Gold album. Snippets of Ed Miller’s rendition of this ballad are available all over the net. After some searching I found a complete performance of Miller’s song at 24:46 of this one-hour Irish music podcast. So on Monday I invite friends of Canada to raise their glasses to Lammas/August Long Weekend, recite Burns’s immoral poem, and toast the pleasures of open air copulation on a bed of wheat stubble (ouch!).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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For better or worse, the song “Corn Rigs” will always be associated in my mind with the beginning of the fim The Wicker Man, in which Christopher Lee plays a lord who presides over a (murderous) neo-pagan cult on one of Scotland’s western islands. I guess that’s fitting—if I recall correctly, the movie has more than one scene of open-air copulation on beds of wheat-stubble.
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As Lammas came and went, I hoped against hope that a pagan lass was going to drop by to carry me off to the stubble. Alas. Must be the catholic, not to say Catholic, nature of Quebec. We don’t even celebrate this august holiday with the ROC (rest of Canada). Here, born-again pagan passions are expressed at the summer solstice, which is the fête nationale, loosely disguised as “Saint John’s Feast”, but all the late night revels, bonfires and fertility rituals are still there. From what I can vaguely remember.
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