Halloween as it is marked in Britain, Ireland and North America is a nineteenth-century and twentieth-century affair, but the date it sits on is older than the name. 31 October was Samhain in the Irish and Scottish Gaelic calendar, the turning point from the light half of the year to the dark, and 1 November became All Hallows' Day in the Western Church. The pumpkin lantern arrived much later, carried by Irish emigrants to North America, where a native gourd replaced the turnip.
Where does Halloween come from and what was celebrated before it?
The word is Scottish, and it is short for All Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Hallows' Day on 1 November. The feast of All Saints was fixed on that date in the Latin Church by the ninth century, and the vigil the night before was kept with bells, candles and prayers for the dead. In 835 the Frankish church under Louis the Pious promoted 1 November as the day of all the saints, and the observance spread; Rome followed in the following centuries. The evening before a feast was, in the medieval reckoning, part of the feast itself, which is why 31 October carries the name and not 1 November.
What was celebrated before the feast is a separate question, and the honest answer is that we know less than the internet suggests. The Gaelic festival of Samhain fell at the same point in the year, and the two calendars sat side by side in Ireland and Scotland for centuries. Whether the Church deliberately placed All Saints against Samhain, or whether the two simply shared a season, is still argued by historians. What is not in doubt is that the night kept a reputation for a thin boundary between the living and the dead, and that reputation outlasted the feast that gave it a name. For a fuller account of how the date moved from a Gaelic quarter day to a modern October, the samhain to halloween history is set out at length in the editorial archive at The Hollow Lantern.
What exactly was Samhain?
Samhain is the Gaelic festival marking the start of winter, and it is pronounced roughly "sow-in" in Irish and "sav-en" in Scottish Gaelic. It is one of the four quarter days of the Gaelic year, alongside Imbolc in February, Bealtaine in May and Lughnasadh in August. The name is usually read as "summer's end".
In the medieval Irish texts, Samhain is the night when the Otherworld opens and its people can cross into the human one. The eleventh-century tale of the Togail Bruidne Da Derga and the Ulster Cycle stories place raids, feasts and supernatural encounters at Samhain. Cattle were brought down from summer pasture, rents and tributes were settled, and great assemblies were held. It was a practical hinge in the farming year as much as a spiritual one.
Three points are worth keeping straight:
- Samhain was not a single night of the dead in the modern sense. It was a season, and the eve was the point at which it began.
- It was not a pan-Celtic festival. Our evidence is Irish and Scottish, with a Manx counterpart, Hop-tu-Naa, on 31 October.
- It did not survive as an unbroken folk rite. The nineteenth-century accounts we rely on were already mixed with Christian practice, and much of what is now called Samhain was reconstructed in the twentieth century.
Why do we carve pumpkins for Halloween?
The lantern is the part of Halloween with the clearest paper trail, and it begins with the turnip. In Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, a hollowed root vegetable with a candle inside was carried or set in a window on the last night of October. It went by several names: jack-o'-lantern, will-o'-the-wisp, spunkie. The figure behind the name is a man called Jack who was turned away from both heaven and hell and left to walk with a coal in a hollowed turnip. The lantern was a warning as much as a decoration.
Turnips are hard work. They are small, dense and awkward to hollow, and a candle inside one gives off very little light. When Irish and Scottish families settled in North America in the nineteenth century, they found Cucurbita pepo, the pumpkin, already growing in the fields and already associated with the harvest. It is larger, softer and far easier to cut. By the late nineteenth century the pumpkin lantern was the standard American form, and by the twentieth it had travelled back across the Atlantic as the thing we now recognise.
The carving itself changed with the tool. The old turnip lanterns were cut with a knife in simple triangular faces, because the flesh gave no room for anything else. The pumpkin allowed larger openings and, from the 1970s onwards, the printed stencil. The result is that most lanterns carved in Britain this week owe their design to a North American craft revival rather than to anything medieval.
How did the night get its customs?
Three customs did most of the work.
Guising and souling. In Scotland and Ireland, young people went from door to door from the sixteenth century onwards reciting verses, singing or performing a short turn in exchange for food or coins. They carried lanterns, and in some districts they carried turnip lanterns. In England and Wales, soul-caking was the parallel practice: children sang for soul cakes on 2 November, All Souls' Day. The American phrase "trick or treat" appears in print in the 1920s and 1930s, and the door-to-door form became general in the United States after the Second World War. It reached Britain in the 1980s, largely through film and television.
Divination. Robert Burns's poem Halloween, published in 1786, records a night of games and fortune-telling in Ayrshire: nuts named for sweethearts set in the fire, apples peeled in one strip and thrown over the shoulder, mirrors consulted for a future husband. These were courtship customs, not ghost stories, and they were the main content of the evening in lowland Scotland.
Mischief. In the nineteenth century, 31 October in Ireland and Scotland was also a night for moving gates, knocking doors and blocking chimneys. The pranks were tolerated and, in places, expected. The American civic Halloween of the 1920s and 1930s was in part an attempt to channel that mischief into organised parties and parades.
What survives, and what does not
The date survives, and so does the lantern, though the vegetable changed. The bonfire survives in Ireland, where 31 October is still one of the busiest nights of the year for the fire services. The apple survives in the game of apple bobbing, which is the one divination custom to have crossed into general use. What has largely gone is the connection to the farming year: the cattle are no longer brought down, the rents are no longer paid, and the quarter day has become a calendar date.
What has also gone, in most places, is the turnip. If you want to see the older form, a swede or a large turnip will still do the job, and it will hold a candle better than a pumpkin in a wet October. It is harder to carve and it smells worse, which is probably why the pumpkin won.
A note on the sources
The folklore of Samhain is well served by the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, which holds the Schools' Collection of 1937 to 1939, and by the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading for the English harvest and soul-caking material. Both are open to the public and both are worth an afternoon. The pumpkin is a North American plant, and its arrival in the lantern is a nineteenth-century story, not an ancient one. The rest is a mixture of church calendar, Gaelic quarter day and Victorian antiquarianism, and it is more interesting for being exactly that.