Some Cases of Longevity and the Preservation of TraditionAuthor(s): Nigel HarveySource: Folklore, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Dec., 1945), pp. 364-365Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1256731 .

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364 Collectanea

appear needlessly complicated; might not the name have been given because of the supposed properties and the connection between the life- giving eye of the god and its counterpart, the health-giving well?

In this last theory we have, I believe, a sufficient explanation of the common belief, wherever it occurs. A belief which came to our shores from the Mediterranean lands and persisted most strongly in the districts where those who introduced it retained a foothold and exerted a cultural influence. In the Scandinavian and Teutonic countries, it may have given rise to the legend of Odin and the Odhrorir of Mimir as well as to the popular belief that " you must not look into running water, because you look into God's eye ",8 but in Britain it was firmly established and intense sanctity was ascribed to the wells which were oculi deorum. An interesting example of this attitude towards the wells and their environs occurs in the legend that a field wherein an eye-well was situated at Blisland, Cornwall, was so sacred that when it was ploughed up in 1878, the farmer's son fell on a scythe and had to have his leg amputated.9

PETER B. G. BINNALL

8 Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, ed. J. S. Stallybrass (London, 1882), p. 146.

O To save space, I have refrained from giving the references to the several wells and their traditions, which are to be found in a number of topographical works and also occur among the numerous MS. notes of the late R. C. Hope, F.S.A.

SOME CASES OF LONGEVITY AND THE PRESERVATION OF TRADITION

THE following paragraph has no direct connection with the above note but may throw some light on the astonishing tenacity of folk-memory preserved by connected lives which plays so important a part in folklore.

When in Suffolk, the writer met an elderly man who had, as a boy, met men who had served under Nelson and could describe, from his father's

accounts, the building of the first railways in those parts. There is also a well-known landowner whose father was born in the year that Robespierre died, 1794, and served in the army in Flanders in 1815, though he was not

actually at Waterloo. In my own family, one of my uncles knew an old village-woman who

remembered the Napoleonic Wars. The grandfather of another uncle was kissed as a boy by Marie-Antoinette and played picquet with

Napoleon at St. Helena. My mother knew Professor Sayce who had met Canon Tristram who had lunched with Routh of Magdalen. Now, Routh died in 1854 at the age of Ioo and, as a boy, had seen Dr. Johnson and attended the coronation of the last King of Poland, Stanislaus II, in

1764, while he knew a lady whose mother had seen Charles II on a royal visit to Oxford.

There is also a by no means elderly professor in Oxford who has

preached a funeral oration over a man who came up to Oxford before the Reform Bill of 1832. This same professor was in the Union in November

1918 reading on the newsboard of the flight of the various German kings,

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Collectanea 365 when he heard a voice behind him saying, " Oh, they will all come back. . .. It will be just like last time.... I remember how it happened in '48, but they all came back."

NIGEL HARVEY

SOME FEATURES OF BASQUE FOLKLORE

THESE few notes on Basque folklore refer to certain religious observances in the Basses Pyre6nes, the western Basque region in France, north of the Pyrenees and inland from Bayonne, along the " gave " or stream which runs down from Saint Jean Pied du Port. In the more eastern district of La Soule I believe the customs are very similar,with more or less accentu- ation on certain points.

I was in the Basses Pyr6nees, also for a day in San Sebastian over the Spanish frontier, early in June 1928, too late for the spring customs, the carneval, cavalcades, or the Easter processions, and too early for the rites of midsummer, which include Saint John's Eve fires, still lighted among the Basques as in many parts of central Europe. I was there specially to see the village processions in commemoration of Corpus Christi. This festival falls on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday, and under the jurisdiction of the higher clergy in the larger towns it is observed with great ceremony on that day. But in the country districts Sunday is the only day possible for such celebration among the farming population during the busy June month, and the festival is kept on the Sunday following the correct date, or at the octave a week later.

I was indebted to a folklore friend, a collector of Basque folk-music, for information as to where the festival procession might best be seen, and we were so fortunate as to find ourselves the only onlookers in the small hamlet of M..., half-way up a lonely hillside. We were there by 10 a.m., and soon after the villagers began to collect at the church-porch. At this and most other festivals every man, woman and child in the parish attends, unless too decrepit to move. We stood beside a low stone wall and noted the various characters of the procession as they walked up the green lanes, already dressed, but quite unconscious of the incongruity of their costumes. There was a gay drum-major with drum and baton, a conspicuous person with braided coat, called the ". Suisse ", some soldiers carrying bayonets, a village band playing Basque tunes and six or eight little girls called angels, in white, with white wreaths and small baskets of red roses, attended by an equal number of small boys, also in white. Most conspicuous of all were four tall men with large white aprons tied at the back; they wore large busbies on their heads adorned with small pieces of mirror shining in the sunshine, which are believed to ward off the influence of the evil eye. The busbies were originally of bear-skin, but today an imitation of bear-skin serves as well. These characters as- sembled in procession quite gravely and simply, the children walking in the rear ; all was taken as a matter of course. The women in their black dresses took their places in the nave, the men climbed up to the wooden galleries running down the sides of the church. The drum-major took up

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