the appellations of Bride, Oats-bride, and Wheat-bride, which in Germany and Scotland are sometimes bestowed both on the last sheaf and on the woman who binds it.[1] Sometimes the idea implied in these names is worked out more fully by representing the productive powers of vegetation as bride and bridegroom, Thus in some parts of Germany a man and woman dressed in straw and called the Oats-wife and the Oats-man, or the Oats-bride and the Oats-bridegroom dance at the harvest festival; then the corn-stalks are plucked from their bodies till they stand as bare as a stubble field. In Silesia, the woman who binds the last sheaf is called the Wheat-bride or the Oats-bride. With the harvest crown on her head, a bridegroom by her side, and attended by bridesmaids, she is brought to the farmhouse with all the solemnity of a wedding procession.[2]
The harvest customs just described are strikingly analogous to the spring customs which we reviewed in the first chapter. (1.) As in the spring customs the tree-spirit is represented both by a tree and by a person,[3] so in the harvest customs the corn-spirit is represented both by the last sheaf and by the person who cuts or binds or threshes it. The equivalence of the person to the sheaf is shown by giving him or her the same name as the sheaf, or vice versâ; by wrapping him or her in the sheaf; and by the rule observed in some places, that when the sheaf is called the Mother, it must be cut by the oldest married woman; but when it is called
- ↑ W. Mannhardt, Die Korndämonen, p. 30; Folk-lore Journal, vii. 50.
- ↑ W. Mannhardt, l.c.; Sommer, Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Sachsen und Thüringen, p. 160 sq.
- ↑ See above, p. 83 sqq.
Maiden (autumnalis nymphula) was Rapegyrne. See Fordun, Scotichron. ii. 418, quoted in Jamieson’s Dict. of the Scottish Language, s. v. “Rapegyrne.”
