The Silver Bough, Volume 3: A Calendar of Scottish National Festivals - Hallowe'en to Yule

by F. Marian McNeill

The Silver Bough is an indispensable treasury of Scottish culture, universally acknowledged as a classic of literature. The author, Florence Marian McNeill, succeeded in capturing and bringing to life many traditions and customs of old before they died out or were influenced by the modern era.

The Silver Branch of the sacred apple tree, laden with crystal blossoms of golden fruit, is in Celtic mythology the equivalent of the Golden Bough of classical mythology – the symbolic bond between the world we know and the Otherworld.

In the first volume of the Silver Bough, the author deals generally with Scottish folk-lore and folk belief, with chapters on ethnic origins, the Druids, the Celtic gods, the slow transition to Christianity, magic, the fairy faith, second sight, selkies, changelings and the witch cult. In volume two she began her more in-depth exploration of the foundations of many of these beliefs and rituals through the Calendar of Scottish national festivals, in which we find enshrined many of the fascinating folk customs of our ancestors. This third volume continues that study by looking at the Festivals from Hallow’en to Yule tide.

As man makes greater and greater advances in the understanding and control of his physical environment, the river between the known and the unknown gradually changes its course, and the subjects of the simpler beliefs of former times become part of the new territory of knowledge. The Silver Bough maps out the old course of the waterway that in Celtic belief winds between here and beyond, and reveals the very roots of the Scottish people’s distinctive customs and way of life.

The Silver Bough is a large and important work which involved many years of research into both living and recorded lore. Its genesis lies, perhaps, in the author’s subconscious need to reconcile the old primitive world she had glimpsed in childhood with the sophisticated modern world she later entered.

“I do not believe that you can exaggerate the importance of the preservation of old ways and customs, and all those little things which bind a man to his native place. Today we live in difficult times. The steam-roller of progress is flattening out many of our old institutions, and there is a danger of a general decline in idiom and distinctive quality in our Scottish life. The only way to counteract this peril is to preserve jealously all these elder things which are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. For, remember, no man can face the future with courage and confidence unless it is solidly founded upon the past. And conversely, no problem will be too hard, no situation too strange, if we can link it with what we know and love” F Marian McNeill

Genres: Scotland, Nonfiction, Folklore

245 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Florence Marian McNeill, MBE was a Scottish folklorist, best known for writing The Silver Bough, a four-volume study of Scottish folklore.

McNeill was born at Holm in Orkney and educated at Kirkwall Burgh School and then at Glasgow University from which she graduated in 1912. For the next year, she taught English in France and Germany. She returned to Britain in 1913 and worked initially as an organiser for the Scottish Federation of Women's Suffrage Societies in Scotland and later as secretary for the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene in London where she remained until 1917. At the end of the First World War, she moved back to Edinburgh and started work as a researcher for the Scottish National Dictionary and by 1929 she had become principal assistant on the project.

During the years between the First and Second World Wars she became involved in the revival of Scottish literature and culture known as the Scottish Renaissance. She is best known as the author of The Scots Kitchen, published in 1929.