St Brigid traditionally welcomes in the Spring for us. Maire Mac Neill in her monumental book The Festival of Lughnasa points out that, in the past, it had its other side. "St Brigid's Eve was happy in the reawakening of nature and the recommencement of activity on the farm, but it had its anxieties as to the state of the family provender." That was in the days of self-sufficiency, long before the era of modern communications and organisations and aids to farming. And, today, to the supermarket down the road.
Estyn Evans, that far-seeing and sensitive man from the borders of Wales, taught us a lot. He points out, in this context, how the early church Christianised many of the pagan beliefs, even to the way that the protective charms fashioned out of rushes became St Brigid's crosses. For, he says, these sometimes take on, more or less, the shape of pre-Christian symbols such as swastikas or lozenges. Sometimes they are magic symbols of suns or eyes. Again, he writes, the three-legged swastika, on old form to him, is reserved for the byre. It may be compared to the Celtic triskele. The dictionary gives this word of greek origin, as meaning merely a symbol of three legs radiating from a common centre. His book Irish Folk Ways gives a full page illustrating various Brigid charms including squares and diamond shapes, some multiple. "Anois teacht an Earraigh" we learned at school. Was the weather different then, that the poet could so confidently hoist his sail and make for the west? Or do we fail to see the rising tide, with the catkins and the snowdrops and crocuses? And sure enough lawns were being mowed in the last week. And before the month is out, someone will find a blackbird's nest, even with a full clutch of eggs in it.
Which remains one of the questions of where the dead birds go, a question asked here recently. Mary Collins of Cork notes that a French poet, Francois Coppee, had the same thought in the last century and wrote: Pourquoi nous ne verrons pas leurs delicate squelettes/Dans le gazon d'avril ou nous irons courir./Est-ce que les oiseaux se cachent pour mourir? Or, roughly: Why do we not see their frail skeletons/In the April grass where we will run about./Do the birds hide themselves away to die? Y