S13E02

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In the last episode, we learned all about the High King of Ireland and how the arrival of the Vikings affected the politics of the gales. Today, we're taking a journey into Gaelic culture. What has become the spookiest night of the year, Halloween, traces its origins to a festival that marked a time of transition and the meeting of our world with the other world. Join me as I step into the shadows of Sowain. Dusk has settled over the valley. You stand watching the last of the sun's light creep under the horizon. Night will soon be here and Sowain will begin. Beacons of fire have been lit around the village. The sound of crackling flames is joined by the ever-growing hum of excited chatter and the lowing of cattle brought down from their summer pastures to be slaughtered in preparation for the coming winter and tonight's feast. And far away, tales have come about the great heathen army that arrived on English shores and like a tidal wave, conquered the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia. Along with his condemnation of the invading heathens, the local priest has spoken of his distaste for this evening's rituals. And like the other people of the village, he finds it hard to see his Christian beliefs in the local traditions. But Sowain has long been the practice of the people here, of their fathers and their fathers' fathers. The harvesters ended and now it is time to once again usher in the darker, colder months. You wander up the main path of the village. Past some folk gathered round a pile of stones. In turn they each mark a stone as their own and will lay them in a circle around the bonfire The custom goes that when you search among the fire's ashes in the morning, if your stone remains it's a good luck omen. Any stones lost or misplaced will they signify bad fortune. You carry on up the track. Nearby, children are laughing. They watch as a young woman ducks her head into a barrel full of water. She tries to catch one of the bobbing apples within. As she straightens her face and hair dripping, she cries out victorious with the fruit gripped between her teeth. She'll peel the apple and throw the peel over her shoulder. Whatever shape it forms will be the first letter of her future spouse's name. Sowain is a time for divining what the next year will bring. As you walk further into the village your gaze is drawn to a mysterious, cloaked figure knocking on the door of a nearby home. You stop and listen as the strange creature recites a verse demanding a token in exchange for the dweller's good fortune. The man who opened the door chuckles and offers the beast what looks like a flask of ale. The hawking figure shakes its inhuman head in satisfaction, turning to move on to the next house. It's then that you see its face, a pale horse's skull crowned with autumnal foliage, someone dressed as a wandering spirit. Winding up the hill you pass homes with food offerings laid by the doorstep, offerings to appease other, more restless spirits, maybe fairies or other unnamed things that go bump in the night. Inside you suspect some of the homes will have set an extra bowl at the table for dead relations. Of course, tonight the boundary between this world and the other world is thinner, more easily crossed. The thought of things unseen in the shadows causes the hairs on your arms and neck to rise. Perhaps it's just because of the cool winter wind at your back, but as you approach the large bonfire which is about to be lit you can't help but feel reassured. Soon the village will be cast in warm, yellow light, offering protection from the darkness. Now atop the hill you join the crowd gathering around the pyre. Once everyone has arrived, the village ailderman steps forward. He is the lord of the harvest and begins to speak, describing the decent harvest that has left the village with plentiful supplies for the winter. He gestures to the long tables laden with cakes and ale and meat, the rich, yeasty smells wet in your appetite. He gives a toast to the old gods and with a pointed glance at the priest, the new god too. With a flaming torch he bends to light the great bonfire. As the celebrations continue, it will burn long into this sowen night. The traditions we associate with sowen are shrouded in mystery and misinformation. To help me shed a light on this darkest of nights, I'm joined by Dr Kelly Fitzgerald, the head of the School of Irish Celtic Studies and Folklore at University College Dublin. Welcome to Echoes of History Kelly. Thank you, thank you so much Matt. I'm really looking forward to getting into all this spookiness for the right time of year too. I guess the first question I have is we're talking about this particular festival and the word is spelled a particular way and my Irish pronunciation is probably not great. So we know that this is spelled S A M H A I N. How should we pronounce that word? We pronounce it as sowen. Sowen. I'm on firm ground now, I'm going to write that down and try remember to say sowen all the way, rest of the way through. What does that word actually mean? I guess when we think about Halloween, which we're going to be connecting this to, we're thinking about spirits and a particularly Christian festival, does sowen have any of those same kind of connections in the word? Well I suppose it's the sense I mean the etymology of sowen is not really understood fully but it has been taken on board to think of it as being end of summer. So soura, that soura part of it, the end of that. So it kind of represents a point in the calendar rather than anything particularly spiritual or religious. Correct, yes. But even saying that, when we look at material in Irish, parts of the calendar, the way in which the year evolves, has so much belief and meaning attributed to certain times of the year. Okay so we can think about it as a time that we'll be drawing in lots of these other elements. It's particularly maybe to celebrate the end of the harvest and the end of summer but it does also draw in some religious elements to it as well. It has and especially over time as any tradition, it shapes, it develops, it works for the society in which it's a part of and has its relevance there. Yeah and I guess as you're going into winter you're thinking about things getting darker and colder and less pleasant so it kind of fits with all of the spookiness doesn't it? It does and in a way I mean I love it because it's my favourite time of the year when the darkness comes in and your evenings are coming sooner and sooner. There's a loveliness I think when you lean into the darkness. Wow we're going to lean into the darkness a little bit closer than I think. And I guess if you're going to start off that time of year what better way to start it than with a party? So we often think about this time of the year being associated with fire. Is that something that Celtic populations would have connected with Samhain as well? Yes when we think of the quarter days the use of fire either to hold it or to share it is found throughout the year and that's no different for the end of October where we have the bonfires. And so it's definitely something that the community is a part of and that they're involved with. I suppose when we think of these islands celebrating or commemorating or marking these days in a very similar way England perhaps would have done much more similar to that but of course now you have Guy Fawkes day so when you have your fires it's just you know five days later. Yeah so we're just blurring those edges having a slightly different festival on a slightly different day. Why not? Why not but yet you get the same as a participant you get the same kind of sense of involvement and participation. And we also obviously we associate Halloween now particularly with lots of supernatural things with being the spookiest time of the year when the spirits are all coming out to play. Is there any evidence in the medieval world and particularly around the idea of Samhain that people believed that spirits from the underworld were walking the earth during this period? Well I suppose it gets a little bit more complicated than that in the Irish tradition. When we think of early Irish literature the material being written down the kind of pseudo history of what happened in Ireland we have these beings the Tuatha Dhaman and Samhain is a really important time of year for them for their kind of magic to happen to have kind of the natural world on their side. So in a way it's not quite as perhaps it's seen in more recent centuries but we do see that the early Irish society definitely recognized the importance at this time of year. Interesting so they might have thought of it as something slightly less kind of spooky and threatening than we did and more of a connection to the natural world around them. And the supernatural. So again when we think of it now what makes Halloween so strong is that we do have the other world you know the veil between this world and that world is at its thinnest. Well it's at its thinnest this time of the year and at the beginning of May as well which is directly across from it when we think of the calendar in a wheel type form. But what we'd also see then for Samhain and the importance of that is that the other world the supernatural are their own beings but then of course at this time of the year it is the world of the dead and the recognition and we see that being marked in the Christian calendar with all souls day and all saints day happening after Ia Howan. Is it right then to think that they would have probably thought of this time of year and Samhain as a less scary less spooky festival that it is connected with the dead but perhaps in remembering relatives that have passed and things like that rather than being threatened by spirits coming back to the earth. Yes but I suppose so the music sounds better in the other world the food tastes sweeter you know the kind of hurling game is better but those in the other world will never make it to heaven. So again you still see this kind of exchange of why you keep people in this world not really wanting to go over to the other side no matter how tantalizing it is and this kind of imagery that you know this kind of you could hear things that like oh if you eat the food in that other world you'll never come back or these things that we see in the land of youth the land of women the land beyond the waves various ways in which that world that parallel world that this world is described the spirits coming back to the earth is something you know that kind of sense if we think of purgatory spirits are coming back because they have unfinished business and then that does connect the spookiness to that image as well and in more recent times you know we do see that kind of development that the supernatural could engage with being kind of projected on in a more general way as well so we do have all of these worlds kind of coming together and as time goes by we see they've become much more conflated in a way and perhaps arguably that really spooky side coming back is perhaps that more kind of American influence coming through in the way in which we see the traditions now. And it's interesting then that that world is about tempting people in it's not necessarily about scaring people away you're trying to tempt people in and the reason to resist is that although it's great it's not heaven and if you go there you won't get into heaven so it's kind of which good do you want rather than necessarily being scary. Exactly exactly and then it's quite interesting so you have these kind of a bandfessor or wise woman who lives between this world and the other world so there would be certain figures that would have knowledge of certain healing activities and in that sense you know this kind of music from the fairies some really well-known musicians in Ireland it would have been said that they would have gained their gift of music from the other world poets would have been known to have gained their gift of poetry from the other world but as soon as they would misuse it or not respect that gift it would be taken away from them. So there is this kind of way in which the other world we see it being validated in this world and how we interact with it. Yeah fascinating and do we have much source material that speaks to the kind of Gaelic ideas of sowing do we have much material to tell us what they were thinking and believing was happening at this time of year? Luckily in more recent decades the Irish folklore commission and folklore collectors would have been carrying out ethnographic fieldwork that really demonstrated how people saw this time of year and we see aspects again because the supernatural world is so close to us one of the strongest aspects of that is the the strength in divination and the strength of of that happening at this time of year. So so many of the games and kind of activities that take place are kind of demonstrating that this is the time of year to engage with those kinds of practices of understanding what the future may hold. That's interesting do we have an example of a game that they might have played and how that fed into the idea of divining the future? Yeah so the the kind of most common thing we think of is a type of tea cake a bar and brack a type of cake and in there there'd be various objects the one that tends to stay in the the kind of bar and brack you can buy at the grocery store now is a gold ring and that of course you know the gold ring marriage prosperity all of that that that associates with it but in earlier times there could be a lot more that you'd find you could find a piece of wood which could represent your coffin you could have a pee if you found a pee poverty was in your future so again it's kind of interesting now how society has kind of aimed for the more positive ways of divination as opposed to having a much more holistic sense of what could happen to you in your life. But also I mean that would bring a whole new level of horror to our modern idea of Halloween if you're getting a sign that at some point this year you're going to need your coffin. Exactly exactly and there'd be other ones as well we have photographs from the 1940s in Dublin and a girl is blindfolded and she has to point you know there's dishes laid out and there's different things and dishes and one of them is just water and if she's pointing to that that's emigration so again you can see things that are happening at the time being brought into the way in which things are being kind of marked or celebrated. See that would terrify me you point at a bowl of water and everyone's like bye then off you go. That's not my idea of fun. You're flying off the island exactly I know. Yeah that's scary and I guess when we think about some of the the darker practices that go back to to kind of pagan ideas the wicker man I guess is one of those things that sticks out in people's minds perhaps the idea that you would sacrificially burn a victim alive inside a wicker man is that a real thing? Well I have never come across that in Irish traditions. I've had many a student that is searching for that. People love human sacrifice. I don't think I can. There's something in people wanting that not that the extraordinary can happen in your imagination they want the extraordinary to really have happened. Again no that that we wouldn't see that's a kind of much more complicated kind of cultural creation than we'd see. There are pranks there are tricks. We do have I mean Klaus a trick where a gentleman ties his wife up to a chair in the barn and thinks demons or devils are gonna take her away and there's a burning of the barn so it can go quite deep but it's it's kind of then seen as a oh it's a funny trick that they've played. Doesn't seem very funny. It seems like the time of year to play out your marital problems in fairly green you know tie your wife up in a barn and hope a demon takes her away for you. Exactly exactly. Things can go dark. I mean it is a time as we see ourselves now why do we watch horror movies we'd love to kind of push the boundaries of human existence and so much of those boundaries are pushed through the imagination and and in some ways we think of it in previous times as stories being told. Now we might engage in different types of medium like film but we see here think of ghost stories or being you know this don't walk through a cemetery on the night of Halloween or this kind of kind of pushing your existence and what can happen in this world and in a way you couldn't have this every day. You couldn't have this kind of pressure on you that this is going to happen every day. So here is a particular time of the year where your beliefs allow things to happen that wouldn't be happening every day or an ordinary day. And in the game in Assassin's Creed Valhalla so we're in the year kind of 876 at this point and players can kind of take part in some sowing celebrations and part of that is a kind of wicker man sacrifice and I wondered how much evidence there is for this kind of collision of practices during that kind of late ninth century between Christianity, paganism with the arrival of Vikings perhaps, all of that kind of mixing together. How were those beliefs getting on? Well it's a difficult one and we wish we really could see it better. It's quite interesting how Ireland converting is in some ways quite seamless. So any material we have even when I'm talking about the Tour de Dallin and the pseudo histories those manuscripts those tales are being written in the monastery by monks. So the pre-Christian society is an oral society and what we have is kind of memories of it recordings of it at a time when society had moved on. So the really interesting thing is we see this kind of supernatural mythological side of things still being seen to be important within Irish society although they have converted to Christianity. Interestingly enough when Vikings come to Ireland here we are in another pagan phase but then there's a kind of seamlessness. I mean it's quite interesting after the Viking period they kind of just mold and melt into Irish society and we don't hear from them so much again until the Anglo-Norman period which of course are just Vikings under a different name. The Vikings are everywhere calling themselves all sorts of things conquering everybody.

Hey, D-man. I'd like to apologize for the subterfuge, but I wanted to do this away from the prying eyes of FANDOM. I know you've seen the conversation between Kimberton (Kimberton) and our staff, where she basically admitted that they only consider accounts sockpuppets if the IPs match. Having dealt with Batalex for years at this point, knowing that they wouldn't take our side if he were to complain about being banned, pretty much soured everyone's feelings over on discord. So we have been discussing the possibility of migrating our wiki to some other provider, like WeirdGloop. We are planning on having a meeting with the editors over on discord very soon. You know I wouldn't ask this of you if I didn't feel it was important, but would you mind making a discord account so we can have you on this discussion? I swear you can delete it afterwards and you won't have to use it for long, but we really don't want to lose you. If you've managed to find this, please include the word "flanchino" in your reply over on your talk page. I'll try and keep you updated regardless.

I'm always quite interested because we often forget I think it's easy to think when a place becomes Christian that they kind of sweep away all of the old beliefs and replace them with Christianity but at every stage we see Christianity very keen to take on local regional festivals at particular times of year. There's a reason that the Christian festivals of things like Easter and All Hallows and Christmas there's reasons that they happen at those times of year that are nothing to really do with Christianity. It's to do with kind of smoothing the process of Christianization by adopting local habits and customs. I think that's quite interesting but when we I think we have to realize how human beings are much more capable of having complex belief systems going on and this kind of binary set of like conversion that you're this kind of pagan person that has converted to Christianity seamlessly is quite difficult and we don't really see that in human behavior. So if you even want to think of kind of Shinto Buddhism in Japan which has seamlessly brought two very kind of some ways very different religions together into a cohesive way of belief system or various other ways. So humans are able to carry much more in a much more complicated way about the world around them and so even though you can be taking on certain things you definitely don't have to just feel you leave everything at the door and I don't think society regardless of its Christianity or not has ever shown that that's how humans behave or interact. Yeah and I always think the idea of the church as a very rigid and set thing is a much later medieval kind of creation. In these early years the church is quite flexible and it's still trying to work out what it is and the best way to integrate people into it and that's probably to allow them to still have their their customs and it's how do you Christianize those customs rather than sweeping them away. Yeah and I suppose when we have to think about Christianity like Christianity was like the hot new international cosmopolitan belief system. So pagan really is the sense the pagan is that you come from the country so this kind of rural beliefs and we still see that to this day that you know we think of the city as being cosmopolitan and urbane and we think of rural as backward and holding on to older beliefs and being much more conservative. So in some ways what we're seeing in that early medieval period that kind of framework we have adhered to for a long time since that period. Yeah and in the game players can see a Sowayan festival taking place kind of in in Gloucestershire in the late ninth century. So do we know whether these would have happened in England and Wales as well as in Ireland? Yes it definitely was. It's quite interesting speaking to so many people from Scotland or Wales or England that this time of year because it's very much when you think of the quarter days they're very much based on the agricultural kind of system starting with the first of February thinking of your animal, husbandry, cattle and hence St. Brigid's Day here in Ireland. She is the patron saint of cattle and milking and all of that in Bullock the earlier term for that day having much to do with milking right in the in the in the belly. So then think of that then we come to the first of May and this is where we really see that kind of strong supernatural element coming through and customs and beliefs and in some ways in the Irish tradition that is where we'd see what we would see a kind of more when we think of the Irish witch that's happening actually on the first of May and here's this kind of shape-shifting female that's stealing the milk profit from farmers. And then coming to the first of August which is Lunisa Lou one of those figures of the two of the Danannam speaking up that is still the name for August in Irish and now we're coming into the harvest and the agricultural side of the year ending at the end of the harvest with sowing. So when we really look at what how this year has broken up it's not difficult to see it fitting in very well into an agricultural system. The game kind of explores some tension between Christianity and communities who are celebrating sowing and it seems like maybe that tension wasn't always there. It's a hard one we do see like again there are reform movements that are happening within the church and there's this you know I in some ways you kind of see references that if certain rituals around death you see that the church is trying to pull that in and that tension we see continuing as as the centuries continue. Just even recently Pope Francis has kind of declared the supernatural is again something that people shouldn't believe in. I thought the church had kind of given up on that. So what we think of has happened in the past you can find parallels through that throughout history in that kind of tension between the vernacular behaviors and habits of the people and what they need out of life and their lives and what they do and how organized religion or organized faiths are trying to kind of dictate how one should live their life. So should we think about sowing kind of never really disappearing but what it does is morph into all hallows and becomes Halloween. Yeah so all hallows it's a hallowed evening you know ia howan in the kind of Celtic way of looking at the calendar events happen on the evening before the day so the night of Halloween so all hallows eve there's a sacredness to that so even if we think of the term Halloween all hallows evening this is a sacred time of the year and we respect that and you can see the church with All Souls Day and All Saints Day taking that on board and and they are really just again the church could argue it's responding to the time of year as well you know as anyone else was doing before that time. And I wonder as well how many of the things that we might associate with Halloween today could we trace back to sowing celebration so you know lots of people go out and carve a pumpkin is there any similar anything similar that might have happened at sowing? Again so again because the pumpkins are what kind of piece of modernity right pumpkins are were discovered with quote unquote new world that wasn't new but new to Europe and we see then that though that that what was the carved turnip is what we would have had within these islands so I've recorded from people from Wales from Scotland and definitely here in Ireland the carving of the turnip and this kind of face coming through it. Okay so we can kind of trace jack-o'-lanterns back there but it would have been a turnip rather than a pumpkin. Correct so again traditions change meanings may change for why you're doing that and we see now the kind of the kind of level of artistry that pumpkin carving has has brought and we see that now here in Ireland so that coming through and that kind of the light the candle inside there to give it that kind of in the darkness there's those points marking your space. Do we get much of a sense from the sources of what people believe the jack-o'-lantern did so again we've got fire being involved which you know we spoke about fire is key around this time of year and these kinds of festivals and if you're carving a face into it is that meant to scare an evil spirit away or something like that? Is it to protect you and again we have to be careful because if certain people have beliefs like again this is very vernacular so it's not saying that everyone had these same beliefs but we do see is aspects of it coming through. Is it there to protect? Is it there to mark the day? This image of will the wisp this kind of you know which has been described as these lights of phosphorus that you can see in the landscape and the stories the imagination the creativity that humans have attributed to the landscape and what natural effects are happening being brought into story and the way that they explain the world around them. And I guess something else that particularly lots of children might be looking forward to doing on Halloween is the two-part thing of putting on a costume and going out trick or treating. Can we see any kind of elements of that going on in Samhain as well of dressing up and of anything like trick or treating? Yes again the we would you know think of it more as guising you know disguise, guising, trick or treating and that would go back you know we would have records of that here in Ireland not necessarily going back to the early medieval period but in the kind of early modern period into the 18th and 19th century we see this and that sense you know because the other world can you know who knows but you don't mess with the other world and what we see is kind of that behavior that is viewed within the supernatural being paralleled in the behavior of humans on this earth so this is that time of year that you can get away with being a little bit mischievous pulling a few tricks doing things like that and then at the same time you know asking for your treat out of this you know this kind of balance of transactional activity going on here and we would have records you know of people pulling you know pouring water down chimneys pulling up cabbages who knows what people are doing at this time of year and previously within the kind of world in which they are. Yeah and is there any element amongst that of the idea of buying off a spirit that's coming to your door kind of thing that that someone would appear in costume looking a little bit scary you give them a gift and they go away and you're sort of appeasing the spirits I don't know. Well appeasing the spirits I mean I guess we could think of that perhaps I think again well in Irish society there would have been in certain areas a very strong belief in changelings that the other world could take the kind of spirit of a human and leave this kind of otherworldly non-human spirit behind so that is a belief that is there not just at Halloween but in terms of engaging with the other world and so then we see at Halloween this kind of disguise you're guising yourself from the other world so that you're not found out and that has gone to great lengths on various islands here such as Inishvan this kind of not wanting to be discovered of who you are and not being found but we then see in Irish tradition that at this time of year as we go into the darkness this type of guising or mumbing continues on and we see it at Christmas with the Christmas Mommers or St. Stephen's Day with the Wren boys and continuing on with the Biddy Boys for St. Brigid's Day so in some ways this is the very beginning of a season of activities that are paralleled throughout the rest of the this time of year. It's really interesting and I guess we're getting firmly back into spooky territory if we're talking about changelings taking away the souls of the living and replacing them with with spirits from another world. Yes yes absolutely we kind of have this kind of cosmological world of looking at traditional Irish society you know it is the Christian world the lives of the saints the stories of the saints are very much a part of this world side by side with these tales these legends of the supernatural the historical traditions as well so what we really see is a very rich layered cosmological world that people here in Ireland were you know inhabiting fully and existing in. Yeah I'm also slightly reminded of the film Us I don't know if you've seen that but that idea that there is a whole parallel world where people or that the inhabitants of that world are desperately trying to enter this world and replace people from this world and kind of swap places with them it's kind of the plot of the film Us and it sounds an awful lot like a Samhain plot. Or that kind of otherworldly thing yes and it's quite interesting because of course I mean I hate to break the news to you but the other world is a kind of human invention and the best thing is again I know I know I know I know before you know what I'm going to tell you that Santa Claus doesn't exist. Wait wait wait no no no don't tell me that. One other thing that crops up in the game that I just wanted to explore a little bit is that players will don a horse skull mask and play the part of the the Marie Lloyd. Do we have any sense of whether that was a real tradition was that going on? That was was it a real horse head I don't know but we have a lot of I mean the hobby horse tradition and this comes through we think of this in particular I'm thinking of Down and Dingle here in County Kerry on Stevens Day we see this kind of that image and there was a lot of this kind of white horse this kind of sexual tension that comes from it and various things that have remained in the tradition so yes absolutely and the term you're saying there is a very the Welsh term and across the continent and again there's a whole way of looking at the horse and the imagery of the horse and the importance of the horse in European customs far beyond thinking here in Ireland. And do we know what exactly what it meant in Ireland because it seems like quite an odd thing to us to put on a the skull of a horse and and it's not what we would necessarily think of as a hobby horse in terms of the child's toy today do we have a sense of what it meant in Ireland? So you've got to remember early Irish tradition the sense that like drinking horses blood and all these kinds of images that came over from Georges Cambrensis it's a long tradition of kind of connecting that but I have no sense of putting a horse's head but the hobby horse you may think it's a kids thing but it is a much older longer tradition. That's fascinating though it's been it's been really interesting to explore the ways in which people consider this time of year you know it's a big change in the time of year it's the end of harvest it's the drawing in of the night and I guess it leans into that idea still of the blurring of the boundaries between our world and another world we've just maybe turned it into something a little bit more scary than they might have thought of at that time. And I think it is scary I mean you're you are going into the darkness now and you have to remember again I would argue what America did you know people from from this side of the world have made a new world for themselves and autumn has become fall and anyone who's experienced fall in New England and the intensity of the colors and the leaves and how it's so different so their traditions from this side of the world they feel parallel again in the northern hemisphere when they are on that side of the world but it's even just that bit more intense and then you have to think about it being this very puritanical society that is developing over in New England and that whole kind of damnation and hell and sleepy hollow and the headless horseman that is very much coming through into Halloween traditions and those could have been coming back even much sooner than we think of this kind of plastic Halloween that we think of from America now. Yeah I mean I'm fascinated by the fact that we quite often think of Halloween as a big American import and the idea of kids going out trick-or-treating as a an American fairly recent invention but it sounds like some of this stretches back for centuries and centuries. It could be yes definitely and I think in some ways like so often when I've interviewed and recorded people's Halloween traditions here in Ireland because it was so low-key they really didn't think much about it. It was just there and I've had some really fascinating interviews with people. It's very much about the community. They've always had so much more fun with Halloween. In some ways Christmas there's pressure there's kind of financial pressures to have a good Christmas. You have to buy gifts you have to kind of the food is much more expensive and the meal is much more elaborate. Halloween is not necessarily the family although the family can have customs and traditions around it but it is much more about the community and kind of being outside and being a part of something larger than being in the home. Yeah that's absolutely fascinating. I mean I guess I'm struck by how unscary people consider this time of year to be compared to what we think but then I also think about the guy tying up his wife in a barn and hoping a demon drags her away or the changelings appearing in beds and things and now I'm creeped out again. And getting a bit of wood and that could be your coffin. I've forgotten about that one. I was trying to block that one out. That's up there with Santa Claus not existing. I don't want to think about it. Again I think it's interesting. We've made everything so much more gory now. We're quite we leave very little to the imagination and what I love looking at folk narratives or various legends and tales that have been collected. The imagery that comes through in just the words and there is a lot of blood. Things are black. They are white. They are red. You need this kind of contrast in an oral tradition in order to make your point right. You can't have the subtleties of literature. You can't have the kind of subtleties of building up a character. Film would work in a very different way. So when you're dealing with storytelling in the oral tradition it is very succinct and tight and it makes a punch and all of the stuff we kind of perhaps think about is there but it really happens in your imagination much more than you visualizing it in front of you. Yeah I guess it's the difference between you know an old black and white hammer horror film and a more modern gore fest you know where some of the stuff happens off screen or you're left to imagine what it might have been as opposed to just having it all slammed in your face. Exactly. Exactly. And the human imagination and the creativity understands that and has really shaped that for a very long time. Yeah and I guess that also leaves us with sort of what you've alluded to a little bit that it can mean different things to different people and there is no one solid tradition that has to be followed because it can be whatever a local community you think it is or need it to be or want it to be. Exactly and I think we have to be careful because people are always looking for the origins or finding the story and the wonderful thing about dealing with folk traditions and vernacular culture is that no one owns it solely. Now everyone in the community feel like they have ownership of it and they will have their thoughts on how tradition should work and they will have their thoughts on where they think traditions have come from or maybe not as I have interviewed so often and people have not given much thought to these things. So again it's the kind of nuances of looking at the human experience and the ways in which we create culture and what we want and again if we think of it games going back to that this kind of projection into the history of what we have in the past is very much something we're doing in the present and that's always been the case. Just to end on Assassin's Creed allows players to step into the animus and be transported back to moments in history so if there was a moment connected to Sowain, a particular celebration or a particular activity that might have happened, is there something that you would like to go back in time and see? So the battle of Mo'chura, the second battle of Mo'chura is the battle between the Tuatha Dhanan and the Fumoreans and it is when Lou really proves what a great hero he is and his grandfather Balor, Balor with this poisonous eye, this eyelid that's kept down because once it's raised just looking at him will kill you, it's so poisonous and so Lou in this kind of David and Goliath imagery, Lou uses a slingshot into his grandfather's eye, kills his grandfather and after that the Fumoreans give into the Tuatha Dhanan and the Tuatha Dhanan are victors at this time of year at Sowain and we have them holding the sovereignty of Ireland until the sons of Miel arrive. Fascinating, that's incredible. Wonderful, well I think this year I'm probably going to change my Halloween habits slightly, I'm going to keep my wife out of any barns and I'm going to find a way on the 1st of November to check my kids are all still real which will bring a whole new level of fear to waking up that morning but thank you so much for joining us Kelly, it's been absolutely fascinating to explore this with you. Thank you, Beth, thank you. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. In the next episode we'll sail to the port of Dublin and learn how the seafaring Vikings changed the politics and culture of the British Isles. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts and if you're enjoying it you can leave us a review too. I'll see you next time among the Echoes of History.