The Hallowed Eve

The Hallowed Eve. By Jack Santino. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998. 167 pp. Illus. ISBN 0 8131 2081 0

Jack Santino has long been fascinated by Halloween. He published his first article on the subject in 1983 and has since been occupied in studying the forms and functions of the festival in the context of North American society. The Hallowed Eve, his most recent published work, travels further afield to explore, in the words of the book's subtitle, "dimensions of culture in a calendar festival in Northern Ireland." Santino paints his picture of the Northern Irish Halloween through discussion of many personal testimonies obtained from accounts in the folklore archives of University College Dublin and the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, and from his own original fieldwork recordings. He explores recent historical and contemporary celebrations of Halloween and attempts to relate these to the current political and social climate in Northern Ireland.

Santino researched this work as a visiting American scholar in the early 1990s and he clearly enjoyed the experience: the book displays a reverent affection for the culture of the province. Of course, Northern Irish Halloween is particularly exciting to an American cultural folklorist, in the same way that the Greenwich Village Halloween parade would seem extraordinary to a British student of calendar customs. An American perspective on Northern Irish Halloween customs is therefore bound to have a different focus from that of a native of the culture. In this respect Santino's accounts of his fieldwork experiences are enthusiastic, colourful, and informative. His data represent a useful contribution to the study of Halloween, while at the same time he manages to convey the idiosyncrasies of contemporary Northern Irish Halloween customs and the variety of cultural influences thereon.

The book chapters focus on separate areas of Halloween custom such as supernatural beliefs; rhyming, pranking and bonfires (grouped together in a chapter entitled "the personality of the season"); divination and related customs; and "the feast of autumn." Santino's collected accounts of these particular Halloween observances are extremely interesting, made more so by rendering them verbatim from his transcripts, so that his informants tell their own stories. Some of the localised divination legends are particularly engaging. Several accounts of "Halloween rhyming" are explored and contrasted, highlighting the variety of the specific songs, costumes and activities involved. The author is clearly fascinated by the tradition of bonfires and fireworks associated with Halloween, as there is no American parallel to this (at this time of the year at any rate), and explores the political implications of these activities in the context of the Northern Irish calendar and individual community expression.

His concluding chapter, entitled "Gender Construction and Cultural Hegemony," considers the ways in which specific customs--divination for girls, bonfire building for boys, and so on--reflect and affirm traditional gender roles. Additionally, he finds Halloween to possess an unusual quality as a non-sectarian festival which reaffirms the insular cohesiveness of separate communities in a non-confrontational manner. While it is possible to disagree with some of Santino's conclusions, the good-hearted nature of his writing and deductions makes his book enjoyable to read, provides food for thought, and raises interesting questions about the relationship of folklore and politics.

Sometimes using American Halloween custom as his point of reference, he seems to be writing primarily for an American audience with the purpose of educating his fellows about an aspect of cultural history in the "old world." While this makes for a refreshing "outsider's" view, the emphasis on Northern Irish Halloween customs as something exciting and unfamiliar fails to show them in their full historical and geographical contexts. For instance, many of the Northern Irish Halloween customs described by Santino are known to British folklorists as occurring in other locations throughout the British Isles. Works such as the Folklore Society's 1940s collections of British Calendar Customs, the Opies' Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, and Kevin Danaher's The Year in Ireland, show wider influences and a richer past of Halloween observance than is revealed in this book. None of these sources is cited in the rather short bibliography. An introductory chapter reviewing published academic scholarship on the complex politics and ethnography of Northern Ireland would also have been useful, as would a detailed summary of his fieldwork recordings. Santino provides few details of his methodology--it is not clear how many recordings he made or the relative proportions of socio-economic and ethnographical groups represented--and this lack of specific context detracts from the effectiveness of his conclusions.