Morgan Verifies … Some Samhain facts

by Morgan Daimler

October is an interesting time online every year, with a range of sources sharing things about both the history of Halloween and the pagan holiday of Samhain. What is shared ends up being a wide range from true to absolute nonsense and everything in between. So for this month’s article, I wanted to touch on a couple of points I tend to see the most often and offer explanations. Let’s dive in:

Does Samhain Mean Summer’s End?

Well…probably, but not definitely.
The idea that Samhain means summer’s end comes from the suggestion that the word can be broken down into two parts: samh, shortened from Samhrad, meaning summer, and fuin, which is usually given in this situation as end. It’s interesting to note, though, that fuin only means end poetically; literally, it means sunset, sinking, hiding, or burial. So we could more poetically translate Samhain, samh fhuin, as ‘sunset of summer’ or ‘hiding of summer’. Unfortunately, scholars don’t entirely agree with this meaning, and the definition is still seen as speculative. It is, however, a very old idea, having been around for about 500 years now, and one that is widely accepted.

The first mention I have found of this meaning is a folk etymology in the late 15^th/early 16^th century Tochmarc Emire:

‘….i. conrubar-sæ cin cotlud o shamuin, edhón sam-fuin .i. fuin an t-samraid ann.’

(that is I shall fight without sleep from Samhain, that is sam-fuin, that is [fuin] end of the summer [samraid] there.)
A 17th-century source, O’Clery’s Glossary, says something very similar: ‘samhain .i. samhfhuin .i. fuin an tsamhraidh’ (Samhain that is samh-fhuin that is the end of the summer).
So it isn’t definitively true, but it is a strong possibility, and a lot of people like this meaning.

Is It Pronounced Sam Hane?

Definitely not.
Samhain is pronounced “Sow-win” or “Sow-wen” in Irish, and Samhuinn is pronounced “Sah-vihn” in Scottish Gaelic; there are, of course, minor variations in different dialects, but in no Celtic language is it pronounced “Sam-hane”. As far as I can tell, pronouncing it that way comes from non-Irish speakers reading the word and applying English phonetic pronunciation rules to it. At this point, there are enough resources and online pronunciation guides that there’s no reason for people not to get Samhain correct. Especially since everyone insists on using the Old Irish spelling for Lughnasadh but people manage to say it Loo-nah-sah just fine, so pronouncing Samhain correctly should be just as easy.

Samhain God of the Dead?

Nope.
There is absolutely no Samhain God of the Dead – or of anything else – in Irish mythology. The idea originated with a Scottish antiquarian in the 18^th century who suggested that since Samhain is a holiday strongly associated with remembering the dead and with increased spirit activity, that must therefore mean Samhain was the name of an Irish death god. This logic (or lack thereof) may have been acceptable in the early modern period but can fairly easily be disproven today. There is no such deity in Irish mythology, and the holiday name is discussed above.
Unfortunately for all of us, the idea of Samhain as a god of death didn’t die with that Scottish antiquarian but was spread by religious pamphlets put out by a deeply conservative US-based evangelical publisher in the 1980s. They claimed that druids sacrificed people, especially children, to the death God/demon Samhain on Halloween to appease him and free the souls he was tormenting. Even more unfortunately, the idea spread from there into some corners of pop culture and so still shows up randomly even today.

Sam Hane: God of the Dead?

Only in fiction.
Despite what some movies and TV shows claim, no, there wasn’t an Irish death god or ‘demon’ named Sam Hane either.

Do We Offer to the Cait Sìth on Samhain?
So this is a very widespread idea that I see a lot this time of year, and I’m sure it will surprise some people to learn its origins don’t lie in Scottish folklore but in a blog-style website from 2000 written by a woman in the USA. This site shared some reasonably accurate folklore but also added in a completely invented offering of milk to the cat sìth on Samhain to please it; if one failed to do so, your cows’ milk would go dry. This idea is now repeated even on Scottish folklore websites as legitimate, despite not being found anywhere prior to 2000 and that one particular site.