Manchester Memoirs, Vol. Ixvi. (1922), No. 3 15 



that have long lost their significance. My friend, the late 

 Rev. Dr. George Henderson, with whom I have discussed the 

 Scottish treatment of the pig, has written in a footnote : — 



'' I noted a children's game in Eriskay (Hebrides) called 

 Mathair Mhor, ' Big Mother,' where the mother was feigned 

 to be a pig ! It is possibly a relic of early ritual." (12, 24-5). 



In Wales the mother pig is associated with Halloween^ 

 the festival at which the life-prolonging apples and hazel-nuts 

 play so prominent a part. There the Black Sow of All- 

 Hallows, as the late Sir John Rhys, Oxford, once wTote to me, 

 " is the very devil." In his '' Celtic Folklore " he shows that 

 the English expression, " the devil take the hindmost," is in 

 the Welsh of Carnarvonshire *' may the black sow without a 

 tail seize the hindmost." '' The cutty black sow is often 

 alluded to nowadays to frighten children in Arfon." The 

 verse " A cutty black sow on every stile, spinning and 

 carding every Allhallows Eve," is in Cardiganshire different. 

 There the sow becomes "a bogie on everv stile." (26, i^ 

 225-6.) 



The '' mystic pig " was known in Ireland. Miss Eleanor 

 Hull, writing in Folklore (1918) on "The Black Pig of Kil- 

 trustan," has shown that " the hunt of magical boars or swine 

 is the theme of many tales " in Ireland and Wales. She 

 states that " nearly all the enchanted swine were transformed 

 human beings," and that " they were connected with the 

 earliest race of deified beings, Manannan, Lugh, Lir and 

 Angus, and that they were usually slain in Connaught." She 

 notes that " in the Late Celtic period the figure of a boar was 

 used as a decoration, and small figures of the animal in bronze 

 have been found in Ireland ; one is preserved in the National 

 Museum, Dublin." An Irish manuscript story states that 

 "" pigs of magic came out of the cave of Cruachan, and that is 

 Ireland's gate of hell . . . Round whatever they used to go, 

 till the end of seven years, neither corn nor grass nor leaf 

 would grow through it " (25). The pork taboo appears to 

 have obtained at one time in certain areas in Ireland. From 

 enquiries which I made among livestock dealers with whom I 

 once travelled from Dublin to Belfast, there are still families 

 in Ireland whose members refuse to eat pork. The great 

 proportion of the Irish people, however, know nothing regard- 

 ing the pork taboo. 



The Continental Celts, like the Achaeans who over-ran 

 Greece, were pig-rearers and pork eaters. Poseidonius of 



