FIRE, COOKING, AND VESSELS. 257 



ancient friction-fire ; and, indeed, the Western clergy, as a 

 rule, discountenanced it as heatlienisli. In the Capitularies of 

 Carloman, in the eighth century, there is a prohibition of " illos 

 saerilegos ignes quos niedfyr vocant."i The result of this op- 

 position by the Church was, in great measure, to break the con- 

 nexion between the old festivals of the Sun, which the Church 

 allowed, and the lighting of the needfire, which is so closely 

 connected with the Sun-worship in our ancient Aryan mytho- 

 logy. Still, even in Germany, there are documents that bring 

 the two together. A glossary to the Capitularies says, " the 

 rustic folks in many places in Germany, and indeed on the 

 feast of St. John the Baptist, pull a stake from a hedge and 

 bind a rope round it, which they pull hither and thither till it 

 takes fire," etc.; and a Low German book of 1593 speaks of 

 the " nodfiire, that they sawed out of wood " to light the 

 St. John's bonfire, and through which the people leapt and 

 ran, and drove their cattle.^ 



It appears, however, that the Eastern and Western churches 

 differed widely in their treatment of the old rite. The Western 

 clergy discountenanced, and, as far as they could, put down the 

 needfire ; but in Russia it was not only allowed, but was (and 

 very likely may be still) practised under ecclesiastical sanction, 

 the priest being the chief actor in the ceremony. This inter- 

 esting fact seems not to have been known to Grimm and 

 Kuhn, and the following passage, which proves it, is still fur- 

 ther remarkable as asserting that the ancient fire-making by 

 friction was still used in Russia for practical as well as ceremo- 

 nial purposes in the last century. It is contained in an ac- 

 count of the adventures of four Russian sailors, who were 

 driven by a storm upon the desert island of East-Spitzbergen.* 

 " They knew, however, that if one rubs violently together two 

 pieces of dry wood, one hard and the other soft, the latter will 

 catch fire. Besides this being the way in which the Russian 

 peasants obtain fire when they are in the woods, there is also 



' Cap. Carlomanni in Grrimm, D. M., p. 570. 



2 Grimm, D. M., pp. 570, 579. See also Migne, Lex. s. v. " Nedifri." 

 ^ P. L. le Eoy, 'Erzahlung der Begebenheiten,' etc.; Riga, 1760. (An E. Tr. in 

 Pinkerton, vol. i.) 



