In European folklore, a need-fire (German: Notfeuer, Old High German: nodfyr, Scottish Gaelic: tein'-éigin, Russian: Живой огонь) is a fire kindled by friction, which is lit in a ritual and used as protective magic against murrain (infectious diseases affecting cattle), plague and witchcraft. It was a tradition in parts of northern, western and eastern Europe until the 19th century, among Germanic, Gaelic and Slavic peoples.[1]
A need-fire would usually be lit when there was an epidemic such as an outbreak of plague or cattle disease. In some regions, a need-fire was lit yearly to prevent such disasters.[1] In the Scottish Highlands they were lit each year at Beltane (1 May),[2] in Poland they were lit on Saint Roch's Day, and in parts of Germany they were also lit yearly.[1]
The need-fire could only be kindled by friction between wood, usually with a large fire drill made from oak.[1] Usually an upright pole would be spun against a level plank until it catches fire. The pole would be spun by pulling a rope wound around it. This would all be held together by a square frame. Both the wooden parts and the rope should be new; if possible, it should be woven of strands taken from a gallows rope.[1]
The need-fire could only be lit after all other fires were doused.[1][2] In one case, the kindling of the need-fire in a village near Quedlinburg, Germany was hindered by a night light burning in the parsonage.[3] In parts of the Scottish Highlands, the rule that all other fires be doused applied only to the land between the two nearest streams.[4]
Only certain people could make the need-fire. In the Scottish Highlands, usually it had to be kindled by nine men, after they had removed all metal.[2] In one account from Caithness, a large need-fire had to be kindled by eighty-one men, divided into nine shifts of nine.[2] In some regions, the rope should always be pulled by two brothers, while in Silesia, the tree used to make the need-fire had to be felled by a pair of twin brothers.[1] In Serbia, the need-fire was sometimes kindled by a boy and girl, between eleven and fourteen years of age, who worked naked in a dark room.[1] In Bulgaria, two naked men would kindle the fire by rubbing dry branches together in the forest, and with the flame they light two fires, one on each side of a crossroad haunted by wolves.[5]
When the need-fire was kindled, a bonfire was lit from it. The flames, smoke and ashes were believed to protect and purify.[1][2] Livestock would be driven around the bonfire, or over its embers once it had died down somewhat.[1][2] The ashes would be scattered over fields to protect crops, and young people would mark each other with them.[1][2] Torches from the bonfire would be carried home and used to rekindle the hearth fires.[1][2] In the Scottish Highlands, a pot of water was heated with the new fire, mixed with some of the ash, and sprinkled on sick people and cattle.[1] According to Sir James George Frazer, on the Isle of Mull, a sick heifer would be cut up and burned as a sacrifice.[1]
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What Is Fire?
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Why Does A Fire Need Oxygen? | Probl∑m Solv∑r
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[MUSIC] In the mid-1800s, Michael Faraday gave a series of Christmas Lectures for kids at the Royal Institution in London, and one of his favorite subjects to talk about was fire. [MUSIC] Faraday was particularly interested in candles, because inside their delicate flames, they hold some amazing lessons on how fire really works. You might have seen fire described like this in chemistry class, but a chemical formula doesn’t explain what fire is anymore than a recipe explains what chocolate chip cookies taste like. The first thing we notice about a candle flame is all those colors. Hot things glow because of black body radiation, which we talked about in our video about the color of the universe. Down at the bottom of the flame, it’s hotter, so it glows blue, and in the middle it’s cooler, so it glows yellowish-orangish. Inside of that flame, there can be hundreds of chemical reactions taking place. The oxygen in the air and the carbon and hydrogen in the candle don’t do anything on their own. It takes a little outside heat to get things started. Solid fuel is vaporized by the heat and ripped into smaller chunks. This is called pyrolysis, and you can’t have a flame without it. You can sometimes see a dark cone around the wick where there’s no fire, where vaporized wax is coming off the candle, but hasn’t started to burn yet. The hydrocarbons hot oxygen in the air slam into each other and their atoms begin to rearrange. Sometimes electrons in those atoms get into an excited state, and when they come back down again they give off light. That’s why the bottom of the flame glows blue. Not all the carbon in the candle gets converted to CO2, so leftover carbon atoms come together and form tiny particles of soot, which heat up and glow orange and yellow like the hot coals under a grill. This glowing soot is where most of a candle’s light comes from. Eventually, at the tip of the flame, all the soot has burned away, and we’re left with only carbon dioxide and water floating off into the air. You can investigate all the different parts of a flame for yourself with just a cold piece of metal. Up here, water vapor. In the yellow part of the flame, soot. And down just next to the wick, we can even recover unburned wax. Flames look really cool. They’re almost hypnotic… Sorry, what was I talking about? Oh right, shape. Gravity pulls cool, denser air down, and makes hot air rise, and this buoyancy is what gives flames their familiar shape. But if you light a flame in zero-g, like on the space station, it will look very different. All of the chemical and quantum reactions that make a flame glow can only happen where it meets the air, so even though they look like solid cones, candle flames are actually hollow. As long as there’s fuel and oxygen, a flame will burn and burn. Why? It’s not the molecular ripping apart that makes a flame hot, the formation of new molecules and new bonds is what creates heat, and that heat drives the chain reaction forward, vaporizing more fuel, slamming more molecules into one another, making the fire burn on. Our species has been gathering around fire for thousands of years, and sitting around, asking questions and telling stories over a flickering flame, is what helped made us human in the first place. Stay curious. [MUSIC]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Frazer, James George (1922). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Chapter 62, Section 8: The Need-fire. Internet Sacred Text Archive.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Hutton, Ronald. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press, 1996. pp. 220–225
- ^ Heinrich Pröhle, Harzbilder, Leipzig, 1855
- ^ Kelly, Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folklore, p. 53 seq.
- ^ A Strauss, Die Bulgaren, p. 198
Further reading
- Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, i. 50, sqq.
- Walter Keating Kelly, Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folklore, p. 48 sqq.
- Charles Isaac Elton, Origins of English History, p. 293 sqq.
- James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, iii. 301.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Need-Fire". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 19 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 338.
This page was last edited on 26 September 2023, at 07:17