Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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However over the number of the seasons among the Germans or, what has often been regarded as the same thing,—and this is an evidence of the false methods by which the problem has been attacked—over the German division of the year, a long and vigorous dispute has been carried on. That the year was divided into two parts, summer and winter, is well known. I refer to the Scandinavian half-years[328], to the testimony of Bede[329] that the Anglo-Saxons reckoned six months for winter and six for summer, and to the German expressions for a year: ‘in bareness and in leaf’, ‘bare and leaf-clad’, ‘in straw and in grass’[330]. No less a scholar than J. Grimm has cast doubt on the statement of Tacitus that the Germans had only three seasons, but later he withdrew his doubts in view of the consideration that the Germans at the time of Tacitus were acquainted with grain-culture but not with fruit-culture, and that the word autumn, harvest, referred to the fruit and vine-harvests and therefore naturally did not appear among the Germans of that time[331]. In view of the linguistic phenomenon mentioned ssss1, it seems now to be agreed that the account of Tacitus is in the main correct. Weinhold has given the treatment of the question its direction. According to him the tripartite division to which reference has been made crowded out the older division into two parts, the points of division, he maintains, doubtless coinciding in the first instance with the three Lauddinge or ungebotene Gerichte (regular courts), which are found as early as the time of Charlemagne. The beginnings of the four seasons—determined from saints’ days—in February, May, August, and November are of foreign origin: on the other hand the quadripartite division of the year, arising from the fact that mid-winter and midsummer were added to the beginning of winter and summer as interpolations in the time-reckoning, is German. This Weinhold tries to prove from the popular festivals associated with these dates. The attempt however is a complete failure. No season begins with any of the solstices, on the contrary these fall right in the middle of a season. His thesis rests on an erroneous conception of the festivals, viz. that they are in general calendar-festivals. Under primitive conditions a festival (the harvest-home in particular) may certainly conclude a division of time and may thus also indicate the beginning of a new season, but as a rule the festivals, though regulated by the calendar, are not so ordered that they coincide with the beginning of a season. We are therefore not authorised in drawing conclusions as to the beginning of a division of the year from the existence of an old festival. Support has been lent to the idea of Weinhold by the fact that in later times the beginnings of the seasons were indicated by festivals and saints’ days. The fact of the matter is that the common medieval calendar was composed of a series of festivals and saints’ days from among which suitable and well-known days were chosen in the dating of the beginnings of the seasons also. For the general understanding it was necessary throughout to bring in popular saints’ days[332]. Tille attacks Weinhold very sharply but remains throughout under the influence of the method indicated by the latter: his work, however, has its good points, inasmuch as it refers to economic conditions, agriculture, the payments of rent, etc. The bipartite division, he asserts, is primitive Indo-European, the tripartite is of foreign (Egyptian) origin: both existed for a long time side by side. This fact is explained by an old sexpartite division of the year, since the six seasons could be run together either in twos or in threes. The beginnings of the half-years are given by natural phenomena, those of the three annual divisions are placed by Tille at March 13, July 10, and Nov. 11, old style: in the north on account of the climatic conditions they are pushed back a month. Hammarstedt[333] remarks very pertinently that the beginning of winter in November, in the north in October, belongs to the reckoning in half-years, and that hence arises the absurdity that Tille has to give Feb. 10 as the date for the beginning of spring in the north. But to assign Dec. 13 with Hammarstedt as the beginning of one of the three seasons agrees just as little with the natural seasons of the year.