Samhain is a Gaelic festival that ushers in the ‘dark half’ of the year which begins on 1st November. As the Celtic day began and ended at sunset, celebrations would commence on the evening of 31 October and run throughout the night. Like All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, the festival is believed to have influenced modern Hallowe’en, with many American traditions having been inherited from Irish and Scottish immigrants.  These include the carving of jack-o'-lanterns and the practice of guising (or mumming) which involved going from house to house dressed in costume while performing songs or verse.

Daniel Maclise’s Snap-Apple Night (1833) depicts an Irish crowd taking part in divination games and apple bobbing as part of Samhain celebrations. Maclise had attended a festive gathering in Blarney the previous year, and his caption for the painting’s first exhibition describes the dancing, card-games, and fortune-telling that he witnessed ‘on the festival of Hallow Eve’.

During the Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, there was a renewed interest in Samhain and other Gaelic seasonal festivals such as Imbolc (spring), Bealtaine (summer), and Lughnasa (autumn). Traditionally, these liminal festivals were believed to mark the blurring of boundaries between this world and the next, which was said to ease contact with aos sí (spirits or fairies).

The Revival’s interest in these festivities was reflected in the naming of the influential early nineteenth-century theatrical periodical Samhain. Originally titled Bealtaine, the publication changed its name to reflect, as W.B. Yeats explained, that the Revival’s ‘[t]heatre [was] coming to an end in its present shape’.  Yeats was a leading contributor to Samhain and outlined his artistic principles in a series of essays published in the journal. Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan, a one-act play co-written with Lady Gregory, was published in the October 1902 issue of Samhain having debuted at the Abbey Theatre the previous April.

An influential figure in the Irish Literary Revival, Yeats’s interest in mythology and the occult informed, among others, The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), The Stolen Child (1889), and numerous poems centred on the warrior Cuchulain.  Samhain festivities feature in Yeats’ Stories of Red Hanrahan (1904) which begins on the eve of Samhain with an otherworldly game of chance. In book’s opening tale, Hanrahan arrives at a rural dwelling and plays cards, only for the deck to transform into a pack of hounds which chases a hare into the dead of night.

This tale is recounted twenty-four years later in The Tower (1928), as Yeats wrestles with old age and recalls his youth. This poem features in a collection of the same name (1928), the title of which refers to the Norman castle which Yeats restored and renamed Thoor Ballylee. The late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney described the tower, which Yeats lived in from 1921 to 1929, as ‘the most important public building in Ireland’.

On Ireland’s east coast stands another famous literary tower: the Martello tower of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Joyce was a notable critic of the brand of Irishness promoted by Yeats and the Revival, considering their idealisation of mythology and rural peasant life to be parochial. According to Yeats, upon their first meeting Joyce told him: ‘I have met you too late. You are too old.’ Joyce pushed back against the Revival’s romanticised image of the past, declaring that ‘Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead.’

Nevertheless, Joyce’s works do engage with Irish mythology. In the kaleidoscopic ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom recalls a school trip to Poulaphouca waterfall which derives its name from the Irish Poll an Phúca meaning ‘the Púca’s hole’.  The Púca are shapeshifting spirits said to bring good or bad fortune and feature in many agricultural traditions associated with Samhain. It is telling that Joyce invokes the Púca - spirits from the Otherworld - within a passage in which reality unravels and hallucinations are brought to life.

Yeats writes about a musical Samhain Púca in the story ‘The Piper and the Puca’ printed in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). The tale concerns a mischievous Púca who transforms a fool into a brilliant musician before making his pipes sound ‘as if all the geese and ganders in Ireland were screeching together’.

Like Yeats, Joyce also mentions Samhain festivities in his work, with the short story ‘Clay’ - which features in Dubliners (1914) - occurring on Hallows’ Eve.  The story follows Maria, who attends a party at which traditional Samhain games are played. Guests eat barmbrack, a bread sweetened with sultanas and raisins, inside of which a ring is hidden and said to bring good luck to whoever finds it.

Samhain symbolism appears again in Joyce’s cyclical novel Finnegans Wake (1939) in which he makes repeated references to the ‘Valley of the Black Pig’, the site of an apocalyptic battle in Irish folklore and thus a symbol of renewal associated with Samhain.  In these references, Joyce hints at Yeats’ poem The Valley of the Black Pig (1896), poking fun at the Revival’s use of mythology by placing this symbol in a comedic, ironic, and parodic context within a novel that blends so-called high and low art.

Yet, in doing so perhaps Joyce captures the spirit of Samhain, a celebration which brought ancient mythology to life around a packet of cards and a bucket of apples, and which lives on in the carved pumpkins and Dracula teeth of today.