The Turnip's Watchful Scowl

Cormac Deane
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — the Scottish Borders, late October

Halloween in the Scottish Borders still smells, if you catch it right, of singed turnip rather than pumpkin. Neep, tumshie, mangold, the word shifts with the parish, but the object is the same: a root vegetable hollowed with a kitchen spoon until your wrist aches and your eyes run from the raw sting of it, carved into a face no sane person would want looking back at them, and set burning on a windowsill or carried through the dark by a child in someone else's coat.

That carrying was the point. On Samhain night, bands of young guisers, their faces blacked with soot or hidden behind masks, their own clothes exchanged for someone else's, went from door to door reciting a verse or singing a song in return for apples, nuts or a coin. It was never quite the trick-or-treat it is often flattened into; the guiser had to earn the gift, perform for it, and the lantern they carried did double work. It lit the road home past hedgerows where you did not want to be caught without light, and it declared, to whatever else was abroad that night, that the bearer already belonged to the strange procession and need not be troubled.

What exactly the lantern was meant to do once lit is one of those points where the record thins and the versions disagree. Some tellings have it warding off the dead and the restless sìthean said to walk at Samhain, when the boundary between their country and ours was at its most porous. Others suggest the grotesque face was less a ward than a disguise, a way of passing among the wandering spirits as one of their own rather than as prey. I have heard both from people who grew up carving the same tumshie lantern every year and never thought to ask which.

Ireland supplies the character who gave the lantern its lasting name. Stingy Jack, in the story told across Munster and beyond, was a drunkard and a trickster who twice caught the Devil in a bargain and twice talked his way free, only to find himself barred from Heaven for his sins and from Hell out of the Devil's spite. Turned out to wander the dark roads forever, he was given, in some tellings, a single ember to light his way, which he is said to have carried inside a hollowed turnip. He became Jack of the Lantern. Whether this grim wanderer was grafted onto an older carving custom, or whether the carving custom grew up around his story, is not a thing I can settle with confidence; the name jack-o'-lantern was also, independently, an old term for the will-o'-the-wisp flickering over bogland, and the two threads of folklore seem to have tangled together long before anyone wrote down which came first.

The pumpkin only enters the story with emigration. Scots and Irish settlers in North America found turnips scarcer and far less forgiving to carve than the squash growing abundantly in their new neighbours' fields, and the softer, larger pumpkin took over the job while keeping the borrowed name. The turnip lantern did not vanish at home, though. In parts of Scotland and Ireland it is still cut every year alongside, or instead of, its American cousin, the carving every bit as punishing as the old guisers remembered, the smell of it just as acrid, the scowl just as crude and just as effective.

Halloween, when it comes round again, is as good a night as any to remember that the first lantern on the step was not grown for the purpose at all. It was dug from the ground, fought into shape with a blunt spoon, and lit because the dark on Samhain night was never thought to be empty.

Cormac Deane is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. Passage tombs, place-names, and the long argument between them; a habit of reading the landscape through the Irish in it, and of pointing out where a translation has quietly invented a story the original never told.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.