Levy dew

In my mildly obsessive way, I have continued to ponder the phrase ‘levez dew’ or ‘levez dew’. papersky in a comment on my last entry suggests it is French – well, in the earlier form it certainly looks very much like it – and interprets it as ‘levez d’eau’, lift the water. laughingmagpie came to the same conclusion independently, and gives an interesting link to an account of the New Year’s Day Levee celebrations held in Canada. artnouveauho has come up with an additional account of the rhyme and the associated custom, which mentions an attempt to find a Welsh origin for the phrase. My thanks to all of you.

I do very much suspect that ‘levez/levy dew’ is a bit of corrupted Welsh. I have been thumbing through my Welsh dictionaries and grammars. Far and away my best guess is ‘llifo dŵr’, ‘the flowing of the water’, or ‘the welling up of the water’. But my Welsh grammar may be all wrong, or I may be assuming an unlikely pattern of sound changes.

Now what, I wonder, are ‘the seven bright gold wires’ and the shining bugles?

UPDATE: I talked to a native Welsh speaker on the phone last night (she was my English teacher in school, long ago): she wasn’t totally dismissive of my theory, but corrected my grammar. In modern Welsh, anyway, ‘the flowing of the water’ would be ‘llifo’r dŵr’. She suggested ‘llif y dŵr’, ‘the flow of the water’. (Now if you put ‘llifo’r dŵr’ into Google you don’t find any examples of it turning up; but there are over 150 instances of ‘llif y dŵr’, which is much closer to ‘levy dew’ anyway.)

But papersky doubts whether the sound changes will work, and reminds me that the Normans colonised Wales and left Norman-French place names and other relics. She knows a huge amount more about this than I, who am just an English tourist and smatterer.

The Welsh friend I talked to last night told me about lots of New Year customs that were in use when she was a child, many of which she still keeps up each year. Her brother did not carry round water from the well, but he did go out just after midnight and make useful amounts of pocket money as what the Scots call a ‘first-footer’. Meanwhile, she wasn’t allowed to go out until after midday, to ensure she did not inadvertently bring bad luck on a neighbour, being a girl. (This was in the forties.)

Her grandmother used to put oranges or tangerines on three sticks and give one to everyone who was in the house as a New Year’s gift, a ‘calennig’; the shining golden fruit represents the sun, of course. My friend still does this every year, though she has lived in England for decades. (She may be one of the last people still doing this.)

The boys like her brother who went round bringing luck sang songs at the doors, like Christmas carols; she translated a couple for me, but I didn’t note them down. She said sometimes whole groups went round, like glee parties. I wonder whether in the past they took instrumentalists with them? That would explain the shining bugles.

One thing I thought was a bit of a pity: she knew the ‘levy dew’ song, of course, having come across it in anthologies. But she didn’t know till I told her that it had been collected in Wales, so thoroughly has it been separated from its roots and turned into a quaint, deracinated ‘traditional rhyme’. I didn’t know where it had come from myself, until I started digging into the matter on New Year’s Day. Anyway, she was intrigued and delighted to hear about its origins.