New Year Song

[wolfinthewood]

Here we bring new water
From the well so clear,
For to worship God with
This happy New Year.
Sing levez dew, sing levez dew,
The water and the wine;
The seven bright gold wires
And the bugles they do shine.
Sing reign of Fair Maid
With gold upon her toe,—
Open you the West Door,
And let the Old Year go.
Sing reign of Fair Maid,
With gold upon her chin,
Open you the East Door
And let the New Year in.

Traditional

Collected in South Wales and first recorded in 1848

The version above was published in Notes and Queries on 3 January 1852. The correspondent cites an article published in The Athenaeum on 5 February 1848. I haven’t had a chance to look up the Athenaeum article. The correspondent to NQ states that it is ‘a song sung by the children in South Wales on New Year’s morning, when carrying a jug of water newly drawn from the well’.

A slightly different version was collected by the American folklore collector Wirt Sikes in Pembrokeshire and published by him in about 1880. He says: ‘As soon as it is light children of the peasantry hasten to provide a small cup of pure spring-water, just from the well, and go about sprinkling the faces of those they meet, with the aid of a sprig of evergreen. At the same time they sing the following verses’ &c. For Sikes’s version, see here. The only important difference is that the puzzling phrase ‘levez dew’ becomes the equally puzzling ‘levy dew’.

The rhyme was popularised by Walter de la Mare, who included it in his popular anthology Come Hither (1923). He printed Sikes’s text, with a bit of tidying up, but gave no details of provenance. From there it found its way into innumerable poetry anthologies, in one of which I first read it, long ago.

The folklorist Christina Hole has a long entry in her Dictionary of British Folk Customs (1976) under the heading ‘New Year Water’. She states that in many parts of Britain special qualities were attributed to the first water drawn on New Year’s Day from any well, pond or stream. It was supposed to be lucky, and people competed to be first at the well to obtain it. She gives a detailed account of the Welsh custom, and a text of the song that is close to that of Sikes, with very minor variants. She says the custom was in use in South Wales until almost the end of the nineteenth century, and that in addition to sprinkling people’s faces, as described by Sikes, the children (boys, she says) would take the water from house to house. If they were allowed in, they would sprinkle some of the water in every room, meanwhile singing their song. For this they were rewarded with money, often very generously.

Nice. I didn’t know before that the song was about bringing luck for the coming year; or if I did, I had forgotten it. The water-sprinkling implies purification: that is, it brings luck because it purges evil, blight and bane.

The rite seems to have pagan origins (much more clearly than many British folk customs that are commonly described as pagan). At least, it is hard to understand the Fair Maid as anything other than a goddess, reborn into youth and beauty at the turn of the year. The line ‘For to worship God with’ has clearly been introduced to the song to disarm the objections of parsons and puritans to a superstitious and heathen custom.

The puzzling part is stanza two, with its ‘levez/levy dew’, gold wires, bugles &c. It is more or less meaningless, therefore it is corrupt, therefore at some point in the transmission the singers stopped understanding what they were singing and sang something that sounded vaguely like what they had received from earlier generations. I wish I knew what that was.


tags: folklore | custom

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Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It couldn't be French "levez" "lift", with "dew" meaning "water" or possibly God?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

No, I've got it, it's "levez d'eau" Lift the water.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

It would fit the context, and you could well be right. I wondered, though, if it were corrupted Welsh: dew could easily be a worn-down form of dŵr (water). But I have only the merest smattering of Welsh and cannot guess at levez/levy.

[laughingmagpie.livejournal.com]

papersky beat me to the suggestion...

I was at a friend's open house today and since they were serving "Moose Milk", I asked what that was all about. She's from the East Coast of Canada and she described the 'Levee' celebrations traditionally held on New Year's day. I immediately thought of this poem and the mysterious dew!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levee_(event)

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Thanks very muchfor this. I found the account of the Levee celebrations, about which I knew nothing, very interesting. I am not sure you and papersky are right, and I have come up with a different suggestion in my next post. But then, I am not at all sure I am right, either.

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of a levée. "Hey everyone, come help me get out of bed!" should definitely be reinstated as an excuse for a party.

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of posting this exact same carol to my journal for New Year's! And I thought "If anyone knows what the hell this means, it will be wolfinthewood.

Here's what I found on it:

Trefor Owen describes the context for this song in Wales. Very early on New Year's Day about three or four o'clock in the morning, groups of boys came round to the houses in the neighborhood, carrying a vessel of cold spring water, freshly drawn, and twigs of box, holly, myrtle, rosemary or other evergreens. They sprinkled the hands and face of anyone they met for a copper or two. In every house, each room was sprinkled with New Year's water and the inmates, who were often still in bed, wished a Happy New Year. For this service and wish they were also gifted with coins. The doors of those houses which were closed to them were sprinkled with the water. The verse was sung during the sprinkling.

In certain parts of Wales this custom is called dwr newy (literally, new water). The exact meaning of the phrase, “levy dew” is unknown, although there have been attempts to trace it to llef I Dduw (Welsh for “cry of God”). This seems to be an imposition of a Christian interpretation on a much older custom. Although the fair maid is now equated with the Virgin, Owen thinks it likely that this custom derives from “an early well-cult made acceptable to medieval Christianity by its association with the Virgin and perpetuated both by the desire to wish one’s neighbor well at the beginning of a new year and by the small monetary payment involved.”

From here (http://www.schooloftheseasons.com/carols.html), which also contains a few other New Year's carols and a painfully hippieish neo-pagan version of the one you posted.

Happy New Year, friend wolf!

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. My further thoughts on ‘levy dew’ are in my next post.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to you too!