While sacrifices
might be made on special occasions, such as the arrival at a holy place,
the setting up of a new house, victory in battle, the opening of the Assembly,
or the death of a king; and might also be carried out by private individuals;
there were regular feasts in which all the community took part. It
also depended on how far North or South you lived as to which seasonal
holidays you celebrated. The fixing of these must have come about long
before any formal calendar was in use, although by the first century AD
the Celts in Gaul seem to have possessed an elaborate one.
Before such calendars
existed, the feast were presumably at the points of the seasonal
round important for farmers, herdsmen, hunters, fishers and warriors, and
could be roughly reckoned by observation of the moon or the planets.
The Celts and the
Germans used the half-year as the basic unit of time. In Iceland
the misseri (from miss, alternation) were summer and winter, each season
29 weeks in length, and the beginning of each was marked by feasting and
religious ritual. The passage of time was noted by counting winters
and nights. Julius Caesar noted that the Gauls held that night came
before day, and kept to this when celebrating birthdays and the beginning
of a month or a year, just as for xtian Christmas begins on Christmas Eve.
Tacitus noted similar with the Germans: ‘They do not reckon time by days,
as we do, but by nights'.
This implies a period
set apart for feasting by the whole community rather than a particular
entertainment when guest where invited to the kings hall....
....but the sacrificial feast can be distinguished
from banquets in general because at this men partook of animals sacrifice
to the gods, and drank mead and ale in the gods honor. They met to
renew their contract with the supernatural world, and to ensure good luck
for the coming season, and this was something for the whole community to
share in and not for selected guests. Games and contests might form
a part of the feast which would last for several days. The essential
element, however, was eating and drinking together, and there are occasions
when strangers were not admitted: One such reference is in the Austrfaravisír,
written by the Christian skald Sigvatr after a journey to Sweden in the
autumn of 1018. He recorded how he was refused entry to several
farms as the álfablót was being held there. The natives
of the land drove the poet from their homes. At one farm, the housewife
was standing at the door and refused him admission stating that she feared
the wrath of Odinn. Her household was heathen and she was holding
a sacrifice to the alfs, an álfablót.