jO_77,

Thanks for the good wishes for a nice weekend.

That the 19th century Irish (or even the 7th century Irish) called Newgrange a "cave" provides an example of the discontinuity between their world and the world of Newgrange's builders. The latter built Newgrange, not as a "cave", but apparently as some sort of monument. It's not even certain that the midwinter sunrise on which the monument is aligned was intended to be seen by anyone living, rather than only by the dead people inside. (The entrance was blocked by a large stone.) Then there's an additional minor factor: the azimuths of solstitial sunrises fluctuate over time. A structure precisely aligned on the midwinter sunrise in 3000 B.C. might not have been so precisely aligned in 100 B.C., though it might still have been "good enough for government work" as our saying is.

That the Irish have words for "midwinter" and "midsummer" doesn't mean that these astronomical events had a formal place in their calendrical systems. We have the words in our language, but they have no formal place in our calendar. (Though the spring equinox can be said to be significant, indirectly, in the sense that the Gregorian calendar reform adjusted the calendar so that the equinox would fall near March 21st, and any future adjustments will probably be made to keep this date close to the astronomical event.) For what it's worth, the original Roman calendar as reconstructed by some scholars did not number days between the ides of December and the 17 or 16 Calends of March or thereabouts (I forget the precise date). Days between those dates, except maybe the Saturnalia, seem not formally to have been part of the year at all. Yet the Latins had a word for midwinter, bruma.

If we conclude that midwinter had a significance in the Irish calendar pre-400 A.D. we still don't automatically know what its significance was.

If we manage to conclude what the significance of midwinter was to the Irish, we still don't automatically know what its signigicance was to the British, or to the Gauls. Nor from the significance of midwinter do we necessarily know, even for the Irish, what the significance of another day, Samhain, was.

T.