ffansvisa_, expecting to be
treated to ale or spirits in return.

The cavalcade is supposed to represent St. Stephen and his followers, yet
the saint is not, as might be expected, the first martyr of the New
Testament, but a dauntless missionary who, according to old legends, was
one of the first preachers of the Gospel in Sweden, and was murdered by
the heathen in a dark forest. A special trait, his love of horses,
connects him with the customs just described. He had, the legends tell,
five steeds: two red, two white, one dappled; when one was weary he
mounted another, making every week a great round to preach the Word.
After his death his body was fastened to the back of an unbroken colt,
which halted not till it came near Norrala, his home. There he was
buried, and a church built over his grave became a place of pilgrimage to
which sick animals, especially horses, were brought for healing.

Mannhardt and Feilberg hold that this Swedish St. Stephen is not a
historical personage but a mythical figure, like many other saints, and
that his legend, so bound up with horses, was an attempt to account for
the folk-customs practised on the day dedicated to St. Stephen the first
martyr. It is interesting to note that legendary tradition has played
about a good deal with the New Testament Stephen; for instance an old
English carol makes him a servant in King Herod's hall at the time of
Christ's birth:--

"Stephen out of kitchen came,
With boares head on hand,
He saw a star was fair and bright
Over Bethlehem stand."

|314| Thereupon he forsook King Herod for the Child Jesus, and was
stoned to death.{11}

To return, however, to the horse customs of the day after Christmas, it
is pretty plain that they are of non-Christian origin. Mannhardt has
suggested that the race which is their most prominent feature once formed
the prelude to a ceremony of lustration of houses and fields with a
sacred tree. Somewhat similar "ridings" are found in various parts of
Europe in spring, and are connected with a procession that appears to be
an ecclesiastical adaptation of a pre-Christian lustration-rite.{12} The
great name of Mannhardt lends weight to this theory, but it seems a
somewhat roundabout way of accounting for the facts. Perhaps an
explanation of the "horsiness" of the day might be sought in some
pre-Christian sacrifice of steeds.

* * * * *

We have already noted that St.