Bonfire
controlled outdoor fire
A bonfire is a large and controlled outdoor fire, used for waste disposal or as part of a religious feast, such as Saint John's Eve.
Etymology
The earliest attestations date to the late 15th century, with the Catholicon Anglicum spelling it as banefyre and John Mirk's Book of Festivals speaking of a communal fire in celebrations of Saint John's Eve that "was clene bones & no wode & that is callid a bone fyre". The word is thus a compound of "bone" and "fire."
Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary incorrectly analyzed "bon" as the French bon 'good'.
Regional traditions
In many regions of continental Europe, bonfires are made traditionally on 23 June, the solemnity of John the Baptist, as well as on Saturday night before Easter. Bonfires are also a feature of Walpurgis Night in central and northern Europe, and the celebrations on the eve of St. John's Day in Spain. In Sweden bonfires are lit on Walpurgis Night celebrations on the last day of April. In Finland and Norway bonfires are tradition on Midsummer Eve and to a lesser degree in Easter.
Alpine and Central Europe
Bonfire traditions of early spring, lit on the Sunday following Ash Wednesday (Funkensonntag, otherwise called Quadragesima Sunday), are widespread throughout the Alemannic German speaking regions of Europe and in parts of France. The burning of "winter in effigy" at the Sechseläuten in Zürich (introduced in 1902) is inspired by this Alemannic tradition.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Bonfire” as controlled outdoor fire. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9505308. The Library of Congress control number is sh00005319. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1755 and 1902.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bonfire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.