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Samhain

Gaelic festival marking the start of winter

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 18, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Samhain or Sauin is a Gaelic festival on 1 November marking the end of the harvest season in autumn and beginning of winter or the "darker half" of the year. It is also the Irish and Scottish Gaelic name for November. Celebrations begin on the evening of 31 October, since the Celtic day began and ended at sunset. This is about halfway between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice. It is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals along with Imbolc, Bealtaine, and Lughnasa. Historically it originated in Ireland and it was widely observed throughout Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. Its Brittonic Celtic equivalent is called Calan Gaeaf in Wales.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Samhain” as gaelic festival marking the start of winter. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Samhain, Gaelic and festival.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 112-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Samhain, Gaelic and festival providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Samhain”, the useful work is to connect “gaelic festival marking the start of winter” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Samhain primary sources, Samhain archive and Samhain research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Samhain” 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.