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Updated: June 22, 2025
In some villages of Brunswick people thought that if everybody who lent a hand in kindling the need-fire did not bear the same Christian name, they would labour in vain. In Silesia the tree employed to produce the need-fire used to be felled by a pair of twin brothers.
So the wise men put their heads together and resolved to light a teine-eigin or need-fire as the best way of stopping the plague. They cut a branch from a tree in a neighbouring wood, stripped it of bark, and carried it to a small island in the Houstry Burn.
The peasants knocked at the window and earnestly entreated that the night-light might be extinguished. But the parson's wife refused to put the light out; it still glimmered at the window; and in the darkness outside the angry rustics vowed that the parson's pigs should get no benefit of the need-fire.
By the influence of this operation, the machinations and spells of witchcraft are rendered null and void." In various parts of the Highlands of Scotland the needfire was still kindled during the first half of the nineteenth century, as we learn from the following account: "Tein-eigin, neid-fire, need-fire, forced fire, fire produced by the friction of wood or iron against wood.
Sometimes nine different kinds of wood were deemed necessary, but rather perhaps to be burned in the bonfire than to be rubbed together for the production of the need-fire. The particular mode of kindling the need-fire varied in different districts; a very common one was this. Two poles were driven into the ground about a foot and a half from each other.
It deserves, further, to be noticed that in North Uist the wood used to kindle the need-fire was oak, and that the nine times nine men by whose exertions the flame was elicited were all first-born sons. Apparently the first-born son of a family was thought to be endowed with more magical virtue than his younger brothers.
Martin will come with a sheaf of straw to burn your guts, a great log of wood to smash your brow, and an iron chain to drag you to hell." In Sweden the need-fire is called, from the mode of its production, either vrid-eld, "turned fire," or gnid-eld, "rubbed fire."
For example, in the month of July 1792 sickness broke out among the cattle belonging to the town of Sternberg; some of the beasts died suddenly, and so the people resolved to drive all the survivors through a need-fire.
John the Baptist, wrench a stake from a fence, wind a rope round it, and pull it to and fro till it catches fire. This fire they carefully feed with straw and dry sticks and scatter the ashes over the vegetable gardens, foolishly and superstitiously imagining that in this way the caterpillar can be kept off. They call such a fire nodfeur or nodfyr, that is to say need-fire."
The fire so produced is caught in fuel and fed with straw, heath, and underwood till it bursts out into a regular need-fire, which must then be somewhat spread out between walls or fences, and the cattle and horses driven through it twice or thrice with sticks and whips. Others set up two posts, each with a hole in it, and insert a winch, along with old greasy rags, in the holes.
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