The Deceiver

At first glance this is a typical example of the kind of cheap fiction for adolescents that was popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. The publisher, A. L. Burt Company, was known for reprinting authors like Horatio Alger, whose books are indeed advertised in the back matter, specifically under the heading of "Books for Boys." Even though Reynard the Fox isn't by Alger, the figure on the front seems like a typical Alger hero: an adolescent boy on his own, staff and bag in hand, ready to find his way in the world. In fact, though, the cover is a complete work of misdirection. To begin with, where is the fox of the title?

The author of this book, or rather its editor and adapter, was Joseph Jacobs, a well-regarded Australian-born scholar who wrote a number of books on folklore and fairy tales as well as on Judaica. He states in the book's Preface that he sought to "provide a text which children could read with ease and pleasure, and at the same time give their parents, their cousins, and their aunts a short résumé of the results which the latest research in folklore and literary history has arrived at with regard to the origin of the book." There is a fairly learned Introduction and occasional footnotes, as well as amusing drawings by W. Frank Calderon.

The book's full title is The Most Delectable History of Reynard the Fox; it was originally published by Macmillan in 1895. Jacobs explains that he has reworked a text published by one Felix Summerley (a pen name for Sir Henry Cole, who is credited with the first commercially marketed Christmas cards). Summerley / Cole in turn took his material from a volume published in the 1490s by William Caxton, who drew on a Flemish version of stories that had been shaped and reshaped since at least the twelfth century. With all those hands involved you might expect something fairly watered-down, but Jacobs's Reynard is actually quite lively and readable, and it has been reprinted several times, notably by Schocken Books. Reynard is classified by folklorists as a typical animal "trickster," but in these pages he's more of a sociopath, a serial murderer, thief, and fabricator. His story doesn't have a tidy moralistic ending; instead, deceit is rewarded, Reynard triumphs over everyone he has wronged, but he's so engaging that of course we root for him all the way.

There's no adolescent boy in the book, let alone an obviously modern one, and the closest the text ever comes to justifying the Burt edition's cover art is a scene where Reynard is described holding a staff and bag of his own. So the question is, was the cover meant to depict the typical reader, rather than the protagonist, of Reynard the Fox, or was it simply a case of bait-and-switch? The bizarre alternate cover below, also published by A. L. Burt, suggests that it may be the latter.

Needless to say, there are no Native Americans or canoes in Reynard the Fox.

Postscript: Twice in the narrative the text refers to two minor animal characters as "the leopard and the loss." "Loss" puzzled me, as I could find no definition for an animal by that name (but Jacobs thought it unnecessary to add a footnote). With a little research I found that Caxton had "losse," and this is from the Dutch "los," meaning "lynx." So this is our old friend the lonza.

Resurrecting Birds

The subject of my last post led me to anthropolgist Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence's 1997 book Hunting the Wren: Transformation of Bird to Symbol. In that book, which sadly is out of print, Lawrence does an outstanding job of tracing as much of the history of the wren hunt as can be reconstructed, and of exploring the dense symbolic networks surrounding it. She examines various latter-day interpretations of the practice in relation to totemism, the dying-and-resurrecting god motif, Christian iconography, and so on.

One of the most interesting aspects of the wren hunt is the suggestion that the "king of all birds" must be not only killed and paraded about but actually cooked and sacramentally eaten. (Some of the songs associated with the hunt make humorous declarations about the vast amount of food provided by the body of the tiny bird.) Although Lawrence doesn't discuss the Grimm Brothers' tale of "The Juniper Tree," which I briefly alluded to in my last post, this passage about the ritual cooking of the wren in a pot or pan immediately brought it to mind:

[...] the wren is destroyed and dismembered but will be miraculously reborn. Through immersion in the cauldron the bird is resurrected, and with it those who partake of the ceremonial feast will be themselves renewed and reborn.

For those unfamiliar with "The Juniper Tree," it concerns a little boy who is murdered by his stepmother, dismembered, and cooked into a stew that is fed to his unknowing father. The boy's half-sister, who has witnessed the dismemberment, gathers up the bones and sets them beneath the titular tree, out of which a brilliantly-plumed bird magically resurrects. The bird then sings a beautiful song, which it will only repeat if given a gift. After collecting a gold chain, a pair of red shoes, and a millstone, it bestows these gifts in turn on the father, the half-sister, and the stepmother (who is crushed by the stone). Interestingly, a gold chain turns up in one verse of one version of the wren song:

God bless the mistress of this house,
A golden chain around her neck,
And if she's sick or if she's sore
The Lord have mercy on her soul

Here it's the mistress, not the father, who receives the chain, but that wouldn't suit the narrative of "The Juniper Tree," since the mistress will receive a fatal punishment instead of a reward.

Another interesting case of the resurrection of a bird by eating it turns up in Peter Blegvad's song "Chicken," which describes how a man and a woman go for a walk carrying a chicken "in a gunnysack." After the man ("Frank") mysteriously disappears, the woman eats the chicken, gathers up the bones (accidentally overlooking one "finger bone"), and throws them down a well.

She calls "Come back, Frank, and find your wife."
When the sack hits the water it comes to life

The woman takes the handle and she turns the crank
Up comes the bucket and there sits Frank
He says "There's only one thing I don't understand."
He says "Where's the little finger of my left hand?"

In a live performance of the song ( St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn Heights, NY, March 14, 1992) Blegvad introduced it by reading from Sigmund Freud's discussion of the case of "Little Arpad," a young boy who was bitten on the penis by a chicken and thereafter developed an obsession with the bird. Blegvad did not, however, mention that (according to Peter Gay) Arpad reportedly also said "One should put my mother into a pot and cook her, then there would be a preserved mother and I could eat her."

The King of All Birds

Ideally I should have posted this on St. Stephen's Day (December 26th according to the Western Christian calendar), but the elements didn't come together until this week.

Back in December my wife and I went to our local music venue for a performance by two Irish-born musicians, John Doyle and Mick McAuley. The concert was billed as "An Irish Christmas" and was accompanied by a CD entitled This Christmas Time. At one point early on in the evening one of the two men (I think it was John Doyle) joked that birds were going to be mentioned in every song that night, and while this didn't turn out to be literally the case there were in fact two notable songs about wrens, specifically, about the Eurasian wren (Troglodytes troglodytes), which we don't have here.

The first song, "Gleann na n-Éan," was a Doyle original, although the story it tells dates back at least to Plutarch (who attributed it to Aesop). The birds gather to choose a king, the crown to be awarded to the bird that can fly highest. The boastful eagle outlasts all the other contestants, but just as he proclaims his triumph the wren, who had ridden to the top concealed on his back, proclaims that he in fact is the highest.

The status of the wren (or in some cases the similarly sized goldcrest, which sports a gold "crown") as king of the birds persisted through the Middle Ages, and a peculiar custom developed of ritually killing a wren every year on St. Stephen's Day, parading it through town on a pole, and begging for money to pay for its interment. The second wren song performed that evening was thus a version of the ditty that was traditionally sung as the procession moved from door to door. (The practice of ritually killing a king at the end of each year did not go unnoticed by Frazer in The Golden Bough). The custom still persists in parts of Ireland, although thankfully no actual birds are now harmed.

Those two songs were still in my head when I came to the crossword puzzle in the New York Times for January 18th, where I found this clue:

48 Across: Avian symbol of good fortune in Celtic culture

It didn't take me long to fill in the four letters of the bird's name. And then I remembered another curious appearance of the Eurasian wren, in Elizabeth Hand's story "Pavane for a Prince of the Air" (from Saffron and Brimstone) which is set in Maine. Hand's tale follows the terminal illness and eventual death of a man named Cal, an old friend of the narrator. After Cal dies and is cremated, his grief-stricken wife and the narrator sift through his uncrushed ashes, picking out fragments of bones and the remains of trinkets that had been placed in the coffin. When they're done they go outside and shake out the sheet bearing the fine particles that are left behind. (The story makes explicit reference to "The Juniper Tree," where the bones of a murdered child are gathered up and placed beneath a tree, only to return to life in the form of a brilliant bird.) While the widow travels the world, scattering portions of Cal's ashes and seeking his next incarnation, it is to the narrator that the title "prince" or king seems to reappear, in the form of a bird not found in Maine at all.

Still, the bird is here. I researched it online, and in some books of folklore I have, and learned that the European wren is the bird that was the subject of the annual wren hunt, an ancient pre-Christian ritual of death and resurrection, still practiced in obscure parts of Ireland and the Isle of Man. It is a creature known for its cheer and its valor, its bravery suiting a bird of far greater size; and also for its song, which is piercingly sweet and flutelike, carrying for miles on a clear day.

As the narrator continues to write at her desk, the bird watches her work. The story concludes:

It sings, day after day after day, and sometimes into the night as well. I never cease to marvel at the sound.

Runaway

The traditional ballad heard here is at least three hundred years old but doesn't seem to have run out of steam. This lovely, fairly recent rendition is credited to a group called Hurray for the Riff Raff; the singer (who, as it happens, is Puerto Rican) is Alynda Segarra.

I'm not sure when I heard "Black Jack Davey" the first time, though I do remember sitting in a university music library in the 1970s listening to a version on LP that was sung by a woman who may or may not have been Almeda Riddle. There are countless renditions under various names — "Gypsy Davey," "The Raggle-Taggle Gypsy," and so on. (I've seen it argued, convincingly or not, that in the Appalachians it became "Black Jack Davey" because there weren't any Gypsies in the Appalachians.)

The outline of the story, in all the versions, is simple: a woman runs off with a Gypsy or outlaw, her husband discovers her flight and catches up to her, he points out to her all she'll be giving up if she doesn't come back, but she throws it all in his face and refuses to come home.

Last night I slept on a warm featherbed
beside my husband and baby
Tonight I sleep on the cold, cold ground
Beside the Black Jack Davey
Pretty little Black Jack Davey

In some versions the husband then slays either or both of the lovers (as in the ballad known variously as "Little Musgrave" or "Matty Groves"), but the song seems more satisying when that's left out. In the Riff Raff version the husband's role has dwindled away to almost nothing. The music critic Nick Tosches linked the song to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. And why not?

Macario

I enjoyed this seasonally appropriate 1960 Mexican film directed by Roberto Gavaldón, with cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. Macario is based on a short story by B. Traven, which is in turn based on a folktale called (in one of its many versions) "Godfather Death." It tells of a poor woodcutter (Ignacio López Tarso) who can barely feed his family enough tortillas and beans to fill their stomachs. Since his one wish in life is to have an entire roast turkey for himself, his devoted wife (Pina Pellicer) finally steals one and cooks it for him. As he sits down to eat it he receives in succession three visitors, whom we realize are in turn the Devil, God (or Jesus), and Death. Each asks to share his meal, but on the basis of some quite logical reasoning he agrees to invite only the third, who, in return, gives Macario a magic liquid that will enable him to cure the dying. There is a catch, however; if Macario sees Death standing at the feet of the patient, he may perform his cure; if Death stands at the head of the bed, the patient is his and Macario must not intervene. Macario makes use of the potion and becomes, in time, a rich man, until the Inquisition gets wind of his activities.

One of the things I liked about the film is that it plays down the potentially garish visual aspect of the story. (That aspect is, in part, reserved for the opening credits, which feature a troupe of folkloric skeleton marionettes.) The Devil, for instance, is a bit of a snazzy dresser, but he doesn't have horns and a goatee, nor is Death a skeletal figure with a flail. Macario, in his unassuming way, recognizes them for who they are nevertheless, and he isn't excessively impressed with either, or with the Señor. López Tarso is particularly good at giving Death skeptical looks at the bedside of patients who are obvious goners but whom Death assures him can still be saved. Really, this one? (Shrug.)

Gavaldón made at least two other films based on Traven novels or stories, Rosa Blanca and Días de otoño. I haven't seen either one, although I've read the story the latter is based on and it could be interesting. Ignacio López Tarso, at this writing, is still alive at the age of 97, which suggests that he set aside a bit of that potion for himself. Sadly, Pina Pellicer, who starred in Días de otoño, died at age 30 of an overdose of sleeping pills.

I'm not sure about the current availability of Macario on DVD or from streaming services; I watched an older DVD release that has subtitle options in both English and Spanish. A version of the folktale can be found in the Lore Segal / Maurice Sendak edition of The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, one of those perfect books that belong in every household.

Fugitive lyrics

In 1975 I took a course taught by a folklorist who had a parallel career as the producer of a number of commercial recordings of folk music. Though the course was aimed at grad students and I was only a sophomore, I was allowed to enroll, which probably wasn't such a great decision all around as it turned out, but the semester did at least leave a few lasting impressions. In particular, I recall two songs he played us in class that came from recordings he had made in the course of field work in the UK. I still remember parts of them almost verbatim (no doubt because they were off-color), and since I can't find any trace of the exact lyrics (though they must be documented somewhere), I present them here.

The first was a version of the notorious comic song known as "Seven Nights Drunk" or "Our Goodman." The premise of the song is that the singer, a habitual drunkard, is being cuckolded by his wife. When he presents her with the evidence of this, which is increasingly unmistakeable as the song progresses, she blames it on his drunken befuddlement and comes up with one far-fetched explanation after another to account for what he thinks he sees. A typical first verse goes as follows:

As I went home on Monday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a horse outside the door, where my old horse should be
So I called me wife, the curse of me life, will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that horse outside the door where my old horse should be.
Ay you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool
As drunk as drunk can be
That's a lovely sow that me mother sent to me
Well it's many a day I've travelled, a hundred miles or more
But a saddle on a sow, sure I never saw before.

The lyrics go downhill from there, depending on the version, but the final one below is typical:

As I went home on Sunday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a thing in her thing where my old thing should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that thing in your thing where my old thing should be
Ah, you're drunk,
you're drunk you silly old fool,
still you can not see
That's a lovely tin whistle that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But hair on a tin whistle sure I never saw before

The last verse I remember was similar, but instead of a tin whistle it's "a rubber tree" or "a rubber tree plant," and the last line (which I've probably Americanized) was "But a rubber tree plant with hair at the roots I never done seen before."

I haven't been able to identify the other song, which was sung by two British sisters who weren't professional performers. With the tape recorder running the song had a refrain of "Just you remember when you're kissing your man / he's trying to get another kiss from you as soon as he can!" Only when the machine was turned off would they agree to sing the saltier version, which ran "Just you remember when you're kissing your man / he's trying to get another rattle out of your tin can!"

Looking back now, I wonder how much my memory has distorted the details. (Did I, perhaps, borrow the "rubber tree plant" from "High Hopes"?) But in a way that distortion is the whole point: that's how oral tradition twists and preserves material from one generation to the next.

Urban legend

Henry Mayhew, the great chronicler of 19th-century London's working poor, collected the following tale in the course of an interview with a lively street "patterer" who specialized in hawking printed broadsides containing accounts of notorious murders:

Then there's the Liverpool Tragedy - that's very attractive. It's a mother murdering her own son, through gold. He had come from the East Indies, and married a rich planter's daughter. He came back to England to see his parents after an absence of thirty years. They kept a lodging-house in Liverpool for sailors; the son went there to lodge, and meant to tell his parents who he was in the morning. His mother saw the gold he had got in his boxes, and cut his throat - severed his head from his body; the old man, upwards of seventy years of age holding the candle. They had put a washing-tub under the bed to catch his blood. The morning after the murder the old man's daughter calls and inquires for a young man. The old man denies that they have had any such person in the house. She says he had a mole on his arm in the shape of a strawberry. The old couple go upstairs to examine the corpse, and find they have murdered their own son, and then they both put an end to their existence.

I recognized the outlines of the tale immediately: it's more or less the plot of Albert Camus's 1943 drama Le malentendu, usually translated as The Misunderstanding. Camus shifts the action to Czechoslovakia, replaces the homicidal father with a sister, and changes the machinery of the eventual revelation scene, but it's clearly the same basic story.

Camus had come across the incident in an article published by the Hearst Universal Service, which described it as having taken place in Yugoslavia; he included a brief reference to it in The Stranger before developing it into the play. But it was a shopworn tale even in Mayhew's day. Folklorist Veronique Campion-Vincent, in a 1998 article in the Nordic Yearbook of Folklore (PDF here) traces it back to several versions dating from 1618; within three years versions of the tale had variously located the supposed events in London, Languedoc, Ulm (in what is now Germany), and Poland. Clearly it was too good a yarn not to pass on. (Elements of it — the failure to recognize a long-lost family member — arguably date back to Oedipus Tyrannus and the Odyssey.)

Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, incidentally, is a revelation in itself. A contemporary and acquaintance of Dickens, he combined statistical analysis (mostly omitted in the abridged Oxford University Press edition shown above) with oral history to provide a kind of non-fiction counterpart to the work of the great novelist. He keeps the moralizing to a minimum and allows individuals who would have been long forgotten by now to speak in their own voices. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst aptly calls his four-volume work "the greatest Victorian novel never written."

John the Bear

The above illustration by the late French artist Jean-Claude Pertuzé is from a version of a folktale known in French as "Jean de l'ours," that is, John of the Bear or John the Bear. The story of a hero, born to a human mother and an ursine father, who is kept in a cave until he is old enough to roll away the stone that encloses it, and who later descends into the underworld to rescue three princesses, the tale was found throughout Europe and has been carried into the Americas. The German philologist Friedrich Panzer traced a series of parallels between the folktale and the saga of Beowulf, whose name may mean "Bee-wolf," that is, "bear."

The classicist Rhys Carpenter went further, connecting the story, by arguments too intricate to describe here, with the Odyssey, and suggesting a common legendary tradition ultimately deriving from memories of a Eurasian bear-cult. The bear, an animal that immures itself and passes the winter in death-like torpor, has often been conceived of as a messenger to the Other World (as among the Ainu), perhaps as their lord himself. Carpenter mentions the case of the bear-like Thracian hero-god Salmoxis, who, according to Herodotus, built a great hall and regaled his guests with promises of eternal life, before disappearing, apparently dead, into an underground chamber for three years, only to return. In Strabo the same figure becomes co-regent of the underworld.

Is it too much to find here an echo in the New Testament, where the stone is rolled away from the tomb of the risen Jesus after the harrowing of Hell?

The Fear

Ruth Otis Sawtell & Ida Treat:

Our greatest adventure we found at Mérigon. Mérigon, with its face to the sunny roadside and its back to the dark gorge where the Volp rushes past the Plantaurel, has been the haunt of something wild and sinister. The peasants called it la Peur, the Fear. All one summer it blasted the valley. Crops drooped, cattle died. There were cries in the night, whirring of wings where no birds flew. At last the men of Mérigon set out to hunt la Peur. Guns in hand they scoured the fields, the river, the rocks, until some one—with a silver bullet—shot it down. He brought back no trophy, only the vague word of having killed "something like a bird," but from that moment the blight was lifted from the countryside. To-day you can not find a man in Mérigon who will admit participating in that hunt. But there is something in the atmosphere of the valley suggesting that if la Peur should rise again, there would still be men to hear the flutter of its wings.

—Primitive Hearths in the Pyrenees

Tout va (très) bien

I'm in the early stages of a long slow re-read of Cortázar's Hopscotch, and this time I'm making a point of annotating some of the many allusions scattered through the pages of the novel, allusions which would have been time-consuming to identify in the pre-internet when I read it for the first time (c.1978?), but which can now generally be tracked down in a matter of seconds. (There's even at least one Spanish-language blog specifically devoted to the task, Mi Rayuela.)

More on that project, perhaps, another time; this morning I looked up a scrap of French that can be found in Chapter 71: Tout va très bien, madame La Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien. Here's a performance of the song from which those words were taken: [Video no longer available]

For those with no French or whose French is as creaky as mine, the gist of the song is that Madame la Marquise (here played by a man in drag) has been away from home for a few weeks and calls her servants on the phone to check on things. Everything's fine, they assure her, well, except for one little incident: her gray mare has died. How did this happen?, she asks. Well, it happened when the stables burned down. In succeeding verses we learn that the stables caught fire when the château burned to the ground, and that the château in turn was set ablaze by the candles her husband knocked over in the process of killing himself, having discovered that he was ruined financially. Other than that, tout va très bien!

The song was new to me, but not the comic routine, a staple of American folklore, renditions of which I heard various times when I was growing up. A version from Missouri, for example, begins as follows:

An old Missouri farmer hardly ever leaves home. He is one of those people who doesn't trust the world to keep on turning if he doesn't keep an eye on it. But this one time he must go to the city for a few days. His first evening in his hotel, he calls home, and his hired man answers. And our farmer says, "So, everything all right at home?"

"Jus' fine, Boss, 'cept you know your dog? Ol' Shep got holt a some dead horse meat, and it kilt 'im."

The farmer is upset, of course, that dog was a good old friend. But then it occurs to him to wonder, "Where did Shep get holt of dead horse meat?"

"Well, Boss, the horses died when the barn burned, and ol' Shep got holt a some dead horse meat, and it kilt 'im."

In the US the candles that set the fire are usually on the coffin of the mother / husband / mother-in-law of the person who has been absent.

To round out this story, a few moments after I identified the source of Tout va très bien, madame La Marquise, I visited (as I do regularly) a nice slice of tororo shiru, the blog maintained by a French copain who writes under the name Tororo, and read his most recent post. The subject was a dream he had in which someone dear to him died; the title of the post: Tout va bien.

Update (2022): There's a passing reference to the song in Georges Perec's novel La vie mode d'emploi. In Chapter 44, Perec describes how, during the liberation of Paris, a young member of the resistance, Olivier Gratiolet, receives and transcribes what are supposedly encoded messages using a clandestine radio receiver hidden in the basement of the apartment building where he lives. The messages include (in David Bellos's translation) the likes of "the presbytery has lost none of its charm nor the garden its splendour," "the archdeacon is a past master at Japanese billiards," and (in the original) "tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise."