BIRDS IN LEGEND
FABLE AND FOLKLORE
St. Francis Preaching to the Birds.
Attributed to Giotto
BIRDS IN LEGEND
FABLE and FOLKLORE
BY
ERNEST INGERSOLL
Author of "The Life of Mammals," "Nature's Calendar,'
"The Wit of the Wild," etc.: and Secretary
of the Authors Club, New York
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO
55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4
TORONTO, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1923
Copyright, 1923, by
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
X 3 - 9 3 5 S 6 -i-' -
O
MADE LN THE UNITED STATES
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A Chat with the Intending Reader ... 3
II. Birds as National Emblems 28
III. An Ornithological Comedy of Errors . . 51
IV. The Folklore of Bird Migration . . . .81
V. Noah's Messengers 9 8
VI. Birds in Christian Tradition and Festival . 109
VII. Birds as Symbols and Badges 127
VIII. Black Feathers make Black Birds . . .154
IX. The Familiar of Witches 179
X. A Flock of Fabulous Fowls 191
XL From Ancient Auguries to Modern Rain-
birds 212
XII. A Primitive View of the Origin of Species . 226
XIII. Birds and the Lightning 242
XIV. Legends in an Historical Setting . . . .253
XV. Some Pretty Indian Stories 270
List of Books Referred to 282
Index 287
BIRDS IN LEGEND
FABLE AND FOLKLORE
BIRDS IN LEGEND
FABLE AND FOLKLORE
A CHAT WITH THE INTENDING READER
Angus Mac-ind-oc was the Cupid of the Gaels. He was a harper
of the sweetest music, and was attended by birds, his own trans-
formed kisses, which hovered, invisible, over young men and
maidens of Erin, whispering love into their ears.
WHEN we say, "A little bird told me," we are
talking legend and folklore and superstition all
at once. There is an old Basque story of a bird
— always a small one in these tales — that tells the truth ;
and our Biloxi Indians used to say the same of the
hummingbird. Breton peasants still credit all birds with
the power of using human language on proper occasions,
and traditions in all parts of the world agree that every
bird had this power once on a time if not now. The
fireside-tales of the nomads of Oriental deserts or of
North American plains and forest alike attest faith in
this power ; and conversation by and with birds is almost
the main stock of the stories heard on our Southern cot-
ton-plantations. You will perhaps recall the bulbul
bazar of the Arabian Nights, and, if you please, you may
read in another chapter of the conversational pewit and
hoopoe of Solomonic fame.
Biblical authority exists in the confidence of the
4 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Prophet Elijah that a "bird of the air . . . shall tell the
matter"; and monkish traditions abound in revelations
whispered in the ear of the faithful by winged mes-
sengers from divine sources, as you may read further
along if you have patience to turn the leaves. The poets
keep alive the pretty fiction; and the rest of us resort
to the phrase with an arch smile whenever we do not care
to quote our authority for repeating some half-secret bit
of gossip. "This magical power of understanding bird-
talk," says Halliday, 1 * "is regularly the way in which the
seers of myths obtain their information."
Primitive men — and those we style the Ancients were
primitive so far as nature is concerned — regarded birds
as supernaturally wise. This canniness is implied in
many of the narratives and incidents set down in the
succeeding pages; and in view of it birds came to be
regarded by early man with great respect, yet also with
apprehension, for they might utilize their knowledge to
his harm. For example: The Canada jay is believed
by the Indians along the northern shore of Hudson Bay
to give warning whenever they approach an Eskimo camp
— usually, of course, with hostile intent; and naturally
those Indians kill that kind of jay whenever they can.
The ability in birds to speak implies knowledge, and
Martha Young 2 gives us a view of this logic prevailing
among the old-time southern darkies:
♦This and similar "superior" figures throughout the text refer
to the List of Books in the Appendix, where the author and
title of the publication alluded to will be found under its number.
The author takes this opportunity, in place of a perfunctory
Preface, to make grateful acknowledgment of assistance to Pro-
fessor A. V. H. Jackson, who revised the chapter on fabulous birds ;
to Mr. Stewart Culin, helpful in Chinese matters, etc.; to Pro-
fessor Justin H. Smith, who scanned the whole manuscript; and
to others who furnished valuable facts and suggestions.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 5
Sis' Dove she know mo'n anybody or anything in de worl'.
She know pintedly de time anybody gwine die. You'll hear
her moanin' fer a passin' soul 'fo' you hear de bell tone.
She know 'fo' cotton-plantin' time whe'r de craps dat gatherin'
'11 be good er bad. To' folks breaks up de new groun' er
bust out middles, Sis' Dove know what de yield '11 be. She
know it an' she'll tell it, too. 'Caze ev'ybody know if
Sis' Dove coo on de right han' of a man plowin', dare '11 be
a good crap dat year; but ef she coo on de lef dar '11 be a
faillery crap dat year.
Sis' Dove she know about all de craps dat grow out er de
groun' but she 'special know about corn, fer she plant de fi'st
grain er corn dat ever was plant' in de whole worl\ Whar
she git it ? . . . Umm — hum ! You tell me dat !
From the belief in the intuitive wisdom of birds comes
the world-wide confidence in their prophetic power.
Hence their actions, often so mysterious, have been
watched with intense interest, and everything unusual
in their behavior was noticed in the hope that it might
express a revelation from on high. Advantage was taken
of this pathetic hope and assurance by the Roman augurs
in their legalized ornithomancy, of which some descrip-
tion will be found in another chapter. Nine-tenths of it
was priestly humbug to keep ordinary folks in mental
subjection, as priestcraft has ever sought to do. The
remaining tenth has become the basis of the present
popular faith in birds' ability to foretell coming weather.
Let me cite a few aboriginal examples of this faith,
more or less sincere, in the ability and willingness of
birds to warn inquiring humanity.
The Omahas and other Siouan Indians used to say
that when whippoorwills sing at night, saying "Hoia,
hohin?" one replies "No." If the birds stop at once, it is
a sign that the answerer will soon die, but if the birds
keep on calling he or she will live a long time. The
Utes of Colorado, however, declare that this bird is the
6 BIRDS IN LEGEND
god of the night, and that it made the moon by magic,
transforming a frog into it; while the Iroquois indulged
in the pretty fancy that the moccasin-flowers (cypri-
pediums) are whippoorwills' shoes.
This is a little astray from my present theme, to which
we may return by quoting from Waterton 73 that if one
of the related goatsuckers of the Amazon Valley be heard
close to an Indian's or a negro's hut, from that night
evil fortune sits brooding over it. In Costa Rica bones
of whippoorwills are dried and ground to a fine powder
by the Indians when they want to concoct a charm against
some enemy ; mixed with tobacco it will form a cigarette
believed to cause certain death to the person smoking it.
To the mountaineers of the southern Alleghanies the
whippoorwill reveals how long it will be before marriage
— as many years as its notes are repeated: as I have
heard the bird reiterate its cry more than 800 times with-
out taking breath, this must often be a discouraging re-
port to an anxious maid or bachelor. One often hears it
said lightly in New England that a whippoorwill calling
very near a house portends death, but I can get no evi-
dence that this "sign" is really attended to anywhere in the
northern United States.
This, and the equally nocturnal screechowl (against
which the darkies have many "conjurings") are not the
only birds feared by rural folk in the Southern States,
especially in the mountains. A child in a family of
Georgia "crackers" fell ill, and his mother gave this
account of it to a sympathetic friend:
Mikey is bound to die. I've know'd it all along. All las'
week the moanin' doves was comin roun' the house, and this
mornin' one come in at the window right by Mikey's head, an'
cooed an' moaned. I couldn't scare it away, else a witch would
'a' put a spell on me.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 7
Mikey lived to become a drunkard, is the unfeeling com-
ment of the reporter of this touching incident in The
Journal of American Folklore.
"One constantly hears by day the note of the limocon,
a wood-pigeon which exercises a most extraordinary
interest over the lives of many of the wild people, for
they believe that the direction and nature of its notes
augur good or ill for the enterprises they have in hand."
This memorandum, in Dean Worcester's valuable book
on the Philippines, 3 is apt to the purpose of this intro-
ductory chapter, leading me to say that the continuing
reader will find doves (which are much the same in all
parts of the world) conspicuous in legend, fable and
ceremony; also that the "direction and nature" of their
voices, as heard, is one of the most important elements
in the consideration of birds in general as messengers
and prophets — functions to which I shall often have oc-
casion to refer, and on which are founded the ancient
systems of bird-divination.
In these United States little superstition relating to
animals has survived, partly because the wild creatures
here were strange to the pioneers, who were poorly ac-
quainted with their characteristics, but mainly because
such fears and fancies were left in the Old World with
other rubbish not worth the freight-charges; yet a few
quaint notions came along, like small heirlooms of no
particular value that folks dislike to throw away until
they must. Almost all such mental keepsakes belong to
people in the backward parts of the country, often with
an ill-fitting application to local birds. A conspicuous
disappearance is that venerable body of forebodings and
fancies attached to the European cuckoo, totally unknown
or disregarded here, because our American cuckoos have
8 BIRDS IN LEGEND
no such irregular habits as gave rise to the myths and
superstitions clustering about that bird in Europe.
We saw a moment ago that the negro farmer estimated
what the yield of his field would be by the direction from
which the dove's message came to his ears. I have an-
other note that if one hears the first mourning-dove of
the year above him he will prosper: if from below him
his own course henceforth will be down hill.
This matter of direction whence (and also of number)
is of vital importance in interpreting bird-prophecy the
world over, as will be fully shown in a subsequent
chapter. Even in parts of New England it is counted
"unlucky" to see two crows together flying toward the
left — a plain borrowing from the magpie-lore of Old
England. In the South it is thought that if two quails
fly up in front of a man on the way to conclude a bargain
he will do well to abandon the intended business. Break
up a killdeer's nest and you will soon break a leg or arm
— and so on.
There always have been persons who were much dis-
turbed when a bird fluttered against a closed window.
A rooster crowing into an open house-door foretells a
visitor. The plantation darkies of our Southern States
believe that when shy forest-birds come close about a
dwelling as if frightened, or, wandering within it, beat
their wings wildly in search of an exit, so some soul will
flutteringly seek escape from that house — and "right
soon." Similar fears afflict the timid on the other side
of the globe. On the contrary, and more naturally, it is
esteemed among us an excellent omen when wild birds
nest fearlessly about a negro's or a mountaineer's cabin.
When a Georgia girl first hears in the spring the plain-
tive call of returning doves she must immediately attend
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 9
to it if she is curious as to her future partner in life.
She must at once take nine steps forward and nine back-
ward, then take off her right shoe: in it she will discover
a hair of the man she is to marry — but how to find its
owner is not explained ! This bit of rustic divination is
plainly transferred from the old English formula toward
the first-heard cuckoo, as may be learned from Gay's
The Sheperd's Week, 8 which is a treasury of rustic cus-
toms in Britain long ago. Says one of the maids :
Then doff'd my shoe, and by my troth I swear,
Therein I spy'd this yellow, frizzled hair.
This matter of the hair is pure superstition allied to
magic, in practicing which, indeed, birds have often been
degraded to an evil service very remote from their nature.
Thiselton Dyer quotes an Irish notion that "in every-
one's head there is a particular hair which, if the swallow
can pluck it, dooms the wretched individual to eternal
perdition." A Baltimore folklorist warns every lady
against letting birds build nests with the combings of
her hair, as it will turn the unfortunate woman crazy.
Any woman afraid of this should beware of that dear
little sprite of our garden shrubbery, the chipping-spar-
row, for it always lines its tiny nest with hair. This
notion is another importation, for it has long been a
saying in Europe that if a bird uses human hair in its
nest the owner of the hair will have headaches and later
baldness. Curiously enough the Seneca Indians, one of
the five Iroquois tribes, are said to have long practised
a means, as they believed it to be, of communicating with
a maiden-relative, after her death, by capturing a fledg-
ling bird with a noose made from her hair. The bird
was kept caged until it began to sing, when it was libe-
io BIRDS IN LEGEND
rated and was believed to carry to the knowledge of the
departed one a whispered message of love.
Now the idea underlying all this faith in the super-
natural wisdom and prophetic gift in birds is the general
supposition that they are spirits, or, at any rate, possessed
by spirits, a doctrine that appears in various guises but is
universal in the world of primitive culture — a world
nearer to us sophisticated readers than perhaps we
realize: but a good many little children inhabit it, even
within our doors.
"The primitive mind, ,, as Dr. Brinton asserts, "did not
recognize any deep distinction between the lower animals
and man"; and continues:
The savage knew that the beast was his superior in many
points, in craft and in strength, in fleetness and intuition, and he
regarded it with respect. To him the brute had a soul not in-
ferior to his own, and a language which the wise among men
might on occasion learn. . . . Therefore with wide unanimity
he placed certain species of animals nearer to God than is man
himself, or even identified them with the manifestations of the
Highest.
None was in this respect a greater favorite than the bird.
Its soaring flight, its strange or sweet notes, the marked hues
of its plumage, combined to render it a fit emblem of power
and beauty. The Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to
Singalang Burong, the god of birds; and birds as the ancestors
of the totemic family are extremely common among the
American Indians. The Eskimos say that they have the faculty
of soul or life beyond all other creatures, and in most primitive
tribes they have been regarded as the messengers of the divine,
and the special purveyors of the vital principles . . . and every-
where to be able to understand the language of birds was
equivalent to being able to converse with the gods. 4
If this is true it is not surprising that savages in various
parts of the world trace their tribal origin to a super-
natural bird of the same form and name as some familiar
FABLE AND FOLKLORE n
local species, which was inhabited by the soul of their
heroic "first man." The Osage Indians of Kansas, for
example, say that as far back as they can conceive of
time their ancestors were alive, but had neither bodies
nor souls. They existed beneath the lowest of the four
"upper worlds/' and at last migrated to the highest, where
they obtained souls. Then followed travels in which they
searched for some source whence they might get human
bodies, and at last asked the question of a redbird sitting
on her nest. She replied: "I can cause your children to
have human bodies from my own." She explained that
her wings would be their arms, her head their head, and
so on through a long list of parts, external and internal,
showing herself a good comparative anatomist. Finally
she declared: "The speech (or breath) of children will
I bestow on your children." 5
Such is the story of how humanity reached the earth,
according to one branch of the Osages : other gentes
also believe themselves descended from birds that came
down from an upper world. Dozens of similar cases
might be quoted, of which I will select one because of its
curious features. The Seri, an exclusive and backward
tribe inhabiting the desert-like island Tiburon, in the Gulf
of California, ascribe the creation of the world, and of
themselves in particular, to the Ancient of Pelicans, a
mythical fowl of supernal wisdom and melodious song —
an unexpected poetic touch! — who first raised the earth
above the primeval waters. This laf; point is in con-
formity with the general belief that a waste of waters
preceded the appearance, by one or another miraculous
means well within the redman's range of experience, of
a bit of land; and it is to be observed that this original
patch of earth, whether fixed or floating, was enlarged
12 BIRDS IN LEGEND
to habitable dimensions not by further miracles, nor by
natural accretion, but, as a rule, by the labor and in-
genuity of the "first men" themselves, usually aided by
favorite animals. Thus the Seri Indians naturally held
the pelican in especial regard, but that did not prevent
their utilizing it to the utmost. Dr. W J McGee 6 found
that one of their customs was to tie a broken-winged, liv-
ing pelican to a stake near the seashore, and then appro-
priate the fishes brought to the captive by its free
relatives.
In fewer cases we find that not only tribal but also
individual origin is ascribed to a bird, the best illustra-
tion of which is the notion of the natives of Perak, in the
Malay Peninsula, that a bird brings the soul to every
person at birth. A woman who is about to become a
mother selects as the place where her baby shall be
born the foot of a certain tree — any one that appeals to
her fancy — and this will be the "name-tree" of her child.
The parents believe that a soul has been waiting for this
child in the form of a bird that for some time before
the birth frequents all the trees of the chosen kind in
that vicinity, searching for the occasion when it may de-
liver its charge, intrusted to it by Kari, the tribal god.
This bird must be killed and eaten by the expectant
mother just before the actual birth or the baby will never
come to life, or if it does will speedily die. A poetic
feature in this tender explanation of the mystery of life
among the jungle-dwellers is that the souls of first-born
children are brought always by the newly hatched off-
spring of the bird that contained the soul of the mother
of the child. 7
Apart from this singular conception of the source of
existence, the general theory of spirituality in birds is
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 13
based, as heretofore intimated, on the almost universal
belief that they are often the visible spirits of the dead.
The Powhatans of Virginia, for example, held that the
feathered race received the souls of their chiefs at death;
and a California tribe asserted that the small birds whose
hard luck it was to receive the souls of bad men were
chased and destroyed by hawks, so that those of good
Indians alone reached the happy hunting-grounds beyond
the sky.
James G. Swan relates in his interesting old book about
early days at Puget Sound, 10 that the Indians at Shoal-
water Bay, Oregon, were much disturbed one morning
because they had heard the whistling of a plover in the
night. The white men there told them it was only a
bird's crying, but they insisted the noise was that of
spirits. Said they: "Birds don't talk in the night; they
talk in the daytime." "But," asked Russell, "how can you
tell that it is the memelose tillicunis, or dead people?
They can't talk." "No," replied the savage, "it is true they
can't talk as we do, but they whistle through their teeth.
You are a white man and do not understand what they
say, but Indians know."
This bit of untainted savage philosophy recalls the
queer British superstition of the Seven Whistlers.
Wordsworth, who was a North-countryman, records of
his ancient Dalesman —
He the seven birds hath seen that never part,
Seen the Seven Whistlers on their nightly rounds
And counted them.
The idea that the wailing of invisible birds is a warning
of danger direct from Providence prevails especially in
the English colliery districts, where wildfowl, migrating
i 4 BIRDS L IN LEGEND
at night and calling to one another as they go, supply
exactly the right suggestion to the timid. Sailors fear
them as "storm-bringers." Even more horrifying is the
primitive Welsh conception (probably capable of a similar
explanation) of the Three Birds of Rhiannon, wife of
Pwyll, ruler of Hades, that could sing the dead to life
and the living into the sleep of death. Luckily they were
heard only at the death of great heroes in battle.
How easily such things may beguile the imagination
is told in Thomas W. Higginson's book on army life in
the black regiment of which he was the colonel during
the Civil War. This sane and vigorous young officer
writes of an incident on the South Carolina Coast: "I
remember that, as I stood on deck in the still and misty
evening, listening with strained senses for some sound
of approach of an expected boat, I heard a low con-
tinuous noise from the distance, more mild and desolate
than anything my memory can parallel. It came from
within the vast circle of mist, and seemed like the cry
of a myriad of lost souls upon the horizon's verge; it
was Dante become audible: yet it was but the accumu-
lated cries of innumerable seafowl at the entrance of the
outer bay." 9
But I have rambled away along an enticing by-path,
as will frequently happen in the remainder of this book
— to the reader's interest, I venture to believe.
Returning to the theme of a moment ago, I recall that
the Rev. H. Friend lx tells us that he has seen Buddhist
priests in Canton "bless a small portion of their rice, and
place it at the door of the refectory to be eaten by the
birds which congregate there." These offerings are to
the "house spirits," by which the Chinese mean the spirits
of their ancestors, who are still kindly interested in the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 15
welfare of the family. This is real ancestor-worship ex-
pressed in birds ; and Spence 12 records that "the shamans
of certain tribes of Paraguay act as go-betweens between
the members of their tribes and such birds as they imagine
enshrine the souls of their departed relatives." The
heathen Lombards ornamented their grave-posts with
the effigy of a dove. This notion of birds as reincarnated
human souls is not confined to untutored minds nor to
an ancient period. Evidences of its hold on the human
imagination may be found in Europe down to the present
day, and it animates one of the most picturesque super-
stitions of pious followers of Mahomet, two forms of
which have come to me. The first is given by Doughty, 13
the second by Keane, 14 both excellent authorities.
Doughty says: "It was an ancient opinion of the
idolatrous Arabs that the departing spirit flitted from
man's brainpan as a wandering fowl, complaining thence-
forward in perpetual thirst her unavenged wrong;
friends, therefore, to avenge the friend's soul-bird, poured
upon the grave their pious libations of wine. The bird
is called a 'green fowl.' "
Quoting Keane: "It is a superstition among the Mo-
hammedans that the spirits of martyrs are lodged in the
crops of green birds, and partake of the fruit and drink
of the rivers of paradise; also that the souls of the good
dwell in the form of white birds near the throne of God."
But the spirits represented in birds are not always
ancestral or benevolent: they may be unpleasant, fore-
boding, demoniac. The Indians and negroes along the
Amazons will not destroy goatsuckers. Why? Because
they are receptacles for departed human souls who have
come back to earth unable to rest because of crimes done
in their former bodies, or to haunt cruel and hard-hearted
Z 6 birds in legend
masters. In Venezuela and Trinidad the groan-like cries
of the nocturnal, cave-dwelling guacharos are thought
to be the wailing of ghosts compelled to stay in their
caverns in order to expiate their sins. Even now, the
Turks maintain that the dusky shearwaters that daily
travel in mysterious flocks up and down the Bosphorus
are animated by condemned human souls.
By way of the ancestral traditions sketched above,
arise those "sacred animals" constantly mentioned in
accounts of ancient or backward peoples. Various birds
were assigned to the deities and heroes of Egyptian and
Pagan mythology — the eagle to Jove, goose and later the
peacock to Juno, the little owl to Minerva, and so on ; but
to call these companions "sacred" is a bad use of the term,
for there was little or nothing consecrate in these ascrip-
tions, and if in any case worship was addressed to the
deity, its animal companion was hardly included in the
reverential thought of the celebrant.
It is conceivable that such ascriptions as these are the
refined relics of earlier superstitions held by primitive
folk everywhere in regard to such birds of their territory
as appealed to their imaginations because of one or an-
other notable trait. Ethnological and zoological books
abound in instances, which it would be tedious to catalog,
and several examples appear elsewhere in this book. A
single, rather remarkable one, that of the South African
ground-hornbill or bromvogel, will suffice to illustrate
the point here. I choose, among several available, the
account given by Layard, 15 one of the early naturalist-
explorers in southern Africa :
The Fingoes seem to attach some superstitious veneration to
the ground-hornbills and object to their being shot in the
neighborhood of their dwellings, lest they should lose their
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 17
cattle by disease. . . . The Kaffirs have a superstition that if
one of these birds is killed it will rain for a long time. I am
told that in time of drought it is the custom to take one alive,
tie a stone to it, then throw it into a "vley"; after that a rain is
supposed to follow. They avoid using the water in which this
ceremony has been performed. . . . Only killed in time of
severe drought, when one is killed by order of the rain-doctor
and its body is thrown into a pool in a river. The idea is that
the bird has so offensive a smell that it will make the water
sick, and that the only way of getting rid of this is to wash it
away to the sea, which can only be done by a heavy rain.
The ground where they feed is considered good for cattle,
and in settling a new country spots frequented by these birds
are chosen by the wealthy people. Should the birds, however,
by some chance, fly over a cattle kraal, the kraal is moved to
some other place. ... It is very weak on the wing, and when
required by the "doctor" the bird is caught by the men of a
number of kraals turning out at the same time, and a particular
bird is followed from one hill to another by those on the look-
out. After three or four flights it can be run down and caught
by a good runner. . . . The Ovampos [of Damara land] seem
to have a superstition [that the eggs cannot be procured because
so soft that] they would fall to pieces on the least handling.
It seems to me likely that the sense of service to men
in its constant killing of dreaded snakes — birds and ser-
pents are linked together in all barbaric religious and
social myths — may be at the core of the veneration paid
the hornbill, as, apparently, it was in the case of the
Egyptian ibis. This wader was not only a foe to lizards
and small snakes, but, as it always appeared in the Nile
just as the river showed signs of beginning its periodic
overflow, a matter of anxious concern to the people, it
was regarded as a prescient and benevolent creature fore-
telling the longed-for rise of the water. At Hermopolis,
situated at the upper end of the great fertile plain of
the lower Nile, the ibis was incarnated as Thoth (identi-
fied by the Greeks with Hermes), one of the highest gods
T S BIRDS IN LEGEND
of the ancient Egyptians. This ibis, and other incarnated
animals, originally mere symbols of lofty ideas, came to
be reverenced as real divinities in the places where their
cult flourished (although they might enjoy no such dis-
tinction elsewhere), were given divine honors when they
died, and were, in short, real gods to their devotees ; that is
to say, the sophisticated Egyptians of the later dynasties
had elevated into the logical semblance of divinity this
and that animal-fetish of their uncultured ancestors.
Another singular case of a bird rising to the eminence
of tutelary deity is that of the ruddy sheldrake (Casarca
rutila) or Brahminy duck in Thibet. From it is derived
the title of the established church of the lamas (practi-
cally the government of that Buddhistic country) ; and
their abbotts wear robes of the sheldrake colors. In
Burmah the Brahminy duck is sacred to Buddhists as a
symbol of devotion and fidelity, and it was figured on
Asoka's pillars in this emblematic character. This shel-
drake is usually found in pairs, and when one is shot
the other will often hover near until it, too, falls a vic-
tim to its conjugal love. 16
A stage in this process of deification is given by Tylor
in describing the veneration of a certain bird in Poly-
nesia, as a Tahitian priest explained it to Dr. Ellis, the
celebrated missionary-student of the South Seas. The
priest said that his god was not always in the idol repre-
senting it. "A god," he declared, "often came to and
passed from an image in the body of a bird, and spiritual
influence could be transmitted from an idol by imparting
it by contact to certain valued kinds of feathers. " This
bit of doctrine helps us to understand what Colonel St.
Johnston has to tell in his recent thoughtful book 48 on the
ethnology of Polynesia, of the special use of the feathers
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 19
(mainly red) of particular birds in the insignia of chiefs,
and in religious ceremonials; and he comments as
follows :
In the Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga groups the very special mats
of the chiefs were edged with the much-prized red feathers
usually obtained with great difficulty from Taverni Island.
. . . In Tahiti the fan was associated with feathers in a pe-
culiar idea of sacredness, and feathers given out by the priests
at the temple at the time of the "Pa'e-atua" ceremony were taken
home by the worshippers and tied on to special fans. These
beautiful feathers of the Pacific were, of course, prized by an
artistic people for their colors alone, but there seems to have
been something more than that, something particularly con-
nected with a divine royalty. In Hawaii the kahili, the sceptre
of the king, was surmounted with special feathers. The royal
cloaks (as in Peru) and the helmets had feathers thickly sewn
on them; the para-kura, or sacred coronet of Tangier was made
of red feathers; and the Pa'e-atua ceremony that I have just
written of consisted of the unwrapping of the images of the
gods, exposing them to the sun, oiling them, and then wrapping
them once more in feathers — fresh feathers, brought by the
worshippers, and given in exchange for the old ones, which
were taken away as prized relics to be fastened to the sacred
fans.
Can it be that the feathers represent divine birds, symbolic
of the "Sky People" ? We know that many birds were peculiarly
sacred (the tropic bird of Fiji might be mentioned among
others), and the messages of the gods were said to have been
at first transmitted by the birds, until the priests were taught
to do so in the squeaky voices — possibly imitative of bird-cries —
they adopted.
Such deifications of birds took place elsewhere than
in Fiji and Egypt. Charles de Kay has written a learned
yet readable book 18 devoted to expounding the worship
of birds in ancient Europe, and their gradual mergence
into deities of human likeness. He calls attention to re-
mains in early European lore indicating a very extensive
connection of birds with gods, pointing to a worship of
20 BIRDS IN LEGEND
the bird itself as the living representative of a god, "or
else to such a position of the bird toward a deity as to
fairly permit the inference that at a period still more
remote the bird itself was worshipped." The Poly-
nesian practices detailed above certainly are of very
ancient origin, probably coming to the islands with the
earliest migrants from the East Indian mainlands; and
the theology involved may be a lingering relic of the
times and ideas described in De Kay's treatise.
To carry these matters further is not within my plan,
for they would lead us into the mazes of comparative
mythology, which it is my purpose to avoid as far as
possible, restricting myself to history, sayings, and allu-
sions that pertain to real, not imaginary, birds.*
The distinction I try to make between the mythical and
the legendary or real, may be illustrated by the king-
fisher — in this case, of course, the common species of
southern Europe. Let us consider first the mythical side.
Alcyone, daughter of /Eolus, the wind-god, impelled by
love for her husband Ceyx, whom she found dead on
the shore after a shipwreck, threw herself into the sea.
The gods, rewarding their conjugal love, changed the
pair into kingfishers. What connection exists between
this, which is simply a classic yarn, and the ancient theory
of the nidification of this species, I do not know; but
the story was — now we are talking of the real bird, which
the Greeks and Latins saw daily — that the kingfisher
hatched its eggs at the time of the winter solstice in a
nest shaped like a hollow sponge, and thought to be
♦Nevertheless, I have made one exception by devoting a chap-
ter to "a fabulous flock" of wholly fictitious birds, namely, the
phenix, rukh (roc), simurgh and their fellows — all hatched from
the same solar nest — because they have become familiar to us, by
name, at least, in literature, symbolism, and proverbial sayings.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 21
solidly composed of fish-bones, which was set afloat, or
at any rate floated, on the surface of the Mediterranean.
The natural query how such a structure could survive the
shock of waves led to the theory that Father yEolus made
the winds "behave" during the brooding-time. As Pliny
explains : "For seven days before the winter solstice, and
for the same length of time after it, the sea becomes calm
in order that the kingfishers may rear their young."
Simonides, Plutarch, and many other classic authorities,
testify to the same tradition, which seems to have be-
longed particularly to the waters about Sicily. More
recent writers kept alive the tender conceit.
Along the coast the mourning halcyon's heard
Lamenting sore her spouse's fate,
are lines from Ariosto's verse almost duplicated by
Camoens; and Southey —
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles,
The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles.
while Dryden speaks of "halcyons brooding on a winter
sea," and Drayton makes use of the legend in five differ-
ent poems. It is a fact that in the region of southern
Italy a period of calm weather ordinarily follows the
blustering gales of late autumn, which may have sug-
gested this poetic explanation; but one student believes
that the story may have been developed from a far earlier
tradition. "The Rhibus of Aryan mythology, storm-
demons, slept for twelve nights [and days] about the
winter solstice ... in the house of the sun-god Savitar."
Such is the history behind our proverbial expression
for tranquillity, and often it has been used very remotely
22 BIRDS IN LEGEND
from its original sense, as when in Henry VI Shakespeare
makes La Pucelle exclaim: "Expect St. Martin's sum-
mer, halcyon days," St. Martin's summer being the
English name for that warm spell in November known to
us as Indian summer. All this is an extended example
of the kind of poetic myth which has been told of many
different birds, and which in this book is left to be sought
out in treatises on mythology.
In contrast with this sort of tale I find many non-
mythical notions, historical or existing, concerning the
actual kingfisher, which properly belong to my scheme.
One of the oldest is the custom formerly in vogue in
England, and more recently in France, of turning this
bird into a weathercock. The body of a mummified king-
fisher with extended wings would be suspended by a
thread, nicely balanced, in order to show the direction
of the wind, as in that posture it would always turn its
beak, even when hung inside the house, toward the point
of the compass whence the breeze blew. Kent, in King
Lear, speaks of rogues who
Turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters.
And after Shakespeare Marlowe, in his Jew of Malta,
says:
But how stands the wind?
Into what corner peers my halcyon's bill?
We are told mat the fishermen of the British and French
coasts hang these kingfisher weathervanes in the rigging
of their boats ; and it seems likely to me that it was among
sailors that the custom began.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 23
Although Sir Thomas Browne 33 attributed "an occult
and secret property" to this bird as an indicator of wind-
drift, it does not otherwise appear that it had any magical
reputation: yet the skin of a kingfisher was sure to be
found among the stuffed crocodiles, grinning skulls and
similar decorations of the consulting-room of a medieval
"doctor," who himself rarely realized, perhaps, what a
fakir he was. Moreover, we read "That its dried body
kept in a house protected against lightning and kept
moths out of garments."
On the American continent, probably the nearest ap-
proach to the "sacredness" discussed in a former para-
graph, is the sincere veneration of their animal-gods, in-
cluding a few birds, by the Zuriis and some other Village
Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, which has been
studied minutely by our ethnologists. Yet we read of
many other sacred birds among the redmen. The red-
headed woodpecker is regarded as the tutelary deity of
the Omahas, and as the patron-saint of children, because,
they say, its own family is kept in so safe a place.
Pawnees have much the same sentiment toward the wren,
which they call "laughing-bird" because it seems always
happy. The crow was the sacred bird of the "ghost-
dance" — a religious ceremony of high significance among
the tribes of the Plains, as is explained in Chapter IX.
The Navahos regard the mountain bluebird as sacred on
account of its azure plumage, which (as something blue)
is representative of the South ; and it is deemed the herald
of the rising sun, which is their supreme image of God.
One of their old men told Stewart Culin that "two blue
birds stand at the door of the house in which [certain]
gods dwell."
In most cases among our Indians, as elsewhere, it is un-
24 BIRDS IN LEGEND
lawful to kill or eat such a bird, which indicates a rela-
tion to totemism. Thus, as Powers 19 asserts, the Mono
Indians of the Sierra Nevada, never kill their sacred black
eagles, but pluck out the feathers of those that die and
wear them on their heads. "When they succeed in cap-
turing a young one, after a fortnight the village makes a
great jubilation. ,, Some Eskimos will not eat gulls'
eggs, which make men old and decrepit.
Whatever tradition or superstition or other motive
affected the choice of any bird as a tribal totem, or en-
dowed it with "sacredness," practical considerations were
surely influential. It is noticeable that the venerated ibis
and hawk in Egypt were useful to the people as devourers
of vermin — young crocodiles, poisonous snakes, grain-
eating mice and so forth. Storks in Europe and India,
and the "unclean" birds of Palestine forbidden to the
Jews, were mostly carrion-eaters, and as such were de-
sirable street-cleaners in village and camp. A tradition
in the ^Lgean island Tenos is that Poseidon — a Greek St.
Patrick — sent storks to clear the island of snakes, which
originally were numerous there. Australian frontiers-
men preserve the big kingfisher, dubbed "laughing- jack-
ass," for the same good reason. The wiser men in early
communities appreciated this kind of service by birds,
and added a religious sanction to their admonition that
such servants of mankind should not be killed. It was the
primitive movement toward bird-protection, which, by
the way, was first applied in this country to the scaveng-
ing turkey-buzzards and carrion-crows of the Southern
States.
As for the smaller birds, where special regard was
paid them it was owing, apart from the natural humane
admiration and enjoyment of these pretty creatures, to
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 25
the mystery and fiction of their being animated by spirits.
When they were black, like ravens and cormorants, or
were cruel night-prowlers, such as owls, or uttered dis-
consolate cries, they were thought to be inhabited by
dread, malignant, spirits "from night's Plutonian shore,"
as Poe expresses it, but when they had pretty plumage,
pleasing ways and melodious voices, they were deemed
the embodiment of beneficent and happy spirits — per-
haps even those of departed relatives.
Hence we have the notion that some birds are lucky
and others unlucky in their relation to us. Those that
bring good luck are mainly those kinds that associate
themselves with civilization, such as the various robins,
wrens and storks, the doves and the swallows. Even so,
however, time and place must be considered in every case,
for the dearest of little birds when it pecks at a window-
pane, or seems bent on entering a cottage door will arouse
tremors of fear in a superstitious heart — much more so
a bird that ordinarily keeps aloof from mankind. Frazer
records, in his essay on Scapegoats, that if a wild bird flies
into a rural Malay's house, it must be carefully caught
and smeared with oil, and must then be released into the
open air with a formula of words adjuring it to take away
all ill-luck. In antiquity Greek women seem to have done
the same with any swallow they found inside the house,
a custom mentioned by both Pythagoras and Plato — the
latter humorously proposing to dismiss poets from his
ideal State in the same manner. Such doings remind
one of the function of the scapegoat ; and in fact, accord-
ing to Frazer, the Hazuls, of the Carpathian Mountains,
imagine they can transfer their freckles to the first
swallow they see in the spring by uttering a certain com-
mand to the bird. Are these practices distorted reminis-
26 BIRDS IN LEGEND
cences of the conjuring by the Hebrew shaman as de-
scribed in the Old Testament ?
This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing:
He shall be brought into the priest. . . . Then shall the priest
command to take for him that is to be cleaned two birds alive
and clean, and cedar wood and scarlet and hyssop. And the
priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an
earthen vessel over running water. As for the living bird, he
shall take it and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop,
and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird
that was killed over the running water; and he shall sprinkle
upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times,
and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird
loose into the open field. (Lev. xiv, 27.)
The matter of "luck" in this hocus-pocus seems to lie
in the chance as to which birds is chosen to be "scapegoat,"
and so is allowed to remain alive, cleaning its feathers as
best it may. Evidently, the bird that wishes to do noth-
ing to offend anyone must go warily. A cuckoo, for ex-
ample, may spoil the day for an English milkmaid by
incautiously sounding its call before her breakfast.
Such has been the mental attitude underlying the amaz-
ing ideas and practices that will be found described in
succeeding chapters of this collection of traditional bird-
lore, much of which is so juvenile and absurd. Until
one reviews the groping steps by which mankind ad-
vanced with very uneven speed — a large body of it having
yet hardly begun the progress, even among the "civilized"
— from the crudest animism to a clearer and clearer com-
prehension of "natural law in the physical world," he
cannot understand how men gave full credence to fictions
that the most superficial examination, or the simplest
reasoning, would show were false, and trembled before
the most imaginary of alarms. Add to this childish
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 27
credulity the teachings of religious and political leaders
who had much to gain by conserving the ignorance and
faith of their followers; add again the fruitful influence
of story-tellers and poets who utilized ancient legends
and beliefs for literary advantage, and you have the his-
tory and explanation of how so many primitive super-
stitions and errors have survived to our day.
CHAPTER II
BIRDS AS NATIONAL EMBLEMS
SEVERAL nations and empires of both ancient and
modern times have adopted birds as emblems of
their sovereignty, or at least have placed promi-
nently on their coats of arms and great seals the figures
of birds.
Among these the eagle — some species of the genus
Aquila — takes precedence both in time and in importance.
The most ancient recorded history of the human race is
that engraved on the tablets and seals of chiefs who
organized a civilization about the head of the Persian
Gulf more than 4000 years before the beginning of the
Christian era. These record by both text and pictures
that the emblem of the Summerian city of Lagash, which
ruled southern Mesopotamia long previous to its subjuga-
tion by Babylonia about 3000 B. C, was an eagle "dis-
played," that is, facing us with wings and legs spread
and its head turned in profile. This figure was carried
by the army of Lagash as a military standard; but a
form of it with a lion's head was reserved as the special
emblem of the Lagash gods, with which the royal house
was identified — the king's standard.
After the conquest of Babylonia by Assyria this eagle
of Lagash was taken over by the conquerors, and appears
on an Assyrian seal of the king of Ur many centuries
later. "From this eagle," says Ward, 23 "in its heraldic
attitude necessitated by its attack on two animals [as
28
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 29
represented on many seals and decorations] was derived
the two-headed eagle, in the effort to complete the
bilateral symmetry. This double-headed eagle appears
in Hittite art, and is continued down through Turkish and
modern European symbolism."
Among the host of rock-carvings in the Eyuk section
of the mountains of Cappadocia (Pteria of the Greeks)
that are attributed to the Hittites, Perrot and Chipiez
found carvings of a double-headed eagle which they
illustrate; 112 and they speak of them as often occurring.
"Its position is always a conspicuous one — about a great
sanctuary, the principal doorway to a palace, a castle
wall, and so forth; rendering the suggestion that the
Pterians used the symbol as a coat of arms."
Dr. Ward thought the Assyrian two-headed figure of
their national bird resulted from an artistic effort at
symmetry, balancing the wings and feet outstretched on
each side, but I cannot help feeling that here among the
Hittites it had its origin in a deeper sentiment than that.
It seems to me that it was a way of expressing the dual
sex of their godhead, presupposed, in the crudeness of
primitive nature-worship, to account for the condition
of earthly things, male and female uniting for productive-
ness — the old story of sky and earth as co-generators of
all life. Many other symbols, particularly those of a
phallic character, were used in Asiatic religions to typify
the same idea; or perhaps the conception was of that
divine duality, in the sense of co-equal power of Good
and Evil, God and Satan, that later became so conspicuous
in the doctrine of the ancient Persians. Could it have
been a purified modification of this significance that made
the eagle during the Mosaic period — if Bayley 24 is right
— an emblem of the Holy Spirit? And Bayley adds
3Q
BIRDS IN LEGEND
that "its portrayal with two heads is said to have re-
corded the double portion of the spirit bestowed on
Elisha."
Old Mohammedan traditions, according to Dalton,
give the name "hamca" to a fabulous creature identical
with the bicephalous eagle carved on Hittite rock-faces.
Dalton 25 says also that coins with this emblem were
struck and issued by Malek el Sala Mohammed, one of
the Sassanids, in 1217; and that this figure was engraved
in the 13th century by Turkoman princes on the walls
of their castles, and embroidered on their battle-flags.
To the early Greeks the eagle was the messenger of
Zeus. If, as asserted, it was the royal cognizance of the
Etruscans, it came naturally to the Romans, by whom
it was officially adopted for the Republic in 87 B. C,
when a silver eagle, standing upright on a spear, its
wings half raised, its head in profile to the left, and
thunderbolts in its claws, was placed on the military
standards borne at the head of all the legions in the
army. This was in the second consulship of Caius
Marius, who decreed certain other honors to be paid to
the bird's image in the Curia.
One need not accuse the Romans of merely copying the
ancient monarchies of the East. If they thought of any-
thing beyond the majestic appearance of the noble bird,
it was to remember its association with their great god
Jupiter — the counterpart of Zeus. Nothing is plainer as
to the origin of the ideas that later took shape in the
divinities of celestial residence than that Jupiter was the
personification of the heavens ; and what is more natural
than that the lightnings should be conceived of as his
weapons? Once, early in his history, when Jupiter was
equipping himself for a battle with the Titans, an eagle
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 31
brought him his dart, since which time Jupiter's eagle has
always been represented as holding thunderbolts in its
talons. The bird thus became a symbol of supreme power,
and a natural badge for soldiers. The emperors of im-
perial Rome retained it on their standards, Hadrian
changing its metal from silver to gold; and "the eagles
of Rome" came to be a common figure of speech to ex-
press her military prowess and imperial sway.
By such a history, partly mythical, and partly practical
and glorious, this bird came to typify imperialism in gen-
eral. A golden eagle mounted on a spear, was the royal
standard of the elder Cyrus, as it had been of his
ancestors.
When Napoleon I. dreamed of universal conquest he
revived on the regimental banners of his troops the
insignia of his Roman predecessors in banditry — in fact
he was entitled to do so, for he had inherited them by
right of conquest from both Italy and Austria, the
residuary legatees of Rome. Discontinued in favor of
their family bees by the Bourbons, during their brief
reign after the fall of Bonaparte, the eagle was restored
to France by a decree of Louis Napoleon in 1852. There
is a legend that a tame eagle was let loose before him
when he landed in France from England to become
President of the first French Republic. Now it is the
proper finial for flagstaffs all over the world except,
curiously, in France itself, where a wreath of laurel
legally surmounts the tricolor of the Republic, which has
discarded all reminders of royalty. Thus the pride of
conquerors has dropped to the commonplace of fashion —
Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
32 BIRDS IN LEGEND
The destruction of the Italian and western half of the
old Roman empire was by the hands of northern bar-
barians who at first were mere conquerors and despoilers,
but finally, affected by their contact with civilization and
law, became residents in and rulers of Italy, and were
proud to assume the titles and what they could of the
dignity of Roman emperors. In the eighth century
Charlemagne became substantially master of the western
world, at least, and assumed the legionary eagle as he
did the purple robes of an Augustus; and his successors
held both with varying success until the tenth century,
when German kings became supreme and in 962 founded
that very unholy combination styled the Holy Roman
Empire. For hundreds of years this fiction was main-
tained. At times its eagle indicated a real lordship over
all Europe ; between times the states broke apart, and, as
each kept the royal standard, separate eagles contended
for mastery. Thus Prussia and other German kingdoms
retained on their shields the semblance of a "Roman"
eagle ; and the Teutonic Knights carried it on their savage
expeditions of "evangelization" to the eastern Baltic lands.
All these were more or less conventional figures of
the Bird of Jove in its natural form, but a heraldic figure
with two heads turned, Janus like, in opposite directions,
was soon to be revived in the region where, as we have
seen, it had been familiar 2000 years before as the
national emblem of the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire,
which for hundreds of years contested with Rome, both
the political and the ecclesiastical hegemony of the world.
Just when this symbol came into favor at Constantinople
is unknown, but one authority says it did not appear be-
fore the tenth century. At that time the Eastern em-
perors were recovering lost provinces and extending their
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 33
rule until it included all the civilized part of western Asia,
Greece, Bulgaria, southern Italy, and much of the islands
and shores of the Mediterranean; and they asserted re-
ligious supremacy, at least, over the rival European em-
pire erected on Charlemagne's foundation. It would
seem natural that at this prosperous period, when
Byzantium proudly claimed, if she did not really possess
all "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that
was Rome," such a double-headed device might be
adopted, signifying that she had united the western power
with her own. The evidence of this motive is doubtful,
however, for it is not until a much later date that the
figure begins to be seen on coins and textiles, first at
Trebizond, particularly in connection with the emperor
Theodore Lascaris, who reigned at the beginning of the
13th century. Dalton 25 suggests plausibly that this
symbol may have become Byzantine through the circum-
stance that this Lascaris had previously been despot of
Nicomedia, in which province Bogaz-Keui and other
Hittite remains were situated, and where the bicephalous
carvings heretofore alluded to are still to be seen on rock-
faces and ruins, always in association with royalty.
It is very attractive to think that this form of eagle
was chosen, as has been suggested, to express the fact
that Constantinople was now lord over both halves, East
and West, into which Diocletian had divided the original
empire of Rome. Whether this idea was behind the
choice I do not know, but at any rate the two-faced
eagle became latterly the acknowledged ensign of imperial
Byzantium, and as such was introduced into European
royal heraldry, whether or not by means of the returning
Crusaders, as commonly stated, remains obscure.
In the 15th century what was left of the Holy Roman
34 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Empire became the heritage of the Austrian house of
Hapsburg which had succeeded the German Hohen-
stauffens; and to Sigismund, head of the house in that
century, is ascribed the design in the Austrian arms of
the two-headed eagle, looking right and left, as if to
signify boastfully that he ruled both East and West.
These were relative and indefinite domains, but as he
had, by his crowning at Rome, received at least nominal
sovereignty over the fragmentary remains in Greece of
the ancient Eastern Empire, he was perhaps justified in
adopting the Byzantine ensign as "captured colors'* ; but
a rival was soon to present a stronger claim to these
fragments and their badge.
In this same period, that is in the middle of the 15th
century, Ivan the Great of Russia was striving with high
purpose and despotic strength to bring back under one
sway the divided house of Muscovy, together with what-
ever else he could obtain. To further this purpose he
married, in 1472, Sophia Paleologos, niece of the last
Byzantine emperor, getting with her Greece and hence a
barren title to the throne of the Eastern empire — a barren
title because its former domain was now over-run by the
Turks, but very important in the fact that it included
the headship of the Greek, or Orthodox, Church. From
this time Russia as well as Austria has borne a two-faced
eagle on its escutcheon; and, although both birds are
from the same political nest, the feeling between them
has been far from brotherly.
It may be remarked here, parenthetically, that in Egypt
the cult of the kingly eagle never flourished, for the
griffon vulture, "far-sighted, ubiquitous, importunate,"
became the grim emblem of royal power; and a smaller
vulture {Neophron pcrcnopterus) is called Pharaoh's
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 35
chicken to this day by the fellaheen. By "eagle" in Semitic
(Biblical) legends is usually meant the lammergeier.
Prussia had kept a single-headed eagle as her cog-
nizance in remembrance of her previous "Roman" great-
ness; and it was retained by the German Empire when
that was created by Bismarck half a century and more
ago. From it the Kaiser designated the two German
military orders — the Black Eagle and the superior Red
Eagle; and Russia and Serbia have each instituted an
order called White Eagle. The traditional eagle of
Poland is represented as white on a black ground. It was
displayed during the period of subjection following the
partition of the country in 1795, with closed wings, but
now, since 19 19, it spreads its pinions wide in the pride
of freedom.
In the years between 191 4 and 19 19 an allied party of
hunters, enraged by their depredations, zvent gunning for
these birds of prey, killed most of them and sorely
wounded the rest!
Although several species of real eagles inhabit the
Mediterranean region and those parts of Europe and Asia
where these nations lived, and warred, and passed away,
and are somewhat confused in the mass of myth and tra-
dition relating to them, the one chosen by Rome was
the golden eagle, so called because of the golden gloss
that suffuses the feathers of the neck in mature birds.
Now we have this species of sea-eagle in the United
States, and it has been from time immemorial the honored
War-eagle of the native redmen. If it was needful at
our political birth to put any sort of animal on our seal,
and the choice was narrowed down to an eagle, it would
have been far more appropriate to have chosen the golden
rather than the white-headed or "bald" species — first be-
36 BIRDS IN LEGEND
cause the golden is in habits and appearance far the nobler
of the two, and, second, because of the supreme regard
in which it was held by all the North American aborigi-
nes, who paid no respect whatever to the bald eagle. On
the other hand, the white head and neck of our accepted
species gives a distinctive mark to our coat of arms.
The history of the adoption of this symbol of the United
States of America is worth a paragraph.
On July 4, 1776, on the afternoon following the morn-
ing hours in which the Congress in Philadelphia had
performed the momentous duty of proclaiming the inde-
pendence of the United States, it dropped down to the
consideration of its cockade, and appointed a committee
to prepare a device for a Great Seal and coat-of-arms
for the new republic. 26 Desiring to avoid European
models, yet clinging to the traditions of art in these
matters, the committee devised and offered in succession
several complicated allegorical designs that were promptly
and wisely rejected by the Congress. Finally, in 1782, the
matter was left in the hands of Charles Thomson, Secre-
tary of the Congress, and he at once consulted with
William Barton of Philadelphia. They abandoned
allegory and designed an eagle "displayed proper," that
is, with a shield on its breast. Mr. Barton, who was
learned in heraldry, explained that "the escutcheon being
placed on the breast of the eagle displayed is a very
ancient mode of bearing, and is truly imperial." To
avoid an "imperial" effect, however, a concession was
made to local prejudice by indicating plainly that the bird
itself was the American bald eagle — unless, indeed, that
happened to be the only one Barton knew !
This design was finally adopted in 1782. Since then
the Great Seal has been re-cut several times, so that the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 37
bird in its imprint is now a far more reputable fowl than
at first — looks less as if it were nailed on a barn-door
pour encourager les autrcs. In its right claw it holds a
spray of ripe olives as an emblem of a peaceful disposi-
tion, and in its left an indication of resolution to en-
force peace, in the form of American thunderbolts —
the redman's arrows.
There were men in the Congress in 1782, as well as
out of it, who disliked using any eagle whatever as a
feature of the arms of the Republic, feeling that it
savored of the very spirit and customs against which the
formation of this commonwealth was a protest. Among
them stood that clear-headed master of common sense,
Benjamin Franklin, who thought a thoroughly native and
useful fowl, like the wild turkey, would make a far truer
emblem for the new and busy nation. He added to the
turkey's other good qualities that it was a bird of courage,
remarking, with his own delightful humor, that it would
not hesitate to attack any Redcoat that entered its barn-
yard!
Franklin was right when he argued against the choice
of the bald eagle, at any rate, as our national emblem.
"He is," he said truly, "a bird of bad moral character ;
he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen
him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for
himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk, and
when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish and is
bearing it to its nest the bald eagle pursues him and takes
it from him. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little
kingbird attacks him boldly. He is therefore by no means
a proper emblem."
None of these depreciatory things could Franklin have
truly said of the skilful, self-supporting, and handsome
3 8! BIRDS IN LEGEND
golden eagle — a Bird of Freedom indeed. (Audubon
named a western variety of it after General Washington.)
This species was regarded with extreme veneration by
the native redmen of this country. "Its feathers," says
Dr. Brinton, the ethnologist, "composed the war-flag of
the Creeks, and its image, carved in wood, or its stuffed
skin, surmounted their council-lodges. None but an ap-
proved warrior dare wear it among the Cherokees, and
the Dakotas allowed such an honor only to him who
first touched the corpse of the common foe. The
Natchez and other tribes regarded it almost as a deity.
The Zuni of New Mexico employed four of its feathers
to represent the four winds when invoking the raingod."
Hence a war-song of the O jib ways reported by School-
craft :
Hear my voice ye warlike birds !
I prepare a feast for you to batten on;
I see you cross the enemy's lines;
Like you I shall go.
I wish the swiftness of your wings;
I wish the vengeance of your claws;
I muster my friends;
I follow your flight.
Doesn't this sound like a bit from the Saga of Harold
Hadrada ?
Mexico did better in choosing her crested eagle, the
harpy ( Thrasaetus harpia),& magnificent representative of
its race, renowned from Paraguay to Mexico for its hand-
some black-and-white plumage adorned with a warrior's
crest, and for its grand flight, dauntless courage and
amazing endurance. Quesada tells us that the Aztecs
called it the winged wolf. The princes of Tlascala wore
its image on their breasts and on their shield as a symbol
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 39
of royalty; and in both Mexico and Peru, where it was
trained for sport in falconry, it was preferred to the
puma, which also was taught to capture deer and young
peccaries for its master, as is the cheeta in India. Cap-
tive harpies are still set to fight dogs and wildcats in
village arenas, and rarely are vanquished.
The tradition is that the Aztecs, a northern Nahuatl
tribe, escaping from the tyranny of the dominant Chiche-
mecas, moved about A. D. 1325 into the valley of Mexico
(Tenochtitlan), and settled upon certain islets in a
marshy lake — the site of the subsequent City of Mexico ;
and this safe site is said to have been pointed out to
them by a sign from their gods — an eagle perched upon
a prickly-pear cactus, the nopal, in the act of strangling
a serpent. This is the picture Cortez engraved on his
Great Seal, and Mexico has kept it to this day.
Guatemala was a part of ancient Mexico ; and perched
on the shield in Guatemala's coat-of-arms is the green or
resplendent trogon {Plmromacrus mocinno), the native
and antique name of which is quetzal. This is one of
the most magnificent of birds, for its crested head and
body (somewhat larger than a sparrow's) are iridescent
green, the breast and under parts crimson, and the wings
black overhung by long, plumy coverts. The quetzal's
special ornament, however, is its bluish-green tail, eight
or ten inches long, whose gleaming feathers curve down
in the graceful sweep of a sabre. It has been called the
most beautiful of American birds, and it is peculiar to
Central America.
How this trogon came to be Guatemala's national sym-
bol, made familiar, by all its older postage-stamps, is a
matter of religious history. One of the gods in the
ancient Aztec pantheon was Quetzalcoatl, of whom it was
4 o
BIRDS IN LEGEND
said in their legends "that he was of majestic presence,
chaste in life, averse to war, wise and generous in action,
and delighting in the cultivation of the arts of peace."
He was the ruler of the realm far below the surface of
the earth, where the sun shines at night, the abode of
abundance where dwell happy souls; and there Quetzal-
coatl abides until the time fixed for his return to men.
The first part of the name of this beneficent god, asso-
ciated with sunshine and green, growing things, meant
in the Nahuatl language a large, handsome, green feather,
such as were highly prized by the Aztecs and reserved for
the decoration of their chiefs; and one tradition of the
god's origin and equipment relates that he was furnished
with a beard made of these plumes. These royal and
venerated feathers were obtained from the trogon, which
his worshippers called Quetzal-totl. The emerald-hued
hummingbirds of the tropics also belonged to him.
Although Mexico and Central America were "con-
verted" to Christianity by a gospel of war and slavery, the
ancient faith lived on in many simple hearts, especially in
the remoter districts of the South, and nowhere more per-
sistently than among the Mayas of Guatemala and Yuca-
tan, whose pyramidal temples are moldering in their uncut
forests. When, in 1825, Guatemala declared its inde-
pendence and set up a local government, what more
natural than that it should take as a national symbol the
glorious bird that represented to its people the best in-
fluence in their ancient history and the most hopeful sug-
gestion for the future.
In the religion of the Mayas of Yucatan the great god
of light was Itsamna, one of whose titles was The Lord,
the Eye of the Day — a truly picturesque description of
the sun. A temple at Itzmal was consecrated to him
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 41
under the double name Eye of Day-Bird of Fire. "In
time of pestilence," as Dr. Brinton informs us, 27 "the
people resorted to this temple, and at high noon a sacrifice
was spread upon the altar. The moment the sun reached
the zenith a bird of brilliant plumage, but which in fact
was nothing else than a fiery flame shot from the sun, de-
scended and consumed the offering in the sight of all."
Another authority says that Midsummerday was cele-
brated by similar rites. Hence was held sacred the flame-
hued ara, or guacamaya, the red macaw.
The Musicas, natives of the Colombian plateau where
Bogota now stands, had a similar half-superstitious re-
gard for this big red macaw, which they called "fire-bird."
The general veneration for redness, prevalent throughout
western tropical America, and in Polynesia, is doubtless
a reflection of sun-worship.
Let us turn to a lighter aspect of our theme.
France rejoices, humorously, yet sincerely, in the cock
as her emblem — the strutting, crowing, combative chan-
ticleer that arouses respect while it tickles the French
sense of fun. When curiosity led me to inquire how this
odd representative for a glorious nation came into exis-
tence, I was met by a complete lack of readily accessible
information. The generally accepted theory seemed to
be that it was to be explained by the likeness of sound be-
tween the Latin word gallus, a dunghill cock, and Gallus,
a Gaul — the general appellative by which the Romans
of mid-Republic days designated the non-Italian, Keltic-
speaking inhabitants of the country south and west of
the Swiss Alps. But whence came the name "gaul" ? and
why was a pun on it so apt that it has survived through long
centuries? I knew, of course, of the yarn that Diodorus
Siculus repeats: that in Keltica once ruled a famous man
42
BIRDS IN LEGEND
who had a daughter "tail and majestic" but unsatisfactory
because she refused all the suitors who presented them-
selves. Then Hercules came along, and the haughty
maiden surrendered at Arras. The result was a son
named Galetes — a lad of extraordinary virtues who be-
came king and extended his grandfather's dominions.
He called his subjects after his own name Galatians and
his country Galatia. This is nonsense. Moreover
"Galatia" is Greek, and was applied by the Greeks, long
before the day of Diodorus, to the lands of a colony of
Keltic-speaking migrants who had settled on the coast
of Asia Minor, and became the Galatians to whom Paul
wrote one of his Epistles. The Greek word Galatai was,
however, a form of the earlier Keltai.
As has been said, what we call Savoy and France
were known to the Romans as Gallia, Gaul ; but this term
had been familiar in Italy long before Caesar had estab-
lished Roman power over the great region between the
German forests and the sea that he tersely described as
Omnia Gallia; and it seems to have originated in the fol-
lowing way:
About i ioo B. C. two wild tribes, the Umbrians and
the Oscans, swept over the mountains from the northeast,
and took possession of northern Italy. These invaders
were Nordics, and used an antique form of Teutonic
speech. They were resisted, attacked, and finally over-
whelmed by the Etruscans, who about 800 B. C, when
Etruria was at the height of its power, extended their
rule to the Alps and the Umbrian State disappeared. In
the sixth century new hordes, calling themselves Kymri,
coming from the west, and speaking Keltic dialects,
swarmed into northern Italy from the present France.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 43
The harried people north of the Po, themselves mostly
descendants of the earlier invasion, spoke of these raiders
by an old Teutonic epithet which the Romans heard and
wrote as Gall us, the meaning of which was "stranger" —
in this case "the enemy."
The word G alius, Gaul or a Gaul, then, was an ancient
Teutonic epithet inherited by the Romans from the
Etruscans, and had in its origin no relation to gallns,
the lord of the poultry-yard. It is most likely, indeed,
that the term was given in contempt, as the Greeks called
foreigners "barbarians" because they spoke some language
which the Greeks did not understand; for the occupants
of the valley of the Po at that time were of truly Ger-
manic descent, and did not regard the round-headed,
Alpine "Kelts" as kin in any sense, but rather as ancient
foes. What the word on their lips actually was no one
knows ; but it seems to have had a root gal or vol, inter-
changeable in the sound (to non-native ears) of its initial
letter, whence it appears that Galatai, Gael, Valais,
Walloon, and similar names connected with Keltic history
are allied in root-derivation. Wales, for example, to the
early Teutonic immigrants into Britain was the country
of the Wealas, i.e., the "foreigners" (who were Gaulish,
Keltic-speaking Kymri) ; and the English are not yet
quite free from that view of the Welsh.
The opportunity to pun with gallus, a cock, is evident,
just as was a bitter pun current in Martial's time between
Gallia, a. female Gaul and gallia, a gall-nut ; but in all this
there is nothing to answer the question why the pun of
which we are in search — if there was such a pun — has
endured so long. I think the answer lies in certain appear-
ances and customs of the Keltic warriors.
44
BIRDS IN LEGEND
Plutarch, in his biography of Caius Marius, describes
the Kymri fought by Marius, years before Caesar's
campaigns, as wearing helmets surmounted by animal
effigies of various kinds, and many tall feathers.
Diodorus says the Gauls had red hair, and made it redder
by dyeing it with lime. This fierce and flowing red head-
dress must have appeared much like a cock's comb, to
which the vainglorious strutting of the barbarians added
a most realistic touch in the eyes of the disciplined legion-
aries. Later, the Roman authorities in Gaul minted a coin
or coins bearing a curious representation of a Gaulish
helmet bearing a cock on its crest, illustrations of which
are printed by G. R. Rothery in his A B C of Heraldry.
Rothery also states that the bird appears on Gallo-Roman
sculptures. Another writer asserts that Julius Caesar
records that those Gauls that he encountered fought
under a cock-standard, which he regarded as associated
with a religious cult, but I have been unable to verify this
interesting reference. Caesar does mention in his Com-
mentaries that the Gauls were fierce fighters, and that
one of their methods in personal combat was skilful kick-
ing, like a game-cock's use of its spurs — a trick still em-
ployed by French rowdies, and known as la savate. In
the Romance speech of the south of France chanticleer
is still gall.
The question arises here in the mind of the naturalist:
If the aboriginal Gauls really bore a "cock" on their
banners and wore its feathers in their helmets (as the
Alpine regiments in Italy now wear chanticleer's tail-
plumes), what bird was it? They did not then possess
the Oriental domestic fowls to which the name properly
belongs, and had nothing among their wild birds re-
sembling it except grouse. One of these wild grouse is
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 45
the great black capercaille, a bold, handsome bird of
the mountain forests, noted for its habit in spring of
mounting a prominent tree and issuing a loud challenge to
all rivals ; and one of its gaudy feathers is still the favor-
ite ornament for his hat of the Tyrolean mountaineer.
By the way, the cockade, that figured so extensively as
a badge in the period of the French Revolution was so
called because of its resemblance to a cock's comb.
Now comes a break of several centuries in the record,
illuminated by only a brief note in La Rousse's Encyclo-
pedic, that in 12 14, after the Dauphin du Viennois had
distinguished himself in combat with the English, an
order of knights was formed styled L'Ordre du Coq; and
that a white cock became an emblem of the dauphins of
the Viennois line.
The cock did not appear as a blazon when, after the
Crusades, national coats-of-arms were being devised;
nevertheless the le coq de France was not forgotten, for
it was engraved on a medal struck to celebrate the birth
of Louis XIII ( 1 60 1 ) . Then came the Revolution, when
the old regime was overthrown; and in 1792 the First
Republic put the cock on its escutcheon and on fts flag
in place of the lilies of the fallen dynasty. When this
uprising of the people had been suppressed, and Napoleon
I had mounted the throne, in 1804, he substituted for it
the Roman eagle, which he had inherited from his con-
quests in Italy and Austria, and which was appropriate
to his ambitious designs for world domination. This re-
mained until Napoleon went to Elba, and then Louis
XVIII brought back for a short time the Bourbon lilies ;
yet medals and cartoons of the early Napoleonic era
depict the Gallic cock chasing a runaway lion of Castile
or a fleeing Austrian eagle, showing plainly what was
46 BIRDS IN LEGEND
the accepted symbol of French power in the eyes of the
common folks of France. One medal bore the motto
Je veille pour le nation.
Napoleon soon returned from Elba only to be extin-
guished at Waterloo, after which, during the regime of
Louis Philippe, the figure of the Gallic cock was again
mounted on the top of the regimental flagstaffs in place
of the gilded eagle; an illustration of this finial is given
in Armories et Drapeaux Frangais. Louis Philippe could
do this legitimately, according to Rothery and others,
because this bird was the crest of his family — the Bour-
bons — in their early history in the south of France. The
Gallic cock continued to perch on the banner-poles until
the foundation of the second Empire under Louis
Napoleon in 1852. Since then the "tricolor," originating
in 1789 as the flag of the National Guard, and dispensing
with all devices, has waved over France. Officially bold
chanticleer was thus dethroned; but in the late World
War, as in all previous periods of public excitement, the
ancient image of French nationality has been revived, as
the illustrated periodicals and books of the time show;
and, much as they revere the tricolor, the soldiers still feel
that it is le coq Gaulois that in 19 18 again struck down
the black eagles of their ancient foes.
Juvenal's sixth Satire, in which he castigates the
Roman women of his day for their sins and follies, con-
tains a line, thrown in as a mere side-remark —
Rara avis in terris, negroque similima cygno —
which has become the most memorable line in the whole
homily. It has been variously translated, most literally,
perhaps, by Madan: "A rare bird in the earth, and very
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 47
like a black swan." The comparison was meant to indi-
cate something improbable to the point of absurdity; and
in that sense has rara avis been used ever since.
For more than fifteen hundred years Juvenal's expres-
sion for extreme rarity held good; but on January 6,
1697, tri e Dutch navigator Willem de Vlaming, visiting
the southwestern coast of Australia, sent two boats ashore
to explore the present harbor of Perth. "There their
crews first saw two and then more black swans, of which
they caught four, taking two of them alive to Batavia;
and Valentyne, who several years later recounted this
voyage, gives in his work a plate representing the ship,
boats and birds at the mouth of what is now known from
this circumstance as Swan River, the most important
stream of the thriving colony now State of Western
Australia, which has adopted this very bird as its armorial
symbol."
Another Australian bird, that, like the black swan, has
obtained a picturesque immortality in a coat-of-arms ;
and on postage stamps, is the beautiful lyre-bird, first dis-
covered in New South Wales in 1789, and now a feature
in the armorial bearings of that State in the Australian
Commonwealth. New Zealand's stamps show the apteryx
(kiwi) and emeu.
One might extend this chapter by remarking on various
birds popularly identified with certain countries, as the
ibis with Egypt, the nightingale with England and Persia,
the condor with Peru, the red grouse with Scotland, the
ptarmigan with Newfoundland, and so on. Then might
be given a list of birds w T hose feathers belonged ex-
clusively to chieftanship, and so had a sort of tribal sig-
nificance. Thus in Hawaii a honeysucker, the mamo,
furnished for the adornment of chiefs alone the rich
48 BIRDS IN LEGEND
yellow feathers of which "royal" cloaks were made; the
Inca "emperors" of Peru, before the Spanish conquest, re-
served to themselves the rose-tinted plumage of an
Andean water-bird; an African chief affected the long
tail-plumes of the widowbird — and so forth.
Only one of these locally revered birds entices me to
linger a moment — the nightingale, beloved of English
poets, whose oriental equivalent is the Persian bulbul.
The mingled tragedies of the nightingale and the swallow
form the theme of one of the most famous as well as
sentimental legends of Greek mythology. These myths,
strangely confused by different narrators, have been un-
ravelled by the scholarly skill of Miss Margaret Verrall
in her Mythology of Ancient Athens; 108 and her analysis
throws light on the way the Greek imagination, from pre-
historic bards down to the vase-decorators of the classic
era, and to the dramatists Sophocles, ^Eschylus, and
Aristophanes, dealt with birds — a very curious study.
Miss Verrall reminds us that a word is necessary as to
the names of the Attic tale. "We are accustomed, bur-
dened as we are with Ovidian association, to think of
Philomela as the nightingale. Such was not the version
of Apollodorus, nor, so far as I know, of any earlier
Greek writer. According to Apollodorus, Procne became
the nightingale ('a^Swv) and Philomela the swallow (x^8cov)
It was Philomela who had her tongue cut out, a tale that
would never have been told of the nightingale, but which
fitted well with the short restless chirp of the swallow.
To speak a barbarian tongue was 'to mutter like a
swallow.' "
But there has arisen in Persia a literature of the night-
ingale, or "bulbul," springing from a pathetic legend —
if it is not simply poetic fancy — that as the bird pours
forth its song "in a continuous strain of melody" it is
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 49
pressing its breast against a rose-thorn to ease its heart's
pain. Giles Fletcher, who had been attached to one of
Queen Elizabeth's missions to Russia, and perhaps in that
way picked up the suggestion, used it in one of his love-
poems in a stanza that is a very queer mixture of two
distinct fancies and a wrong sex, for the thrush that
sings is not the one that has any occasion to weep about
virginity:
So Philomel, perched on an aspen sprig,
Weeps all the night her lost virginity,
And sings her sad tale to the merry twig,
That dances at such joyful mystery.
Ne ever lets sweet rest invade her eye,
But leaning on a thorn her dainty chest
For fear soft sleep should steal into her breast
Expresses in her song grief not to be expressed.
The poetic vision over which Hafiz and others have
sighed and sung in the fragrant gardens of Shiraz seems
to owe nothing to the Greek tale, and to them the plain-
tive note in the bird's melody is not an expression of
bitter woe, but only bespeaks regret whenever a rose is
plucked. They will tell you tearfully that the bulbul will
hover about a rosebush in spring, till, overpowered by
the sweetness of its blossoms, the distracted bird falls
senseless to the ground. The rose is supposed to burst
into flower at the opening song of its winged lover. You
may place a handful of fragrant herbs and flowers before
the nightingale, say the Persian poets, yet he wishes not
in his constant and faithful heart for more than the
sweet breath of his beloved rose —
Though rich the spot
With every flower the earth has got,
What is it to the nightingale
If there his darling rose is not.
50 BIRDS IN LEGEND
But romantic stories of the association of the queen of
flowers with the prince of birds are many, and the reader
may easily find more of them. In a legend told by the
Persian poet Attarall the birds once appeared before
King Solomon and complained that they could not sleep
because of the nightly wailings of the bulbul, who ex-
cused himself on the plea that his love for the rose was
the cause of irrepressible grief. This is the tradition to
which Byron alludes in The Giaour:
The rose o'er crag or vale,
Sultana of the nightingale,
The maid for whom his melody,
His thousand songs, are heard on high,
Blooms blushing to her lover's tale —
His queen, the garden queen, the rose,
Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows.
CHAPTER III
AN ORNITHOLOGICAL COMEDY OF ERRORS
tMONG the many proverbial expressions relating to
r\ birds, none, perhaps, is more often on the tongue
than that which implies that the ostrich has the
habit of sticking its head in the sand and regarding itself
as thus made invisible. The oldest written authority
known to me for this notion is the Historical Library of
Diodorus Siculus. Describing Arabia and its products
Diodorus writes:
It produces likewise Beasts of a double nature and mixt
Shape; amongst whom are those that are called Strathocameli,
who have the Shape both of a Camel and an Ostrich ... so that
this creature seems both terrestrial and volatile, a Land-Beast
and a Bird: But being not able to fly by reason of the Bulk
of her body, she runs upon the Ground as Swift as if she flew
in the air ; and when she is pursued by Horsemen with her Feet she
hurls the Stones that are under her, and many times kills the
Pursuers with the Blows and Strokes they receive. When she
is near being taken, she thrusts her Head under a Shrub or
some such like Cover; not (as some suppose) through Folly or
Blockishness, as if she would not see or be seen by them, but
because her head is the tenderest Part of her Body. 109
It would appear from this that Diodorus was anticipat-
ing me by quoting an ancient legend only to show how
erroneous it was; but the notion has survived his expla-
nation, and supplies a figure of speech most useful to
polemic editors and orators, nor does anyone seem to care
whether or not it expresses a truth. The only founda-
52 BIRDS IN LEGEND
tion I can find or imagine for the origin of this so persis-
tent and popular error in ornithology is that when the
bird is brooding or resting it usually stretches its head
and neck along the ground, and is likely to keep this pros-
trate position in cautious stillness as long as it thinks it
has not been observed by whatever it fears. The futile
trick of hiding its head alone has been attributed to var-
ious other birds equally innocent.
Ostriches in ancient times roamed the deserts of the
East from the Atlas to the Indus, and they came to hold
a very sinister position in the estimation of the early in-
habitants of Mesopotamia, as we learn from the seals and
tablets of Babylonia. There the eagle had become the
type of the principle of Good in the universe, as is else-
where described ; and a composite monster, to which the
general term "dragon" is applied, represented the prin-
ciple of Evil. The earliest rude conception of this
monster gave it a beast's body (sometimes a crocodile's
but usually a lion's), always with a bird's wings, tail, etc.
"From conceiving of the dragon as a monster having a
bird's head as well as wings and tail, and feathers over
the body, the transition," as Dr. Ward 23 remarks, "was
not difficult to regard it entirely as a -bird. But for this
the favorite form was that of an ostrich ... the largest
bird known, a mysterious inhabitant of the deserts, swift
to escape and dangerous to attack. No other bird was
so aptly the emblem of power for mischief. . . . Ac-
cordingly, in the period of about the eighth to the seventh
centuries, B. C, the contest of Marduk, representing
Good in the form of a human hero or sometimes as an
eagle, with an ostrich, or often a pair of them, repre-
senting the evil demon Tiamat, was a favorite subject
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 53
with Babylonian artists in the valleys of the Tigris and
Euphrates."
In view of their inheritance of these ideas it is no
wonder that Oriental writers far more recent told strange
tales about this bird, especially as to its domestic habits,
as is reflected in the book of Job, where a versified render-
ing of one passage (xxxix, 15, 16) runs thus:
Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks?
Or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?
Which leaveth her eggs in the earth,
And warmeth them in the dust,
And forgetteth that the foot may crush them,
Or that the wild beast may break them?
She is hardened against her young ones
As though they were not hers:
Because God hath deprived her of wisdom,
Neither hath he imparted to her understanding.
This was more elegant than exact, for ostriches are ex-
ceedingly watchful and patient parents, as they have need
to be, considering the perilous exposure of their nests on
the ground, and the great number of enemies to which
both eggs and young are exposed in the wilderness.
Major S. Hamilton, 110 than whom there is no better au-
thority, testifies to this. "The hen-bird," he says, "sits
on the eggs by day and the cock relieves her at night,
so that the eggs are never left unguarded during incuba-
tion." The chicks are able to take care of themselves
after a day or two, and there is no more foundation in
fact for the Biblical charge of cruelty than for that other
Oriental fable that this bird hatches its eggs not by brood-
ing but by the rays of warmth and light from her eyes.
"Both birds are employed," the fable reads, "for if the
gaze is suspended for only one moment the eggs are
54 BIRDS IN LEGEND
addled, whereupon these bad ones are at once broken."
It is to this fiction that Southey refers in Thalaba, the
Destroyer:
With such a look as fables say
The mother ostrich fixes on her eggs,
Till that intense affection
Kindle its light of life.
Hence, as Burnaby tells us, ostrich eggs were hung in
some Mohammedan mosques as a reminder that "God
will break evil-doers as the ostrich her worthless eggs."
Professor E. A. Grosvenor notes in his elaborate volumes
on Constantinople, that in the turbeh of Eyouk, the
holiest building and shrine in the Ottoman world, are
suspended "olive lamps and ostrich eggs, the latter sig-
nificant of patience and faith." Their meanings or at
any rate the interpretations vary locally, but the shells
themselves are favorite mosque ornaments all over Islam,
and an extensive trans-Saharan caravan-trade in them
still exists. Ostrich eggs as well as feathers were im-
ported into ancient Egypt and Phoenicia from the Land
of Punt (Somaliland) and their shells have been re-
covered from early tombs, or sometimes clay models of
them, as at Hu, where Petrie found an example decorated
with an imitation of the network of cords by which it
could be carried about, just as is done to this day by the
Central-African negroes, who utilize these shells as water-
bottles, and carry a bundle of them in a netting bag.
Other examples were painted; and Wilkinson surmises
that these were suspended in the temples of the ancient
Egyptians as they now are in those of the Copts. The
Punic tombs about Carthage, and those of Mycenae, in
Greece, have yielded painted shells of these eggs; and
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 55
five were exhumed from an Etruscan tomb, ornamented
with bands of fantastic figures of animals either engraved
or painted on the shell, the incised lines filled with gold ;
what purpose they served, or whether any religious sig-
nificance was attached to them, is not known. Eggs are
still to be found in many Spanish churches hanging near
the Altar: they are usually goose-eggs, but may be a
reflection of the former Moorish liking for those of the
ostrich in their houses of worship.
To return for a moment to the notion that the ostrich
breaks any eggs that become addled (by the way, how
could the bird know which were "gone bad" ?), let me add
a preposterous variation of this, quoted from a German
source by Goldsmith 32 in relation to the rhea, the South
American cousin of the ostrich — all, of course, arrant
nonsense:
The male compels twenty or more females to lay their eggs
in one nest; he then, when they have done laying, chases them
away and places himself upon the eggs; however, he takes the
singular precaution of laying two of the number aside, which
he does not sit upon. When the young one comes forth these
two eggs are addled; which the male having foreseen, breaks
one and then the other, upon which multitudes of flies are
found to settle; and these supply the young brood with a
sufficiency of provision till they are able to shift for themselves.
Another popular saying is: "I have the digestion of
an ostrich !"
What does this mean? Ancient books went so far as
to say that ostriches subsisted on iron alone, although
they did not take the trouble to explain where in the
desert they could obtain this vigorous diet. A picture in
one of the Beast Books gives a recognizable sketch of
the bird with a great key in its bill and near by a horse-
56 BIRDS IN LEGEND
shoe for a second course. In heraldry, which is a
museum of antique notions, the ostrich, when used as a
bearing, is always depicted as holding in its mouth a
Passion-nail (emblem of the Church militant), or a horse-
shoe (reminder of knightly Prowess on horseback), or
a key (signifying religious and temporal power).
An amusing passage in Sir Thomas Browne's famous
book, Common and Vulgar Errors 33 — which is a queer
combination of sagacity, ignorance, superstition and
credulity — is his solemn argument against the belief
prevalent in his day (1605-82) that ostriches ate iron;
but he quotes his predecessors from Aristotle down to
show how many philosophers have given it credence with-
out proof. The great misfortune of medieval thinkers
appears to have been that they were bound hand and foot
to the dead knowledge contained in ancient Greek and
Latin books — a sort of mental mortmain that blocked
any progress in science. They made of Aristotle,
especially, a sort of sacred fetish, whose statements and
conclusions must not be "checked" by any fresh observa-
tion or experiment. Browne was one of the first to ex-
hibit a little independence of judgment, and to suspect
that possibly, as Lowell puts it, "they didn't know every-
thing down in Judee."
"As for Pliny," Sir Thomas informs us, "he saith
plainly that the ostrich concocteth whatever it eateth.
Now the Doctor acknowledgeth it eats iron: ergo, ac-
cording to Pliny it concocts iron. Africandus tells us
that it devours iron. Farnelius is so far from extenua-
ting the matter that he plainly confirms it, and shows that
this concoction is performed by the nature of its whole
essence. As for Riolanus, his denial without ground we
regard not. Albertus speaks not of iron but of stones
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 57
which it swallows and excludes again without nutriment."
This is an excellent example of the way those old
fellows considered a matter of fact as if it were one of
opinion — as if the belief or non-belief of a bunch of
ancients, who knew little or nothing of the subject, made
a thing so or not so. Sir Thomas seems to have been
struggling out of this fog of metaphysics and shyly
squinting at the facts of nature ; yet it is hard to follow
his logic to the conclusion that the allegation of iron-eat-
ing and "concocting" (by which I suppose digestion is
meant) is not true, but he was right. The poets, how-
ever, clung to the story. John Skelton (1460-1529) in
his long poem Phyllip Sparrow writes of
The estryge that wyll eate
An horshowe so great
In the stede of meate
Such feruent heat
His stomake doth freat [fret].
Ben Johnson makes one of his characters in Every Man
in his Humor assure another, who declares he could eat
the very sword-hilts for hunger, that this is evidence that
he has good digestive power — "You have an ostrich's
stomach." And in Shakespeare's Henry VI is the re-
mark: "I'll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and
swallow my sword."
Readers of Goldsmith's Animated Nature, 32 published
more than a century later (1774) as a popular book of
instruction in natural history (about which he knew
nothing by practical observation outside of an Irish
county or two), learned that ostriches "will devour
leather, hair, glass, stones, anything that is given them,
but all metals lose a part of their weight and often the
58 BIRDS IN LEGEND
extremities of the figure." That the people remembered
this is shown by the fact that zoological gardens have lost
many specimens of these birds, which seem to have a very
weak sense of taste, because of their swallowing copper
coins and other metallic objects fed to them by experi-
mental visitors, which they could neither assimilate nor
get rid of. It is quite likely that the bird's reputation for
living on iron was derived from similarly feeding the cap-
tive specimens kept for show in Rome and various East-
ern cities, the fatal results of which were unnoticed by
the populace. The wild ostrich contents itself with tak-
ing into its gizzard a few small stones, perhaps picked
up and swallowed accidentally, which assist it in grinding
hard food, as is the habit of many ground-feeding fowls.
Much the same delusion exists with regard to the emeu.
If I were to repeat a tithe of the absurdities and
medical superstitions (or pure quackery) related of birds
in the "bestiaries," as the books of the later medieval pe-
riod answering to our natural histories were named, the
reader would soon tire of my pages; but partly as a
sample, and partly because the pelican is not only
familiar in America but is constantly met in proverbs, in
heraldry, and in ecclesiastical art and legend, I think it
worth while to give some early explanations of the
curious notion expressed in the heraldic phrase "the
pelican in its piety." It stands for a very ancient mis-
understanding of the action of a mother-pelican alight-
ing on her nest, and opening her beak so that her young
ones may pick from her pouch the predigested fish she
offers them within it. As the interior of her mouth is
reddish, she appeared to some imaginative observer long
ago to display a bleeding breast at which her nestlings
were plucking. Now observe how, according to Hazlitt, 84
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 59
that medieval nature- fakir, Philip de Thaum, who wrote
The Anglo-Norman Bestiary about 1120, embroiders his
ignorance to gratify the appetite of his age for marvels —
sensations, as we say nowadays — and so sell his book:
"Of such a nature it is," he says of the pelican, "when it comes
to its young birds, and they are great and handsome, and it
will fondle them, cover them with its wings; the little birds
are fierce, take to pecking it — desire to eat it and pick out its
two eyes; then it pecks and takes them, and slays them with
torment; and thereupon leaves them — leaves them lying dead —
then returns on the third day, is grieved to find them dead, and
makes such lamentation, when it sees its little birds dead, that
with its beak it strikes its body that the blood issues forth; the
blood goes dropping, and falls on its young birds — the blood
has such quality that by it they come to life "
and so on, all in sober earnest. But he made a botch of
it, for earlier and better accounts show that the male
bird kills the youngsters because when they begin to grow
large they rebel at his control and provoke him ; when the
mother returns she brings them to life by pouring over
them her blood. Moreover, there crept in a further cor-
ruption of the legend to the effect that the nestlings were
killed by snakes, as Drayton writes in his Noah's Flood:
By them there sat the loving pellican
Whose young ones, poison'd by the serpent's sting,
With her own blood again to life doth bring.
St. Jerome seems to have had this version in mind
when he made the Christian application, saying that as
the pelican's young, "killed by serpents," were saved by
the mother's blood, so was the salvation by the Christ re-
lated to those dead in sin. This point is elaborated some-
what in my chapter on Symbolism.
60 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Before I leave this bird I want to quote a lovely para-
graph on pelican habits, far more modern than anything
"medieval," for it is taken from the Arctic Zoology
(1784) of Thomas Pennant, who was a good naturalist,
but evidently a little credulous, although the first half of
the quotation does not overstrain our faith. He is speak-
ing of pelicans that he saw in Australia, and explains:
They feed upon fish, which they take sometimes by plunging
from a great height in the air and seizing like the
gannet; at other times they fish in concert, swimming
in flocks, and forming a large circle in the great rivers
which they gradually contract, beating the water with their
wings and feet in order to drive the fish into the centre ; which
when they approach they open their vast mouths and fill their
pouches with their prey, then incline their bills to empty the
bag of the waters ; after which they swim to shore and eat their
booty in quiet. ... It is said that when they make their nests
in the dry deserts, they carry the water to their young in the
vast pouches, and that the lions and beasts of prey come there
to quench their thirst, sparing the young, the cause of this
salutary provision. Possibly on this account the Egyptians style
this bird the camel of the river— the Persians tacub, or water-
carrier.
Now let us look at the Trochilus legend, and trace how
an African plover became changed into an American
hummingbird. The story, first published by Herodotus,
that some sort of bird enters the mouth of a Nile crocodile
dozing on the sand with its jaws open, and picks bits of
food from the palate and teeth, apparently to the rep-
tile's satisfaction, is not altogether untrue. The bird
alluded to is the Egyptian plover, which closely re-
sembles the common British lapwing; and there seems
to be no doubt that something of the sort does really
take place when crocodiles are lying with open mouth
on the Nile bank, as they often do. This lapwing has a
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 61
tall, pointed crest standing up like a spur on the top of
its head, and this fact gives "point," in more senses than
one, to the extraordinary version of the Herodotus story
in one of the old plays, The White Devil, by John Web-
ster (1612), where an actor says:
"Stay, my lord ! I'll tell you a tale. The crocodile, which
lives in the river Nilus, hath a worm breeds i' the teeth of 't,
which puts it to extreme anguish : a little bird, no bigger than
a wren, is barber-surgeon to this crocodile; flies into the jaws
of 't, picks out the worm, and brings present remedy. The fish,
glad of ease, but ingrateful to her that did it, that the bird may
not talk largely of her abroad for nonpayment, closeth her
chaps, intending to swallow her, and so put her to perpetual
silence. But nature, loathing such ingratitude, hath armed this
bird with a quill or prick on the head, top o' the which wounds
the crocodile i' the mouth, forceth her open her bloody prison,
and away flies the pretty tooth-picker from her cruel patient."
A most curious series of mistakes has arisen around
this matter. Linguists tell us that the common name
among the ancient Greeks for a plover was trochilus
(rpoxtW), and that this is the word used by Herodotus for
his crocodile-bird. But in certain passages of his His-
tory of Animals Aristotle uses this word to designate a
wren ; it has been supposed that this was a copyist's error,
writing carelessly rpoxiAos for Vx i ^ 0? > but it was repeated
by Pliny in recounting what Herodotus had related, and
this naturally led to the statement by some medieval com-
pilers that the crocodile's tooth-cleaner was a wren.
This, however, is not the limit of the confusion, for when
American hummingbirds became known in Europe, and
were placed by some naturalists of the 17th century in
the Linnaean genus (Trochilus) with the wrens, one
writer at least, Paul Lucas, 1774 (if Brewer's Handbook
may be trusted), asserted that the hummingbird as well
62 BIRDS IN LEGEND
as the lapwing entered the jaws of Egyptian crocodiles —
and that he had seen them do it !
This curious tissue of right and wrong was still fur-
ther embroidered by somebody's assertion that the
diminutive attendant's kindly purpose was "to pick from
the teeth a little insect" that greatly annoyed the huge
reptile. Even Tom Moore knew no better than to write
in Lalla Rookh of
The puny bird that dares with pleasing hum
Within the crocodile's stretched jaws to come.
The full humor of this will be perceived by those who
remember that hummingbirds are exclusively American —
not Oriental. Finally Linnaeus confirmed all this mixture
of mistakes by fastening the name Trochilidae on the
Hummingbird family.
Finally, John Josselyn, Gent., in his Rarities of Nezv
England, calls our American chimney-swift a "troculus,"
and describes its nesting absurdly thus :
The troculus— a small bird, black and white, no bigger than
a swallow, the points of whose feathers are sharp, which they
stick into the sides of the chymney (to rest themselves), their
legs being exceedingly short) where they breed in nests made
like a swallow's nest, but of a glewy substance; and which is
not fastened to the chymney as a swallow's nest, but hangs
down the chymney by a clew-like string a yard long. They
commonly have four or five young ones; and when they go
away, which is much about the time that swallows used to de-
part, they never fail to throw down one of their young birds
into the room by way of gratitude. I have more than once ob-
served, that, against the ruin of the family, these birds will
suddenly forsake the house, and come no more.
Another unfortunate but long-accepted designation in
systematic ornithology was attached by Linnaeus to the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 63
great bird of paradise in naming this species Paradisca
apoda (footless) ; and it was done through an even worse
misunderstanding than in the case of Trochilus — or else
as a careless joke. It is true that at that time no perfect
specimen had been seen in Europe ; yet it is hard to under-
stand Linne's act, for he could not have put more faith
in the alleged natural footlessness of this bird than in the
many other marvelous qualities ascribed to it. Wallace
has recounted some of these myths in his Malay
Archipelago : 35
When the earliest European voyagers reached the Moluccas
in search of cloves and nutmegs, they were presented with the
dried skins of birds so strange and beautiful as to excite the
admiration even of those wealth-seeking rovers. The Malay
traders gave them the name of "manuk dewata," or God's birds ;
and the Portuguese, finding they had no feet or wings, and being
unable to learn anything authentic about them, called them
"passares de sol" or birds of the sun; while the learned Dutch-
men, who wrote in Latin, called them avis paradeus or paradise-
bird. Jan van Linschoten gives these names in 1598, and tells
las that no one has seen these birds alive, for they live in the
air, always turning toward the sun, and never lighting on the
earth till they die; for they have neither feet nor wings, as he
adds, may be seen by the birds carried to India, and sometimes
to Holland, but being very costly they were rarely seen in
Europe. More than a hundred years later Mr. William Fennel,
who accompanied Dampier . . . saw specimens at Amboyna
and was told that they came to Banda to eat nutmegs, which in-
toxicated them, and made them fall senseless, when they were
killed by ants. [Tavernier explains that the ants ate away their
legs — thus accounting for the footlessness.]
It is to this nutmeg dissipation that Tom Moore alludes
in Lalla Rookh:
Those golden birds that in the spice time drop
About the gardens, drunk with that sweet fruit
Whose scent has lured them o'er the summer flood.
64 BIRDS IN LEGEND
The unromantic fact was that the natives of the Moluccas
then, as now, after skilfully shooting with arrows or
blow-guns and skinning the (male) birds, cut off the legs
and dusky wings and folded the prepared skin about a
stick run through the body and mouth, in which form
"paradise-birds" continued to come to millinery markets
in New York and London. A somewhat similar blunder
in respect to swallows (or swifts?) has given us in the
martlet, as a heraldic figure, a quaint perpetuation of an
error in natural history. "Even at the present day,"
remarks Fox Davies, 111 speaking of England, "it is popu-
larly believed that the swallow has no feet ... at any
rate the heraldic swallow is never represented with feet,
the legs terminating with the feathers that cover the
shank."
I do not know where Dryden got the information sug-
gesting his comparison, in Threnodia Augustalis, "like
birds of paradise that lived on mountain dew" ; but the
idea is as fanciful as the modern Malay fiction that this
bird drops its egg, which bursts as it approaches the
earth, releasing a fully developed young bird. Another
account is that the hen lays her eggs on the back of her
mate. Both theories are wild guesses in satisfaction of
ignorance, for no one yet knows precisely the breeding-
habits of these shy forest-birds, the females of which are
rarely seen. Dryden may have read that in Mexico, as
a Spanish traveller reported, hummingbirds live on dew ;
or he may have heard of the medieval notion that ravens
were left to be nourished by the dews of heaven, and,
with poetic license to disregard classification, transferred
the feat to the fruit-eating birds of paradise.
Next comes that old yarn about geese that grow on
trees. When or where it arose nobody knows, but some-
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 65
where in the Middle Ages, for Max Miiller quotes a car-
dinal of the nth century who represented the goslings
as bursting, fully fledged, from fruit resembling apples.
A century later (1187) Giraldus Cambrensis, an arch-
deacon reproving laxity among the priests in Ireland, con-
demns the practice of eating barnacle geese in Lent on
the plea that they are fish; and soon afterward Innocent
III forbade it by decree. Queer variants soon appeared.
A legend relating to Ireland inscribed on a Genoese
world-map, and described by Dr. Edward L. Stevenson
in a publication of The Hispanic Society (New York)
reads: "Certain of their trees bear fruit which, decaying
within, produces a worm which, as it subsequently de-
velops, becomes hairy and feathered, and, provided
wings, flies like a bird."
An extensive clerical literature grew up in Europe in
discussion of the ethics of this matter, for the monks
liked good eating and their Lenten fare was miserably
scanty, and a great variety of explanations of the alleged
marine birth of these birds — ordinary geese (Branta
bernicla) when mature — were contrived. That some-
thing of the kind was true nobody in authority denied
down to the middle of the 17th century, when a German
Jesuit, Gaspar Schott, was bold enough to declare that
although the birth-place of this uncommon species of
goose was unknown (it is now believed to breed in
Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla), undoubtedly it was pro-
duced from incubated eggs like any other goose. Never-
theless the fable was reaffirmed in the Philosophical
Transactions of the Scottish Royal Society for 1677.
Henry Lee 38 recalls two versions of the absurd but preva-
lent theory. One is that certain trees, resembling willows,
and growing always close to the sea, produced at the ends
66 BIRDS IN LEGEND
of their branches fruits in the shape of apples, each con-
taining the embryo of a goose, which, when the fruit was
ripe, fell into the water and flew away. The other is that
the geese were bred from a fungus growing on rotten
timber floating at sea, and were first developed in the
form of worms in the substance of the wood.
It is plain that this fable sprang from the similitude
to the wings of tiny birds of the feathery arms that
sessile barnacles reach out from their shells to clutch from
the water their microscopic food, and also to the remote
likeness the naked heads and necks of young birds bear
to stalked or "whale" barnacles (Lepas). Both these
cirripeds are found attached to floating wood, and some-
times to tree-branches exposed to waves and to high tides.
The deception so agreeable to hungry churchmen was
abetted by the etymologies in the older dictionaries. Dr.
Murray, editor of The New Oxford Dictionary, asserts,
however, that the origin of the word "barnacle" is not
known, but that certainly it was applied to the mature
goose before its was given to the cirriped.
Speaking of geese, what is the probable source of the
warning "Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs"
beyond or behind the obvious moral of ^Esop's familiar
fable? The only light on the subject that has come to
me is the following passage in Bayley's 24 somewhat
esoteric book:
The Hindoos represent Brahma, the Breath of Life, as riding
upon a goose, and the Egyptians symbolized Seb, the father of
Osiris, as a goose. . . . According to the Hindoo theory of
creation the Supreme Spirit laid a golden egg resplendent as the
sun, and from the golden egg was born Brahma, the progenitor
of the Universe. The Egyptians had a similar story, and de-
scribed the sun as an egg laid by the primeval goose, in later
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 67
times said to be a god. It is probable that our fairy tale of
the goose that laid the golden egg is a relic of this very ancient
mythology.
These notions in India probably were the seed of a
Buddhist legend that comes a little nearer to our quest.
According to this legend the Buddha (to be) was born
a Brahmin, and after growing up was married and his
wife bore him three daughters. After his death he was
born again as a golden mallard (which is a duck), and
determined to give his golden feathers one by one for the
support of his former family. This beneficence went on,
the mallard-Bodhisat helping at intervals by a gift of a
feather. Then one day the mother proposed to pluck the
bird clean, and, despite the protests of the daughters, did
so. But at that instant the golden feathers ceased to be
golden. His wings grew again, but they were plain white.
It may be added that the Pali word for golden goose
is hansa, whence the Latin anser, goose, German gans,
the root, gan appearing in our words gander and gannet ;
so that it appears that the "mallard" was a goose, after
all — and so was the woman!
This may not explain iEsop, for that fabulist told or
wrote his moral anecdotes a thousand years before Bud-
dhism was heard of; but it is permissible to suppose that
so simple a lesson in bad management might have been
taught in India ages before y£sop (several of whose
fables have been found in early Egyptian papyri), and
was only repeated, in a new dressing, by good Buddhists,
as often happens with stories having a universal appeal
to our sense of practical philosophy or of humor.
We have had occasion to speak of the eagle in many
different aspects, as the elected king of the birds, as an
emblem of empire, and so on, but there remain for use
68 BIRDS IN LEGEND
in this chapter some very curious attributes assigned to
the great bird by ancient wonder-mongers that long ago
would have been lost in the discarded rubbish of primi-
tive ideas — mental toys of the childhood of the world —
had they not been preserved for us in the undying pages
of literature. Poetry, especially, is a sort of museum
of antique inventions, preserving for us specimens —
often without labels — of speculative stages in the early
development of man's comprehension of nature.
In the case of the eagle (as a genus, in the Old World
not always clearly distinguished from vultures and the
larger hawks) it is sometimes difficult to say whether
some of its legendary aspects are causes or effects of
others. Was its solar quality, for example, a cause or a
consequence of its supposed royalty in the bird tribe?
The predatory power, lofty flight, and haughty yet noble
mien of the true eagle, may account for both facts, to-
gether or separately. It would be diving too deeply into
the murky depths of mythology to show full proof, but
it may be accepted that everywhere, at least in the East,
the fountain of superstitions, the eagle typified the sun
in its divine aspect. This appears as a long-accepted con-
ception at the very dawn of history among the sun-wor-
shippers of the Euphrates Valley, and it persisted in art
and theology until Christianity remodelled such "heathen"
notions to suit the new trend of religious thought, and
transformed the "bird of fire" into a symbol of the
Omnipotent Spirit — an ascription which artists inter-
preted very liberally.
In Egypt a falcon replaced it in its religious signifi-
cance, true eagles being rare along the Nile, and "eagle-
hawks" were kept in the sun-gods' temples, sacred to
Horus (represented with a hawk-head surmounted by a
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 69
sun-disk), Ra, Osiris, Seku, and other solar divinities.
"It was regarded," as Mr. Cook explains in Zeus, 37 "as
the only bird that could look with unflinching gaze at
the sun, being itself filled with sunlight, and eventually
akin to fire." Later, people made it the sacred bird of
Apollo, and Mithraic worshippers spoke of Helios as a
hawk, but crude superstitions among the populace were
mixed with this priestly reverence.
It was universally believed of the eagle, that, as an old
writer said, "she can see into the great glowing sun";
few if any were aware that she could veil her eyes by
drawing across the orbs that third eyelid which naturalists
term the nictitating membrane. Hence arose that fur-
ther belief, lasting well into the Middle Ages, that the
mother-bird proved her young by forcing them to gaze
upon the sun, and discarding those who shrank from the
fiery test — "Like Eaglets bred to Soar, Gazing on Starrs
at heaven's mysterious Pow'r," wrote an anonymous poet
in 1652. "Before that her little ones be feathered," in the
words of an old compiler of marvels quoted by Hulme, 38
"she will beat and strike them with her wings, and thereby
force them to looke full against the sunbeams. Now if
she sees any one of them to winke, or their eies to water
at the raies of the sunne, she turns it with the head fore-
most out of the nest as a bastard."
How many who now read the 103d Psalm, or that fine
figure of rhetoric in Milton's Areopagitica, could explain
the full meaning of the comparison used? The passage
referred to is that in which Milton exclaims: "Methinks
I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing her-
self like a strong man after sleep. . . . Methinks I see
her renewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undaz-
zled eyes at the sun." Milton evidently expected all his
7 o BIRDS IN LEGEND
readers to appreciate the value of his simile — to know
that eagles were credited with just this power of juvenes-
cence. "When," in the words of an even older chronicler,
"an eagle hathe darkness and dimness in een, and heavi-
nesse in wings, against this disadvantage she is taught by
kinde to seek a well of springing water, and then she flieth
up into the aire as far as she may, till she be full hot by
heat of the air and by travaille of flight, and so then by
heat the pores being opened, and the feathers chafed, and
she f alleth sideingly into the well, and there the feathers
be chaunged and the dimness of her een is wiped away
and purged, and she taketh again her might and strength."
Isn't that a finely constructed tale? Spencer thought so
when he wrote:
As eagle fresh out of the ocean wave,
Where he hath left his plumes, all hoary gray,
And decks himself with feathers, youthful, gay.
Margaret C. Walker 39 elaborates the legend in her
excellent book, suggesting that it may have originated in
contemplation of the great age to which eagles are sup-
posed to live; but to my mind it grew out of the ancient
symbolism that made the eagle represent the sun, which
plunges into the western ocean every night, and rises,
its youth renewed every morning.
"It is related, ,, says Miss Walker, "that when this bird feels
the season of youth is passing by, and when his young are still
in the nest, he leaves the aging earth and soars toward the
sun, the consumer of all that is harmful. Mounting upward to
the third region of the air — the region of meteors — he circles
and swings about under the great fiery ball in their midst, turn-
ing every feather to its scorching rays, then, with wings drawn
back, like a meteor himself, he drops into some cold spring or
into the ocean wave there to have the heat driven inward by
the soul-searching chill of its waters. Then flying to his eyrie
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 71
he nestles among his warm fledglings, till, starting into perspi-
ration, he throws off his age with his feathers. That his re-
juvenescence may be complete, as his sustenance must be of
youth, he makes prey of his young, feeding on the nestlings
that have warmed him. He is clothed anew and youth is again
his."
Cruden's Concordance B1 to the Bible, first published in
1737, contains under "Eagle" a fine lot of old Semitic
misinformation as to the habits of eagles, which Cruden
gives his clerical readers apparently in complete faith and
as profitable explanations of the biblical passages in which
that bird is mentioned. Allow me to quote some of these
as an addition to our collection, for I find them retained
without comment in the latest edition of this otherwise
admirable work:
It is said that when an eagle sees its young ones so well-
grown, as to venture upon flying, it hovers over their nest,
flutters with its wings, and excites them to imitate it, and take
their flight, and when it sees them weary or fearful it takes
them upon its back, and carries them so, that the fowlers can-
not hurt the young without piercing through the body of the
old one. ... It is of great courage, so as to set on harts and
great beasts. And has no less subtility in taking them; for hav-
ing filled its wings with sand and dust, it sitteth on their horns,
and by its wings shaketh it in their eyes, whereby they become
an easy prey. ... It goeth forth to prey about noon, when
men are gone home from the fields.
It hath a little eye, but a very quick sight, and discerns its
prey afar off, and beholds the sun with open eyes, Such of her
young as through weakness of sight cannot behold the sun, it
rejects as unnatural. It liveth long, nor dieth of age or sick-
ness, say some, but of hunger, for by age its bill grows so
hooked that it cannot feed. ... It is said that it preserves its
nest from poison, by having therein a precious stone, named
Aetites (without which it is thought the eagle cannot lay her
eggs . . .) and keepeth it clean by the frequent use of the herb
maidenhair. Unless it be very hungry it devoureth not whole
prey, but leaveth part of it for other birds, which follow. Its
72 BIRDS IN LEGEND
feathers, or quills, are said to consume other quills that lie near
them. Between the eagle and dragon there is constant enmity,
the eagle seeking to kill it, and the dragon breaks all the
eagle's eggs it can find.
If the Jewish eagles are as smart as that, my sympathies
are with the dragon !
The relations between Zeus, or Jupiter, and the eagle,
mostly reprehensible, belong to classic mythology; and
they have left little trace in folklore, which, be it re-
membered, takes account of living or supposed realities,
not of mythical creatures. The most notable bit, per-
haps, is the widely accepted notion that this bird is never
killed by lightning; is "secure from thunder and un-
harmed by Jove," as Dryden phrases it. Certain common
poetic allusions explain themselves, for instance, that in
The Myrmidons of ^Eschylus:
So, in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
'With our own feathers, not by others' hands
'Are we now smitten/
These little narratives, which are certainly interesting
if true — as they are not — are good examples of the
failure to exercise what may be called the common-sense
of science.
Extraordinary indeed are the foolish things that used
to be told of birds by men apparently wise and observant
in other, even kindred, matters. Isaak Walton, 40 for
example, so well informed as to fish, seemed to swallow
falsities about other animals as readily as did the
gudgeon Isaak's bait. He writes in one place, after
quoting some very mistaken remarks about grasshoppers,
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 73
that "this may be believed if we consider that when the
raven hath hatched her eggs she takes no further care,
but leaves her young ones to the care of the God of
Nature, who is said in the Psalms 'to feed the young
that call upon him.' And they be kept alive, and fed
by a dew, or worms that breed in their nests, or some
other ways that we mortals know not."
The origin of this is plain. The ancient Jews told one
another that ravens left their fledgings to survive by
chance, not feeding them as other birds did. This is
manifested in several places in the Bible, as in the 147th
Psalm : "He giveth to the beast his food and to the young
ravens which cry"; but this absurd notion is far older,
no doubt, than the Psalms. Aristotle 41 mentions that
in Scythia — a terra incognita where, in the minds of the
Greeks, anything might happen— "there is a kind of bird
as big as a bustard, which . . . does not sit upon its
eggs, but hides them in the skin of a hare or fox," and
then watches them from a neighboring perch. Readers
may guess at the reality, if any, behind this. Aristotle
seems to have accepted it as a fact, for he goes on to de-
scribe how certain birds of prey are equally devoid of
parental sense of duty; but we cannot be sure what species
are referred to, despite the names used in Cresswell's
translation of the History of Animals, as follows:
The bird called asprey . . . feeds both its young and those
of the eagle ... for the eagle turns out its young . . . before
the proper time, when they still require feeding and are unable
to fly. The eagle appears to eject its young from the nest
from envy . . . and strikes them. When they are turned out
they begin to scream, and the phene comes and takes them up.
Why so strange notions of maternal care in birds
should ever have gained credence in the face of daily ob-
74 BIRDS IN LEGEND
servation of the solicitude of every creature for its young,
is one of the puzzles of history, but that they were wide-
spread is certain, and also that they persisted in folklore
down to the time when, at the dawn of the Renaissance,
observation and research began to replace blind confidence
in ancient lore. Thus J. E. Harting, 42 in his well-known
treatise on the natural history in Shakespeare, quotes
from a Latin folio of 1582 in support of his statement
that "it was certainly a current belief in olden times that
when the raven saw its young newly hatched, and covered
with down, it conceived such an aversion that it forsook
them, and did not return to its nest until a darker plumage
showed itself."
Ravens have quite enough sins to answer for and
calumnies to live down without adding to the list this
murderous absurdity, contrary to the very first law of
bird-nature. Nevertheless the poets, as usual, take ad-
vantage of the thought (for its moral picturesqueness, I
suppose), as witness Burns's lines in The Cotters Satur-
day Night —
That he who stills the raven's clamorous nest
Would in the way his wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide.
It is plain that the plowman-poet was too canny to be-
lieve it, but perhaps it is well to say that there is no foun-
dation in fact for this extraordinary charge. Ravens
are faithful and careful parents: in fact Shakespeare
makes a character in Titus Andronicus mention that
"some say that ravens foster forlorn children," a view
quite the opposite of the other.
Another calumny is thoughtlessly repeated by Brewer 34
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 75
in his widely used reference-book Phrase and Fable
(which unfortunately is far from trustworthy in the de-
partment of natural history) when he records: "Ravens
by their acute sense of smell, discern the savor of dying
bodies, and under the hope of preying on them, light on
chimney-tops or flutter about sick-rooms."
The correction to be made here is not to the gruesome
superstition but to the asserted keenness of the bird's
sense of smell. The gathering of vultures to a dead
animal is not by its odor, but by the sight of the carcass
by one, and the noting of signs of that fact by others,
who hasten to investigate the matter. Oliver Goldsmith 32
fell into the same error when he wrote of the protective
value, as he esteemed it, of this sense in birds in general,
"against their insidious enemies" ; and cited the practice
of decoymen, formerly so numerous as wildfowl trappers
in the east of England, "who burn turf to hide their
scent from the ducks." The precaution was wasted, for
none of the senses in birds is so little developed or of
so small use as the olfactory. Goldsmith's Animated
Nature was, a century ago, the fountain of almost all
popular knowledge of natural history among English-
reading people, and was often reprinted. As a whole it
was a good and useful book, but its accomplished author
was not a trained naturalist, and absorbed some state-
ments that were far from authentic — perhaps in some
cases he was so pleased with the narrative that he was not
sufficiently critical of its substance, as in the story of
the storks in Smyrna:
The inhabitants amuse themselves by taking away some of
the storks' eggs from the nests on their roofs, and replacing
them with fowls' eggs. "When the young are hatched the saga-
cious male bird discovers the difference of these from their own
7 6 BIRDS IN LEGEND
brood and sets up a hideous screaming, which excites the atten-
tion of the neighboring storks, which fly to his nest. Seeing the
cause of their neighbor's uneasiness, they simultaneously com-
mence pecking the hen, and soon deprive her of life, supposing
these spurious young ones to be the produce of her conjugal
infidelity. The male bird in the meantime appears melancholy,
though he seems to conceive she justly merited her fate."
In Goldsmith's day such contributions to foreign
zoology were common. Even the so-called scientific men of
early Renaissance times indulged in the story-teller's joy.
Albertus Magnus asserted that the sea-eagle and the
osprey swam with one foot, which was webbed, and cap-
tured prey with the other that was armed with talons.
Aldrovandus backed him up, and everybody accepted the
statement until Linnaeus laughed them out of it by the
simple process of examining the birds. These, you may
protest, are not mistakes but pure fancies ; yet it is only
a short step from them to the romance, hardly yet under
popular doubt, that the albatross broods its eggs in a raft-
like, floating nest and sleeps on the wing, as you may
read in Lalla Rookh:
While on a peak that braved the sky
A ruined temple tower'd so high
That oft the sleeping albatross
Struck the wild ruins with her wing,
And from her cloud-rocked slumbering
Started, to find man's dwelling there
In her own fields of silent air.
Even more poetic is the tale of the death-chant of the
swan, still more than half-believed by most folks, for
we constantly use it as a figure of speech, describing in a
word, for example, the final protest of a discarded office-
seeker as his "swan-song." It is useless to hunt for the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 77
origin of this notion — it was current at any rate in Aris-
totle's time, for he writes: "Swans have the power of
song, especially when near the end of their life, and some
persons, sailing near the coast of Libya, have met many
of them in the sea singing a mournful song and have
afterwards seen some of them die." Pliny, vElian (who
called Greece "mother of lies"), Pausanias and othermore
recent philosophers, denied that there was any truth in
this statement ; but the sentimental public, charmed by the
pathos of the picture presented to their imaginations, and
refusing to believe that in reality this bird's only utterance
is a whoop, or a trumpet-like note, have kept it alive
aided by the poets who have found it a useful fancy — -
for example Byron, who moans
Place me on Sunium's marbled steep,
Where nothing save the waves and I
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
There, swan-like, let me sing and die.
The poets are not to be quarrelled with too severely on
this account. It must be conceded that our literature
would have been considerably poorer had poets declined
to accept all that travellers and country folk told them.
Chaucer uses the "swan-song," and Shakespeare often
alludes to it, as in Othello:
I will play the swan and die in music.
A swan-like end, fading in music.
Even Tennyson has a poem on it, picturing a scene of the
most charming nature, the pensive beauty of which is
vastly enhanced by the bold use of the fable.
It has required both the hard scientific scrutiny of the
past century and a wide scattering of geographical infor-
78j BIRDS JIN LEGEND
mation, to offset in the minds of most of us the tendency
to imagine that "over the hills and far away" things
somehow are picturesquely different from those in our
own humdrum neighborhood, and that perhaps yonder
the laws of nature, so inexorable here, may admit now
and then of exceptions. Amber came from — well, few
persons knew precisely whence; and wasn't it possible
that it might be a concretion of birds' tears, as some
said?
Around thee shall glisten the loveliest amber
That ever the sorrowing sea-bird hath wept —
sang an enamored poet.
Facilis descensus Averni is a Latin phrase in constant
use, with the implication that it is difficult to get back —
sed revocare gradus, that's the rub ! But how many know
that this dark little cliff-ringed lake near Cumae, in Italy,
was anciently so named in the belief that because of its
noxious vapors no bird could fly across it without being
suffocated. Hence a myth placed there an entrance to
the nether world, and, with keen business instincts, the
Cumaean sybil intensified her reputation as a seer by tak-
ing as her residence a grotto near this baleful bit of water.
Who can forget the monumental mistake of that really
great and philosophic naturalist, Buffon, in denying that
the voices of American birds were, or could be, melodious.
He said of our exquisite songster, the wood-thrush, that
it represented the song-thrush of Europe which had at
sometime rambled around by the Northern Ocean and
made its way into America ; and that it had there, owing
to a change of food and climate, so degenerated that its
cry was now harsh and unpleasant, "as are the cries of all
birds that live in wild countries inhabited by savages."
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 79
The danger of error in drawing inferences as to pur-
pose in nature is great in any case; but it is doubly so
when the philosopher is mistaken as to his supposed
facts.
By going back a few decades one might find examples
of more or less amusing errors in natural history to the
point of weariness, but with one or two illustrations from
The Young Ladies' Book (Boston, 1836), I will bring
this chapter to its end. This little volume, doubtless Eng-
lish in origin, was intended for the entertaining instruc-
tion of school-girls, and in many respects was excellent,
but when it ventured on American ornithology it put
some amusing misinformation into its readers' minds. It
teaches them that our butcherbirds "bait thorns with
grasshoppers to decoy the lesser insectivorous birds into
situations where they may easily be seized" — a beautiful
sample of teleological assumption of motive based on the
fact that the shrike sometimes impales dead grasshoppers,
mice and so forth on thorns or fence-splinters, having
learned apparently that that is a good way to hold its
prey (its feet are weak, and unprovided with talons)
while it tears away mouthfuls of flesh. Often the victim
is left there, only partly eaten, or perhaps untorn; and
rarely, if ever, does the shrike return to it, and certainly
it attracts no "lesser insectivorous" birds nor any other
kind.
The author also instructs his young ladies that "the
great American bittern has the property of emitting a
light from its breast," and so forth. His authority for
this long-persistent and picturesque untruth was a review
of Wilson's American Ornithology in Loudon's Magazine
of Natural History (London, Vol. vi., 835.) Speaking
of this familiar marsh-bird, which, let me repeat, has
80 BIRDS IN LEGEND
no such aid in making a living, or need of it, as it is not
nocturnal in its habits, the anonymous reviewer writes:
It is called by Wilson the great American bittern, but, what
is very extraordinary, he omits to mention that it has the power
of emitting a light from its breast, equal to the light of a
common torch, which illuminates the water so as to enable it
to discover its prey. ... I took some trouble to ascertain the
truth of this, which has been confirmed to me by several gentle-
men of undoubted veracity, and especially by Mr. Franklin
Peale, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Museum.
A similar belief existed in the past in regard to the
osprey, which we in the United States call the fish-hawk.
Loskiel (Mission to the Indians, 1794) records it thus:
"They say that when it [the fish-hawk] hovers over the
water, it possesses a power of alluring the fish toward
the surface, by means of an oily substance contained in
its body. So much is certain, that, if a bait is touched
with this oil, the fish bite so greedily, that it appears as
if it were impossible for them to resist." How much
of this is native American, and how much is imported
it is hard to determine now.
CHAPTER IV
THE FOLKLORE OF BIRD MIGRATION
I WAS sitting on a hillside in the Catskill Mountains
a few years ago in June, when a hawk came sailing
over the field below me. Instantly a kingbird sprang
from the edge of the woods and rushed, in the cavalier
manner of that flycatcher, to drive the hawk away, pre-
sumably from its nesting neighborhood. The hawk tried
to avoid the pecking and wing-beating of its furious
little foe, but the tormenter kept at it; and before long I
saw the kingbird deliberately leap upward and alight on
the hawk's broad back, where it rode comfortably until
both birds were out of sight. I have seen a humming-
bird indulge in the same piece of impudence.
The Arawak Indians of Venezuela relate that their
ancestors obtained their first tobacco-plants from Trini-
dad by sending a hummingbird, mounted on a crane,
to snatch and bring back the jealously guarded seeds.
The association of these birds in this way seems sig-
nificant.
It was doubtless because adventures similar to that
of the kingbird were noticed long ago, that there grew
up the very ancient fable that on one occasion a general
assembly of birds resolved to chose for their king that
bird which could mount highest into the air. This the
eagle apparently did, and all were ready to accept his rule
when a loud burst of song was heard, and perched upon
the eagle's back was seen an exultant wren that, a stowa-
81
BIRDS IN LEGEND
way under its wing, had been carried aloft by the kingly
candidate. This trickiness angered the eagle so much,
says one tradition, that he struck the wren with his wing,
which, since then, has been able to fly no higher than a
hawthorn-bush. In a German version a stork, not an
eagle, carries the wren aloft concealed under its wing.
W. H. Hudson, the authority on Argentine zoology,
says that the boat-tailed grakle, or "chopi," pursues all
sorts of predatory birds, even the great caracara eagle,
"pouncing down and fastening itself on the victim's
back, where it holds its place till the obnoxious bird has
left its territory." Sir Samuel Baker encountered in
Abyssinia bands of cranes walking about in search of
grasshoppers, every crane carrying on its back one or
more small flycatchers that from time to time would
fly down, seize an insect in the grass, and then return to
a crane's shoulders. Precisely the same thing has been
recorded of bustards and starlings in South Africa.
Bird-students are well aware that certain ducks that
nest in trees, and such marine birds as guillemots breed-
ing on sea-fronting cliffs, sometimes carry down their
young from these lofty birth-places by balancing them on
their backs ; also that it is a common thing to see water-
fowls, especially grebes and swans, swimming about with
a lot of little ones on deck, that is, on the broad maternal
back.
These facts prepare us somewhat for examining the
widely credited assertion that various large birds of
powerful flight transport small birds on their semiannual
migrations — a speculation accepted since classic times, or
before them. In Deuteronomy, xxxii, II, we read:
"As the eagle fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad
her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings," etc.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 83
Modern ornithologists scout the notion. Thus Alfred
Newton 55 refers to it in a scornful way, but admits that
it is the conviction not only of Egyptian peasants but of
Siberian Tartars, who assured the ornithologist Gmelin,
in 1740, that in autumn storks and cranes carried south-
ward on their backs all the Siberian corncrakes. In a
Gaelic folk-tale of Cathal O'Couchan a falcon, knowing
that the wren of the story has a long way to go, says:
"Spring up between my wings, and no other bird will
touch thee till thou reach home."
In fact, this popular notion is almost world-wide,
and it is useful to assemble such evidence as may be
had as to the basis of it, for one cannot well dismiss with a
gesture of disdain a theory that appears to have arisen in-
dependently, and from observation, among peoples so
widely separated as those of Siberia and Egypt, of Crete
and the Hudson Bay country ; and which continues to be
held by competent observers. A German man of letters,
Adolph Ebeling, who published a book of his experiences
in Egypt in 1878, was surprised to find the wagtail there
at that season. This is a small, ground-keeping bird that
flits about rather than flies; and he expressed to an old
Arab his astonishment that such birds should be able to
get across the Mediterranean. "The Bedouin," Ebeling
relates, "turned to me with a mixture of French and
Arabic as follows: 'Do you not know, noble sir, that these
small birds are borne over the sea by the larger ones ?' "
I laughed, but the old man continued quite naturally:
"Every child among us knows that. Those little birds
are much too weak to make the long sea-journey with
their own strength. This they know very well, and there-
fore wait for the storks and cranes and other large birds,
and settle themselves upon their backs. In this w r ay they
84 BIRDS IN LEGEND
allow themselves to be borne over the sea. The large
birds submit to it willingly, for they like their little guests
who by their merry twitterings help to kill the time on
the long voyage.''
Ebeling met that evening, he says, in Cairo, the African
explorer Theodor von Heuglin, who, as all know, was a
specialist in African ornithology, related to him the con-
versation with the Bedouin, and asked his opinion on it.
"Let others laugh," said von Heuglin. "I do not laugh,
for the thing is known to me. I should have recently
made mention of it in my work if I had had any strong
personal proof to justify it. We must be much more
careful in such matters than a mere story-teller or
novelist."
A Swedish traveller, Hedenborg, is quoted by August
Petermann, the geographer, as stating that in autumn on
the Island of Rhodes, in the y£gean Sea, when the storks
came in flocks across the water he often heard birds sing-
ing that he was unable to discover. "Once he followed a
flock of storks, and as they alighted he saw small birds
fly up from their backs."
There was published in London in 1875 a book entitled
Bible Lands and Bible Customs, the author of which was
the Rev. Henry J. Van Lennep, D.D. Dr. Lennep in-
forms his readers that many small birds are unable to
fly across the Mediterranean, "and to meet such cases the
crane has been provided. ... In the autumn numerous
flocks may be seen coming from the north . . . flying
low and circling over the plains. Little birds of various
species may then be seen flying up to them, while the
twittering songs of those comfortably settled on their
backs may then be distinctly heard." (Quoted in Nature,
March 24, 1881 ). We may smile at the good man's faith
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 85
that God "provided" big birds as carriers for little ones —
especially as we know that the weakest warblers are able
to cross from Europe to Africa; but other equally modern
and more matter-of-fact testimony comes from the same
quarter of the world. In The Evening Post, of New
York City, dated November 20, 1880, a long letter ap-
peared on this topic, written by an anonymous corre-
spondent who gave his own similar experience in Crete
in the autumn of 1878, part of which reads:
"On several occasions the village priest — a friendly Greek
with whom I spent the greater part of my time — directed my
attention to the twittering and singing of small birds which he
distinctly heard when a flock of sand-cranes passed by on
their southward journey. I told my friend that I could not see
any small birds, and suggested that the noise came from the
wings of the large ones. This he denied, saying 'No, no ! I
know it is the chirping of small birds. They are on the backs
of the cranes. I have seen them frequently fly up and alight
again, and they are always with them when they stop to rest and
feed.' I was still sceptical, for with the aid of a field-glass I
failed to discover the 'small birds' spoken of. I inquired of
several others and found the existence of these little feathered
companions to be a matter of general belief. 'They come over
from Europe with them.' One day, while fishing about fifteen
miles from shore, a flock of cranes passed quite near the yacht.
The fishermen, hearing the 'small birds/ drew my attention to
their chirping. Presently one cried out, 'There's one !' but I
failed to catch sight of it, whereupon one of the men discharged
his flintlock. Three small birds rose up from the flock and soon
disappeared among the cranes."
This letter, despite its column-length and its anonym-
ity, was copied in full by that highly scientific journal
Nature, of London, and this immediately brought out a
note from John Rae, one of the wisest explorers of north-
western Canada, who related (Nature, March 3, 1881)
that it was the general belief among the Maskegan (Cree)
86 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Indians dwelling along the southwestern shore of Hudson
Bay that "a small bird, one of the Fringillidae, performs
its northward migration in spring on the back of the
Canada goose. These geese reach Hudson Bay about the
last of April, and the Indians state that when they are
fired at little birds are seen flying away from them." Mr.
Rae adds: "An intelligent, truthful and educated Indian,
named George Rivers . . . assured me that he had wit-
nessed this, and I believe I once saw it occur."
Almost simultaneously Forest and Stream (New York,
March 10, 1881) printed a communication from J. C.
Merrill of Fort Custer, Montana, alleging "a general be-
lief among the Crow Indians of Montana that the sand-
hill crane performs the same office for a bird they call
napite-shu-ntl, or crane's back." Mr. Merrill continued:
"This bird I have not seen, but from the description it is
probably a small grebe. It is 'big medicine/ and when obtained
is rudely stuffed and carefully preserved. . . . About ten or
fifteen per cent of cranes are accompanied by the 'crane-back/
which, as the crane rises from the ground, flutters up and
settles on the back between the wings, remaining there until the
crane alights. Such is the Indian account, and many of their
hunters and chiefs have assured me that they have frequently
seen the birds carried off in this way. At these times the bird
is said to keep up a constant chattering whistle, which is the
origin of the custom of the Crow warriors going out to battle,
each with a small bone whistle in his mouth ; this is continually
blown, imitating the notes of the 'crane's-back,' and, as they
believe, preserves their ponies and themselves from wounds, so
that in case of defeat they may be safely carried away as is the
napite-shu-utl.
"The Cree Indians are said to observe the same habit in the
white crane."
Now there is no good reason to deny the honesty or
sneer at the value of these widely distributed observations
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 87
so long as they arc regarded as descriptive of exceptions
and not of a rule of migration. Neither the observers
nor die reporters had any motive for deception, and are
not likely to deceive themselves in every case — moreover,
new witnesses continually arise. For example: Mr. E.
Hagland, of Therien, Alberta, wrote to me as follows in
a casual way, without any prompting, in April, 1919:
"One fall a flock of cranes passed over me flying very low,
and apart from their squawking I could distinctly hear the
twittering of small birds, sparrows of some kind. The chirping
grew louder as the cranes drew towards me, and grew fainter
as they drew away; and as the cranes were the only birds in
sight I concluded that little birds were taking a free ride to the
south."
The manner of flight of sandhill cranes as described
by Dr. Elliott Coues 50 suggests why they might well be
utilized as common carriers by small birds going their
way. "Such ponderous bodies, moving with slowly beat-
ing wings, give a great idea of momentum from mere
weight . . . for they plod along heavily, seeming to need
every inch of their ample wings to sustain themselves."
This would make it easy and tempting for a tired little
migrant to rest its feet on the crane's broad back — and
once settled there, why not stay ?
The flaw in this whole matter is the unwarranted in-
ference made by the Bedouins who talked with Herr
Ebling, and by wiser persons, namely, that all the wag-
tails and other little birds annually perform their over-
seas journeys by aid of stronger-winged friends. That is
reasoning from some to all, which is bad logic. It is as
if a stranger in town noticed a few schoolboys hopping
on the back of a wagon, and immediately noted down that
in Pequaket boys in general rode to school on the tail-
88 BIRDS IN LEGEND
boards of farm-wagons. Little birds, like small boys,
have sense enough in their migrations to utilize a conven-
ience when it is going their way — in other words a very
few lucky ones each year manage to "steal a ride."
Thus far we have been dealing with a matter pretty
close to actual ornithology; but it is only within recent
years that study has made clear to us "the way of an eagle
in the air," which, as a symbol of the semiannual move-
ment of bird-hosts, was such a mystery to our fore-
fathers. They imagined many quaint explanations, often
no more sensible than the theory of the Ojibway Indians,
who say that once bird-folk played ball with the North
Wind. The latter won the game, and those kinds of
birds who were on his side now stay in the North all
winter, while those of the defeated side are obliged to
flee southward every autumn, as their ancestors did at
the end of the great ball-game.
Sir Walter Scott recalls in one of his novels the fond
conceit of the little nuns in the abbey of Whitby, on the
Northumberland coast, that the wee immigrants arriving
there after their flight across the North Sea fluttered to
earth not in weariness of wings but to do homage to
Hilda, their saintly abbess. That was fifteen long cen-
turies ago ; but the story is true, for you may still see the
ruins, at least, of Hilda's abbey, and still, spring by
spring, do tired birds pause beside it as if to pay their de-
votions.
Much less pleasant is the dread inspired in the hearts
of those who listen to the Seven Whistlers. Formerly no
Leicestershire miner would go down into a pit, after hear-
ing them, until a little time had elapsed, taking the sounds
as a warning that an accident was impending ; and doubt-
less coincident mishaps occurred often enough to confirm
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 89
faith in the presentiment. Level-headed men knew well
enough what the Seven Whistlers were — "it's them long-
billed curlews, but I never likes to hear 'em," said one.
The northern name of these birds is "whimbrel," a form
of the English whimperer. As these curlews when mi-
grating often travel low on dark nights, and are unseen,
it is not strange that their unearthly cries should chill the
imagination of the superstitious, and that the Scotch
should call them "corpse-hounds." "Gabble retchet" is
another Scotch term ; and probably the Irish banshee had
a similar origin. Still another name is "Gabriel hounds,"
originating, it is thought in Scandinavia, and explained
by the fact that there the calling to one another of bean-
geese in their nocturnal journeys, in spring, have a
singular resemblance to the yelping of beagles; and the
story is that Gabriel is obliged to follow his spectral pack,
said to be human-headed, high in the dark air, as a
punishment for having once hunted on Sunday.
Wordsworth in one of his sonnets connects this belief
with the German legend of the Wild Huntsman, "doomed
the flying hart to chase forever on aerial grounds." A
Lancashire explanation, quoted by Moncure D. Conway
is that these migrants, there deemed to be plovers, were
"Wandering Jews," so called because they contained the
souls of Jews who assisted at the Crucifixion, and in con-
sequence were condemned to float in the air forever. A
curious coincidence, given by Skeat, 7 is that the Malays
have an elaborate story of a spectral huntsman, and hear
him in the nocturnal notes of the birikbirik, a nightjar.
It is hardly more than a century ago that intelligent
men abandoned the belief that certain birds hibernated in
hollow trees, caverns, or even buried themselves every
autumn in the mud at the bottom of ponds, and then re-
go BIRDS IN LEGEND
covered in the spring. This theory is of great antiquity,
and was applied especially to the swallows, swifts, night-
ingales and corncrakes of the Mediterranean region; but
even Aristotle doubted whether it was true of all birds.
He discusses at some length in his Natural History a
the winter retreat of fishes and other creatures that hi-
bernate, and continues :
"Many kinds of birds also conceal themselves, and they do
not all, as some suppose, migrate to warmer climes . . . and
many swallows have been seen in hollow places almost stripped
of feathers; and kites, when they first showed themselves, have
come from similar situations. . . . Some of the doves conceal
themselves; others do not, but migrate along with the swallows.
The thrush and the starling also conceal themselves."
I have an unverified memorandum from the pen of
Antonio Galvano, who resided in Mexico, long ago, that
in his time hummingbirds 'live of the dew, and the juyce
of flowers and roses. They die or sleeepe every yeere in
the moneth of October, sitting upon a little bough in a
warme and close place: they revive or wake againe in
the moneth of April after that the flowers be sprung, and
therefore they call them the revived birds."
Even Gilbert White, 45 was inclined to think hibernation
might be true, at least of British swallows ; and Cowper
sings —
The swallows in their torpid state
Compose their useless wings.
Alexander Wilson 46 thought it necessary to combat
vigorously the same fiction then persistent among Penn-
sylvania farmers, and did so at length in his American
Ornithology published in 1808.
But the wildest hypothesis was the one prevalent in the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 91
Middle Ages and alluded to by Dryden in his poem The
Hind and The Panther, speaking of young swallows in
autumn :
They try their fluttering wings and trust themselves in air,
But whether upward to the moon they go,
Or dream the winter out in caves below,
Or hawk for flies elsewhere, concerns us not to know.
Southwards, you may be sure, they bent their flight,
And harbored in a hollow rock by night.
Or as Gay's shepherd surmises: 8
He sung where woodcocks in the summer feed,
And in what climates they renew their breed;
Some think to northern coasts their flight tend,
Or to the moon in midnight hours ascend:
When swallows in the winter season keep,
And how the drowsy bat and dormouse sleep.
A quaint theological justification of this theory that
birds fly to the moon as a winter-resort is to be found in
Volume VI of The Harleian Miscellany. It is entitled
"An Inquiry into the Physical and Literal Sense of the
Scriptures/' and is an exegesis of Jeremiah viii, 7: "The
stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed time, and the
turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time
of their coming. ,, The reverend commentator, whose
name is lost, begins at once to explain migration among
birds. He first assures his readers that many birds, in-
cluding storks, often fly on migration at a height that
renders them indiscernible. Now, he argues, if the flight
of storks had been in a horizontal direction flocks of
birds would have been seen frequently by travellers —
ignoring the fact that they are and always have been ob-
served. But, he goes on, as the flight is not horizontal it
92
BIRDS IN LEGEND
must be perpendicular to the surface of the earth, and,
therefore, it becomes clear that the moon would be the
first resting-place the birds would be likely to strike,
whereupon he draws this conclusion: "Therefore the
stork, and the same may be said of other season-observing
birds, till some place more fit can be assigned to them, does
go unto, and remain in some one of the celestial bodies ;
and that must be the moon, which is most likely because
nearest, and bearing most relation to this our earth, as
appears in the Copernican scheme; yet is the distance
great enough to denominate the passage thither an itine-
ration or journey."
The author next clinches the matter by taking the
time that the stork is absent from its nesting-place, and
showing how it is utilized. Two months are occupied in
the upward flight, three for rest and refreshment, and
two more for the return passage. Thus this ingenious
writer lays what he considers a solid scientific foundation
beneath an ancient and vague theory.
The sudden vanishing of some migratory birds while
others resembling them remained in view gave to ancient
ignorance — not yet altogether dissipated, even in these
United States — the belief that a bird might change into
the form of another. The difference noticed in plumage
in some species in summer and winter was accounted for
in the same way, as many old Greek myths illustrate.
Thus Sophocles, trying in one of his dramas to explain
an inconsistency between two versions of the myth of
Tereus, declares that the hoopoe of the older story is the
hawk of the newer one — the birds were altered, not the
narrative. He was easily believed, for to the Greeks of
his day it appeared plain that birds might become trans-
formed into others birds. Aristotle took great pains to
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 93
show the absurdity of this notion, yet it has held
on. Swann tells of an Englishman who declared that it
was well-known that sparrow-hawks changed into
cuckoos in spring; and another old belief is that the
European land-rail becomes in winter the water-rail, re-
suming its own form in spring. A French name for the
land-rail, by the way, is "king of the quails, ,, because the
quails chose it as leader in their migrations.
One of the most picturesque incidents in the story of
the wilderness-roving of the Children of Israel, who were
"murmuring" for the fleshpots of Egypt, is the sudden
coming of quails that "filled the camp." The interpre-
tation is plain that a migratory host of these birds had
settled for the night where the Hebrews, or some of them,
were; and the notable point is their abundance, and that
they had disappeared when morning came, which is
characteristic. These quails visit Europe in summer in
prodigious numbers from south of the Mediterranean,
and are netted for market by tens of thousands. It is
said that in old times the bishops of Capri — Italy receives
the greatest flight — derived a large part of their wealth
from a tax on the catching of quails. Pliny alleges, as
an example of the immense migrations of these quails in
his time, that often, always at night, they settled on the
sails of ships and so sank them. This really seems
possible when one thinks of the small size of the "ships"
of that period, and recalls that flights of our own mi-
grating pigeons (now extinct) used to smash down stout
branches of trees by the weight of the crowds of birds
that settled on them.
Cranes are birds of striking characteristics, as we have
seen, and seem to have impressed very forcibly the ancient
Greeks as well as recent Orientals, the latter finding in
94 BIRDS IN LEGEND
them an extraordinary symbolism. The Greeks believed
that during their winter absence the cranes were in con-
stant battle with the Pygmies — 'That small infantry
warred on by cranes," as Milton characterized those
diminutive, but pugnacious folks who lived no one knew
exactly where, but certainly at the ends of the earth.
'The cranes travel," Aristotle records, "from Scythia to
the marshes in the higher parts of Egypt from which the
Nile originates. This is the place where the Pygmies
dwell ; and this is no fable, for there is really, it is said,
a race of dwarfs, both men and horses, which lead the
life of troglodytes."
When the shrill clouds of Cranes do give alarmes,
The valiant Pigmy stands unto his armes:
Straight, too weak for the Thracian bird, he's swept,
And through the eye in crooked tallons rapt. 48
But this is only one item in the crane's list of wonders.
When this bird migrates it always flies against the wind,
according to ancient bird-minders, and carries a
swallowed stone as ballast so that it may not be swept out
of its course by a change of wind; and this stone when
it is vomited up is useful as a touchstone for gold. Aris-
totle had heard of this ballasting precaution, and ex-
pressly denies it, but he says nothing about other stones
associated with the history of the bird, perhaps because
they had not been discovered in his day. The sagacious
cranes were also said to post sentinels, while halting at
night, and to insure their necessary vigilance these senti-
nels were required to stand on one foot, and to hold in
the other, uplifted one a large stone. Should one of
these sentinel-birds drowse the stone would drop and by
its noise awaken the sleepy sentry. This explains the
fact that in British heraldry the crane is always repre-
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 95
sented with a bit of rock in its fist, the pose signifying
"vigilance."
Lyly, 49 in that queer old book Euphucs, confesses:
"What I have done was only to keep myselfe from sleepe,
as the Crane doth the Stone in her foote; and I would
also, with the same Crane, that I had been silent, holding
a Stone in my mouth." His 16th-century readers under-
stood this second simile, for they remembered that cranes
were said to be thus gagged when migrating, so as not
to utter any cries that would bring eagles or other birds of
prey to attack them.
This, perhaps, will be the most appropriate place to
mention some other quaint but widely credited stories of
birds possessed of stones, although they are not usually
connected with migratory habits.
The people of Rome in the old days were told of a
crystalline stone called alec tonus, as large as a bean, to
be found in the gizzard of the barnyard cock. It was
held to have wonderful properties, endowing its possessor
with strength, courage, and success with women and
money, and to this apparently complete list of virtues is
added by one historian the quality of invisibility. This
last virtue also pertained to the stone placed by the raven
in the throat of its fledging, but the formalities described
as necessary for anyone who sought to obtain it were
quite impossible to fulfil. "It may, indeed," as Hulme 38
remarks, "have had the same effect on the original owner*
as there could scarcely be an authentic instance of such
peculiar property being found." On the other hand we
are told that a stone from the hoopoe, when laid upon the
breast of a sleeping man, forced him to reveal any
rogueries he might have committed.
It is stated in Cassell's Natural History (Vol. IV),
9 6 BIRDS IN LEGEND
that in India exists a popular superstition that if you will
split the head of an adjutant stork before death you may
extract from the skull "the celebrated stone called sahir
mora, or 'poison-killer,' of great virtue and repute as an
antidote to all kinds of poison." One would suppose that
all the adjutants in India would long ago have been ex-
terminated, but in fact this is one of the most numerous
of birds there — the scavenger of every village.
The common swallow was once believed to have two
of these miraculous stones stowed away somewhere in its
interior. One was red, and cured an invalid instantly: the
other, a black one, brought good fortune. Also, it was
reported, swallows found on a seabeach, by some sort of
inspiration, a particular kind of stone which would re-
store sight to the blind; and it was to this legend that
Longfellow alluded in Evangeline —
Seeking with eager eyes that wondrous stone which the swallow
Brings from the shore of the sea to restore the sight of her
fledglings.
Various birds also gave, or strengthened, sight to their
young by means of certain plants mentioned by old
herbalists. Finally, it should not be overlooked that on
page 152 of the most recent edition of Cruden's celebrated
Concordance 51 to the Bible, among the generally
astonishing notes beneath the word "eagle" is printed the
following: "It is said that it preserves its nest from
poison, by having therein a precious stone, named Aetites
(without which it is thought the eagle cannot lay her
eggs, and which some use to prevent abortion and help
delivery in women, by tying it above or below the navel)
and keepeth it clean by the frequent use of the herb
maiden-hair."
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 97
Now it is all well enough to find this information in the
writings of Pliny senior, who alleges that these "eagle-
stones" (in fact natural hollow nodules of iron-impreg-
nated clay) were transported by nesting eagles to their
domiciles to assist them in ovulation, whence by analogy —
recognizing unwittingly the kinship of men and animals —
they would aid women in travail, and to smile over it with
the shrewd editor of Vulgar Errors, 33 but it is odd to find
such an absurdity recommended by a modern clergyman
as "profitable" material for sermons.
Let me round out this chapter with that recognition of
bird-migration in the custom among the Vikings of the
8th and 9th centuries of saying as they embarked upon
some raid upon the coasts south of them that they were
"following the swan's path."
CHAPTER V
NOAH'S MESSENGERS
OUR first thought when we hear the word "deluge"
is of Noah and his Ark, and the funny toy of our
childhood rises to the mind's eye. In that child-
hood we had no doubt that the flood described in the
first book of the Old Testament covered the whole globe.
Now we know that the story is a Semitic tradition, per-
haps nothing more than a sun-myth in origin, although
the actual occurrence of some extraordinary inundation
may have got mixed with it and localized it. In fact, the
belief in an all-submerging deluge, or, in what is its
equivalent — namely, a time when the world was a plain
of water with no land above its quiet surface — is a part
of the mythology or theology, or both, of many diverse
peoples in both hemispheres ; and almost always birds are
prominently associated with its incidents and the ensuing
separation of land from water.
A surprising number of persons of ordinary intelli-
gence even now, and in this enlightened country, continue
to regard beds of water- worn gravels, and the fossil
shells, etc., seen in the rocks, as relics of the Noachian
deluge, and "diluvian" and "antediluvian" are terms that
hardly yet have disappeared from popular geology.
The earliest available accounts of such a deluge as the
Noachian are engraved on clay tablets recovered from
the ruins of Babylonia, and written 2000 or more years
before the beginning of the Christian era. Several narra-
FABLE AND BOLKLORE 99
tives have been deciphered, agreeing in the facts of a
vast destruction by water in Mesopotamia, and of a
relatively huge house-boat built by a chosen family for
the preservation of themselves and an extensive collection
of livestock. After floating about for seven days this
Babylonian ship grounded on a submerged hill-top, and
seven days later the patriarchal shipmaster sent out as ex-
plorers a dove, a swallow, and a raven. The dove and the
swallow returned, the raven did not.
The close similarity between this and the Biblical ac-
count of Noah's voyage on a world of waters (which
account appears to be a combination of two separate
legends) leads to the opinion that the whole narrative is
derived from some more ancient and widespread Oriental
tradition ; and there seems fair evidence that it does not
describe any physical happening at all, but is a symbolical
sun-myth, a hint of which is given, even in the Bible, by
the incident of the rainbow. Let me quote the history in
Genesis so far as it relates to our purpose :
"And it came to pass at the end of forty days that Noah
opened the window of the ark which he had made: and he sent
forth a raven which went forth to and fro until the waters
were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent forth a dove
from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of
the ground. But the dove found no rest for the sole of her
foot, and she returned unto him into the ark; for the waters
were on the face of the whole earth. Then he put forth his
hand and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.
And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth
the dove out of the ark. And the dove came in unto him in
the evening, and, lo, in her mouth was an olive-leaf plucked off:
so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
And he stayed yet other seven days, and sent forth the dove,
which returned not again unto him any more.
As to the choice of these particular birds out of Noah's
ioo BIRDS IN LEGEND
great aviary, it is well to remember that doves were sacred
in ancient Babylonia to Ishtar, who, as the deified
(female) personification of productiveness, co-existent
with the (male) Sun-god, was sometimes designated as
Mother-goddess, or even as "Mother Earth": so that it
would be highly appropriate to send first a dove as a
messenger to this incarnation of fruitful land. This falls
in with Moncure D. Conway's suggestion 56 that the dove
and raven were tribally "sacred" animals among the
people affected by this Babylonian deluge. The choice
of the swallow was natural, when one remembers its
habit of flying long and far over bodies of water; and
that the raven should not come back is in keeping with its
character as much as is the quick return of the semi-
domestic dove and swallow. Dr. Laufer 52 notes that
St. Ambrose, in his treatise De Noe et Area, devotes a
whole chapter to the "crow's" impiety in not returning to
the Ark. The Arabs, according to Keane, 14 even yet call
this bird "raven of separation," meaning the separation
of the water from the land at the close of the Flood. An-
other Arabic source, quoted by Baring-Gould from the
medieval Chronicle of Abou-djafer Tabari, transmits tra-
ditional particulars that considerably extend the too-
laconic Biblical log of the Ark. "When Noah had left the
Ark," it relates, "he passed forty days on the mountain,
till all the water had subsided into the sea. . . . Noah
said to the raven, 'Go and place your foot on the earth,
and see what is the depth of the water.' The raven de-
parted, but having found a carcass it remained to devour
it and did not return. Noah was provoked, and he cursed
the raven, saying, 'May God make thee contemptible
among men, and let carrion be thy food.' "
Johann von Herder, the poet and friend of Goethe,
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 101
either found or invented another story to account for the
curse resting on the raven, which runs thus in the words
of an old translator:
Anxiously did Noah look forth from his swimming ark, wait-
ing to see the waters of the flood abate. Scarcely had the
peaks of the highest mountains emerged from the waves, when
he called all the fowls around him. "Who among you," said
he, "will be the messenger to go forth and see whether the
time of our deliverance is nigh?" The raven with much noise
crowded hastily in before all the rest: he longed ardently for
his favorite food. Scarcely was the window open, when he flew
away and returned no more. The ungrateful bird forgot his
errand and the interests of his benefactor — he hung at his
carcass ! But punishment did not delay. The air was yet filled
with poisonous fog, and heavy vapors hung over the putrid
corpses; these blinded his eyes and darkened his feathers. As
a punishment for his forgetfulness, his memory as well as his
sight became dim; even his own young he did not recognize;
and he experienced towards them no feelings of parental joy.
Quoting again the Arab chronicler Abou-djafer Tabari:
"After that Noah sent forth the dove. The dove de-
parted, and without tarrying put her foot in the water.
The water of the Flood scalded and pricked the legs of
the dove. It was hot and briny and feathers would not
grow on her legs any more, and the skin scaled off. Now,
doves which have red and featherless legs are of the sort
that Noah sent forth. The dove returning showed her
legs to Noah, who said : 'May God render thee well pleas-
ing to men/ For that reason the dove is dear to men's
hearts."
Still another Arabic version, given by Gustav Weil, is
that Noah blessed the dove, and since then she has borne
a necklace of green feathers; but the raven he cursed,
that its flight should be crooked — never direct like that of
other birds. This is also a Jewish legend. A more mod-
102 BIRDS IN LEGEND
ern addendum is that the magpie, one of the same group
of birds, was not permitted to enter the ark, but was
compelled to perch on the roof because it gabbled so in-
cessantly. A quaint 14th-century manuscript quoted by
Hulme 38 says of the raven's exit from the ark:
Then opin Noe his window
Let ut a rauen and forth he flew
Dune and vp sought heare and thare
A stede to sett upon somequar.
Vpon the water sone he fand
A drinkled best ther flotand
Of that flees was he so fain
To ship came he never again.
To this list of messengers medieval tradition added a
fourth — the kingfisher, which in Europe is blue-green
above and rich chestnut on the breast. At that time, how-
ever, it was a plain gray bird. This scout flew straight up
to heaven, in order to get a wide survey of the waters,
and went so near the sun that its breast was scorched to
its present tint and its back assumed the color of the sky
overhead. (This recalls Thoreau's saying that our blue-
bird carries the sky on its back and the earth on its
breast.)
Faith in a general flood long ago is shown by primitive
documents to have prevailed not only in Asia Minor and
eastward, but in Persia, India and Greece. It did not
prevail in Europe generally, nor in Africa. On the other
hand missionaries report traditions of it in Polynesia —
where, curiously, geographers find evidence of great sub-
sidences since the archipelagoes affected have been in-
habited ; and certainly it was a part of the mythical pre-
history of many tribes among the aborigines of North
America, where birds were often connected with the ad-
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 103
ventures of the few or solitary survivors by means of
whom the world was repeopled. Thus scores, perhaps
hundreds, of varying traditions and fables exist of the
creation of the earth out of a chaos of water, or of its
restoration after having been drowned in a universal
flood ; and often it is hard to distinguish the creation-myth
from the deluge-tale.
The American story-material of this nature may be
divided into groups that would correspond roughly to the
various aboriginal language-stocks, betraying a family
likeness in each group, but showing tribal variations as a
rule connected with each particular tribal or mythical
"first man," or with the totemic ancestor.
The creation-legends, as such, do not concern us much.
They are of purely mythical, supernatural beings of
various sorts, descending from the sky or coming up out
of the underworld, and either finding a readymade earth
to dwell upon or else creating one by magic. Some
Southern darkies will tell you that the blue jay made the
earth. "When all de worF was water he brung de fust
grit er dirt." The strangest conception of this kind is not
American but that of the Ainus of northern Japan, who
say that the earth originally was a sterile, cold, unin-
habitable and dreadful quagmire. The creator existed
aloft, however, and finally made and despatched a water-
wagtail to construct a place habitable for men. The bird
fluttered over the water-spaces, trampled the thin mud
and beat it down with its feet. Thus ground was
gradually hardened and elevated in spots, the water
steadily drained away and good soil was left. Hence the
Ainus hold the little wagtail in almost worshipful esteem.
Let us, however, restrict the inquiry to North America,
and to the deluge-story proper — that is, the destruction of
104 BIRDS IN LEGEND
human life by water overwhelming a flourishing world,
and the subsequent restoration.
The widely spread Algonkin stock has many such
legends, in which one or several persons and animals sur-
vive by floating in a canoe or raft, and at their behest a
beaver or a muskrat — the most natural agents — bring up
from the bottom a little mud, which is expanded by magic
into a new continent ; but frequently birds do this service
or otherwise help to form livable conditions. The Lenni
Lenape (Delawares) had a tradition of a universal deluge
in the far distant past, which Dr. Brinton 27 recounted as
follows, assuring us that it is unmixed with any teaching
by white missionaries: "The few people that survived
had taken refuge on the back of a turtle who had reached
so great an age that his shell was mossy, like the bank of
a runlet. In this forlorn condition a loon flew that way,
which they asked to dive and bring up land. He complied
but found no bottom. Then he flew away and returned
with a small quantity of earth in his bill. Guided by him,
the turtle swam to a place where a spot of dry land was
found. There the survivors settled and re-peopled the
land."
Few legends explain how or why the flood occurred.
The Ojibways, however, say that it was the result of the
malice of an underground monster visualized as a huge
serpent (recalling the earth-dragon of the Chinese), which
throughout all their mythology is the antagonist of the
good, constructive genius represented by their tribal hero
Manabozho.
The Beaver Indians of the Mackenzie Valley offer a
more materialistic and more picturesque explanation.
They told George Keith, one of the fur-traders there a
century ago, whose Letters are printed in Masson's col-
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 105
lection of northern archives," that the deluge resulted
from the sudden melting of a snowfall so deep that tall
trees were buried. This disastrous melting was produced
by the release of the sun from a bug in which it had been
hidden by sorcery. Then the sun flew away and began
to shed its heat. There's a sun-myth for you !
In the resulting freshet so philosophically accounted for
the few persons who had been left unburied in the world
of snow fled toward a high mountain, but only a man
and a woman reached it. On this mountain were gathered
pairs of all the kinds of animals in the country. The flood
persisted, and there was nothing to eat. Then the mal-
lard, the little grebe, or hell-diver, and the buzzard (?)
were sent to dive into the sea and try to find its bottom.
All failed repeatedly, but the buzzard dived again a few
days later, and came up with his bill full of earth, which
showed that the flood was subsiding. Finally the waters
drained away or dried up, but the soil had been so ruined
by submergence that not even roots could be found to
serve as food. When everybody was nearly starved, how-
ever, the human pair and the animals succeeded in finding
the home of Raven, who lived far away, and from his
stores they obtained food. Then a new world of life
began.
The Cheyennes and the Arikarees say that at the height
of the flood "a person" (masculine) was floating in the
water with all sorts of aquatic birds swimming about
him. He asked that one of them dive and get some earth.
All tried it and failed until a small duck brought up a
little mud in its beak and gave it to the man. He kneaded
it with his fingers until it was dry, then made little piles of
it on the surface of the water, which enlarged and
coalesced into a wide plain.
i 6 BIRDS IN ^LEGEND
The Chitimacha Indians of northern Lousiana used to
relate that a great deluge came, whereupon the redheaded
woodpecker went up to the sky and hung by his claws
to escape drowning, but his tail hung down into the dirty
water and was stained black, as you now see it. The
Pimas and other tribes of Arizona tell similar stories of
certain birds, one clan of Pueblo Indians putting it on the
turkey. They say that a flood was produced by the god
Baholi Konga to punish tribal wickedness. The good
persons in the community escaped this punishment by
means of the fact that Baholi Konga had clothed them in
turkey-skins, enabling them to fly to the high mountains.
They flew too low, however, and the tails of their dresses
dragged in the water, the stain of which is still visible.
With one more and a rather pretty tale from the tradi-
tions of the Paiute Indians, whose home is in the region
of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, I must close this
glance at aboriginal legends of a deluge here in America.
These Indians relate that formerly the whole world was
under water save the summit of Mt. Grant, on which
existed a fire. It was the only fire in the universe, and it
would have been extinguished when the wind blew hard
and the waves were dashed against the peak had not the
sage-hen settled down there and fanned away the water
with her wings; but while doing this inestimable ser-
vice to mankind the heat of the precious flame scorched
her breast, and that accounts for its present blackness.
A curiously similar story, which illustrates the primi-
tive savage's perception that obtaining fire was the most
important, the first, thing to do in beginning or recon-
stituting a habitable world, appears in the folklore of the
Arawaks of British Guiana, and may well be told among
deluge myths. They assure you that the world was once
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 107
engulfed in a flood that left exposed only a hilltop where
grew some tall cocoanut palms. The heavenly leader,
Sigu, conducted all the animals to this hill and made such
as could go up the trees, while others were placed in a
cave sealed water-tight with wax. (It was during that
long, distressful waiting in the palm-tops that the howl-
ing-monkeys perfected the agonizing quality of their
terrific voices.) Finally the waters subsided and the
agami (the trumpeter, Psophia crepitans) ventured too
soon upon the ground in search of food ; thereupon hordes
of starved ants, issuing from their half-drowned nests,
swarmed upon its legs, then of respectable size, and so
nearly devoured them that only the sticklike shanks now
characteristic of the bird remained. Sigu rescued the un-
fortunate agami, and then with infinite trouble kindled a
fire with a spark that the maroodie (or guan, a fellow-
bird with the agami of South- American barnyards) had
snapped up in mistake for a shining red insect. The guan
tried to shift the blame for this sinful error upon the
alligator but failed to do so, for his own guilt was be-
trayed by the glowing spark that had stuck in his throat,
as one may see by looking at any guan to-day.
Another instance of the misfortunes of the trumpeter
is related by Leo Miller 53 as he heard it among the
Maquritari Indians who live on the headwaters of the
Orinoco :
In the very beginning of things a trumpeter and a curassow
[a near cousin of the guan] decided upon a matrimonial
alliance, but domestic troubles soon broke out, and there was no
possibility of a reconciliation; it was thereupon decided to lay
the case before the gods who live on the summit of Mount
Duida. The wise gods ordered them to fight it out. In the
course of the combat that followed the curassow pushed the
trumpeter into the fire, burning off the feathers of the latter's
I0 8 BIRDS IN LEGEND
tail. The trumpeter promptly retaliated by pushing her mate
into the fire, singeing his crest. Thereupon the gods decided
that they should remain in this humiliating plight for the rest
of their days, and so . . . the curassow wears a curled crest
and the trumpeter has a very short tail.
I am tempted, in spite of my intention to stop here, to
annex an elaborate and somewhat amusing creation-myth
of the Yocut Indians of southern California, because it is
both appropriate and picturesque. It is thus set down by
Powers: 19
Once there was a time when there was nothing in the world
but water. About the place where Tulare Lake now is, there
was a pole standing far up out of the water, and on this pole,
perched a hawk and a crow ... for many ages. At length they
wearied of the lonesomeness, and they created the birds which
prey on fish, such as the kingfisher, eagle, pelican, and others.
Among them was a very small duck, which dived down to the
bottom of the water, picked its beak full of mud, came up, died,
and lay floating on the water. The hawk and crow then fell
to work and gathered from the duck's beak the earth which it
had brought up, and commenced making the mountains. They
began at the place now known as Ta-hi-cha-pa Pass, and the
hawk made the east range, while the crow made the west one.
Little by little, as they dropped in the earth, the great mountains
grew athwart the face of the waters pushing north. It was a
work of many years, but finally they met at Alt. Shasta, and
their labors were ended.
But behold, when they compared their mountains it was
found that the crow's was a great deal the larger. Then the
hawk said to the crow. "How did this happen, you rascal? I
warrant you have been stealing the earth from my bill, and that
is why your mountains are the biggest." It was a fact, and the
crow laughed in his claws. Then the hawk went and got some
Indian tobacco and chewed it and it made him exceedingly wise.
So he took hold of the mountains and turned them around in a
circle, putting his range in place of the crow's; and that is why
the Sierra Nevada is larger than the Coast Range.
CHAPTER VI
BIRDS IN CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND
FESTIVAL
THE crowing of a cock ushered in the momentous
tragedy that closed the earthly career of Jesus of
Nazareth. Jesus had told one of his disciples in
the evening of the Passover, that "the cock shall not
crow this day before that thou shalt twice deny that thou
knowest me" {Luke, xxii, 34). Later that same night
Jesus was arrested and taken into the house of the Jewish
high priest, and when, one after another, three persons
had identified Peter as one of the Disciples Peter each
time denied it, "and immediately, while he yet spake, the
cock crew. ,,
Although the cock and his brood have had a part in
Oriental and classical superstitions, ceremonies, and
myths since these things began, it is probable that Jesus
had in mind nothing more than the time of "cock-
crowing," which among the Jews was a recognized name
of the third watch of the night, beginning at three o'clock
in the morning. Mark enumerates the four watch-divis-
ions when he says: "Ye know not when the master of
the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-
crowing, or in the morning."
Out of this simple matter, a natural habit of the bird,
the early Christians, with the avidity of zealots for in-
spired pegs on which to hang new devotions, set up many
theories and customs. For instance, I find in the English
109
HO BIRDS IN LEGEND
periodical Nature Notes (VI, 189) the following, trans-
lated from the Treasury of Brunetti Latini, a teacher of
Dante in the poet's youth: "By the song of the cock we
may know the hour of the night, and even as the cock
before it singeth beateth its body with its wings, so should
a man before he prays flagellate himself." To this added
a fourteenth-century chant, as follows:
Cock at midnight croweth loud,
And in this delighteth:
But before he crows, his sides
With his wings he smiteth:
So the priest at midnight, when
Him from rest he raiseth,
Firstly doeth penitence,
After that he praiseth.
Ratzel mentions that in Abyssinia cocks were often
placed in churches as living alarm-clocks. It is a tradition
that at the moment of the great Birth the cock crowed :
Christus natus est! Hence as early as the 4th century
arose the belief in its crowing always on Christmas
eve — a legend alluded to by Shakespeare:
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Whereon our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long.
By a similar passage in Hamlet, where Bernardo,
Heraldo, and Marcellus are discussing the apparition of
the ghost of Hamlet's father, the reader learns of an-
other ancient superstition:
Bern. It was about to speak when the cock crew.
Her. And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
FABLE AND FOLKLORE in
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of clay; and, at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine: and of the truth herein
This present object made probation.
Mar. It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Not only ghosts, but the Devil and all his powers of
darkness, especially warlocks and witches, must disappear
at Chanticleer's cheerful warning that daylight is at
hand.
Domestic fowls had become common in Palestine at the
time of Jesus, having been received long before from
Persia. According to the Mishna Jews were prohibited
from selling a white cock to the heathen because it was suit-
able for sacrifice, but if it were defective it became unsuit-
able. Cyrus Adler tells us that they used to cut off a toe, and
so circumvent the prohibition. Says the Talmud : "There
be three that be unyielding — Israel among the peoples,
the dog among beasts, and the cock among birds" (Beca,
56).
No doubt it is true, as Mr. R. L. Gales pointed out a
few years ago in the National Review, that the sacred
mythology of the Nativity and Passion, which is far
wider than my immediate use of it, sprang up when the
minds of people constantly dwelt on the Faith in a spirit
of devotion rather than of controversy. "It seems, too,
that there was in the Christianity of the earlier ages
something that we may perhaps call a pantheistic ele-
ment, which has since disappeared."
Russians tell the story that while Christ was hanging
on the cross the sparrows were maliciously chirping /if!
jif! that is, "He is living, He is living!" in order to urge
the tormenters to fresh cruelties ; but the swallows cried,
112 BIRDS IN LEGEND
with opposite intent, Umer! Umer!" "Dead! Dead!"
Therefore the swallow is blessed, but the sparrow is
under a curse, and ever since that time it hops, because its
legs are tied together, for its sin, by invisible bonds.
Another story is that the sparrow was the bird that be-
trayed the hiding-place of Jesus in the Garden at Geth-
semane, whereas all other birds tried to entice away the
officers who were searching for him, especially the
swallow, whose erratic flight still shows that it is seeking
to find him.
The oystercatcher is still known among the Gaels of
northern Scotland as St. Bride's lad, says Seton Gordon
{Nineteenth Century, 1927,, p. 420) from the fact that
when that saint first visited Long Island she carried an
oystercatcher in each hand; also, there is an old Gaelic
tradition that this bird covered Jesus with seaweed when
his enemies appeared in hot pursuit. The oystercatcher was
therefore blessed, and still shows, as it flies, the form of
a cross on its plumage.
A Spanish legend asserts that the owl was once the
sweetest of singers; but that, having been present when
Jesus died, from that moment it has shunned daylight,
and now only repeats in a harsh tone Cruz! Cruz!
Most of the legends of the Cross, so far as concern
birds, at least, seem to have arisen in Sweden. The
Swedes say, for example, that a swallow hovered over the
Crucifixion crying Svale! Svale! "Cheer up! Cheer up!"
and it is therefore called in their country the bird of con-
solation. A similar story is current in Scandinavia of the
stork, which is said to have cried to the Redeemer, as it
flew about the Cross, Styrket! Styrket! "Strengthen ye."
In both cases there is a play on the Swedish names of
these birds; but they testify that the stork, now virtually
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 113
mute, formerly had a voice. In Sweden, where the red
crossbill is a familiar winter bird, arose the tradition that
its peculiarly crossed beak became twisted by its efforts
to pull the nails from Christ's hands and feet:
Stained with blood and never tiring
With its beak it doth not cease,
From the Cross 't would free the Saviour
Its creator's son release.
And the Saviour speaks in mildness:
Blest be thou of all the good!
Bear as token of this moment
Marks of blood and holy rood.
So Longfellow paraphrases Julius Mosen's little German
hymn.
The same loving service has been attributed to the red-
browed goldfinch of Europe in a legend current in Great
Britain — a story put into verse in The Spectator
(London, 19 10) by Pamela Tenant, partly thus:
Held in his slender beak the cruel thing,
Still with his gentle might endeavoring
But to release it.
Then as he strove, spake One— a dying space-
Take, for thy pity, as a sign of grace,
'Semblance of this, my blood, upon thy face
'A living glory.'
The complaining love-note of the wood-pigeon has, in
the northwestern part of Europe, become the subject of a
well-adapted and pathetic myth, as Watters 57 denomi-
nates it in his entertaining Birds of Ireland. "It is said
that a dove perched in the neighborhood of the holy cross
when the Redeemer was expiring, and, wailing its notes
of sorrow, kept repeating the words Tvyrie! Kyrie!'
114 BIRDS IN LEGEND
[Kyrie eleison — Lord have mercy !] to alleviate the agony
of his dying moments."
Of all the legends connecting birds with this awful
scene those relating to the little robin-redbreast of Europe
are most familiar, for they have been celebrated in poems
that everyone reads. The story is that the robin, pitying
the pain of the cruel crown pressed on the Saviour's brow,
plucked away the sharpest of the thorns; and some say
that before that moment the bird was all gray, and was
bound to remain so until it had done something worthy
of its having a red breast. A forgotten writer, whose
lines have been preserved in an old volume of Notes and
Queries, tells the story thus:
Bearing his cross, while Christ passed by forlorn,
His Godlike forehead by the mock crown torn,
A little bird took from that crown one thorn,
To soothe the dear Redeemer's throbbing head.
That bird did what she could ; His blood, 't is said,
Down-dropping dyed her tender bosom red.
Since then no wanton boy disturbs her nest;
Weasel nor wildcat will her young molest —
All sacred deem that bird of ruddy breast.
The Spaniards, however, believe swallows — also "red-
breasts" in their way — to be the birds that pulled the
thorns from Christ's crown — two thousand of them !
Another northern tradition is that the robin carries in
its beak daily a drop of water to those shut up in the
"burning lake," and that its breast is red because scorched
by the flames of Gehenna. This old Swedish legend gave
Whittier the inspiration for an exquisite poem:
He brings cool dew in his little bill,
And lets it fall on the souls of sin;
You can see the mark on his red breast still
Of fires that scorch as he drops it in.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 115
Still another theory explains that its reddish front re-
mains tinctured by the stain it received in trying to
staunch the blood that flowed from the Redeemer's
pierced side.
Almost all boys in Great Britain are, or used to be,
collectors of birds' eggs, before bird-protecting societies
and public enlightenment restricted their destructive en-
thusiasm; but the nest of the "ruddock" (robin) was
rarely disturbed by the most careless of them, who, if un-
deterred by any soft sentiment, were frightened by the
superstition that bad luck followed any such vandalism.
Many maxims to this effect might be quoted, one of
which, a proverb in Cornwall, runs :
He that hurts robin or wren
Will never prosper, boy or men.
In Essex they repeat to children a little ballad like this:
The robin and the redbreast,
The robin and the wren;
If ye take out o' their nest
Ye'U never thrive again.
The robin and the redbreast,
The martin and the swallow;
If ye touch one o' their eggs
Bad luck will follow.
The Scotch say it a little differently:
The laverock and the lintie,
The robin and the wren;
If ye harry their nests
Ye'll never thrive again.
Let me digress here for a moment. "Laverock" is
Scottish for lark, meaning the skylark. De Gubernatis, 54
n6 BIRDS IN LEGEND
who discourses learnedly on the mythical connotations of
the name in India and ancient Greece, finds that the sig-
nificance of this bird in popular tales is due to its crest,
which he shows to be an indication that it was among the
birds of the sun. "The crested lark," he says, "is the same
as the crested sun, the sun with its rays," and he con-
tinues: "In the legend of St. Christopher I see an
equivoque between the word Christos and the word cresta,
crest, and either way I see the sun personified."
Whatever these speculations may be worth the old
stories attribute to the lark that funereal charity which
belongs to several birds, among them the European robin ;
and this brings us back to the main track and to the pretty
story of the Babes in the Woods. Away back in bad old
times a Norfolk gentleman left legacies to two infant
children, which were to pass to their uncle if the babies
died. After a year this uncle hired ruffians to take the
children into a forest and kill them, but instead the men
left them there to starve. For a time they ate black-
berries, but soon became exhausted, lay down, and went
to sleep, and expired.
Their little corpse the robin-redbreast found,
And strew'd with pious bill the leaves around. 8
More modern poets have made many allusions to this
touching tale, which Shakespeare knew, for in Cymbeline
he makes Arviragus say over Imogen —
Thou shalt not lack
The flowers that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azured harebell. . . . The ruddock would
With charitable bill bring thee all these.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 117
And in William Collins's Dirge to Cymbclinc are the
lines :
The redbreast oft at evening hours
Shall kindly lend his little aid,
With heavy moss, and gathered flowers,
To deck the ground where thou art laid.
The conceit is far more ancient than Shakespeare or
Gay or even than Robert Yarrington — who, in 1601,
wrote a ballad on it concluding,
No buriall this pretty pair of any man receives
Till Robin Redbreast piously did cover them with leaves —
for Horace relates in one of his poems how he as a child
wandering one day on Mount Vultur fell wearily asleep,
and was covered by protecting doves with laurel and
myrtle leaves.
The robin is always remembered at Christmas in
the rural villages and farms of northern Europe,
for it is not migratory. In South Germany the cus-
tom is to put grain on a roof for the redbreasts, who
come trustfully about houses at that season, and find
welcome shelter in barns and straw-stacks: and in
Sweden and elsewhere an unthreshed sheaf of wheat is
set up on a pole for their winter fare.
It will have been noticed that in the ballads quoted, the
wren is associated with the robin in a protective way. A
whole book might be written about this least of birds,
which, although the least, is called "king" in every
European language. We are told that a wren was in the
stable at Bethlehem when Christ was born ; and an Irish
proverb runs: 'The robin and the wren are God's two
holy men." How surprising, then, to read of a custom
called Hunting (or in some places Burying) the Wren,
n8 BIRDS IN LEGEND
which once prevailed in southern France, in Keltic parts
of England, in Wales, and also in Ireland, where it per-
sisted until abolished by the British Government about the
middle of the 19th century. Accounts of the practices,
songs, etc., connected with it may be found in antiquarian
histories, for example the following from Miles's book of
Christmas customs:
In the Isle of Man very early on Christmas morning, when
the church-bells had rung out midnight, servants went out to
hunt the wren. They killed the bird, fastened it to the top of
a long pole; and carried it in procession to every house, chant-
ing these words:
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for Jack of the Can,
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for everyone.
At each house they sought to collect money. At last, when all
had been visited, they laid the wren on a bier, carried it to
the church-yard, and buried it with the utmost solemnity, sing-
ing Manx dirges.
It is evident that this is a very ancient practice, and
embodies in its utterly degenerate state a religious idea
or symbolism, the meaning of which has been forgotten.
Why, for example, should the feathers of the murdered
Manx wrens be preserved, one by one, among the coast
families, as a talisman preserving the possessor from ship-
wreck, unless some religious sanction was involved, and
this may be connected with St. Stephen, the first Christian
martyr, who was stoned to death ; for this savage custom
belonged to St. Stephen's Day, December 26, as well as to
Christmas, or locally in place of Christmas. But why
the wren, rather than some other bird? The matter is
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 119
interesting enough to justify quoting the broad account
of the matter furnished by Swann: 47
An old Irish custom on St. Stephen's Day, and one that
has not quite died out, was the "hunting of the wren" by boys.
When captured it was tied, alive but maimed, to a pole (or,
according to Vallancey — De Reb. Hib., IV, 13 — tied by the
leg in the center of two hoops placed at right angles with one
another) and paraded around the neighborhood, a few doggerel
verses being repeated at each house, while a donation was re-
quested, one version being;
The wran, the wran, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze,
Come, give us a bumper, or give us a cake,
Or give us a copper, for Charity's sake.
Yarrell records a similar practice in Kerry, where the peasantry
on Christmas Day used to hunt the bird with two sticks, "one to
beat the bushes the other to fling at the bird." Bullock also
mentions it as prevalent in the Isle of Man, both on Christmas
Eve and St. Stephen's Day, and tells us it was founded on a
tradition of a beautiful fairy who lured the male inhabitants
to a watery grave in the sea, and who to escape subsequent de-
struction took the form of a wren, which form she was sup-
posed to be doomed by a spell to reassume each succeeding New
Year's Day, ultimately perishing by human hands. ... To my
own knowledge this custom of a "wren hunt" existed in Not-
tinghamshire also within recent times, the bird being hunted
along the hedgerows by boys armed with stones, but I do not
recollect that anything was done with the bird when killed or
maimed. . . .
In connection with this belief [alluded to above] in the king-
ship over other birds, a Twelfth Day custom of parading a
caged wren in Pembrokeshire, with the lines recited, is described
in Swainson's Folklore of British Birds, O'Curry has recorded
that the wren, like the raven, was kept domesticated on account
of the auguries derived from it, which were employed by the
Druids. An Irish proverb asserts that "The fox is the cunning-
est beast in the world barring the wren." According to Dalyell
the wren is considered an unlucky token in Scotland, but the
robin a lucky one.
120 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Explanations of this revolting yet long persistent cus-
tom have been many and various. A totemic sort of
theory is that the bird "was once regarded as sacred, and
the Christmas hunting is the survival of an annual cus-
tom of slaying the divine animal, such as is found among
primitive peoples. The carrying of its body from door
to door is apparently intended to convey to each house a
portion of its virtues." I know of no facts in history to
support this theory as applied to the Keltic race. One
authority tells us that the "crime" for which the bird
must be punished so ferociously is that it has "a drop o'
the de'il's blood in its veins," but so has the magpie, which
is not persecuted.
Lady Wilde 60 assures us that "the wren is mortally
hated by the Irish for on one occasion, when the Irish
troops were approaching to attack a portion of Thomas
Cromwell's army the wrens came and perched on the
Irish drums, and by their tapping and noise aroused the
English soldiers, who fell on the Irish troops and killed
them all." For this tragic incident we are given no time
or place; and it happens that the same report was made
respecting a battle between Irish and Danish invaders
some 800 years before Cromwell's campaigns in the
Emerald Isle or anywhere else.
The real clue to the puzzle is contained in the fact that
in their barbarous hunt for wrens the men and boys kept
yelling words that in Cormac's Glossary (10th century)
are explained as "draoi-en," Druid-bird. We know that
the Druid priests were accustomed to draw auguries from
the chirpings of the wren — a divination to which the
early Christian missionaries objected strenuously. It is
probable that they condemned the little songster as a
symbol of heathen rites, and encouraged their converts to
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 121
kill it at the time of the annual Christian feast as a sign
of abnegation of Druidical connections. The stoning of
the birds on St. Stephen's Day might be regarded as a
vengeful reminder of the manner of that martyr's
murder by a mob.
One more bird-story is connected with Christianity in
general — that alluded to in Hamlet, where Ophelia says:
"Well, God 'ield you ! They say the owl was a baker's
daughter!" This enigmatical remark probably had ref-
erence to the story formerly, and perhaps still, com-
mon among the peasantry in the English Midlands, of a
baker's daughter that was transformed into an owl by
Jesus as a punishment for reducing to a very small size
the large piece of dough which her mother had agreed
to bake for him. The dough, however, swelled in the
oven to enormous proportions, to the girl's great astonish-
ment, and she gasped out "Heu, heu, heu!" This owl-
like noise suggested her transformation into that bird.
The story is told to children as a warning lesson against
illiberal treatment of the poor. It is evidently alluded to,
also, in Beaumont and Fletcher's play The Nice Valour,
where the Passionate Lord says, after speaking of a nest
of owls, "Happy is he whose window opens to a brown
baker's chimney! he shall be sure there to hear the bird
sometimes after twilight." In northern Germany they
say a baker's man was the offender; and that he was
changed by Jesus into a cuckoo, the white spots in whose
wings show where the flour was sprinkled on the man's
dun coat. The Norse people apply the same moral by
means of their common woodpecker, whose pattern of
dress is indicated in the legend known to Norse children
as the Gertrud story, which is prettily related by Miss
Walker. 39 Brewer's Handbook notes that a maid-ser-
122 BIRDS IN LEGEND
vant of the Virgin Mary, who had purloined one of her
mistress's dresses, was converted into a lapwing and con-
demned forever to cry "Tyvit, tyvit!" (I stole it). The
source of the anecdote is not given, nor the language of
the one who interprets it, but it reminds one of Tenny-
son's.
With a lengthened loud halloo,
Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o.
The Greeks, according to Andrew Lang, had a similar
legend of feminine impiety, by which they mystically ex-
plained the origin of owls and bats.
The prevalence of a belief in such transformations as
these by Jesus is very widespread; the traditions vary
somewhat, as we have seen, in different countries, but it is
evident that the root is in the primitive notion that such
miracles were not only possible, but natural. Rather
more remote and obscure is the connection of birds with
certain other religious feasts, such as the substitution of
turkey for boar's-head as the central dish for the Christ-
mas dinner among the English Dissenters, attributed to
the fact that turkeys became common about the time of
the Reformation, and acquired a meritorious character
on that account among those who wanted to continue the
Christmas feast without the taint of a dish partaking of
the customs of the hated Papists. Is our New England
custom of a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day trace-
able to this, remembering that the Puritans paid little or
no heed to Christmas ?
For centuries, and until comparatively recent times,
among the sports and jollifications recalling the Roman
carnival (at the same date) that marked Shrove Tuesday,
the last day before Lent, both in Britain and in France,
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 123
along with the eating of unlimited pancakes, cock-fight-
ing and "throwing at cocks" had the most prominent
place. The last-mentioned sport consisted in fastening
live cocks in a certain position, and letting men compete
in throwing clubs at them, the man who killed the bird
winning it. This atrocious form of amusement did not
shock the populace of a time when bear-baiting, bull-bait-
ing, and the pitting of dogs against each other or against
badgers and rats were popular; yet a few protested, and
even in the 17th century antiquaries were searching for
the origin of the custom. Hearne asserted that it was in
memory of English victories over the French (symbolized
by the Gallic coq) in the time of Henry V; but the sport
was customary in France itself long before that time.
A writer quoted by Smith 61 records that "the common
account of it is that the crowing of a cock prevented our
Saxon ancestors from massacring their conquerors, the
Danes, on the morning of a Shrove Tuesday while asleep
in their beds/' which recalls one of the explanations of
the Irish wren-hunting. My own opinion is that the
custom had no particular significance, but was just a
sportive way of getting without much cost the material
for a good dinner, as were the "turkey shoots" of our
western frontier ; and that Erasmus was fairly right when
he remarked that "the English eat a certain cake on
Shrove Tuesday, on which they immediately run mad and
kill the poor cocks."
Lent closes with the joyful celebration of Easter, an
occasion in which the eggs of birds, at least, have a per-
sistent and prominent part, and doves find a place in
several Old World ceremonies of the Church.
In the matter of the almost universal and everywhere
popular custom of playing with colored eggs at Easter,
I24 BIRDS IN LEGEND
I can do no better than quote The Catholic Encyclopedia,
article "Easter" :
Because the use of eggs was forbidden during Lent they were
brought to the table on Easter Day, colored red to symbolize
the Easter joy. This custom is found not only in the Latin but
also in the Oriental Churches. The symbolic meaning of a
new creation of mankind by Jesus risen from the dead was
probably an invention of later times. The custom may have its
origin in Paganism, for a great many pagan customs, celebrat-
ing the return of spring, gravitated to Easter. The tgg is the
emblem of the germinating life of early spring. Easter eggs,
the children are told, come from Rome with the bells which on
Thursday go to Rome and return Saturday morning. The
sponsors in some countries give Easter eggs to their god-chil-
dren. Colored eggs are used by children at Easter in a sort of
game which consists in testing the strength of the shells. Both
colored and uncolored eggs are used in some parts of the United
States in this game, known as "egg-picking." Another practice
is the "egg-rolling" by children on Easter Monday on the lawn
of the White House in Washington.
A quaint feature in this pagan survival in a Christian
celebration of a momentous incident and idea is the con-
nection with it of the rabbit. Wherever colored Easter
eggs are displayed, images of a rabbit are likely to ac-
company them. Children are told that the Easter Rabbit
lays the eggs, for which reason they are, in some coun-
tries, hidden in a nest in the garden. The strangeness of
the association disappears when we remember that the
date of the feast is determined by the time when the
moon first becomes full after the spring equinox, and that
the rabbit, which has from time immemorial been a sym-
bol of fertility, is representative of the moon-goddess,
Luna, which was worshipped annually at a date coincid-
ing with the Easter festival. Thus, like many other
pagan rites and symbols significant of reviving nature, it
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 125
became confused with the Christian celebration of the
Resurrection.
At the feast of the Pentecost, on Whitsunday, com-
memmorating the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the
Apostles, doves were formerly always employed in
Europe in staging the solemnities.
On Whitsuntide, white pigeons tame in strings from heaven fly,
And one that framed is of wood still hangeth in the skie,
as we are told by Neogeorgus (151 1-63), speaking of the
custom in Germany; and elsewhere we learn that in
Spain pigeons with cakes tied to their legs were let loose
in churches, where representations of the Holy Ghost
were a part of the celebration. This last fact accounts for
the use of the dove — an emblem of the third element of
the God head, as we shall see.
To a similar old custom, if Marion Crawford, the
learned author of Salve Venctia, is not mistaken, we owe
the picturesque fact that pigeons are a feature of the plaza
of St. Mark in Venice — one of the "sights" of that
wonderful city:
The Venetians always loved processions, and it is to one of
these pageants that the pigeons of St. Mark's owe their im-
munity. As early as the end of the fourteenth century it was
the custom to make a great procession on Palm Sunday, in the
neighborhood of St. Mark's. A canon of the Cathedral de-
posited great baskets on the high altar containing the artificial
palms prepared for the Doge, the chief magistrates, and the
most important members of the clergy. . . . According to the
appointed service the procession began immediately after the
distribution of the palms; and while the choir chanted the
words "Gloria, latis et honor" of the sacred hymn, a great number
of pigeons were sent flying from different parts of the facade
down into the square, having little screws of paper fastened
to their claws to prevent them from flying too high. The people
i 2 6 BIRDS IN LEGEND
instantly began to catch the birds, and a great many were
actually taken; but now and then one, stronger than the rest,
succeeded in gaining the higher parts of the surrounding build-
ings, enthusiastically cheered by the crowd.
Those who had once succeeded in making their escape were
regarded as sacred forever with all their descendants. The
state provided them with food from its granaries, and before
long, lest by mistake any free pigeons should be caught on the next
Palm Sunday the Signory next decreed that other birds must be
used on the occasion.
F. Hopkinson Smith, in his Gondola Days, gives a more
secular account of the origin of the regard felt by the
Venetians for these "pets of the State," whose ancestor,
the genial artist writes, brought the good news to Venice
of the capture (in 1205) of Candia by Admiral Enrico
Dandolo.
CHAPTER VII
BIRDS AS SYMBOLS AND BADGES
CERTAIN kinds of birds have become symbols of
popular ideas, or even significant badges of
persons and events, and are thus more or less con-
ventionalized accessories in art, by reason of their ap-
pearance (form, color), or their habits, or their connec-
tion with some historic incident or fabulous tale. In
many cases this symbolism is of very ancient origin, as
is most particularly true of the eagle and the dove. The
eagle is accounted for elsewhere in its various aspects and
relations: but the dove, by which is meant the prehis-
torically domesticated blue rock-pigeon, almost deserves
a chapter to itself.
To trace the career of the dove in religion, customs, and
art is, indeed, one of the most engaging of my tasks, and
the quest discloses a curiously double and diverse symbo-
lism running almost simultaneously from the beginning
of history to the present, for this bird serves as an emblem
of purity and conjugal affection in one association, and
in another suggests the familiar epithet "soiled."
The story of this bird goes back to the misty dawn of
civilization and religion in Mesopotamia, the Garden-of-
Eden land, where arose the dual "nature-worship" of the
combining elements heaven and earth, male and female.
The fecund soil, yielding its fruits to the fertilizing sun-
shine and rain, sent by the sky-god, became personified as
Ishtar (Ashtaroth), and to her was assigned the amorous
127
i 2 8 BIRDS IN LEGEND
and prolific dove as a type of the family concord and
productiveness she represented; and white doves were
sold to worshippers at Babylon to be offered as sacrifices
in her temple. Her worship was spread to Asia Minor
and the shore of the iEgean by Babylonian and Assyrian
conquests, and she became known to the Phrygians as
Cybele, to the Syrians as Darketo, and to the Phoenicians
as Atagartis, whom the Ionian Greeks called Astarte.
In these transformations the primitive Ishtar gradually
fell from her original state as a type of motherhood to
the baser one of physical love-indulgence, and among
her votaries were troops of maidens who publicly offered
their virginity at her shrine, as a form of sacrifice and
service.
Some of the Syrians are said to have thought of their
goddess Darketo as "Semiramis," but this was by con-
fusion with her fabled daughter. Whether or not a real
woman and queen of that name ever existed, I leave
to the historians, but a mythical Semiramis belongs to my
story, and her history was first written by Ctesias, an
Asiatic-Greek historian of the fourth century B.C.
Ctesias says that near Askalon was a large lake beside
which Darketo (otherwise Atagartis) had a habitation;
she is represented with the face of a woman and the body
of a fish — perhaps the most antique conception of a mer-
maid. She fell in love with a fair youth and a girl-baby
resulted. Then, in shame, Darketo destroyed her lover,
exposed the child in a rocky desert, and flung herself
into the lake. The babe, nurtured by doves on milk and
cheese, was discovered and reared by a herdsman, who
called the child Semiramis — a Syrian word for "doves."
At the close of her life this mythical Semiramis changed
herself into a dove and flew away with certain other
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 129
birds. Hence, in Ctesias's time, divine honors were paid
in the East to doves; and a dove is the badge of Semi-
ramis in Syrian monumental art. Diodorus Siculus re-
peats this account with additional details.
The sceptre in the hand of the revered image of
Atagartis in her great temple at Hierapolis bore the
golden figure of a dove on its summit ; and in Phoenicia,
Cyprus, Sardinia, and wherever the Phocians and other
Levantine traders of that day traded and colonized, have
been found small terra-cotta figures of this goddess, or of
one of her priestesses, always with a dove.
To the devotees of this cult, which was confined to the
coastal region, and in which the Hebrews and other
Semites of the interior desert-plains took no part, a dove
was so sacred that if a person even accidentally touched
one he was "unclean" throughout the day. Hence the
birds thronged in the villages and houses and swarmed
about the temple yards, where they were fed by visitors,
as still is the custom in the Mohammedan mosques that
have taken their place. This was noted especially at
Hierapolis, where, according to Lucian, one of the vene-
rated images had a pigeon's head.
This religious doctrine, and more particularly the
Phrygian cult of Cybele, was undoubtedly carried to the
iEgean islands and to Greece, while civilization was still
in its infancy there, for the "sea-born" Aphrodite — an
epithet indicative of her arrival from across the waters — -
is only Astarte transformed in Greek thought, which
seems to explain the classic story that Aphrodite was born
from an egg, with a dove brooding upon it, rolled ashore
by a fish.
The focus of religious emotion in those early centuries
of Greece, at least in Attica, was probably in the most
I3 o BIRDS IN LEGEND
ancient of oracles, that at Dodona. Tradition ascribed its
origin to a dove that spoke with a human voice; and
among those who served the shrine were three priestesses
popularly called "Doves," whose duty it was to announce
oracles requested as if real birds uttered them from the
foliage of the surrounding oaks — divine trees. Con-
nected with the cult of Zeus at Dodona was that of
Aphrodite, then regarded as the goddess of exalted love,
not of the sensual passion by which in later times her cult
in Rome, as Venus, became degraded. It was natural,
as we have seen, that the dove should be associated with
this pristine Aphrodite, and equally suitable that it should
be adopted subsequently as the attendant of lascive
Venus, for as De Kay 18 observes, doves are forever mak-
ing love and caressing each other. "Chaucer speaks of
'the wedded turtil with her herte trewe'. ... So the
bird is by its nature and habits fitted to be the attendant
and symbol of the goddess of love — the bird that draws
her flower-studded chariot through the air." A Persian
poet asks:
Knowest thou why round his neck the dove
A collar wears? — it is to tell
He is the faithful slave of love,
And serves all those who serve him well. 88
An interesting memorandum here is the observation by
A. B. Cook, 37 the erudite author of Zeus, that the oracle
in the oasis Ammon (Siwah), which Alexander the
Great took such prodigious trouble to visit and consult,
was, like that at Dodona, founded by a dove. "More-
over," Mr. Cook remarks, "Semiramis is said to have
learned her destiny from Ammon, and to have fulfilled
it by becoming a dove. ... In short, it appears that the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 131
whole apparatus of the oracle at Dodona . . . was to be
matched in the oasis of Ammon. Strabo adds that both
oracles gave their responses in the selfsame manner, not
by words but by certain tokens, such as the flight of
doves."
The conception of Aphrodite also included that of
spring, ushered in by the early return of this migrant
from its winter resort in Africa and the time when it
cooed for a mate — the season when "a livelier iris changes
on the burnished dove"; while the revival of nature in
spring has always to imaginative souls typified the Resur-
rection as taught in Christian doctrine and exemplified in
some of the customs of Easter, which, of course, is only
an adaptation of the far more ancient festival of rejoicing
at the return of the sun — the rebirth of the year.
Another line of thought apparently of Oriental origin,
but prevalent in northern Europe, connected this dove
with the Fates and with death, especially death by
violence — a phase that is traced in wearisome detail back
to the Rigvedas and other misty sources by the myth-
readers, and which probably comes from its plaintive
"cooing." Sometimes, however, the fateful dove brings
good tidings and succor to the distressed, as in the story
of Queen Radegund, who in the form of a dove once de-
livered sailors from shipwreck.
This is an appropriate place, perhaps, to repeat the
legend related by the Rhodian Apollonius in his poem
Argonautica, concerning the Symplegades — the two
islands that stand on opposite sides of the Bosphorus
"mouth." It appears that these islands were wont in
days ancient even to Apollonius to swing together and
crush any living thing that attempted to pass between
them and enter the Black Sea. Phineas, who lived on the
132 BIRDS IN LEGEND
shore near by told Jason, who had arrived there on his
journey in search of the Golden Fleece, and who wanted
to go on into the Euxine, how to escape the fatal grasp
of the island-gates. He was to sail or row the Argo as
near as he dared to the entrance, then let loose a dove.
The bird would fly onward, the islands would rush to-
gether to crush it; and the instant they had swung back
Jason must drive his ship on between them before they
could close again. This plan, so clever except for the
poor bird, succeeded, and broke the magic spell. Living
heroes had passed safely between them, and ever since
then the malicious Symplegades have remained stable.
This story has been scientifically analyzed by the
mythologists in various ways, but none has deigned to
consider why a dove was chosen, rather than some other
bird, as the martyr of the occasion. I am inclined to think
it was because among sailors of those days the dove was
believed to help them ; and that, in turn, was owing to its
association with the "foam-born" Aphrodite, who was
worshipped by mariners, especially about Cyprus, as god-
dess of the sea.
I have dwelt somewhat at length on these antique
fables, not only to give a glimpse of the nativity of
certain far more modern, or even existing, ideas and
customs connected with the dove, but more especially to
display the background of tradition and feeling that
affected the minds of people toward this familiar bird at
the time when Christianity began to manifest itself in
Italy, and began to replace by a Christian symbolism the
previous figurative significance of the dove. The highest
place given it in early Christian thought and art was as
a representative of the third member of the godhead —
the Holy Ghost, and it still holds this significance, as
FABLE AND FOLKLORE
133
every one may realize who recalls the hymn beginning
"Come Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove," which will be sung
in perhaps hundreds of churches next Sunday. An old
and natural inference followed, that the devil cannot ever
take (by magic) the form of this celestial messenger.
According to an apocryphal gospel the Holy Ghost in
the semblance of a dove, designated Joseph as the spouse
of the Virgin Mary by alighting on his head ; and in the
same manner, according to Eusebius, Fabian was indi-
cated as divinely appointed to be Pope in the third cen-
tury. It is said also that at the Council of Nice (A. D. 325 )
the creed formulated there was signed by the Holy
Spirit, appearing as a dove — a legend that magnifies the
tremendous importance of that document.
Again, there is the story of the miraculous dove at the
consecration of Clovis on Christmas Day, 496, at Rheims.
When Clovis and St. Remi, the bishop, reached the
baptistery the priest bearing the holy chrism was pre-
vented by the density of the crowd from reaching the
font. Then a dove, whiter than snow, brought a vial
(ampoule) filled with chrism sent from heaven; and the
bishop took it, and with this miraculous chrism perfumed
the baptismal water for the Frankish chief by whose vic-
tories over Germanic barbarians France was founded.
The lives of medieval saints and martyrs — or at any
rate, the records of them — abound in such incidents of
supernatural recognition. Several devoted women on
taking the vow of virginity received their veils from
doves hatched in no earthly nest; bishops were more than
once given approval of public acts, especially when un-
popular, by similar manifestations of divine approbation,
doves alighting on their heads. "A dove is the special
emblem of Gregory the Great (A. D. 590-604), and its
I3 4 BIRDS IN LEGEND
figure rests on his right shoulder in the magnificent statue
of this pope in Rome."
This is in allusion, according to The Catholic Encyclo-
pedia, "to the well-known story recorded by Peter the
Deacon {Vita, xxviii), who tells us that when the pope
was dictating his homilies in Ezechiel a veil was drawn
between his secretary and himself. As, however, the
pope remained silent for long periods of time, the servant
made a hole in the curtain and, looking through, beheld
a dove seated on Gregory's head with its beak between
his lips. When the dove withdrew its beak the holy
pontiff spoke and the secretary took down his words ; but
when he became silent the servant again applied his eyes
to the hole and saw that the dove had again placed its
beak between his lips." Much the same incident belongs
to the biography of another early pope; and apropos to
the significance of this bird in the Romanist method of
demonstrating that faith to the populace, Mackenzie E.
Walcott contributed the following bit of history to Notes
and Queries in 1873:
The dove was regarded as the symbol of the holy spirit
which came in the eventide of days, bringing safety and peace
to the ark of Christ and a world rescued from wreck, and to
whom Christians should be conformed in innocency. A dove
was suspended over the altar, as Amphilochius says of S. Basil
that he broke the Holy Bread and placed one third part in the
pendant golden dove over the altar. The Council of Constanti-
nople charged a heretic with robbing the gold and silver doves
that hung above the fonts and altars. The dove was also the
symbol of our Blessed Lord, as we learn from Prudentius and
an expression of Tertullian, "the Dove's house," applied to a
church, probably in allusion to Coloss. i, 20.
The dove for reservation [that is, withholding a part of the
eucharist] whether for communion of infants in the baptistery,
or of sick under a ciborium, was suspended by a chain. One is
preserved in the church of S. Nazarius at Milan, and a solitary
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 135
mention of another is contained in an inventory of Salisbury.
In Italy at an early date, the dove was set upon a tower for
reservation. . . . We also find in early works of devotional art
the dove represented as flooding a cross with streams of living
water. There is a famous example in the Lateran, symbolical
of Holy Baptism. A holy lamb and dove are placed on the
canopy of the baptistery at Saragossa.
It seems unlikely that Mohammed could have heard of
these pontifical sources or methods of divine inspiration,
yet, according to Brewer, 34 Prideaux, in his Life of
Mahomet, relates that he taught a dove to pick seed
placed in his ear as it perched on his shoulder; but the
wily prophet "gave it out it was the Holy Ghost, in the
form of a dove, come to impart to him the counsels of
God." This accounts probably (for Shakespeare may
well have heard the tradition) for the doubting query in
Henry V: "Was Mohammed inspired with a dove?"
Whether this legend is credible or not, it is certain
that Islam has preserved the ancient Oriental reverence
for this bird, which now flocks in great numbers around
all the mosques; and the Moslems have a half-super-
stitious feeling that any bird that seeks its rest and
makes its nest about temples and holy buildings must not
be disturbed — a kindly regard in which swallows share,
at least in the Near East, where the Mohammedans say
that the swallow must be a very holy bird, because it
makes an annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
John Keane, 14 an Englishman who spent a long time
in Arabia about forty years ago, records that at Mecca
vast flocks of pigeons were to be seen in the public space
surrounding the kaaba. By repeated observations he esti-
mated that between 5000 and 6000 pigeons assembled
there daily, all so tame that they would alight on men's
136 BIRDS IN LEGEND
heads and shoulders. They are still held as almost sacred,
are never killed, and nest in nearly every building in
niches left for that purpose in the walls of the rooms.
Pilgrims purchase baskets of grain to give to the pigeons
as a pious act, and each benefactor "becomes the vortex
of a revolving storm of pigeons." In some remote places,
indeed, these temple-pets become themselves almost ob-
jects of worship. For example, on the direct road be-
tween Yarkand and Khotan, Chinese Turkestan, stands
the locally celebrated pigeon-shrine (Kaptar Mazzar),
where all good Moslems must dismount and reverently
approach the sacred spot. "Legend has it that Imam
Shakir Padshah, trying to convert the Buddhist inhabi-
tants of the country to Islam by the drastic agency of
the sword, fell here in battle against the army of Khotan,
and was buried in the little cemetery. It is affirmed that
two doves flew forth from the heart of the dead saint,
and became the ancestors of the swarms of pigeons we
saw . . . sated with the offerings of the Faithful, and
extremely fat. . . . We were told that if a hawk were
to venture to attack them it would fall down dead."
A pretty story is related by E. Dinet, a French artist,
in his book of sketches in Algeria. "Doves, which the
Arabs name imams, because," he was told, "like the imam
in the mosques, they call the faithful to prayer, and be-
cause, like him, they do not cease to prostrate themselves
by inclining their necks in devotions to the Creator."
Newspapers of the year 192 1 contained an account of
how two European boys ignorantly provoked a riot in
Bombay by killing a couple of pigeons in the street. The
Mohammedans were horrified and the police had difficulty
in supressing an extensive disturbance; the stock ex-
change and other general markets were closed, and a
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 137
wide-spread strike of workmen in India was threatened, as
an evidence of the deep feeling aroused by the boys'
sacrilegious act. It was evidence also of the panic-force
of superstition under an appropriate stimulus, and a good
illustration of Professor George Santayana's definition
of superstition as "reverence for what hurts." In the
same year it was reported by telegraph from Brownsville,
Texas, that a snow-white pigeon flew into Sacred Heart
Church there on the morning of November 11, during a
service celebrating Armistice Day, and perched over a
memorial window, where it remained throughout the
service. Had it been a sparrow or woodpecker no one
would have thought of recording the incident.
Men in the Middle Ages had perfect faith in prodigies
such as those connected with the holy ampoule of St.
Remi and the subsequent miracles in which it was so
efficacious ; and everyone understood their meaning. This
continued as long as the Church held sway over hearts
and minds of the populace. Nobody, probably, had the
disposition, not to say the hardihood, to deny the story —
you may read it in Froissart — that at the battle of Roose-
beek (or Rosebeque), which put an end to the power of
Philip van Artevelde in 1382, a white dove was seen to
circle about and alight on the French oriflame, which
then swept on to victory.
Readers of Malory's Morte D' Arthur will recall that
as on its appearance the Holy Grail passes before Lance-
lot's eyes in the castle of Pelleas, a dove, entering at the
window and carrying a small golden censer in its beak,
impressed the awe-struck knights of the Table Round as
a lovely token of the purity and worship to which the
castle was devoted. Nothing could be more natural in
medieval romance than this incident — a miracle com-
138 BIRDS IN LEGEND
memorated in the opera Parsifal. The Venetians still
assert that the pigeons so familiar and petted in the piazza
of St. Mark fly three times daily around the city in honor
of the Trinity.
A later example: in the first voyage of Hernando
Cortez to America water and food were almost exhausted,
and everybody in the vessel was discouraged and
mutinous, when "came a Dove flying to the Shippe, being
Good Friday at Sunsett; and sat him on the Shippe-top;
whereat they were all comforted, and tooke it for a
miracle and good token . . . and all gave heartie thanks
to God, directing their course the way the Dove flew."
Any sort of bird would have been welcome as an indica-
tion of nearness of land, but a dove meant to them a
heavenly pilot. No wonder that they were comforted!
And when they had landed they found in abundance a
flower (the orchid Peristeria data) which they at once
named La Flor del Espiritu Santu — Flower of the Holy
Ghost. Why? Because in its center the consolidated
pistil and stamens form an unmistakable image of a dove.
The immediate source of this symbolism is evidently
the account in the gospels of the divine sanction witnessed
at the baptism of Jesus. Matthew (iii, 16) records : "Lo,
the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit
of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him" ;
and St. Luke strengthens the realism by writing that
"the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove."
Hence this bird is constantly associated with Christ and
with the Cross by artists and decorative designers; and
it is no wonder that in so strictly Catholic countries as
Italy it is considered sacrilegious by many of the people
to eat the flesh of pigeons.
"In the fifth century," as Mrs. Jenner tells us in her
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 139
book on Christian symbolism, 63 the dove is shown de-
scending on the Blessed Virgin at the Annunciation.
After this date the Holy Dove is commonly shown in
depicting both these subjects, as well as the sacrament of
baptism. It appears frequently also over the pictures of
the Virgin and Child, and in pictures of the Creation,
where "the spirit of God moved on the face of the
waters. . . . The Holy Spirit as a dove bestowing the
Gift of Tongues is shown with flames proceeding from
Him."
The prophet Elisha is represented in a window of
Lincoln College, England, with a two-headed dove on his
shoulder — evidently an allusion to his petition to Elijah
(77 Kings, ii, 9) : "I pray thee, let a double portion of
thy spirit be upon me."
But this venerated bird has many other meanings in
Christian art and parable, sometimes so comprehensive
as to include the Church, or Pope, or Christians generally
in the sense that they are distinguished from Pagans by
their gentleness and innocence.
Reference has been made to the funereal quality of this
bird, which appears on medieval funerary monuments as
testimony of death in Christian faith. In the miracle-
play depicting the career and martyrdom of St. Eulalia
of Barcelona, which is still enacted annually in the Cata-
lan village-churches of the eastern Pyrenees, it is repre-
sented that the tortured soul of the Christian maiden
escapes to heaven in the form of a dove. Even to-day
one sees these birds, or a pair of them, carved on tomb-
stones, or their stuffed skins employed as a part of funeral
wreaths and accessories, and certain superstitions have
grown out of this practice, as is related elsewhere.
The white domestic dove has always been a figure of
i 4 o BIRDS IN LEGEND
purity by reason, no doubt, of its whiteness, as of un-
stained snow or light — the same feeling that prescribes
white raiment in such church services as the confirmation
of girls, and white veils and flowers for brides. This,
probably, was the reason, too, why white doves, and even
geese, were acceptable for sacrifice in the Jewish temple
of old from those who could not afford to give a lamb.
Mary, mother of Jesus, offered doves at her sacrificial
purification ; and that these birds were commonly used for
that purpose is evident from the fact that a great trade in
them had grown up in and around the temple in
Jerusalem, profaning it, so that later Jesus drove away
from its hallowed precincts "them that sold doves." A
tradition says that Moses, a good economist, decreed as a
proper sacrifice-offering either a turtle-dove or two young
pigeons, because doves were good to eat at any time,
whereas pigeons (the larger and wilder stock) were tough
and unpalatable except as squabs; and it is to be re-
membered that the edible flesh of sacrificed animals was
afterward eaten, and for that end was divided equally be-
tween the offerer and the priests.
A more widespread, popular and persistent notion
makes the dove the symbol of peace, usually depicted with
a spray of olive in its beak. How the olive came to have
this character has been thoroughly discussed by the Rev.
H. Friend. 11 It appears to be largely an accidental
acquisition, even if one believes that the idea is derived
from the olive-leaf brought back by the dove that Noah
sent forth from the ark. In old times a tree-branch of
any sort served as does a modern flag of truce between
warring factions; or was held aloft as a sign of friendly
intentions when strangers approached others without
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 141
hostile purpose. The tradition of the Deluge suggested,
and usage has strengthened, the supposition that the olive
was the proper sort of branch to show (without danger
of misunderstanding), as was the practice of Roman
heralds, and the fact that this bird was associated with
the olive in Biblical legend has made the dove the "bird
of peace. ,, The olive-tree was given to Athens and the
world by Pallas Athene, patron of peace and plenty.
As a matter of ornithology the choice of this bird as a
representative of peace is an unfortunate one, for pigeons
are unusually quarrelsome among themselves; it is
noticeable, however, that in all these relations the sym-
bolic dove is a white one — not the gray ring-dove. In
Japan, on the contrary doves are considered messengers
of war, which perhaps originated in the legend of an
escape from his enemies by the mythical hero Yoritomo.
He was hiding in a hollow tree, and when his pursuers
saw two doves fly out of the hollow they concluded no
one could be there and passed on. Yoritomo afterward
became shogun, and he erected shrines to the god of war,
whose birds are doves, become so, perhaps, by reason of
their pugnacity.
Next to the dove (or perhaps the eagle) the peacock
appears to have most importance among birds as a
symbol. To us it stands as a vainglorious and foppish
personality of very little use in a practical world; and
India has a proverb that the crow that puts on peacock's
feathers finds that they fall out and that he has left only
the harsh voice. De Gubernatis 54 quotes another Hindoo
saying, that this bird has angel's feathers, a devil's voice
and a thief's walk. Other stories tell of the proud bird's
chagrin when he looks down and perceives how black and
i 4 2 BIRDS IN LEGEND
glossy are his feet — as old Robert Chester sang it in
Love's Martyr:
The proud sun-loving peacocke with his feathers,
Walkes all alone, thinking himself a king,
And with his voyce prognosticates all weathers,
Although God knows but badly doth he sing;
But when he lookes downe to his base blacke feete,
He droops, and is asham'd of things unmeete.
A still earlier poet had sung of this secret chagrin
attributed to the conceited fowl, and had accounted for
it by a popular Moslem tradition, illustrated to this day
by the fact that the Devil-worshipping sect of Yezd, in
northern Mesopotamia, reverence the peacock as the ac-
complice of Eblis, which is Satan; my reference is to the
Persian Azz' Eddin Elmocadessi, 88 who wrote —
The peacock wedded to the world,
Of all her gorgeous plumage vain,
With glowing banners wide unfurled,
Sweeps slowly by in proud disdain;
But in her heart a torment lies,
That dims the lustre of those eyes;
She turns away her glance — but no,
Her hideous feet appear below !
And fatal echoes, deep and loud,
Her secret mind's dark caverns stir;
She knows, though beautiful and proud,
That Paradise is not for her.
For, when in Eden's blissful spot
Lost Eblis tempted man, she dared
To join the treach'rous angel's plot
And thus his crime and sentence shared.
Her frightful claws remind her well
Of how she sinned and how she fell.
The native home of this resplendent pheasant is India
and Malaya, and the brilliance of its plumage (in the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 143
male sex, to which all that follows refers), the radiating,
rustling quills and prismatic eye-spots of the magnificent
tail-coverts, together with other features of the bird's life,
led to its association in Eastern mythology with the sun
and sometimes with the rainbow. Taken westward by
adventurous traders, the glittering dress of the cock
entered into the popular conception of the phenix, and
thus the peacock came to be accepted in pagan Greece
and Italy as a substitute for that gorgeous fiction, as no
real phenix was obtainable. Naturally the new bird was
assigned, superseding her homely goose, to Hera (Juno)
the consort of Zeus (Jupiter) whose cognizance was
the eagle — the other component of the hybrid phenix;
and, as Juno was queen of heaven, the bird was
used by prechristian artists as the symbol of the
apotheosis of an empress as was the eagle that of an
emperor.
These ideas were of Eastern origin, and came with the
bird when it was introduced into the western world
from its home in southern Asia, where its harsh cry of
warning to the jungle whenever it espied a tiger, leopard
or big snake, was also a welcome signal to the people
of the woodland villages to be on their guard. "For this
reason, as well as its habit of foretelling rain by its danc-
ing and cries of delight, it has from time immemorial
been held in the East as a bird of magic, or the embodi-
ment of some god of the forest whose beneficence is well
worth supplication, and whose resentment might bring dis-
aster. Hence it was ever protected, not by law, but
from a feeling of veneration."
The words quoted are from one of a series of articles
on Oriental Art by Mrs. Katherine M. Ball, 68 printed in
Japan (July, 1922), from which the reader may gather
i 4 4 BIRDS IN LEGEND
further facts as to the place the bird holds in the religious
and artistic thought of the Orient. In China, for ex-
ample, in the time of the Tang dynasty (8th century,
A. D.), "many thousand districts," according to the
chronicles, "paid tribute in peacocks, because their
feathers were required by the state, not only as decora-
tions for the imperial processions, but for the designa-
tion of official rank; for the peacock feather was be-
stowed upon officials, both military and civil, as a reward
for faithful service." Such feathers differed according
to the honor to be dispensed, hence there are the "flower"
feather, the "green" feather, and the "one-eyed," "two-
eyed" and "three-eyed," all of which were greatly
treasured and worn on special occasions. This use of the
feather is accounted for by Mrs. Ball in this way: "In
the Chin dynasty a defeated general took refuge in a
forest where there were many peacocks. When the pur-
suing forces arrived, and found the fowl so quiet and
undisturbed, they concluded that no one could possibly
have come that way, and forthwith abandoned the search.
The general — who later became known as the ancestor of
five kings — was thus able to escape, and so grateful was
he that later when he came into power he instituted the
custom of conferring a peacock feather as an honor for
the achievement of bravery in battle." This incident re-
minds us of the escape of Yoritomo of Japan, and of the
Tartar general who avoided capture under the protection
of a quiet owl, as related elsewhere.
The Japanese are fond of the peacock as a motive in
their exquisite art, and frequently combine it with the
peony, as do the Chinese, who consider that. the only
flower worthy of such association. Another subject fre-
quently seen illustrated is a representation of the Buddhist
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 145
healing deity Kujako Myowo, the Japanese analogue of
the Hindoo deification of this fowl.
Whether the peacock was brought to the Mediterranean
region from India or Persia or from Phoenicia is un-
known. It is commonly said that Alexander the Great
was its introducer ; but wherever it went its symbolic sig-
nificance accompanied it, otherwise the peoples of
Greece and Italy would hardly have given it the name of
their own goddess of light and day, or have held it to be
a visible sign of the rainbow itself. In combination with
the eagle it was originally an attribute of Pan, who later
was obliged to yield it to Juno, the goddess of Heaven,
thus making it the star-bird, the symbol of the starry
firmament, on account of the "eyes" in its tail-feathers,
which were regarded as the very stars themselves. Out
of this arose many myths, chief among which is that of
the hundred-eyed Argus — how Argus was set by Juno
to watch Io, of whom she had been jealous, but was killed
by Mercury in the interest of the queen's unrepentant
husband ; and how Juno makes the best of a bad situation :
Thus Argus lies in pieces cold and pale;
And all his hundred eyes with all their light
Are closed at once in one perpetual night.
These Juno takes, that they no more shall fail,
And spreads them on her peacock's gaudy tail. 69
But the Christians, in their revolt against everything
Pagan, regarded this bird, which like so many other facts
and fancies of the ancient regime they could not destroy,
from a new and different angle. They observed that al-
though it lost (by molting) its splendid raiment yet as
often it was re-acquired — manifestly a similitude of the
resurrection of the devoted soul into renewed glories
146 BIRDS IN LEGEND
after death. The fact was true, of course of all birds,
but it was most noticeable in this gaudy stranger from the
land of sunrise; and, in addition, a belief was borrowed
from the phenix that its flesh was incorruptible. Thus
the peacock became in early Christian art a symbol of im-
mortality.
In the general mental lethargy that marked the Middle
Ages this elevated idealism was degraded ; yet that some-
what of the bird's traditional sacredness remained is
shown by the fact that among the customs of chivalry,
knights and squires took oath on the king's peacock,
which, stuffed and brought ceremoniously to the table,
was a feature in various solemnities. Critics trace to
this the Shakespearian oath "By cock and pye!" — to my
mind a dubious gloss. "It is said of Pythagoras," De
Gubernatis 54 notes, "that he believed himself to have once
been a peacock, that the peacock's soul entered into
Euphorbus, a Homeric Trojan hero, that of Euphorbus
into Homer, and that of Homer into him." Those who
are familiar with classic literature may be able to con-
tinue the history of this literary metempsychosis down to
the present. Hehn and Stallybrass elaborate their history
of the peacock in custom and myth in exhaustive detail in
their Wanderings of Plants and Animals.
A quaint relic of ancient ideas survives in the prevalent
notion that the beautiful tail-plumes of the peacock are
unlucky or worse, for it is widely feared that illness and
death speedily follow putting them into a house, especially
as affecting the health of youngsters. It occurred to me
that this superstition, as foolish as it is baleful, was prob-
ably connected with the far-reaching dread of the Evil
Eye, having in mind the gleaming ocellse that decorate
these splendid feathers, but Elworthy's exhaustive
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 147
treatise 06 on that dreaded visitation (especially feared
among Italians) alludes to the matter only casually, and
expresses the opinion that the alleged ill-luck is a relic of
the ancient cult of Juno — a lingering fear that in some
way her anger may be excited by the plucking of the
feathers of her favorite bird ; while the idea that so long
as these plumes are kept in the house no suitors will come
for the daughters points to the old attribute of spite or
jealousy in love or matrimonial matters with which Juno
was always accredited in Pagan times.
It occurs to me, also, that the fact that the revered
peacock throws away (moulds) its quills every year sug-
gests to a superstitious imagination that they may be
distasteful to the bird, and hence something to be avoided
by careful devotees. Nevertheless, on Easter Day in
Rome, when the pope is borne in magnificent state into
St. Peter's, he waves over the heads of the reverent wor-
shippers assembled there a fan (flabbellum) of ostrich
feathers on which have been sewn the eye-spots from
peacock plumes, the latter, we are told, signifying the
all-seeing vigilance of the Church — against foolishness as
well as downright evil, let us hope !
No bird is more often employed symbolically in Chris-
tian art than the pelican, which, like the peacock became a
representative of salvation through the self-sacrifice of
Christ. How this developed from the supposed habit of
resuscitating her nestlings by feeding them blood from
her bosom, after they had been murdered by the father, is
explained in another chapter. It is said that the story
originated in Egypt, with reference to a vulture. St.
Jerome, however, first gave it a theological application,
teaching that similarly those dead in sin were made alive
again by the blood of the Christ. The form — still
v-
i 4 8 BIRDS IN LEGEND
familiar in heraldry — is that of a bird sitting by its nest
with its beak depressed and tearing at its breast, repre-
senting "the pelican in its piety," the last word here hav-
ing its original meaning of parental care. It also became
a pictured symbol of the Christ and of the Passion, "and
more particularly of the Eucharist, wherein Christians
are nourished by Christ himself." Thomas Aquinas
(13th century) is the author of a well-known verse of
this import:
Pelican of Piety, Jesus, Lord and God,
Cleanse thou me, unclean, in thy most precious blood,
But a single drop of which doth save and free
All the universe from its iniquity.
A similar stanza in John Skelton's Armoury of Birds
reads :
Then sayd the Pellycane,
When my byrdts be slayne,
With my bloude I them reuyue [revive],
Scrypture doth record
The same dyd our Lord,
And rose from deth to lyue. [life]
The eagle is to be regarded rather as an emblem than
as a symbol yet it has a significance of this sort, for by
the early Christians it was considered a symbol of the
Ascension. This may have been a pious inversion of the
custom in Pagan Rome of setting free an eagle at the
funeral pyre of an emperor, in the belief that this mes-
senger of Jove would carry the dead monarch's soul
straight up to Olympus.
The notion that in death the soul leaves the body in
the form of a bird is old and very general. Medieval
biographies of Christian saints and martyrs abound in
instances, as, for example, the story of Saint Devote,
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 149
found in a boat near Monaco at the moment of her ex-
piring, with a dove issuing from her lips. 67 The Paris
Figaro, in October, 1872, describing the ceremonies at
the death of a gipsy in that city, mentioned that a bird
was held close to the mouth of the dying girl, ready to re-
ceive her expired soul. This is not an illogical idea, if
the conception of a person's soul as a distinct entity is
conceded; for if it is to fly away to Paradise it must
have something in the nature of wings, and a bird, or the
semblance of a real bird, is inevitably suggested, the
wings of a bat being too repulsive — reserved, in fact, for
representations of Satan and his emissaries. Angels and
genii have always been provided by prophets, romancers,
and artists with swanlike wings, springing from behind
their shoulders, reckless of comparative anatomy — other-
wise how could these "heavier-than-air" beings ac-
complish their travelling?
I have said that the theory that the disengaged soul de-
parts to heaven in the form of or by aid of a bird is
historically very old. Probably, indeed, it is of pre-
historic antiquity, for various savage peoples have arrived
at the same doctrine, based on an obvious philosophy.
For example: Powers 19 tells us that the Keltas of
southern California believe that when one of the tribe dies
a little bird flies away with his soul. "If he was a bad
Indian a hawk will catch the bird and eat it up, body,
feathers and all; but if he was a good Indian the soul-
bird will reach the spirit-land."
In Christian iconography the eagle is the emblem of the
evangelist St. John, an assignment originating, it is said,
in Jerome's interpretation of the amazing visions of the
four "beasts" as recorded in Ezekiel i 15, and somewhat
less fantastically in Revelations iv.y. Wherever in
150 BIRDS IN LEGEND
sculpture, painting, or stained glass St. John appears he
may be recognized by his eagle; and sometimes the bird
is rather more conspicuous than the saint, as when it is
bearing him aloft on its back, both gazing, open-eyed and
resolute, at the sun, as the eagle is fabled to be able to
do. This association also accounts for the practice of
carving the support of the reading-desk in both Catholic
and Anglican churches in the form of an eagle with
outstretched wings. At the beginning, we are told,
figures of all four evangelists upheld the lectern; but
one by one the others disappeared before the demands of
artistic grace until at last John, "the beloved disciple,"
alone remained, and presently he came to be represented
only by his emblem. "Medieval writers," remarks B. L.
Gales, in an article in The National Review (1808), "de-
light in all sorts of wild and wonderful tales about his,"
that is, the eagle's "renewing his youth by gazing at the
sun or plunging into a clear stream, and allegorize at
length on the Waters of Baptism and the true Sun —
Jesus Christ." This, of course, is simply a comparatively
modern illustration of the very ancient myth that when
the sun set in the western ocean, yet arose bright and hot
next morning, it had rejuvenated itself by its bath as it
passed from west to east underneath the world.
In the East, where the sport of falconry originated, and
where the Mongols trained and employed, and still do,
eagles as well as hawks, the falcon has acquired much
interesting symbolism, especially in Japan, as appears in
many exquisite drawings by early artists ; and often these
can be fully understood and enjoyed by us of the West
only when the subtle meaning involved in the picture is
interpreted to us, or we learn the tradition to which it
refers. For example, in Hokusai's drawing San Pitku
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 151
(The Three Lucky Things) the mountain symbolizes the
beauty of nature, the falcon the delights of the chase,
and the eggplant the wisdom of frugality and of the
simplicity of life. This undaunted bird (talca, the heroic
one) is to the Japanese the symbol of victory; and the
Medal of Victory, which the government confers upon
distinguished warriors has emblazoned upon it a golden
falcon, in commemoration of the coming to Japan of its
mythical ancestor, Jimmu Tenno; for it is related that
as he set foot up on the Island's shore, a falcon flew
toward him and lit on his bow, an incident which has ever
been regarded as prophetic of the success of his under-
taking.
Little can be added in this connection concerning the
birds of prey. In ancient Egypt the vulture represented
Nekht, the tutelary deity of the South, who appeared to
men in that form; and the protection she accorded to
the queens of Egypt was indicated by the vulture-head-
dress worn by these ladies at least during the Empire.
The kite, too, is connected with early Egyptian history,
according to a tradition, preserved by Diodorus Siculus,
that the book of religious laws and customs was origi-
nally brought to Thebes by a kite ; wherefore the sacred
scribes wore a red cap with a kite's feather in it.
The cock in Christian religious art is to be interpreted
as an emblem of vigilance — also as an image of preachers,
in which may be a touch of humor. "When introduced
near the figure of St. Peter," says one authority, "it ex-
presses repentance; in this connection it is one of the
emblems of the Passion. ,, The placing of the image of
a cock on church towers is said to be an allusion to Peter
as the head of the Church on earth, and as representing
the voice of the Church, which by day and in the watches
152 BIRDS IN LEGEND
of the night calls on men to repent. Another tradition
is that some early pope ordered that the weathervane on
churches be in that form in order to remind the clergy of
the necessity of watchfulness — a second reference to
Mark, iii, 35.
Ragozin tells us that in the Vendida, the "Bible" of the
ancient Medes, great credit is given to the cock as the
messenger who calls men to the performance of their
religious duties: "Arise, O men! Whichever first gets
up shall enter paradise!" A Hebrew legendary saying
is that when a cock crows before dawn it warns: "Re-
member thy Creator, O thoughtless man!" Finally
Drayton sings of —
The cock, the country horologe that rings
The cheerful warning to the sun's awake.
Nowadays, if chanticleer calls to mind anything in
particular, except wrath at his too early rising to adore
the god of day, it is the spirit of boastfulness and "cock-
sureness"; while his humble mate represents maternal
cares carried to the extreme of fussiness.
The names of a good many birds serve as synonyms of
prevailing ideas, or become figures of speech, without
having a special myth or story behind them. Thus the
words eagle and falcon convey to the listener the notion
of nobility in power, while hawk simply means fierceness,
with somewhat of prying, detective skill. Old provokes
in the imagination a rather smiling picture of solemn
pretence of wisdom — a reputation, by the way, almost
wholly due to the little European screech-owl's accidental
association with Pallas Athene. Swallow suggests spring
all over the world; goose and gull connote easy credulity
and foolishness; vulture and raven, rapine and cruelty;
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 153
parrot senseless chatter or the lavish repetition of an-
other's ideas or sayings; cuckoo, poaching on another
man's domestic preserves ; and so on down to the stork,
which in Germany symbolizes filial piety because of its
fancied solicitude toward aged storks, and which children
are taught to believe brings babies from the fountain to
their mothers' laps. The Chinese and Japanese peasantry
hold the Mandarin duck in high esteem as a model of
conjugal virtues, because it is said to mate for life, and
Hindoos feel the same toward their (sarus) crane — a
bird that figures extensively in the legendary lore of both
China and Japan. Figures of the crane are found deco-
rating bridal attire in Japan, and this bird is commended
to womankind generally in Nippon as an example of
motherhood to be emulated. "In this respect it is like
the pheasant, which is said to stay by her young during
a grass-fire, covering them with her outstretched wings
until, together, they perish in the flames ; for in a similar
way the crane shields her young from the bitter cold of
the winter snows."
In ancient Egypt the plume of the ostrich, "on account
of the mathematical equality of the opposing barbs in
point of length — a peculiarity not present in the primary
feathers of any other bird with which the Egyptians were
acquainted — was regarded as the sacred symbol of justice."
Osiris was represented with two ostrich plumes in his
crown. Says Dr. Cyrus Adler: "The Egyptian con-
sidered the hoopoe as symbolical of gratitude because it
repays the early kindness of its parents in their old age
by trimming their wings and bringing them food when
they are acquiring new plumage. The Arabs call it
'doctor/ believing it to possess marvellous medicinal
qualities, and they use its head in charms and incanta-
CHAPTER VIII
BLACK FEATHERS MAKE BLACK BIRDS
NO one bird known to Americans is so entangled
with whatever witchcraft belongs to birds as is
the raven, yet little of it is American besides Poe's
melodramatic mummery, whose raven was a borrowed
piece of theatrical property. The shrewd people of this
country pay little attention to signs and portents, yet some
survive among us, for the extravagant notions popularly
held as to the sagacity of our crow, with its "courts" and
"consultations," are no doubt traceable in some measure
to the bird's history in Old World superstition.
In Europe no bird, save possibly the cuckoo, is so laden
with legends and superstitious veneration as the raven,
chiefly, however, in the North, where it is not only most
numerous and noticeable but seems to fit better than in
the gladsome South. To the rough, virile Baltic man, or
to the Himalayan mountaineer, worshipping force, care-
less of beauty, this sable bird of hard endurance, challeng-
ing cry and powerful wing, the "ravener," tearer, was an
admirable creature ; while to the more esthetic dweller by
the Mediterranean or on /Egean shores such qualities
were repulsive, and the raven became a reminder of
winter, when alone it was seen in the South, and of the
savage forests and hated barbarians whence it came.
Much the same antithesis belongs to this bird and its
relatives in the minds of Orientals. To understand the
impression the raven made on primitive men, and the
154
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 155
symbolism and dread that have grown up about it, one
must have some knowledge of the real Corvus corax.
The raven is the largest member of the ornithological
family Corvidae, measuring two feet from beak to tail-
tip. It is everywhere black, with steel-blue and purplish
reflections, and is distinguished from its equally black
cousins, the crows, by its stouter beak, somewhat hooked
at the tip, and especially by the elongated and pointed
feathers on the throat. It is powerful in flight, and is
noted for performing queer antics in the air. Judged
by its anatomy it stands high in the scale of classification,
so that some ornithologists, considering also its intellect,
have put it quite at the top of the scale — made it the true
King of Birds. In its northern home this species is to
be found right around the world, inhabiting Asia and
Europe as far south as the great ridge of mountains that
extends from Spain to Siberia, and also living in Asia
Minor and Syria. It is native to all North America,
where no arctic island is too remote to be visited by it in
summer. Most of the ravens fly southward in winter
from polar latitudes to kindlier regions, but those that
stay in the far north become doubly conspicuous in a
wilderness of snow, for they do not turn white in winter
as do many arctic residents; therefore Goldsmith wasted
much philosophy in explaining in his Animated Nature
why they "become white.'' The raven's ordinary call-
note is well enough described by the words "croak" and
"caw," but it has many variations. Nuttall quotes Por-
phyrius as declaring that no less than 64 different intona-
tions of the raven's cries were distinguished by the sooth-
sayers of his day, and given appropriate significance.
Some notes are indescribably queer.
Ravens have almost disappeared from thickly settled
156 BIRDS IN LEGEND
regions, in striking contrast to their near relatives the
crows, rooks, choughs, magpies, jackdaws, and various
related species in the Old World, which thrive and grow
tame in the company of civilized humanity. Few pairs
of ravens remain in the United States east of the Rocky
Mountains, except on the wilder parts of the Maine coast
and about Lake Superior.
Readers of Charles Dickens's novels will recall the imp-
ish specimen "Grip" that Barnaby Rudge used to carry
about with him, and which became his fellow-prisoner in
jail — and served him right, for he was always declaring
"I'm a devil!"
This raven was modelled after an actual pet, named
"Grip," in the family of the novelist when he was writ-
ing Barnaby Rudge in 184 1. It died in July of that year,
and its body passed into the possession of Dr. R. T. Judd,
an English collector of Dickens' material. In 1922 this
collection, including the stuffed skin of Grip, and its
former cage, labelled with its owner's name, was offered
for sale at the Anderson Galleries in New York. It ap-
pears from accompanying letters that as the novel was
originally written it contained no reference to the bird;
but before the manuscript was completed it occurred to
Mr. Dickens that he could make good use of the mis-
chievous creature in the story, as is revealed in a letter
to George Cattermole, dated January 28, 1841.
The raven may not only be tamed to the point of
domestication, but will learn to speak a few words. Gold-
smith asserted, apparently from experience, that it not
only would speak but could "sing like a man." Like all
its thievish tribe it loves to pick up and hide objects that
attract its quick eye, especially if they are bright, like
a silver spoon or a bit of jewelry; and this acquisitive
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 157
disposition has more than once involved in serious mis-
fortune servants accused of purloining lost articles, as
happened in the case of the Jackdaw of Rheims.
The tradition on which Barham's Ingoldsby Legend is
embroidered is a very old one, the earliest statement of which,
probably, is that in Mignie's Patrologia Latinia, compiled by a
monk of Clairvaux. The narrative is that of an incident in the
time of Frederick Barbarossa (12th century) when the mon-
astery of Corvey was ruled by a prince-bishop named Conrad.
One day he left his episcopal ring lying on the dining-table, and
it disappeared. The bishop blamed the servants and suspected
his guests, and finally issued a decree of excommunication to-
ward any one who had stolen it. Thereupon the bishop's pet
jackdaw "began to sicken little by little, to loathe his food, to
cease more and more from his droll croakings and irrational
follies whereby he was wont to delight the minds of fools who
neglect to fear God."
At this dreadful stage it occurred to some bright genius that
this portentous change in the bird was the effect of the curse,
and that it was the sought-for thief. Its nest was searched, the
precious ring was found, the curse was taken off, and the jack-
daw recovered its plumage and good spirits.
Where ravens can get other food plentifully they
seldom attack living animals. Bendire frequently saw
them feeding among his chickens without harming them,
yet undoubtedly they are occasionally guilty in our West
of killing young lambs, game-birds, and poultry, sins
of which they are much accused in Europe. Certainly
they rob wild birds of eggs and fledglings, but these evil
deeds are done mainly in spring, in providing their own
nestlings with soft food. During most of the year the
food of the raven consists of carrion, grasshoppers,
worms, mussels and other shellfish (the larger kinds of
which they lift high in the air and then drop to break
their shells), and of ground-squirrels and young rabbits
when they can get hold of them.
i 5 8 BIRDS IN^LEGEND
When a raven alights on a dead animal its first act is
to pluck out the eyes. One of the barbarities in the an-
cient East was to throw the bodies of executed criminals
out to be devoured by beasts and birds of prey — a custom
of which the Parsee Towers of Silence is a modified relic.
The popular knowledge of this gave great force to
Solomon's warning {Proverbs xxx, 17) : "The eye that
mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother,
the ravens of the valley shall pick it out" — that is, so bad
a boy would end on the gallows.
Although ravens were regarded by the ancient
Zoroastrians as "pure," because they were considered
necessary to remove pollution from the face of the earth,
the Jews classed this creature as "unclean" for the same
reason — it ate carrion. In view of this the Biblical
legend that the Prophet Elijah, when he hid by the brook
Kerith from the wrath of Ahab, was fed by ravens at
command of the Lord, is so unnatural that commentators
have done their best to explain it away. To this day the
Moors regard ravens as belonging to Satan. In Chapter
V of the Koran, where the killing of Cain by his brother
is described, we read: "And God sent a raven which
scratched the earth to show him how he should hide the
shame [that is, the corpse] of his brother, and he said
Woe is me! am I to be like this raven?* . . . and he
became one of those who repent." This is from Sale's
edition, Philadelphia, 1868; and the editor adds a note
that this legend was derived from the Jews, but that in
their version the raven appears not to Cain but to Adam,
who thereupon buried Abel.
That a bird black as night and its mysteries, a familiar
of the lightning-riven pine and the storm-beaten crag,
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 159
a ghoulish attendant of battling men and feasting on their
slain, muttering strange soliloquies, and diabolically cun-
ning withal — that such a creature should have appealed
to the rough mariners of the North is far from surpris-
ing. The supreme Norse god was Odin, an impersona-
tion of force and intellect — an apotheosis, indeed, of the
Viking himself; and his ministers were two ravens,
Hugin and Munin, i.e., Reflection and Memory. 'They
sit upon his shoulders and whisper in his ears," says
history. "He sends them out at daybreak to fly over the
world, and they come back at eve, toward meal-time."
Hence it is that Odin knows so much, and is called
Rafnagud, Raven-god. Most solicitously does Odin
express himself about these ministers in Grunner's lay
in the Elder Edda :
Hugin and Munin fly each day
Over the spacious earth. I fear for Hugin
That he come not back,
Yet more anxious am I for Munin.
Again, in Odin's fierce Raven Song, Hugin goes "to ex-
plore the heavens." Jupiter's two eagles, sent east and
west, will be recalled by readers of classic tales.
As the eagle of Jove became the standard of the
Roman legions, so Odin's bird was inscribed on the
shields and the banners of his warrior sons. You may
see such banners illustrated in the Bayeux tapestry. The
Dane called his standard landeyda (land- waster), and
had faith in its miraculous virtues. The original ensign,
that is, the one brought to England by the first invaders,
is described in St. Neot's biographical Chronicles (9th
century). In 878, it records, a wild Danish rover
160 BIRDS IN LEGEND
named Hubba came with twenty-three ships on a raid
into Devon : but the people rose and killed or drove away
all the vikings.
"And there got they [that is, the Devon men] no
small spoil, wherein they took, moreover, that banner
which men call the Raven. For they say that the three
sisters of Ingwar and Hubba, the daughters, sooth to
say, of Lodbrock, wove that banner, and made it all
wholly ready between morn and night of a single day.
They say, too, that in every fight wherein that flag went
before them, if they were to win the raven in the midst
thereof seemed to flutter, as if it were alive, but were
their doom to be worsted, then it would droop, still and
lifeless."
Britain came to know well that portentous flag —
The Danish raven, lured by annual prey,
Hung o'er the land incessant,
as Thomson laments. Finally Harold hurled the power
of Canute from England's shores forever, and Tennyson
sings Harold's paean:
We have shattered back
The hugest wave from Norseland ever yet
Surged on us, and our battle-axes broken
The Raven's wing, and dumbed the carrion croak
From the gray sea forever.
"The crow and the raven," MacBain 71 announces, "are
constantly connected in the Northern mythologies with
battle-deities. 'How is it with you, Ravens?' says the
Norse Raven Song. 'Whence are you come with gory
beak at the dawning of the day. . . . You lodged last
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 161
night, I ween, where ye knew the corses were lying.'
The ravens also assist and protect heroes both in Irish
and Norse myth. It was a lucky sign if a raven followed
a warrior."
But the bold Norse sailors made a more practical use
also of this knowing bird, for in those days, before the
compass, they used to take ravens with them in their
adventurous voyages on the fog-bound northern seas,
and trust the birds to show them the way back to land.
A notable instance was Floki's voyage to Iceland in 864
A. D., a few years after that island's discovery; and the
French historian Mallet 30 narrates it thus:
We are told that Floki, previous to setting out on his expe-
dition, performed a great sacrifice, and having consecrated three
ravens to the gods took them with him to guide him on his
voyage. After touching at the Shetland and Faroe islands he
steered northwest, and when he was fairly out at sea, let loose
one of his ravens, which, after rising to a considerable elevation,
directed its flight to the land they had quitted. . . . The second
bird, after being some time on the wing, returned to the ship,
a sign that the land was too far distant to be descried even by
a raven hovering in the sky. Floki therefore continued his
course, and shortly afterwards let loose his third raven, which
he followed in its flight until he reached the eastern coast of
Iceland.
This is a somewhat poetic account, I imagine, of what
perhaps was a more prosaic custom of seamanship, for
doubtless it was usual at that time to carry several birds
on such voyages, and to let them fly from time to time
that they might learn and indicate to the voyagers
whether land was near, and in what direction, as did old
Captain Noah, master of the good ship Ark. Berthold
162 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Lauffer 52 treats of this point with his customary
thoroughness in his pamphlet Bird Divination:
Indian Hindoo navigators kept birds on board ship for the
purpose of despatching them in search of land. In the Baveru-
Jataka it is "a crow serving to direct navigators in the four
quarters" . . . Pliny relates that the seafarers of Taprobane
(Ceylon) did not observe the stars for the purpose of naviga-
tion, but carried birds out to sea, which they sent off from time
to time and then followed the course of the birds' flying in the
direction of the land. The connection of this practice with
that described in the Babylonian and Hebraic traditions of the del-
uge was long ago recognized. . . . When the people of Thera, an
island in the iEgean Sea emigrated to Libya, ravens flew along
with them ahead of the ships to show the way. According to
Justin ... it was by the flight of birds that the Gauls who
invaded Illyricum were guided. Emperor Jimmu of Japan
(7th century) engaged in a war expedition and marched under
the guidance of a gold-colored raven.
Mr. Lauffer might have added that Callisthenes relates that
two heaven-sent ravens led the expedition of Alexander across
the trackless desert from the Mediterranean coast to the oasis
of Ammon (Siwah), recalling stragglers now and then by
hoarse croaking.
The folklore of northern Europe is full of the cunning
and exploits of this bird and its congeners, which it would
be a weary task to disentangle from pure myth. In
Germany there is, or was, a stone gibbet called, with
gruesome memories, Ravenstone, to which Byron alludes
in Werner —
Do you think
I'll honor you so much as save your throat
From the Ravenstone by choking myself?
We read that the old Welsh king Owein, son of Urien,
had in his army three hundred doughty ravens, consti-
tuting an irresistible force; perhaps they were only human
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 163
"shock" troops who bore this device on their targes.
Cuchulain, the savage hero of Irish fables, had, like Odin,
two magic ravens that advised him of the approach of
foes. Old-fashioned Germans believe that Frederick I
(Barbarossa) is sleeping under Raven's Hill at Kaiser-
lauten, ready to come forth in the last emergency of his
country. There in his grotto-palace a shepherd found
him sleeping. Barbarossa awoke and asked: "Are the
ravens still flying around the hill?" The shepherd
answered that they were. "Then," sighed the king, "I
must sleep another hundred years."
Waterton 73 tells us that a tradition was once current
throughout the whole of Great Britain that King Arthur
was changed into a raven (some say a chough) by the art
of witchcraft; and that in due time he would be restored
to human form, and return with crown and sceptre. In
Brittany, where Arthur and his knights are much more
real than even in Cornwall, the sailor-peasants will assure
you that he was buried on the little isle of Avalon, just
off the foreshore of Tregastel, but they will add very
seriously that he is not dead. If you inquire how that
can be, they will explain that the great king was con-
veyed thither magically by Morgan le Fay, and he and
she dwell there in an underground palace. They are in-
visible now to all human eyes, and when Arthur wants
to go out into the air his companion turns him into a
raven ; and perchance, in proof, your boatman may point
your gaze toward a real raven sitting on the rocks of the
islet.
Ravens figure in many monkish legends, too, usually in
a beneficent attitude, in remembrance of their friendly
offices toward Elijah. Saint Cuthbert and several lesser
saints and hermits were fed by these or similar birds.
1 64 BIRDS IN LEGEND
One hermit subsisted many years on a daily ration of
half a loaf of bread brought him by a raven, and one
time, when another saint visited him, the bird pro-
vided a whole loaf! Fish was frequently brought: and
once when a certain eremite was ill, the bird furnished
the fish already cooked, and fed it to the patient bit by
bit. Miss Walker 39 shows that as a companion of saints
this bird has had a wide and beneficent experience, which
may be set against the more conspicuous pages of mis-
deeds in his highly variegated record. Thus we learn
that St. Benedict's raven saved his life by bearing away
the poisoned loaf sent to this saint by a jealous priest.
"After his torture and death at Saragossa, when the body
of St. Vincent was thrown to the wild beasts it was res-
cued by ravens and borne to his brothers at Valencia,
where it reposed in a tomb till the Christians of that place
were expelled by the Moors. The remains of the saint
were . . . again placed in a tomb [at Cape St. Vincent]
to be guarded forever more by the faithful ravens."
Have you doubts about this story? Go to that wild head-
land, where Portugal sets a firm foot against the Atlantic,
watch the ravens hovering above it, and be convinced!
And to many other holy men did these noble birds render
substantial service — to St. Meinrad especially, as is
affirmed by no less an authority than the great Jerome.
"In some parts of Germany,'' Miss Walker records,
"these birds are believed to hold the souls of the damned,
while in other sections wicked priests only are supposed
to be so re-incarnated. In Sweden the ravens croaking
at night in the swamps are said to be the ghosts of mur-
dered persons who have been denied Christian burial."
A local and humorous touch is given to this conception
by the Irish in Kerry, who allege that the rooks there
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 165
are the ghosts of bad old landlords, because they steal
vegetables from the peasants' gardens — "Always robbin'
the poor!"
This eerie feeling is of long descent. The supreme
war-goddess of the Gaels, as Squire 7 * explains, was
Morrigu, the Red Woman or war-goddess, who figures
in the adventures of Cuchulain, and whose favorite dis-
guise was to change herself into a carrion-crow, the
"hoodie-crow" of the Scotch. She had assistants who
revelled among the slain on a battlefield. "These grim
creatures of the savage mind had immense vitality . . .
indeed, they may be said to survive still in the supersti-
tious dislike and suspicion shown in all Keltic-speaking
countries for their avatar — the hoodie crow."
In Pennant's Tour in Scotland (1771) is described a
curious ceremony in which offerings were made by Scot-
tish herdsmen to the hooded crow, eagle and other
enemies of sheep to induce them to spare the flocks. A'
Morayshire saying in old times ran thus:
The guil, the Gordon, and the hoodie crow,
Were the three worst things Murray ever saw.
(The guil, Swann explains, is an obnoxious weed, the
Gordon refers to the thieving propensities of a neighbor-
ing clan, and the crow killed lambs and annoyed sickly
sheep.) "It is interesting," says Wentz, 62 "to observe
that this Irish war-goddess Morrigu, the bodb or babd,
. . . has survived to our own day in the fairy-lore of the
chief Celtic countries. In Ireland the survival in the
popular and still almost general belief among the
peasantry that the fairies often exercise their magical
powers under the form of royston crows; and for this
reason these birds are always greatly dreaded and
166 BIRDS IN LEGEND
avoided. The resting of one of them on a peasant's
cottage may signify many things, but often it means the
death of one of the family or some great misfortune, the
bird in such case playing the part of a bean-sidhe
(banshee)" In the western Highlands "the hoody crow
plays the same role; and in Brittany fairies assume the
form of the magpie."
Under the influence of Christian teaching Odin
gradually became identified throughout northern Europe
with Satan: so the raven and all the Corvidae are now
"Devil's birds" in the folklore of the North. Even the
magpie is said to have devils' blood in its tongue, and its
chattering is ominous of evil, requiring various rustic
charms to counteract its harm — in fact, if the farmer-
folk are correctly informed, virtually all the birds of this
family was naturally tainted with deviltry. It is not sur-
prising then to hear that European crows go down to hell
once every year, when they must appear before Old
Nick and give him a tribute of feathers. The time of
this visit coincides with their moulting-season in mid-
summer, when the crows retire and remain inconspicuous
and silent for a time — so maybe it's true !
An extraordinary survival of this last notion — unless
it be original — is found among the negroes of some of
our Southern States, who say that the "jaybird" (blue-
jay) is never to be seen on Friday, because on that day
he is carrying sticks to the Devil in hell ; that in general
this bird is the Devil's messenger and spy; and that the
reason he is so gay and noisy on Saturday is that he is
so glad to get back to earth. An old Georgia darky ex-
plained the matter a follows :
"Some folks say Br'er Jay takes a piece er wood, des a
splinter, down to de bad Place ev'y Friday fer ter help out
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 167
Mister Devil, so's to let him 'n* his wife, ole Aunty Squatty,
have good kindlin' wood all de time. . . . But some folks tell
de tale mother way. Dey say he make dat trip ever' Friday
ter tote down des a grit er dirt. He make de trip sho'.
Ever'body knows dat. But for what he goes folks tells diffunt
tales. You sho'ly can't see a jay bird in dis worl' on Friday
fum twelve o'clock twel three — hit takes 'em des dat long ter
make de trip. . . . Some folks say Bre'r Jay and all his fambly,
his folks, his cousins, and his kin, does go dat way and d'rection,
ev'y one totin' dey grain o' sand in der bill an' drappin' hit in —
des one teeny weeny grit — wid de good hopes er fillin' up dat
awful place." 2
Lousiana negroes are of the opinion that the jay is
condemned to this weekly trip as a punishment for mis-
behavior at Christ's crucifixion, but what dreadful deed
he did has been forgotten. Every reader of "Uncle
Remus," or of the stories of Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart,
Mr. Harry Stillwell Edwards, and other Southern
writers, knows how largely the "jaybird" figures in the
plantation-tales of the negroes, especially of the coastal
districts, where the blue jay is one of the most conspicuous
and interesting of resident birds.
The coming of Christianity, as has been said, swept
away the images of Odin and of his Pagan familiars
Hugin and Munin out of both Teutonic and Keltic
Europe, but it did not sweep away the birds themselves,
nor discolor their sable wings, nor silence the baleful
croak; and the impression left by the old tales lingered
long in the minds of the people. To the horror of the
raven and his kind among the natives of Britain, as a
symbol of the northern marauders from whom they had
so long suffered, was now added the anathema of pious
missionaries who condemned everything pagan as
diabolic, and all things black — except their own robes — -
as typifying the powers of darkness. Truly, remarked
1 68 BIRDS IN LEGEND
St. Ambrose, all shamelessness and sin are dark and
gloomy, and feed on the dead like the crow. A Chinese
epithet for the raven is "Mongols' coffin."
The people were sincere enough in this, for behind
them was not only the Devil-fearing superstition of the
Middle Ages but a long line of parent myths and folklore
that made the bird's reputation as black as its plumage,
and added to this was the new and terrifying idea of
prophecy. You get a hint of the feeling in Gower's
Confessio Amantis:
A Raven by whom yet men maie
Take evidence, when he crieth,
That some mishap it signifieth.
In Greece and Italy ravens were sacred to Apollo, the
great patron of augurs, who in a pet turned this bird from
white to black — and an ill turn it was, for black feathers
make black birds; and in this blackness of coat lies, in
my opinion, the root of their sinister repute.
The "jumbie-bird," or "big witch," of the West Indian
region, for example, is the dead-black ani, a kind of
cuckoo. Spenser speaks of "the hoarse night-raven,
trompe of doleful dreer," but his "night-raven" was not
a raven at all, but the bittern.
It is only in an earlier day and under a brighter sky
that we find these corvine prophets taking a more
cheerful view of the future. Of course they are among
the "rain-birds":
Hark
How the curst raven with his harmless voice
Invokes the rain.
So the "foresight of a raven" became proverbial, as
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 169
Waterton 73 illustrates by an anecdote: "Good farmer
Muckdrag's wife, while jogging on with eggs to market,
knew there was mischief brewing as soon as she had
heard a raven croak on the unlucky side of the road:
"That raven on the left-hand oak,
Curse on his ill-betiding croak,
Bodes me no good !"
She had scarcely uttered this when down came her old
stumbling mare to the ground. Her every egg was
smashed to atoms ; and whilst she lay sprawling . . . she
was perfectly convinced in her own mind that the raven
had clearly foreseen her irreparable misadventure."
If one alighted on a church-tower the whole parish
trembled, and when a cottager saw one perched on his
roof-tree he made his will; or if it happened that a
man or woman was ill in his house the death of that
person was regarded as certain. The more learned
would quote for you how Tiberius, Plato, Cicero and
other great men of the past had been similarly warned,
and doubtless many a person has died in these circum-
stances of nervous fright and discouragement. It is to
this dread that Marlowe refers in his Jew of Malta:
Like the sad presaging raven that tolls
The sick man's passport in her hollow beak,
And, in the shadow of the silent night,
Does shake contagion from her sable wing.
The last line contains a new and heinous calumny
widely credited. So Shakespeare makes Caliban threaten
Prospero and Ariel with
As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen.
170
BIRDS IN LEGEND
I wonder, by the way, who first spoke — the simile is,
at any rate, as old as Chaucer's time — of the wrinkles that
gather about the corners of our eyes when we get on in
life, as "crow's feet"? Frederick Locker sings of his
grandmother:
Her locks as white as snow,
Once shamed the swarthy crow;
By-and-by
That fowl's avenging sprite
Set his cruel foot for spite
Near her eye.
The expression of course is a suggestion of the radiat-
ing form of the wrinkles at the outer corner of the eye
to a crow's track; and this reminds us of the fact that
when soon after the Norman conquest in England there
was a vast popular interest in royal genealogy, people
spoke of the branching form of a family tree, when
drawn on paper, as a "crane's foot" (pied de grue),
whence our term pedigree.
Omens are deduced from the flight and cries of ravens,
crows, magpies, and certain other corvine species,
especially as regards their direction relative to the in-
quirer. Horace, for example, in his Ode to Galatea on
her undertaking a journey, tells her that he, as a "prov-
ident augur,"
Ere the wierd crow, re-seeking stagnant marshes,
Predict the rainstorm, will invoke the raven
From the far East, who, as the priestlier croaker,
Shall overawe him.
That is to say, Horace will make the raven, appearing or
heard from the eastward (the lucky direction), over-rule
the bad omen of the crow.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 171
There is also grave meaning in the number visible at
one time, as Matthew Lewis knew when he wrote the
ballad Bill Jones:
"Ah, well-a-day," the sailor said,
"Some danger must impend,
Three ravens sit in yonder glade,
And evil will happen I'm sore afraid
Ere we reach our journey's end."
"And what have the ravens with us to do?
Does their sight betoken us evil?"
"To see one raven is luck, 'tis true,
But it's certain misfortune to light upon two,
And meeting with three is the devil."
Quoting Margaret Walker: 39
The belief in his power of divination was so general that
knowledge of the whereabouts of the lost has come to be known
as "raven's knowledge." To the Romans he was able to reveal
the means of restoring lost eyesight even. In Germany he was
able to tell not only where lost articles were, but could also
make known to survivors where the souls of their lost friends
were to be found. In Bohemia he was assigned the task usually
performed by the stork in other lands, while in some parts
of Germany witches were credited with riding upon his back in-
stead of on the conventional broomstick.
Regular formulas regarding magpies are repeated in
rural Britain, where magpies are numerous — they are
common in our American West, also, but nobody is super-
stitious about them there — of which a common example
runs:
One for sorrow, two for mirth,
Three for a wedding, four for a birth.
Many variations of these formulas are on record, some
carrying the rimes up to eight or nine pies seen at once ;
173
BIRDS IN LEGEND
and folklore has many quaint ways of dissipating the
evil effects feared from their presence.
Now all this is but the ragtag and bobtail, as it were,
of the science of the ancient Oriental world that has come
down to us in frayed and disconnected fragments, to be
now a matter more of amusing research than of belief or
practice among most of us. It was old even at the be-
ginning of the Christian era, but all the ornithomancy of
the Greek and Roman soothsayers was inherited in its
principle, if not always in its forms, from the remotely
antique "wisdom" of the East, in which the consultation
of birds appears to be the basis of divination.
In the Far East the raven has been regarded from
time immemorial with dread interest, and where that
species was rare the crow — equally black, destructive,
and cunning — took its place. To the primitive phi-
losophers of Persia and India the raven was a divine bird,
of celestial origin and supernatural abilities, and was the
messenger who announced the will of the Deity. A
German commentator on the Vcdas, H. Oldenberg, con-
cludes that the animals sent by the gods, as pictured in the
myths, were those of a weird, demoniacal nature, and
were for this reason themselves deified, but subsequently
became mere stewards to divine mandators. "In the
belief of the Persians/' says Lauffer, "the raven was
sacred to the god of light and the sun." Moncure D. Con-
way, 66 when discussing the Biblical legend of the Deluge,
suggests that the raven sent out of the Ark may typify
the "darkness of the face of the deep," and the dove the
"spirit of God" that "moved upon the face of the waters."
In China, Dr. Williams 76 tells us, "the sun is signalized
by the figure of a raven in a circle." I have seen Chinese
drawings of it in which the raven (or a crow) stood on
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 173
three legs, as does the toad that the Taoists see in the
moon — but why three legs? Mrs. Ball answers this
question thus :
The crow — known in China as wuya, and in Japan as karasu
■ — is most intimately related to the sun. Ch'un Ch'iu in an
ancient poem says: ''The spirit of the sun is a crow with three
legs"; while again Hwai Nan Tse, an ancient philosopher, ex-
plains that this crow has three legs because the number three
is the emblem of yang [light, good] of which the sun is the
supreme essence. . . . The Chinese, it would appear, actually
believed in the existence of a three-legged crow, for in the
official history of the Wei dynasty — 3d century A. D. — it is
related that "more than thirty times, tributes consisting of three-
legged crows were brought from the neighboring countries.
. . . The principal of sun-worship [in Japan] was Amateresu
no Ohokami, from whom the imperial family traces its descent.
This divinity . . . had as her messenger and attendant ... a
red bird having three legs."
Based on the fears and philosophy indicated above, the
soothsayers of India contrived a most elaborate scheme
of judging meanings from the actions of ravens and
crows, for little attention seems to have been paid to
ornithological distinctions; and this spread in very early
times to China and Thibet. It is a wonderful monument
of priestcraft, which has been elucidated by several
students of early Oriental manuscripts; and I am in-
debted to a profoundly learned discourse on the subject
by Dr. Berthold Lauffer. 52 Briefly the scheme was as
follows:
A table or chart was constructed containing ninety
squares, each square holding an interpretation of one or
another sound of a raven's or crow's voice; but his
utterances were separated into five characters of sound,
and the day divided into five "watches," while the direc-
tion from which the bird's voice came may be from any
174 BIRDS IN LEGEND
one of eight points of the compass, or from the zenith,
making nine points in all. Multiplying these together
gives the ninety squares of the mystic table, and the inter-
section of two conditions gives you the square where the
appropriate interpretation or prophecy is written.
Thus if in the first watch (i.e., early in the morning)
you hear a raven in the east say ka-ka, your wish to ob-
tain more property will be fulfilled; but if in the fourth
watch you hear a bird off in the southeast say da-da you
may be sure that a storm will arise in seven days. Five
different tones of the cawing were recognized as sig-
nificant. Just where and what you see a raven do when
you are travelling foretells some sort of a fortunate or
unfortunate incident of the progress or outcome of your
journey; yet these omens differ according to whether you
are moving and the bird is stationary, or you are stand-
ing still and the bird is flying, or both or neither are
motionless !
There was also a settled rule for taking prognostica-
tions from the nests of these birds. "When a crow has
built its nest on a branch on the east side of a tree," ac-
cording to Donacila's translation of a Thibetan manu-
script, "a good year and rain will be the result of it.
When it has built its nest on a southern branch the crops
will then be bad. When it has built its nest on a branch
in the middle of a tree, a great fright will then be the re-
sult of it. When it makes its nest below, fear of the
army of one's adversary will be the result of it. When it
makes its nest on a wall, on the ground, or on a river,
the [sick] king will be healed."
Whenever it appears that the omen observed portends
harm, offerings of food and so forth must be made to
the bird in order to avert the evil, and these offerings vary
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 175
according to prescribed rules. It is no wonder that an
extensive priesthood was needed to aid in this intricate
guarding against danger or the foretelling of benefits
to come; and one suspects that the whole thing was a
clever invention by the sacerdotal class to provide priests
with a good living. Nor have the practices, and much
less the superstitious notions behind them, become wholly
obsolete, for not only in India and China are the move-
ments of birds now watched with anxiety, and offerings
made to them in the temples and individually by the
peasantry, but similar ideas and practices prevail in all
Malayan lands, as readers of such books as Skeat's Malay
Magic 7 may learn.
Perhaps learned students of ancient ways of thinking
may be able to explain why the direction of a prophetic
bird from the listener was an essential element in its
message: for example, why is the cawing of a crow
east of you a more favorable portent than cawing from
the west? Lord Lytton studies this question briefly in
the Notes to his translation of the Odes of Horace, who,
in his Ode to Galatea, exclaims :
May no chough's dark shadow
Lose thee a sunbeam, nor one green woodpecker
Dare to tap leftward.
Why should "leftward" (Icevus) signify ill-luck in this
case, when the left was considered lucky by the Romans,
although unlucky by the Greeks? "It is suggested," is
Lytton's comment, "that the comparison may have arisen
from the different practice of the Greeks and Romans in
taking note of birds — the former facing north, the latter
south [an attitude connected with migration?] I believe,
however, it was the tap of the woodpecker, and not his
176 BIRDS IN LEGEND
flight, that was unlucky. It is so considered still in
Italy, and corresponds to our superstitious fear of the
beetle called the death-watch. If, therefore, heard on the
left, or heart side, it directly menaced life."
I leave the solution of the general problem of the
value of direction in ancient ornithomancy to the
Orientalists, advising them that a hint of subtile and half-
forgotten reasons for such distinctions may be found in
the ideas prevailing among the shamans, or "medicine
men," of our southwestern village-Indians; among the
Hopi (miscalled Mokis), for example, North is repre-
sented in their mystical ceremonies by yellow, West by
blue, South by red, and East by white.
Religious interest in black-hued birds is not confined
to the Old World, as was tragically illustrated in that
remarkable excitement among the Indians of the Upper
Missouri region in 1890, known as the Ghost Dance, of
which the crow was the honored symbol. James
Mooney, 77 of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, in-
vestigated this outburst of sentiment very thoroughly,
and explained it at length in the 14th Annual Report of
that Bureau, from which I extract the information as to
the crow's part in the matter. Dr. Mooney reminds us in
advance that the crow was probably held sacred by all
the tribes of the Algonquian race. Roger Williams,
speaking of the New England tribes, says that although
the crow did damage to the corn, hardly an Indian would
kill one, because it was their tradition that this bird had
brought them their first grain and vegetables, "carrying
a grain of corn in one ear and a bean in the other from
the field of their great god Cautantouwit in Sowwaniu,
the Southwest, the happy spirit-world where dwelt the
gods and the souls of the great and good."
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 177
The so-called Ghost Dance meant to the Plains Indians
generally a preparation for the coming of a superhuman
Messiah who would restore the old order of things when
the redman was supreme in the land, and free from the
restraint of an alien and encroaching civilization; and
primarily it contained no special hostility toward white
neighbors.
Among the western redmen the eagle for its general
superiority, the magpie (particularly by the Paiutes),
the sagehen because connected with the country whence
the Messiah was to come, and some other birds, were re-
vered in certain subsidiary ceremonies; but the central
bird-figure in this excitement was the crow, for it was
regarded as the directing messenger from the spirit-
world, because its color is a reminder of death and the
shadow-land. I have seen the figures of two upward fly-
ing crows and two magpies in a "medicine shirt" made
to be worn in the Ghost Dance. The raven shared in this
devotional respect, but is rare on the northern plains,
where its humbler relative was an abundant substitute.
Some understanding of this supreme position of the crow
in the Ghost-dancing — the equivalent of our "revival"
meetings — may be had by examining the Arapahoe
version of the belief on which the anticipated advent of
a red Messiah was based. Dr. Mooney expounds it 7T as
follows:
In Arapahoe belief the spirit world is in the west, not on the
same level with this earth of ours, but higher up, and sepa-
rated also from it by a body of water. . . . The crow, as the
messenger and leader of the spirits who had gone before [i.e.
the dead] collected their armies on the other side and advanced
at their head to the hither limit of the shadow-land. Then,
looking over, they saw far below them a sea, and far out be-
yond it toward the east was the boundary of the earth, where
178 BIRDS IN LEGEND
lived the friends they were marching to rejoin. Taking up
a pebble in his beak, the crow then dropped it into the water
and it became a mountain towering up to the land of the
dead. Down its rocky slope he brought his army until they
halted at the edge of the water. Then taking some dust in his
bill the crow flew out and dropped it into the water as he flew,
and it became a solid arm of land stretching from the spirit
world to the earth. He returned and flew out again, this time
with some blades of grass, which he dropped upon the land
thus made and at once it. was covered with a green sod. Again
he returned and again flew out, this time with some twigs in
his bill, and dropping these also upon the new land, at once it
was covered with a forest of trees. Again he flew back to the
base of the mountain, and is now [that is, at the time of the
Ghost dancing] coming on at the head of all the countless spirit-
host.
CHAPTER IX
THE FAMILIAR OF WITCHES
I FEAR no one would admit that a book of this
character was anywhere near complete did it not in-
clude at least one chapter on the observances and
superstitions connected with owls. Nevertheless I doubt
whether I should not have taken the risk of the reader's
displeasure had I not been able to avail myself of essays
by several men who have handled this large and intricate
phase of bird-lore in a way that discourages any rivalry.
The Atlantic Monthly for September, 1874, contained
an article by Alexander Young on "Birds of 111 omen/'
in which one may find treated not only the historic dread
of owls, but many similar facts and fears connected with
ravens, crows, magpies, and their fellow-craftsmen in
alleged diabolism. "Most birds," Mr. Young remarks,
"were considered ominous of good or evil according to
the place and manner of their appearance. ... It is
noticeable that this stigma has been affixed only to those
birds whose appearance or voice is disagreeable, and
whose habits are somewhat peculiar." The nocturnal
owls perhaps fulfil these conditions as well as any bird
could. "Their retired habits," to quote Broderip, 78 "the
desolate places that are their favorite haunts, their hollow
hootings, fearful shrieks, serpent-like hissings and coffin-
maker-like snappings, have helped to give them a bad
eminence, more than overbalancing all the glory that
Minerva and her own Athens could shed around them."
179
180 BIRDS IN LEGEND
The little Grecian owl — it is a foreign replica of our
own small screech owl, which, as a matter of fact, gurgles
rather melodiously instead of screeching — was well
thought of in Athens in its prime, and was the special
cognizance of the wise and dignified goddess of her
citizens, Pallas Athene — Minerva of the Romans. De
Kay, 18 indeed, reasons her out an owl-goddess, and it is
said that statues of her have been found with an owl's in-
stead of a human head. If she was a humanized ex-
pression for the moon, as some interpret her, this little
lover of moonlight is most suitable as her symbol. There-
fore one need not speculate on the reputed "wisdom" of
the owl, any owl — said to be proved wise by its being the
only bird that looks straight before it — for that reputa-
tion is merely a reflection from the attributes of its
patron, the stately goddess. Homer makes Athene the
special protector of those, chiefly women, engaged in
textile crafts ; and there is an old saying that the owl was
a weaver's daughter, spinning with silver threads. When,
therefore, in the midst of the momentous naval battle of
Salamis an owl alighted on the mast of the flagship of
Admiral Themistocles, as tradition attests, it was re-
ceived as an assurance from Pallas Athene herself that
she was fighting with and for the harassed Greeks. The
bird is displayed as large as space permits on Greek coins
of the period.
When the Romans took over Athene as Minerva her
owl came with her, but its symbolic importance quickly
faded. The Italians cared nothing for their little "strix"
— had no use for it except to eat it or make it a lure for
their bird-catching nets, and even charged it with suck-
ing the blood of children ; and they had no respect at all
for the rest of its tribe. The language applied to them by
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 181
the Latin poets reveals the detestation and dread with
which owls were held among the Romans. Derogatory
references abound in books of the classical era, and
similar sentiments might be quoted from authors down
into medieval times. Even the elder Pliny, called a
naturalist, but really hardly more than a too credulous
compiler, condemns the tribe in very harsh words —
especially the big-horned species; yet he only reflected
the general belief that they were messengers of death,
whence everybody trembled if one was seen in the town
or alighted on any housetop. One luckless owl that
made a flying trip to the Capitol was caught and burnt,
and its ashes were cast into the Tiber. Twice Rome
underwent ceremonial purification on this account,
whence Butler's jibe in Hitdibras:
The Roman senate, when within
The city walls an owl was seen,
Did cause their clergy with lustrations
(Our synod calls humiliations)
The round-faced prodigy t' avert
From doing town and country hurt.
The deaths of several Roman emperors, among them
Valentinian and Commodus Antoninus, were presaged
by owls alighting on their residences, and it is recorded
that before the death of the great Augustus an owl sang
on the Curia.
In central India the owl is now generally regarded as
a bird of ill omen. "If one happens to perch on the
house of a native, it is a sign that one of his household
will die, or some other misfortune befall him within a
year. This can only be averted by giving the house or its
value in money to the Brahmins, or making extraordi-
nary peace-offering to the gods." It is easy to calculate
182 BIRDS IN LEGEND
the origin of that particular form of superstition. In
southern India, according to Thurston (quoted by
Lauffer), the same dread prevails; and there the natives
interpret the bird's cries by their number, much as they
did those of crows. "One such screech forebodes death ;
two screeches, success in any approaching undertaking;
three, the addition by marriage of a girl to the family;
four, a disturbance ; five, that the hearer will travel. Six
screeches foretell the coming of guests; seven, mental
distress; eight, sudden death; and nine signify favorable
results. The number nine plays a great role in systems
of divination."
In view of this Oriental and Greco-Latin history,
which spread with the imperial civilization into all west-
ern Europe, and in view of the bad associations of these
birds in the Old Testament, where they are pronounced
"unclean," and relegated to the desert as companions of
a dreadful company (Isaiah, xxxiv, n), it was natural
that owls should be regarded with almost insane fear and
aversion in the Middle Ages, as the record shows they
were. In Sweden even yet, the owl is considered a bird
of sorcery, and great caution is necessary in speaking of
any of them to avoid being ensnared; moreover it is
dangerous to kill one, as its associates might avenge its
death. Nuttall, 79 the English-American ornithologist,
notes that he often heard the following couplet when he
was a child in the old country:
Oh ! — o-o-o — o-o !
I was once a king's daughter, and sat on my father's knee,
But now I'm a poor hoolet, and hide in a hollow tree.
This is explained in the northern counties of England
by a legend that Pharaoh's daughter was transformed
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 183
into an owl, and when children hear at night the screams
of one of these nocturnal hunters they are told the story
of its strange origin — but why Pharaoh's daughter?
Then there is that cryptic "little ode" quoted from the
memory of his childhood by Charles Waterton 73 in ref-
erence to the barn-owl, and explained elsewhere in this
book, which runs thus :
Once I was a monarch's daughter, and sat on a lady's knee,
But now I'm a nightly rover, banished to the ivy-tree,
Crying hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo,
for my feet are cold
Pity me, for here you see me, persecuted, poor and old.
If the delvers into Indo-European mythology are
right, the dread of owls existed long before the Romans
colonized among Gauls and Britons, and were in turn
overrun by Teutonic hordes. It exists among the wild-
est savages in every part of the world where owls prowl
with ghostly silence and stealth and hoot in the darkness,
startling men's nerves, and it survives in all peasantries.
In that delightful Sicilian book by Mrs. John L.
Heaton, 80 we have a narrative of a journey after dark
with some village-women. "A screech-owl [citca]
hooted. Gra Vainia crossed herself, and Donna Ciccia
muttered: 'Beautiful Mother of the Rock, deliver us!'
Donna Catina touched something [a gold cross] in the
bosom of her dress." On another occasion: "The silence
that fell again was broken by the hoot of the cuca. 'Some
one must die/ shuddered Donna Catina."
Owls have always been regarded as the familiars of
witches, sometimes bearing them through the night on
noiseless wings to some unholy tryst, sometimes con-
tributing materials to their malignant, magic-brewing
recipes. It was by meddling in such matters that the
1 84 BIRDS IN LEGEND
hero of that fine old romance, The Golden Ass of
Apuleius, fell into his ridiculous and painful predicament.
British poets, and especially the dramatists from
Chatterton down, have taken advantage of the black re-
pute of owls to enhance any scene of horror they want to
depict, Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens furnished ex-
cellent examples; and my friend J. E. Harting, 42 of
London, has gathered into his admirable Ornithology of
Shakespeare many owl-extracts from the great master's
play. 'The owlet's wing," Mr. Harting finds, "was an
ingredient in the cauldron wherein the witches prepared
their 'charm of powerful trouble' (Macbeth, iv, i);
and with the character assigned to it by the ancients,
Shakespeare, no doubt, felt that the introduction of an
owl in a dreadful scene of tragedy would help to make
the scene come home more forcibly to the people who
had from early times associated its presence with melan-
choly, misfortune and death. ... Its doleful cry pierces
the ear of Lady Macbeth while the murder is being done :
Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman
Which gives stern'st good-night.
"And when the murderer rushes in immediately after-
wards, exclaiming 'I have done the deed. Did thou not
hear a noise?' she replies 'I have heard the owl scream.'
And later on : The obscure bird clamored the live-long
night!' . . . Should an owl appear at a birth, it is said
to forebode ill luck to the infant. King Henry VI, ad-
dressing Gloster, says: The owl shrieked at thy birth,
an evil sign'; while upon another occasion its presence
was supposed to predict a death or at least some dire mis-
hap. . . . When Richard III is irritated by the ill news
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 185
showered thick upon him, he interrupts the third mes-
senger with 'Out on ye, Owls! Nothing but songs of
death/ M
It is not surprising on turning to the medieval phar-
macopoeia, where there was quite as much magic as
medicine, that the owl was of great potency in prescrip-
tions. "Thus the feet of the bubo, burnt with hard
plumbago, was held to be a help against serpents. If the
heart of the bird was placed on the left breast of a sleep-
ing beauty, it made her tell all her secrets: but the
warrior who carried it was strengthened in battle/' A !
modern relic of this bit of superstitious therapeutics was
found by me in The Long Hidden Frietid, a. little book
printed at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1863, which was a
crude translation by George Homan of a German book
published at Reading, Penn., in 1819. It consists of a
long series of remedies and magic arts to be followed,
and which were actually in use in that region in cases of
disease. Some of them introduced birds, one of which
is reminiscent of the "sleeping beauty" mentioned a
moment ago, and reads thus: "If you lay the heart and
right foot of a barn-owl on one who is asleep, he will
answer whatever you ask him, and tell what he has done."
This should be known to our chiefs of police, whose de-
tectives appear to be wasting much time in applying the
extractive process called the Third Degree.
The owl tribe, among the most innocent and service-
able, in its relation to mankind, of avian groups, has been
as outrageously slandered south of the Mediterranean as
north of it. "The inhabitants of Tangier," as Colonel Irby
tells us 81 in his book on the ornithology of Gibraltar, con-
sider the barn-owls, numerous there, "the clairvoyant
friends of the Devil."
186 BIRDS IN LEGEND
The Jews believe that their cry causes the death of
young children; so, in order to prevent this, they pour
a vessel of water out into the courtyard every time they
hear the cry of one of these owls, the idea being that
thus they will distract the bird's attention, and the
infant will escape the intended malice. The Arabs be-
lieve these owls can cause all kinds of evil to old as
well as young, but they content themselves with cursing
the bird whenever it is seen or heard. The Moham-
medans say : "When these birds cry they are only curs-
ing in their own language ; but their malediction is harm-
less unless they know the name of the individual to
whom they wish evil, or unless they have the malignity
to point out that person when passing him. As the Devil
sleeps but little when there is evil work to be done, he
would infallibly execute the commands of his favorite,
if one did not, by cursing him, thus guard against the
power of that enemy."
It is a pleasure to have this long record of misde-
meanors and diabolism relieved by at least one good deed
in history. Having read in Watters's 57 curious little
volume that the Tartars attribute to the barn-owl the
saving of the life of their great commander Genghis
Khan, I searched far and wide for the particulars of what
seemed likely to be an entertaining incident, and at last
I came upon the facts in the eleventh volume of Purchase
His Pilgrims. It appears that Changius Can, as the old
historian spells it, had his horse shot under him in a
certain fight that was going against him, and he ran and
hid in a thicket of shrubs — which is a novel view of the
"Tartar Terror." "Whither, when the enemies were
returned, with purpose to spoil the dead Carkass, and to
seek out such as were hidden, it happened that an Owle
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 187
came and sate upon those little trees or shrubs which he
had chose for his court, which when they had perceived
they sought no further in that place, supposing that the
said bird would not have sat there if any man had been
hidden underneath. ,,
A very similar legend in China accounts for the use of
peacock plumes as insignia of rank and is related as fol-
lows by Katherine M. Ball 68 : In the Chin dynasty a de-
feated general took refuge in a forest where there were
many peacocks. When the pursuing forces arrived, and
found the fowl so quiet and undisturbed, they concluded
that no one could possibly have come that way, and forth-
with abandoned the search. The general — who later be-
came the ancestor of five kings — was thus able to escape,
and so grateful was he that later, when he came into
power, he instituted the custom of conferring a peacock
feather as an honor for the achievement of bravery in
battle.
Japan has a similar mythical legend.
Frenchmen call the common brown owl of Europe
chouette; and when in 1793 disgruntled smugglers and
Royalist soldiers were carrying on guerrilla warfare in
Brittany and Poitu against the new order of things, they
came to be called Chouans, "owls," from the signal-cries
they made to one another in their nocturnal forays as
appears so often in Balzac's novel The Chouans.
Not much of this spookish and legendary lore seems
to have been imported into the United States, or else it
has disappeared, except that which still lingers among
the superstitious negroes of the South. A writer in one
of the early issues of The Cosmopolitan (magazine) re-
lated that to the black folks of the Cotton Belt forty years
or so ago the quavering "song" of our small mottled
1 88 BIRDS IN LEGEND
screech-owl spoke of coming death; but the birds were
considered sensitive to countercharms put upon them
from within the house over which they crooned their
tremulous monologue. "Jest J am de shevel inter de fire,
en time hit git red-hot dee '11 hesh dere shiverin' !" If
you don't like that, sprinkle salt on the blaze, or turn a pair
of shoes up on the floor with the soles against the wall.
"Perhaps this faint semblance to a laid-out corpse will
pacify the hungry spirit; the charm certainly, according
to negro belief, will silence its harsh-voiced emissary."
The darkies warn you that you must turn back on
any journey you are making if a screech-owl cries above
you. An old "hoot-owl," however, may foretell either
good or bad fortune according as its three hoots are
given on the right or left hand. This is an unfailing sign,
and is especially heeded in 'coon or 'possum hunting,
at night, when three hoots from the left will send any
hunter home hopeless.
All these indications and charms bear the familiar
marks of the Old World fears and formulas, but it is
surprising to meet them on the fields of Dixie-land.
Owls were too well understood by our native redmen
to be regarded with much superstition, and the smaller
ones were well liked. Prince Maximilian mentions in
his Travels (about 1836) that owls were kept in the
lodges of the Mandans and Minnitarees, who lived in
permanent villages in the upper Missouri Valley, and
were regarded as "soothsayers," but I think they were no
more than pets, as they are now in Zufii houses. Yet in
the American Museum of Natural History in New York
is a stuffed owl mounted on a stick, labeled as an object
"worshipped" by the sorcerers among the Menominee
Indians (eastern Wisconsin), "who believe they can
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 189
assume the shape of an owl, and can in this disguise
attack and kill their enemies" — that is, they try to make
others believe so. The owl is chosen for their disguise, of
course, because it typifies the sly, unseen method of attack
in darkness with which they sought to terrify the people.
Mr. Stuart Culin tells me that in Zufii owls, of which
four kinds are recognized by names, are not considered
sacred, and are killed for their feathers, which are used
on ceremonial masks, and, once a year, to decorate long
prayer-sticks. The people, he says, think that a certain big
gray owl lives in a house like a man, and if any Indian
goes to its house and the owl looks at him he will surely
die. When the headmen go out at night for some cere-
mony, and this owl is heard, it is a sign that rain will
come very soon. This large owl and the small burrowing-
owl are kept in houses as pets. Children are afraid of
them, and they are utilized by parents to make the
youngsters behave themselves.
The Ashochimi, a mountain tribe of Californian
Indians now extinct, as described by Powers, 19 feared
certain hawks and owls, regarding them as malignant
spirits which they must conciliate by offerings, and by
wearing mantles of feathers, thus:
When a great white owl alights near a village in the evening,
and hoots loudly, the headman at once assembles all his warriors
in council to determine whether Mr Strix demands a life or
only money. ... If they incline to believe that he demands a
life, someone in the village is doomed and will speedily die.
But they generally vote that he can be placated by an offering,
and immediately set out a quantity of shell-money and pinole,
whereupon the valorous trenchermen fall to eat the pinole them-
selves, and in the morning the headman decorates himself with
owl-feathers, carries out the shell-money with solemn for-
mality and flings it into the air under the tree where the owl
perched.
190
BIRDS IN LEGEND
A somewhat more spiritual view was taken by the
Pimas of old times in the southwestern deserts. Their
ideas of the destiny of the human soul varied, but one
theory was that at death the soul passed into the body of
an owl. "Should an owl happen to be hooting at the time
of a death, it was believed that it was waiting for the
soul. . . . Owl-feathers were always given to a dying
person. They were kept in a long, rectangular box or
basket of maguey leaf. If the family had no owl-feathers
at hand they sent to the medicine-man who always kept
them. If possible, the feathers were taken from a living
bird when collected; the owl might then be set free or
killed." 83
CHAPTER X
A FLOCK OF FABULOUS FOWLS
WE are pretty sure to hear of the phenix every
time a tailor or soap-maker announces that he
will rebuild his shop after it has been burned;
and its picture is a favorite with the advertising de-
partment of fire-insurance companies. The world first
learned of this remarkable fowl when Herodotus brought
back to Greece his wonder-tales from Egypt, some 400
years before Cleopatra made so much trouble by mixing
love and politics. It will be well to quote in full the
account by the great Greek traveller as it is found in the
translation by Laurent:
There is another sacred bird, called the "phenix," which I
myself never saw except in a picture, for it seldom makes its
appearance among the Egyptians — only every five-hundred
years, according to the people of Heliopolis. They state that
he comes on the death of his sire. If at all like his picture,
this bird may be thus described in size and shape. Some of
his feathers are of the color of gold; others are red. In out-
line he is exceedingly similar to the eagle, and in size also.
This bird is said to display an ingenuity which to me does not
appear credible: he is represented as coming out of Arabia,
and bringing with him his father to the temple of the Sun,
embalmed in myrrh, and there burying him. The manner in
which this is done is as follows: In the first place he sticks to-
gether an egg of myrrh, as much as he can carry, and then
tries if he can bear the burden. This experiment achieved, he
accordingly scoops out the egg sufficiently to deposit his sire
within. He next fills with fresh myrrh the opening in the egg
by which the body was inclosed; thus the whole mass contain-
191
l 9 2 BIRDS IN LEGEND
ing the carcase is still of the same weight. Having thus com-
pleted the embalming, he transports him into Egypt and to the
temple of the Sun. (Euterpe, Book II.)
Herodotus seems to have been most interested in the
odorous embalming, quaintly referred to in a 17th-
century song —
Have you e'r smelt what Chymick Skill
From Rose or Amber doth distill?
Have you been near that Sacrifice
The Phoenix makes before she dies?
And it will be noticed that this observant reporter says
nothing of the quality that has given the bird its present
popularity as a type of recovery from disaster — its ability
to "rise from its ashes," which, indeed, appears to have
been a later conception.
Greeks of that day probably accepted this story from
Herodotus without much demur or criticism, for they
had their own traditions of wonderful birds — the
Stymphalids, for example. These were gigantic and
terrible fowls that lived along the river Stymphalus, in
northern Arcadia — a region of savage mountains that
the Athenians knew little about. They were believed to
be man-eating monsters with claws, wings, and beaks of
brass, and feathers which they shot out like arrows.
"Heracles scared them with a brazen rattle, and succeeded
in killing part and in driving away the rest, which settled
on the island of Artias in the Black Sea, to be frightened
away after a hard fight by the Argonauts." So Seyfert
summarizes their history; and an illustration on an an-
tique vase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a
flock of them looking much like pelicans.
Pausanias visited the curious River Stymphalus and
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 193
found it rising in a spring, flowing into a marsh, and then
disappearing underground — a good setting for strange
happenings, and he refers to the legend in his usual
bantering way, thus:
"There is a tradition that some man-eating birds lived on its
banks, whom Hercules is said to have killed with his arrows.
. . . The desert of Arabia has among other monsters some birds
called Stymphalides, who are as savage to men as lions or
leopards. They attack those who come to capture them, and
wound them with their beaks and kill them. They pierce
through coats of mail that men wear, and if they put on thick
robes of mat the beaks of these birds penetrate them too. . . .
Their size is about that of cranes and they are like storks,
but their beaks are stronger and not crooked like those of storks.
If there have been in all time these stymphalides like hawks and
eagles, then they are probably of Arabian origin."
The Greeks knew also of half-human Harpies, of web-
footed Sirens, of the Birds of Seleucia, and of various
other ornithological monstrosities, so that the tale of an
Egyptian one was easily acceptable to their minds. The
ugliest of the ugly flock were the Harpies, bird-women,
on whom the ancients expended the direst pigments of
their imagination, and whom Dante makes inhabitants of
the gnarled and gloomy groves wherein suicides are con-
demned to suffer in the nether world —
There do the hideous Harpies make their nests
Who chased the Trojans from the Strophades
With sad announcement of impending doom;
Broad wings have they, and necks and faces human,
And feet with claws, and their great bellies fledged
They make lament upon the wondrous trees.
The Romans liked Herodotus and his story as well as
they pleased the Greeks, and Pliny heard or invented
194 BIRDS IN LEGEND
additional particulars. He insists that only one phenix
exists at a time, clothed in gorgeous feathers and carrying
a plumed head ; and at the close of its long life it builds
a nest of frankincense and cassia, on which it dies.
From the corpse, as Pliny asserts, is generated a worm
that develops into another phenix. This young phenix,
when it has grown large enough, makes it its first duty to
lay its father's body on the altar in Heliopolis; and
Tacitus adds that its body is burned there. The implica-
tion in most accounts is that the bird is male (the
Egyptians are said to have believed all vultures female),
and doubtless the whole conception is a primitive phase
of the nature-worship out of which developed the more
formal Osiris-legend.
But the picture has many variants. One is that the
phenix subsists on air for 500 years, at the end of which,
lading its wings with perfumed gums gathered on Mt.
Lebanon (!) it flies to Heliopolis and is burned — itself
now, not its parent — into fragrant ashes on the altar of
the Sun temple. On the next morning appears a young
phenix already feathered, and on the third day, its pinions
fully grown, it salutes the priest and flies away. Here
we come to the best remembered feature of the mystery,
caught and kept alive for us by the poets, such as John
Lyly, 49 who in 1591 reminded the world that —
There is a bird that builds its neast with spice,
And built, the Sun to ashes doth her burne,
Out of whose sinders doth another rise,
And she by scorching beames to dust doth turne.
De Kay 18 discourses on these notions in his Bird Gods:
"In the oldest tombs, discovered lately on the upper Nile by
Jacques de Morgan and others, the phenix is seen rising from
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 195
a bed of flames, which may well mean the funeral pyre of the
defunct. The inscriptions in question are so early that they
belong to a period when the ceremonial of the mummy had not
become universal in Egypt, and the conquerors of Egypt, prob-
ably a swarm of metal-using foreigners from the valley of the
Euphrates, who crossed from Arabia and the Red Sea, were
still burning the bodies of their chiefs and kings. The phenix
of these inscriptions may indicate the soul of the departed rising
from its earthly dross as the soul of Herakles, according to the
much later legend in its Greek form, rose from his funeral
pyre to join the gods of Olympus."
Now, whether or not the priests of Heliopolis en-
couraged their worshippers to believe that such a creature
really existed, they themselves knew well that it was a
mere symbol of the sun; and it is easy to identify it with
the bird "bennu" spoken of in the Book of the Dead and
other Egyptian sacred texts, which unquestionably was
a picturesque representative of the sun, rising, pursuing
its course, and at regular intervals expiring in the fires of
sunset, then renewing itself on the morrow in the flames
of sunrise over Arabia. Plentiful evidence that this was
perfectly understood in Greece and Italy of the classic
age may be read in the works of their essayists and poets.
Claudian (365-408), wrote, and Tickell, a British poet,
translated into verse, a long poem on the phenix.
Petrarch carried their wisdom onward when he declared
there could be only one phenix at a time because there
was only one sun.
When the Arabs succeeded the Romans in the Nile
Provinces they picked up from the people remnants of the
legend, and confused it with their own ancient belief
in a creature that resisted burning, by whose existence
they accounted for the incombustible property of asbestos,
a mineral known to them, but the origin of which was a
mystery. It came from the Orient, and some said it was
196 BIRDS IN LEGEND
a vegetable product, others the hair of a rat-like animal:
the western Arabs, however, mostly believed it to be the
plumage of a bird, so that naturally they identified it with
the fire-loving phenix. Arabian authors of the ioth cen-
tury and onward describe this bird, under the Greek name
"salamandra," as dwelling in India, where it lays its eggs
and produces young in fire. Sashes, they say, are made
of its feathers, and when one of them becomes soiled it
is thrown on a fire, and comes out whole, but clean.
This is an excellent example of the mingling of fact
and fancy by which a student of these old matters is con-
stantly perplexed. It is probable that small woven
articles had long been known to the Arabs and Moors
as Eastern curiosities, for the people of southern China
since very ancient times had been collecting and preparing
fibrous asbestos, and weaving it into fire-proof cloth.
Such fabrics had, no doubt, a rough, fuzzy surface, not
unlike fur or the down of birds, and might easily be sup-
posed to be the latter. Hence the assertion that asbestos
was the skin of a bird indestructible by fire, the identifica-
tion of the phenix with the salamandra (as a bird — it had
other legendary forms), and the trade-name "samand"
given to asbestos cloth when the Arabs themselves began
to manufacture and sell it. So our proverbial idea of the
salamander goes back to a remote antiquity; but how it
came to be represented among us as a newt instead of a
bird belongs to another book.
Meanwhile on the northern shore of the Mediterranean,
where the legend of the phenix was popular, it had been
introduced into Christianity as a symbol, as we know
from memorial sculpture, and from the writings of St.
Clement, who was the second pope after Peter. Its special
meaning was immortality, which in that period meant the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE
197
physical resurrection of the dead ; and the peacock came
to be used in the same sense, as representing, if not
virtually merged with, the phenix. The image in men's
minds at that time appears to have been that of an eagle,
a bird closely identified with the sun, clothed in the
plumage of the peacock, another sun-bird (as representa-
tive of the gorgeous clouds at sunset) ; and the very name
confirms these solar associations, for our "phenix" is the
Greek word phoinix, crimson red. How large a place the
peacock in this aspect fills in the art and mythology of
China and Japan appears in Chapter VII.
Hulme informs us that Philippe de Thaum writes in
his Bestiary of the mystic bird: "Know this is its lot; it
comes to death of its own will, and from death it comes
to life: hear what it signifies. Phoenix signifies Jesus,
Son of Mary, that he had power to die of his own will,
and from death come to life. Phoenix signifies that to
save his people he chose to suffer upon the cross." "God
knew men's unbelief," St. Cyril laments, "and therefore
provided this bird as evidence of the Resurrection." St.
Ambrose also declares that "the bird of Arabia teaches
us, by its example, to believe in the Resurrection." Pas-
sages of like tenor might be quoted from Tertullian and
other expositors of the early Christian church, all show-
ing the most unsuspicious faith in the real existence of
such a bird.
The symbolic connection of this fabulous creature with
the idea of immortality may have been an inheritance
from Jewish traditions. According to the Talmud Eve,
after eating the terrible fruit in the Garden of Eden,
tried to force it, and its consequences, on all the animals,
but the bird "chol" (the phenix) would not eat, but flew
away from temptation, and thus preserved its original
198 BIRDS IN LEGEND
gift of perpetual life. "And now the phenix . . . lives a
thousand years, then shrivels up till it is the size of an
tgg, and then from himself emerges beautiful again."
In the Middle Ages this deathless bird was supposed to
inhabit the sacred garden of the Earthly Paradise.
Peacocks carved on early Christian sarcophagi are
perched on a palm tree (the conventional sign of martyr-
dom in primitive Christian iconography), and hence elo-
quent of that rapturous belief in immortality character-
istic of the catacombs, as Mrs. Jenner expresses it. Repre-
sentations of the bird rising from a flaming nest and
ascending toward the sun are less common, but do occur
in medieval heraldry, by which pictorial path, it is prob-
able, the notion has come down to our own day and be-
come the cognizance of one of the oldest American in-
surance companies.
The association with the palm mentioned above re-
calls another line of legendry, for some etymologists say
that the name "phenix" should be so written (not
phoenix), and that it is the older name of the date-palm.
This tree was regarded in ancient Egypt as the emblem
of triumph, whence, perhaps, our modern symbolic use
of its fronds; and Pliny was informed that "in Arabia
the phenix nested only on a palm," and that "the said
bird died with the tree and revived of itself as the tree
sprang again."
Now, Arabic authors of the Middle Ages had much
to say of a mythical bird, "anka," that lived 1700 years;
and they explained that when a young anka grows up if it
be a female the old female burns herself, and if it be a male
the old male does so. This is very phenix-like, but the anka
is distinguished by huge size, the Arabic writer Kazweenee,
as quoted by Payne," describing the anka as the greatest
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 199
of birds. "It carries off the elephant," he says, "as the
cat carries off the mouse" ; and he relates that in conse-
quence of its kidnapping a bride God, at the prayer of the
prophet Handhallah, "banished it to an island in the cir-
cumambient ocean unvisited by men under the equinoctial
line."
I find in Miss Costello's Rose Garden of Persia 88 some
interesting notes quoted from M. Garcin de Tassy, rela-
tive to the anka, which, De Tassy says, has become a
proverbial symbol in Persia for something spoken of
but not seen — and not likely to be ! Here he seems to be
using the Arabic name for the bird the Persians call
"simurgh," the signification of which, as Professor
A. V. W. Jackson tells me, is "the mythical," and which
is derived from the avestan word for "eagle" — another
link in our chain. De Tassy explains:
It [the anka] is known only by name, and is so called from
having a white line round the neck like a collar; some say be-
cause of the length of the neck. ... It is said that the inhabi-
tants of the city of Res. . . . had in their country a mountain
called Demaj, a mile high. There came a very large bird with
a very long neck, of beautiful and divers colors. This bird was
accustomed to pounce on all the birds of that mountain, and
eat them up. One day he was hungry and birds were scarce,
so he pounced on a child and carried it off. He is called anka-
mogreb because he carries off the prey he seizes. . . . Soon
after this he was struck by a thunderbolt.
Mohammed is reported to have said that at the time of
Moses God created a female bird called anka; it had eight
wings like the seraphs, and bore the figure of a man. God gave
it a portion of every thing, and afterwards created it a male.
Then God made a revelation to Moses that he had created two
extraordinary birds, and had assigned for their nourishment
the wHd beasts around Jerusalem. But the species multiplied,
and when Moses was dead they went to the land of Nejd and
Hijaz, and never ceased to devour the wild beasts and to carry
off children till the time when Khaled, son of Senan Abasi,
200 BIRDS IN LEGEND
was Prophet, between the time of Christ and Mohammed. It
was then that these birds were complained of. Khaled in-
voked God, and God did not permit them to multiply, and their
race became extinct.
This characteristic Bedouin camp-fire novelette re-
minds us at once of the famous roc, or "rukh," to adopt
the more correct spelling, with which we are familiar
from the story in the Arabian Nights of Sinbad the
Sailor. Let me quote it succinctly from Payne's edition. 87
Sinbad had sailed on a commercial venture from his
home in Basra, a port on the Persian Gulf, and the ship
had stopped at a very pleasant island, situation un-
recorded. Sinbad went ashore with others, wandered in
the lovely woods, fell asleep, and awoke to find the ship
gone and himself the only person on the island. As he
was exploring the place rather timidly he came to a great
shining dome, but could see no doorway. "As I stood,"
he relates, "casting about how to gain an entrance, the
sun was suddenly hidden from me and the air became
dark. . . »
So I marvelled at this, and lifting my head looked steadfastly
at the sun, when I saw that what I had taken for a cloud was
none other than an enormous bird whose outspread wings, as it
flew through the air, obscured the sun and veiled it from the
island. At this sight my wonder redoubled, and I bethought
me of a story I had heard aforetime of pilgrims and travellers,
how in certain islands dwells a huge bird, called the roc, which
feeds its young on elephants, and was assured that the dome
aforesaid was none other than one of its eggs. As I looked
. . . the bird alighted on the egg and brooded over it, with its
wings covering it and its legs spread out behind it on the ground,
and in this posture it fell asleep, glory be to Him who sleepeth
not!
When I saw this I arose, and unwinding the linen of my tur-
ban twisted it into a rope with which I girt my middle, and
bound myself fast to his feet.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 201
SinbacTs purpose was to get himself carried away to
some better place, but when, next morning, the roc did
bear him aloft and afar, and finally alighted, the sailor
found himself in a horrid desert. After many further
adventures and voyages Sinbad revisits his island yet
does not recognize it until the men with whom he is stroll-
ing bade him look at a great dome. Not knowing what
it was they broke it open with stones, ''whereupon much
water ran out of it, and the young roc appeared within;
so they pulled it forth of the shell and killed it, and took
of it great store of meat." Dreadful misfortune fol-
lowed this inconsiderate act.
This was a well-known Arabic wonder-tale. The au-
thor of one of their popular old books of "marvels,"
several of which exist, tells almost exactly Sinbad's story
as happening to himself, and at least two other Arabic
works are said to contain the tale with picturesque varia-
tions. In later times the home of the monster was
placed in Madagascar. Marco Polo, the adventurous
Italian, who in the 13th century wandered overland to
China, and whose Travels 89 are a fine mixture of fact
and fancy, had a fair idea of where Madagascar was, and
recorded much that he was told about it — mostly errone-
ous. He relates that the people of that island report
"That at a certain season of the year . . . the rukh
makes its appearance from the southern region. . . .
Persons who have seen this bird assert that when the
wings are spread they measure sixteen paces in extent."
Marco says that he heard that the agents of the Grand
Khan took to him a feather ninety spans long. It is ex-
plained in Yule's edition of Polo's Travels that the sup-
posed roc's feather was one of the gigantic fronds of the
raphia palm "very like a quill in form."
202 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Such wonder-tales have a truly phenixlike quality of
indestructibility. As late as the time of Charles I of Eng-
land there lived in Lambeth, on the Surrey side of
London, John Tradescant, renowned as traveller and
florist, who accumulated an extensive "physic-garden"
and museum of antiquities and curiosities. He was a
man of science, but to satisfy the popular taste of the
time, as Pennant explains, his museum contained a feather
alleged to be of the dragon, and another of the griffin.
"You might have found here two feathers of the tail
of the phoenix, and the claw of the rukh, a bird capable
to trusse an elephant." This collection after the death of
Tradescant's son in 1622, became the property of Elias
Ashmole, and it was the nucleus of the Ashmolean
Museum founded at Oxford in 1682.
But phenix, rukh, anka, simurgh, garuda, feng-huang
and others that have not been mentioned, such as Yel, the
mythical raven of our Northwest, and those of Malaya
described by Skeat, 7 are all, apparently, members of the
brood hatched ages ago in that same sunrise nest and
still flying amid rosy clouds of prehistoric fable.
The first glimpse of them is on the seals and tablets
recovered from Mesopotamian ruin-mounds. In the
mystic antiquity of the Summerian kingdom of Ur and
its capital-city Lagash, a gigantic eagle, "the divine bird
Imgig" was the royal cognizance. In those days, as Dr.
Ward 23 discloses from his study of the oldest Babylonian
cylinders, people told one another tales of monstrous and
fantastic birds of prey that could fly away with an ante-
lope in each talon, and which fought, usually victoriously,
against huge winged and feathered dragons with bodies
like those of crocodiles, and sometimes with human heads.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 203
Such representations of demons were the prototypes of
the grotesque combinations of animal features, and of
men and animals, more familiar to us in the Egyptian
Sphinx, the classic centaurs, and medieval angels and
devils.
When the elders in Babylon expounded the reason for
faith in these antagonistic supernatural creatures, they
explained that the "divine" eagle symbolized beneficence
and protective power in the universe, while the feathered
monsters stood for the baffling forces of malignancy and
harm. In this philosophy, probably, is the underlying re-
lationship that connects all this Oriental flock of fabulous
fowls — visionary flight-beings in varying forms and
phases that seek to portray the powers of the air, mys-
terious, uncontrollable, overwhelming, capable of all the
mind of primitive man could conceive or his gods per-
form. All of them became endowed in time with the
luxuriant colorings of Eastern poetry and fiction, and
appear now heroic and picturesque, as one expects of
everything in the dreamy Orient of tradition.
In the cold and stormy North, however, where the
sun is a source of comfort rather than of terror, and
movements of the atmosphere are more often feared
than blessed, the similar conception of a gigantic skybird
is far more definite. When the native of the Russian
plains, struggling homeward against driving snow, hears
the shrilling and howling of the tempest he knows Vikhar,
the Wind-Demon, is abroad. Norsemen represent him
as Hraesvelg, the North Wind, an eagle: he does not
"ride on the wings of the wind," he is the wind, and the
blast from the arctic sea that beats upon your face is the
air set in motion by the wings of this colossal, invisible
204 BIRDS IN LEGEND
bird flying southward. That it is big enough to stir the
atmosphere into a veritable hurricane is plain:
From the East came flying hither,
From the East a monstrous eagle,
One wing touched the vault of heaven,
While the other swept the ocean;
With his tail upon the waters,
Reached his beak beyond the cloudlets.
And such an eagle as this one, described as a reality in
the Kalevala, the legendary epic of the Finns, possessing
beak and talons of copper, once seized and bore away a
maiden to its eyrie, thus showing itself true to the "form"
of the East whence it came.
Most of our North American Indians typified the
winds, especially those from the north, as birds, and many
tribes identified the storm-bringing ones with their
thunder-birds, which was very natural. The Algonkins
believed that certain birds produced the phenomena of
wind and created waterspouts, and that the clouds were
the spreading and agitation of their gigantic wings. The
Navahos thought that a great white swan sat at each of the
four points of the compass and conjured up the blasts
that came therefrom, while the Dakotas believed that in
the west is the residence of the Wakinyjan, "the Flyers/'
that is, the breezes that develop into occasional storms.
It was in the Orient, however, where, by the way,
both simurgh and garuda serve as storm-bringers in
several myths, that the conception of gigantic bird-beings
was expanded and elaborated with the picturesque details
that have been suggested in an earlier paragraph.
A very old Persian tale, with many fanciful embroider-
ings, runs as follows: There are, or were, two trees—
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 205
one the Tree of Life, and the other the Tree Opposed to
All Harm, the tree that bears the seeds of all useful
things; which is like the two trees in the Garden of
Eden, over in Babylon. In the latter tree sits and nests
the chief of all the mythic birds, the simurgh (called in the
Avesta "saena-meregha" ) , which is said to suckle its
young, and to be three natures "like a bat." "Whenever
he arises aloft a thousand twigs will shoot out from that
tree, and when he alights he breaks off the thousand twigs
and bites the seeds from them. And the bird cinamros
[second only to the simurgh] alights likewise in that
vicinity ; and his work is this, that he collects those seeds
that are bitten from the tree of many seeds, which is
opposed to harm, and he scatters them where Tishtar
[angel that provides rain] seizes the water [from the
demons of drought] ; so that, while Tishtar shall seize the
water, together with those seeds of all kinds, he shall
rain them on the world with the rain." Such is the lan-
guage of the sacred books. 26
The simurgh figures in Firdausi's 93 legendary epic as
the foster-parent of Zal, father of Rustam, the national
hero of Persia. When Rudabah's flank was opened to
bring forth Rustam her wound was healed by rubbing it
with a simurgh's feather. Rustam himself, once wounded
unto death, was cured in the same manner, and other
cases are recorded in great variety. Firdausi explains
that the simurgh had its nest on Mt. Elburz, on a peak
that touched the sky in a place no man had ever seen;
and that it was to that eyrie that it carried the princely
baby Zal, whence it was recovered by its parents. In
the ancient Avestan ritual it is stated of the vulture
varengana: "If a man holds a bone of that strong bird
... or a feather, no one can smite or turn to flight that
206 BIRDS IN LEGEND
fortunate man. The feather of that bird brings him
help . . . maintains him in his glory." According to
De Kay 18 the simurgh was a "god-like bird that discussed
predestination with Solomon, as the eagle of Givernberg
held dialogues with King Arthur. . . . The simurgh was
a prophet."
But of all the fabulous birds that infest ancient Persian
mythology none is held so important as the falcon-like
"karshipta," which brought the sacred law into the
Paradise of Jamshid. "Regarding the karshipta they
say that it knew how to speak words, and brought the
religion to the enclosure which Yim made, and circulated
it: there they utter the Avesta in the language of birds."
We read also of a gigantic bird in Iran, the "kamar,"
"which overshadowed the earth and kept off the rain till
the rivers dried up."
In the Hindu mythology Vishnu is the sun-god, while
Indra represents the lightning and storm, and the two are
in general opposites, rivals, enemies. Vishnu rides on an
eagle of supernatural size and power called garuda. In
the Pahlavi translation of the stories the simurgh takes
the place of the eagle, for their characters as well as their
names are interchangeable. Garuda was born from an
egg laid by Vinata, herself the daughter of a hawk and
the mother of the two immense vultures that in Persian
myths guard the gates of hell, and elsewhere figure boldly
in Oriental fables ; it is a mortal enemy, now of the ser-
pent and now of the elephant, and now of the tortoise —
all three connected with Indra. This bird carries into
the air an elephant and a tortoise in order to devour
them, and in one of the various accounts leaves them on
a mountain-top as did the simurgh and the rukh their
iniquitous "liftings."
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 207
Garuda also appears in Japanese legendary art as gario,
or binga, or bingacho, or karobinga, half woman, half
bird, a sort of winged and feathered angel with a tail like
a phenix and legs like a crane. This reminds us of the
harpies of Greece. The Malays recognize the image, and
when a cloud obscures the sun Perak men will say:
"Gerda is spreading his wings to dry."
The Chinese, and after them the Japanese, had a
phenix-like bird in their mythical aviary, which persists
in the faith of the more simple-minded of their peoples,
and as a fruitful motive in the decorative art of each.
It was one of the four supernatural creatures that in
ancient Chinese philosophy symbolized the four quarters
of the heavens. The Taoists, whose religious ideas are
older than Confucianism and prevailed especially among
the humble and unlearned, called it the Scarlet Bird, and
associated it with the element Fire, and with their mys-
tic number 7. Archaic pictures show a crested bird with
long tail-feathers — a figure that might well be meant for
a peacock. The creature itself is said not to have been
seen by mortal eyes since the time of Confucius, but it
has by no means been forgotten, for it is the fung-
whang, or feng-huang (which is the names of the male
and the female of the species conjoined) ; and it lives
even now on embroidered screens and painted vases, or
proudly distinguishes royal robes, from the Thibetan
mountains to the Yellow Sea.
A recent writer on Eastern art 68 describes the proper
fung as a gorgeously colored bird with a long tail. Its
feathers are red, azure, yellow, white, and black, the five
colors belonging to the five principal virtues; and the
Chinese ideograms for uprightness, humanity, virtue,
honesty, and sincerity, are impressed on various parts of
208 BIRDS IN LEGEND
its body. Its cries are symbolic, its appearance precedes
the advent of virtuous rulers. As in the other cases
this bird carries something away — this time an eminent
philosopher, Baik-fu, was translated. In Japan the
peasantry, at least, still hold to the reality of the same
bird under the name ho-ho, and artists and symbolists
have beautifully utilized the conception. 90 The belief
is that the sun descends to earth from time to time in the
form of the ho-ho, as a messenger of love, peace, and
goodwill, and rests on one or another of the torii. It
appears to have become a badge of imperial rank in
China before the time of the Ming dynasty, and, in
Japan it became the symbol of the empress, and in old
times, as we are told, only empresses and royal princesses
could have its likeness woven into their dress-goods.
It will be noticed that this last-considered member of
our fabulous flock, the fung-whang or ho-ho, is the
only one not of gigantic size or distorted or terrifying
aspect. This indicates to me its comparatively recent
origin, and its beneficent disposition shows that it is the
creation of men accustomed to peace under kindly skies.
It is an interesting fact that when the Mongolian felt
called upon to portray demoniac beings he exaggerated to
the extent of his ability human expressions of rage,
villainy and ferocity, instead of using for his purpose
animals of Titanic size, or in horrifying combinations,
as did magicians south of the great mountains.
The explanation seems not far away. The territory
that apparently always has been the home of the homo-
geneous "yellow" race is essentially a vast plain extend-
ing from the mountains of central Asia westward to the
Pacific and meridianally from southern China to the
border of Kamptchatka. It includes the spacious valleys
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 209
of China, proper, the plains and deserts of Mongolia,
and the broad prairies that stretch across Manchuria,
making together the widest area of fairly level and till-
able land on the globe. Much of it was never forested,
and from a large part of the remainder the scanty growth
of woods had been cleared before written history began.
The climate as a whole is temperate and equable, and
rarely disturbed by startling and destructive meteoro-
logical phenomena. Furthermore, except the tigers of
the jungly southeastern border, no dangerous animals are
to be feared or to be idealized into mythical things of
terror. Two evils of nature remain to disturb the in-
habitants of this favored region — annual spring-floods,
often fatally widespread; and, second, frequent earth-
quakes. The floods are perfectly understood in their
cause as well as in their effects, and afford little material
for superstition. As for the earthquakes, the people long
ago found a sufficient explanation in the invention of a
burrowing beast of prodigious size and strength, which
they called an "earth-dragon," and whose movements as
it stirs about heaves the ground beneath our feet. The
wave-like character of the earth-shocks showed that the
dragon must be elongated and reptile-like; and now and
then a landslide or diggings disclosed long and massive
bones that evidently were those of these subterranean
monsters, although foreigners said they were fossil re-
mains of Mesozoic reptiles or something else. The whole
idea, in fact, is so plausible and logical, that it really be-
longs to scientific hypothesis rather than to mythology.
The reaction of this tranquil geographical situation and
history has been to produce, or mould, a people gentle,
self-contained and averse to strife. This is not par-
ticularly to their credit or their discredit. It is as natural
210 BIRDS IN LEGEND
for a race developed in the valley of the Hoang Ho to be
peaceable as for one bred along the Danube or the St.
Lawrence to be belligerent.
In such an unterrifying situation as his the Mongolian
felt no impulse to coin the manifestations of nature,
elemental or animated, into malignant demons, but rather
impersonated them, if at all, as beings with kindly in-
tentions and of beautiful form. That such impersona-
tions are few, and that Chinese mythology furnishes a
comparatively small contribution to the world's store of
specimens of that primitive stage in human mentality, is,
I think, another evidence of the equable physical en-
vironment in which the people of the Flowery Kingdom
have been nurtured, which, while it contributed to their
sanity, did little to stimulate their imaginations.
On the other hand, men and women who endured,
day by day, the blistering heat and drouth of the desert;
or who knew the awe-inspiring mountains, where gloomy
glens alternate with cloud-veiled heights, the thunders of
unseen avalanches shock the ear, and appalling fires that
no man kindles rage against the snows ; or who night and
day must guard his or her life in the jungle against lurk-
ing perils from tooth and claw and poison-fang — such
persons were aroused to mental as well as physical alert-
ness for safety's sake, and saw in almost every circum-
stance of their lives visions of unearthly power. Unable
in their narrow, slowly developing knowledge and meagre
intellection, to comprehend much of what confronted
them, yet understanding some small sources and agencies
of power, what more natural than that they should picture
the often tremendous exhibitions of nature's force as the
product of enormously greater powers. Hence not only
the bigness attributed to the mythical birds we have
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 211
sketched but their supernatural abilities, and also — in ac-
cordance with constant experience of the general antago-
nism between nature and human purposes — the malig-
nancy characterizing most of them.
For, as has been said, Garuda, Simurgh, Phenix,
Fung- Whang and all the others are only visions woven
out of the sunshine, the clouds and the winds, in the loom
of primitive imagination. It is quite a waste of time,
therefore, to try as some have done (notably Professor
Newton 55 ) to connect any one of them with some living
or extinct reality, as, for example, the Rukh with the
epiornis or any other of the big extinct ratite birds of
Madagascar. Eagles and vultures and peacocks have
served as suggestions for fantastic creations of a vagrant
fancy, and that is all the reality they ever had. We do
not know, probably never can know, the ultimate source
of these stories and images, so varied yet so alike; nor
whether all have spread from one source, or have in some
instances arisen independently, as would seem probable in
the case of those told about American aboriginal camp-
fires ; but we may be sure that their conception was in the
morning of civilization (more likely far back of that) as
products of the uncultured, nature-fearing, marvel-loving
fancy of prehistoric mankind.
CHAPTER XI
FROM ANCIENT AUGURIES TO MODERN
RAINBIRDS
THE pagans of primitive times along the shores of
the Mediterranean believed in personal gods and
their guidance in human affairs. With the ap-
proval of these gods, or of that departmental god or
goddess having charge of the matter in mind, one's pro-
ject would prosper, whereas their disapproval meant
failure and very likely some punishment under divine
wrath. The human difficulty was to learn the will of said
gods.
Equally well settled was the doctrine that birds — which
seemed to belong to the celestial spaces overhead where
the gods lived and manifested their variable moods, now
in sunshine and zephyr, now by storm-clouds, and rainfall
— were inspired messengers of the gods, and required
reverent attention. This, however, did but throw the
difficulty one step further back, for how could human in-
telligence comprehend the messages birds were constantly
bringing ?
At any rate the principal and most numerous omens
in the pre-Christian centuries were drawn from birds;
and this kind of divination gained so much credit that
other kinds were little regarded. It was based, as has
been indicated, on the theory that these creatures, by
their actions, wittingly or unwittingly, conveyed the will
of the gods. This super-avian attribute was by no means
212
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 213
confined to the prominent raven and crow, whose pro-
phetic qualities have been portrayed in another chapter,
for various birds came to be considered "fortunate" or
"unfortunate," from the point of view of the seeker after
supernal guidance, either on account of their own
characteristics or according to the place and manner of
their appearance; hence the same species might, at dif-
ferent times, foretell contrary events. Let me quote here
a succinct statement from The Encyclopedia Londonensis,
published in the early part of the 18th century:
If a flock of various birds came flying about any man it was
an excellent omen. The eagle was particularly observed for
drawing omens; when it was observed to be brisk and lively,
and especially if, during its sportiveness, it flew from the right
hand to the left, it was one of the best omens that the gods
could give. Respecting vultures there are different opinions,
both among the Greek and the Roman authors; by some they
are represented as birds of lucky omen, while Aristotle and
Pliny reckon them among the unlucky birds. If the hawk was
seen seizing and devouring her prey, it portended death; but if
the prey escaped deliverance from danger was portended.
Swallows wherever and under whatever circumstances they
were seen were unlucky birds ; before the defeat of Pyrrhus and
Antony they appeared on the tent of the former and the ship
of the latter; and, by dispiriting their minds, probably pre-
pared the way for their subsequent disasters. In every part of
Greece except Athens, owls were regarded as unlucky birds;
but at Athens, being sacred to Minerva, they were looked upon
as omens of victory and success. The swan, being an omen
of fair weather, was deemed a lucky bird by mariners.
The most inauspicious omens were given by ravens, but the
degree of misfortune which they were supposed to portend
depended, in some measure, in their appearing on the right
hand or the left; if they came croaking on the right hand it
was a tolerably good omen; but if on the left a very bad one.
. . . The crow appearing [at a wedding] denoted long life to
the married pair, if it appeared with its mate ; but if it was seen
single separation and sorrow were portended. Whence it was
214 BIRDS IN LEGEND
customary at nuptials for the maids to watch that none of these
birds coming singly should disturb the solemnity.
It was hardly to be expected that the comprehension
of all this science of soothsaying should belong to
ordinary mortals; and therefore there arose early in its
development certain clever ''wise men" who declared
themselves endowed with magical power to understand
the language of birds, and to interpret both their chatter
and their actions. Thus originated the profession of
augury, a word that spells "bird-talk" in its root-meaning,
with its later product auspices, or "bird-viewers." The
augur originally was a priest (or a magician, if you prefer
that term) who listened to what the birds said; and the
auspex was another who watched what they did, or
examined their entrails to observe anything abnormal that
he might construe as an answer to prayer, or interpreted
something else in the nature of an omen from this or that
divinity, or from all the gods together.
I need not describe the elaborate rites and ceremonies
that came to be associated with the practice of this kind
of divination (ornithomancy), especially under the
revered and powerful College of Augurs that practically
ruled the Roman Republic, even in the Augustan age, for
it will suffice to direct attention to a few features.
Birds were distinguished by the Roman augurs as
oscines or alites, "talkers" and "flyers." The oscines were
birds that gave signs by their cry as well as by flight, such
as ravens, owls and crows. The alites included birds like
eagles and vultures, which gave signs by their manner of
flying. The quarter of the heavens in which they ap-
peared, and their position relative to that of the observer,
were most important factors in determining the sig-
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 215
nificance of the supposed message, as has been extensively
explained in an earlier chapter of this book.
This science or business of bird-divination, for it was
both, was of prehistoric antiquity. Plutarch 94 records
that Romulus and Remus, the fabled founders of the
Latin race began their eventful life under a wild fig-tree,
where a she-wolf nursed them, and a woodpecker con-
stantly fed and watched over them. 'These creatures, ,,
Plutarch remarks, "are esteemed holy to the god Mars —
the woodpecker the Latins still especially worship and
honor. Romulus became skilled in divination, and first
carried the lituits, or diviner's staff, a crooked rod with
which soothsayers indicated the quarters of the heavens
when observing the flight of birds."
Among the Romans not a bird
Without a prophecy was heard.
Fortunes of empire often hung
On the magician magpie's tongue,
And every crow was to the state
A sure interpreter of fate. — Churchill.
The peculiar province of the auspices, or bird-in-
specters, was to seek the will of the gods as to some con-
templated act or policy by watching the behavior of
the sacred chickens, cared for by an official called
pullarius. "If the chickens came too slowly out of the
cage, or would not feed, it was a bad omen; but if they
fed greedily, so that some part of their food fell and
struck the ground, it was deemed an excellent omen." —
and so forth and so forth.
It is rather engaging to inquire why the humble barn-
yard fowl was used for so momentous a function.
Partly, no doubt, because it was the most convenient kind
of bird to keep and propagate in captivity, and therefore
216 BIRDS IN LEGEND
would always be at hand when wanted (and in case the
prophecy-demand was light an occasional pullet for the
official pot would not be missed!), but also because its
witlessness made it dependable. A devotee of this way of
omen-catching would explain that of course the bird was
unconscious of the part it played; that its mind was a
mere receptacle of divine impulses to act in a certain way,
the significance of which the auspex understood and re-
ported. If that theory is true, it follows that the more
empty-headed the "medium" is the better, for it would
then have fewer ideas of its own to short-circuit the in-
spired impulses. This view has, in fact, influenced ignor-
ant folks everywhere in their conclusion that men who
were witless, or crazy, or had lost their mentality in a
trance, were "possessed," mostly by devils but sometimes
by good "spirits" which had found a mind "swept and
garnished," as St. Luke said, and had become vocal
tenants ; whence, it was argued, no human rationality in-
terfered with the transmission of the message, and men
must accept what the tongues uttered as inspired words.
"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings came forth
praise" that was praise indeed, because the infants knew
not what they said. That was the reason Balaam listened
with so much respect to the warning spoken by his ass;
and many a preaching ass since has had a similar reward
for articulate braying.
One more consideration suggests itself. The ominous
flock kept by the pullarius contained both cocks and hens ;
and the cock, as a bird of the sun, has been "sacred" from
prehistoric antiquity in that primitive nature-worship
from which the Greco-Romans were by no means free.
"It is not improbable," we are assured by Houghton 9B
"that the sacrificial rites and consultation by augury, in
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 217
which cooks figured among the Romans, came originally
from Babylonia ... I think that the figure [in a seal] of
a cock perched on an altar before a priest making his of-
ferings . . . represents the bird in this capacity as a sooth-
sayer." In fact, a whole department of the science of
augury was known as alectromancy, in which a barnyard
cock was the agent or medium of inspiration.
These practices — which were entirely void of morality
— are a curious index of the mental barbarism of the early
Greeks and Romans, for they are quite on a level with
the ideas and doings of savages now.
With the advance in knowledge and enlightenment cul-
minating in the philosophy of Cicero and his skeptical
contemporaries, both faith and practice in this childish
consultation of chickens and crows disappeared, or de-
scended to be merely a political sop for the credulous
populace. Even this passed away when superstitious
paganism faded out of the religion of mankind in Europe,
or, more exactly, it became changed into a faith in weather
prophecy by noticing the behavior of birds and other
animals ; but these prognostications are based not on a sup-
posed message from the gods but on deductions from ob-
servation and experience. Let us see how far this
modern method of augury is of service as a sort of home-
made Weather Bureau — we will, as it were, study the
genesis of the Rain-bird. It began early. Aristophanes
tells us, of the Greeks:
From birds in sailing men instruction take
Now lie in port, now sail, and profit make.
The proprietor of Gardiner's Island, at the eastern end
of Long Island, New York, where fish-hawks then
abounded, and always since have been under protection,
218 BIRDS IN LEGEND
told Alexander Wilson 46 many facts of interest respect-
ing their habits, among others the following:
They are sometimes seen high in the air, sailing and cutting
strange gambols, with loud vociferations, darting down several
hundred feet perpendicularly, frequently with part of a fish in
one claw, which they seem proud of, and to claim "high hook," as
the fishermen call him who takes the greatest number. On these
occasions they serve as a barometer to foretell the changes of
the atmosphere; for when the fish-hawks are thus sailing high
in air, in circles, it is universally believed to prognosticate a
change of weather, often a thunder-storm in a few hours. On
the faith of the certainty of these signs the experienced coaster
wisely prepares for the expected storm, and is rarely mistaken.
It would be hard to find a better epitome of the "signs"
given by birds to the weather-prophet. Similar behavior
in sea-gulls is interpreted in the same way: but in most
cases high flight is said to denote continuance of fine
weather, and in general there is good sense in that view,
because, as a rule, bad weather descends upon us from
the higher strata of the atmosphere, and birds up there
would be the first to feel its approach. Hence the joyous
greeting, "Everything is lovely and the goose honks
(not 'hangs') high." Sailors have a rhyme —
When men-of-war-hawks fly high, 't is a sign of clear sky;
When they fly low prepare for a blow.
This point is made in particular in respect to swallows
of various kinds, which are regarded in most countries as
presaging rain when they all go skimming along close to
the ground; but it was pure fancy that expanded this
warning into the senseless couplet
When the swallow buildeth low
You can safely reap and sow.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 219
That is, I suppose, the season will then furnish rain
enough for a good crop. The same thing is sung of
swans. But even the swallows cannot be depended on as
indicators, for in late summer and autumn they are more
likely to skim along the ground and over ponds than to
go anywhere else; and, as showing the uncertainty in
men's minds in this matter, or else how signs change with
locality, it may be mentioned that in Argentina swallows
are held to indicate coming storms not by low but by ele-
vated flight. Thus the naturalist Hudson ** writes of the
musical martin (Progne), familiar about Buenos Ay res:
"It is ... . the naturalist's barometer, as whenever, the
atmosphere being clear and dry, the progne perches on
the weathercock or lightning-rod, on the highest points of
the house-top, or on the topmost twig of some lofty tree,
chanting its incantation, cloudy weather and rain will
surely follow within twenty-four hours.''
None of the host of sayings, of which you may read
hundreds in the publications of the United States Weather
Service, and in such collections of odd lore as Gleanings
for the Curious* 6 that pretend to foretell the character of
a whole season from what birds do, are worth credence.
For example, some declare that "a dry summer will fol-
low when birds build their nests in exposed places," on
the theory, I suppose, that the builders will have no fear
of getting wet; and
If birds in the autumn grow tame,
The winter will be cold for game.
One important exception to this kind of nonsense may
be made, however, for in certain circumstances it is fair
to accept from our American birds a broad hint as to the
character of the approaching winter. Experience con-
220 BIRDS IN LEGEND
vinces us that an unusually early arrival of migratory
birds from the north indicates an extra cold winter to fol-
low. Several northwestern sayings about ducks and geese
tell us that whenever they leave Lake Superior noticeably
earlier than is their wont; or fly southward straight and
fast, not lingering near accustomed halting-places, then
a severe season is to be anticipated. In the sum this is
logical, for this reason:
Birds whose home is in the far North — and several
species go to the extreme limit of arctic lands to make
their nests — must quit those desolate coasts as soon as
chilling rains, snow-storms, and frost begin to kill the
insects, bury the plants and freeze the streams, thus cut-
ting off food-supplies ; and they must keep ahead of those
famine-producing conditions as they travel southward
toward their winter-resorts in a more hospitable zone.
On the average, their arrival in the United States will be
nearly on the same date year after year.
It sometimes happens, however, that winter will pounce
upon the arctic border of the continent days or weeks
earlier than usual, and the cold and snowfall will exceed
the normal quantity. In such circumstances the birds
must make their escape more hastily than ordinarily, and
will come down across the Canadian border in larger and
more hurrying companies, very likely accompanied by
such species as snow-birds, crossbills, pine finches and
evening grosbeaks, which in general pass the winter some-
what to the north of our boundary. Excessive cold in
the far North is almost certain to influence southern
Canada and the northern states, and it is therefore safe
to conclude, when we witness this behavior of migratory
birds, that a winter of exceptional severity has set in at
the north and is in store for us. But the prophets are
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 221
ourselves — not the birds ! They are dealing with danger-
ous conditions, and leave it to us to do the theorizing.
One feature of the behavior of the fish-hawks in Wil-
son's story was their restlessness, taken by fishermen to
betoken a rising storm. There may be some value in this
"sign," since it is noted in many other cases. Dozens of
proverbs mention as indications various unusual actions
noticeable in poultry, such as crowing at odd times, clap-
pings of the wings, rolling in the dust, standing about in a
distraught kind of way, a tendency to flocking, and so
forth. Many popular sayings tell us that both barnyard
fowls and wild birds become very noisy before an un-
favorable change in the weather.
When the peacock loudly bawls
Soon we'll have both rain and squalls,
is one such. Virgil's statement that "the owl" screeches
unduly at such a time is supported by modern testimony.
A reasonable explanation of this uneasiness is that it
is the effect of that increased electrical tension in the at-
mosphere that often precedes a shower, to which small
creatures are perhaps more sensitive than are men and
large animals. It will not do, then, to reject all the
weather-signs popularly alleged to be given by animals.
At the same time, as has been suggested, much of the
current weather-prophecy relating to animals is silly,
such, for example, that a solitary turkey-buzzard seen at
a great altitude indicates rain; that blackbirds' notes are
very shrill before rain ; that there will be no rain the day
a heron flies down the creek ; that when woodpeckers peck
low on the tree-trunks expect a hard winter. These, and
many other nonsensical maxims, are in fact spurious.
Most of them, no doubt, were uttered originally in jest,
222 BIRDS IN LEGEND
or as a whimsical answer to some inquisitive child, then
repeated as amusing, and finally quoted seriously. Others
have been brought to us from the old world by early
farmer-immigrants — French in Canada, Louisiana and
New England, Dutch in New York, Swedish and German
in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Spanish in the South-
west, and so on — and have been applied to our native
birds, where often they fail to fit. A saw that perhaps had
some value when told of the European robin or black-
bird, is ludicrously inappropriate when said of our black-
birds and robins, which are totally different in nature and
habits.
One of the most venerable of these worthless prognos-
tics, and one that very likely is a relic of Roman auspices,
twenty-five centuries ago, is that of the goose-bone :
"To read the winter of any year take the breast-bone of a
goose hatched during the preceding spring. The bone is trans-
lucent, and it will be found to be colored and spotted. The dark
color and heavy spots indicate cold. If the spots are of light
shade, and transparent, wet weather, rain or snow, may be
looked for.
"If the November goose-bone be thick,
So will the winter weather be;
If the November goose-bone be thin,
So will the winter weather be."
One need not wonder at the indignant refusal of hard-
headed commanders of old who refused to let their strat-
egy or tactics to be interfered with by alarmed priests
who reported unfavorable auguries from dissected hens.
Eusebius records the legend that a bird was presented to
Alexander the Macedonian when on the point of setting
out for the Red Sea, in order that he might read the
auguries according to custom, Alexander killed the bird
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 223
by an arrow, saying, "What folly is this ? How could a
bird that could not foresee its death by this arrow, predict
the fortunes of our journey?" The shocked bystanders
might have replied, of course, that the poor creature had
no such knowledge in itself, but was merely the blank on
which divine intelligence was written ; but the chances are
that they held their tongues ! Plutarch mentions many a
case in which commanders construed the "omens" in a
way contrary to the priestly interpretation, in order to
carry out some plan that could not be delayed, and yet
conciliate the superstitious soldiers.
It will have been noticed that most of the prophecies
learned from birds relate to coming rain or bad weather,
and winter rather than summer. In The Strange Meta-
morphosis of Man (1634), as quoted by Brewer, 34 speak-
ing of the goose, we read: "She is no witch or astrologer,
. . . but she hath a shrewd guesse of rainie weather,
being as good as an almanac to some that beleeve in her."
Men generally seem more desirous of ascertaining the
evil than the good that may be in store for them. The
feeling is, perhaps, that if we knew of dangers ahead we
might prepare for them, but that in fair days we can take
care of ourselves. Almost every country has some par-
ticular "rain-bird" whose cry is supposed to foretell
showers. In England it is the green woodpecker, or
yaffle ; in Malaya a broadbill ; in some parts of this country
the spotted sandpiper, or tipup ; but everywhere some sort
of cuckoo is called "rain-bird" or "rain-crow," although
the various cuckoos of America, Europe, and the Orient,
differ widely in appearance, habits and voice.
Why should peoples so dissimilar and widely scattered
attribute to this very diverse cuckoo family the quality of
"rain-birds" more than to another family? I can only
224 BIRDS IN LEGEND
believe that it denotes the survival of a very ancient
Oriental notion, whose significance was very real in a
symbolic way to the primitive people among whom it
originated locally, but has now been utterly forgotten.
Plunging into the thickets of comparative mythology,
hoping to pluck a few fruity facts for our pains, we find
that in Hindoo myths the cuckoo stands as a symbol of
the sun when hidden behind clouds, that is, for a rainy
condition of the sky; furthermore that this bird has a
reputation for possessing exceeding wisdom surpassing
that of other birds, all of which are fabled to be super-
naturally wise : and that it knew not only things present
but things to come. It was, in fact, in the opinion of the
ancient Hindoos, a prophetic bird of unrivalled vatic
ability. The Greeks thought their own cuckoo had in-
herited some of these qualities, for they made it one of
the birds in the Olympian aviary of Zeus, who, please re-
member, was the pluvial god.
Plainly this rainy-day character was given to the bird
through the circumstance that in southern Asia, as in
southern Europe, the cuckoo is one of the earliest and
quite the most conspicuous of spring-birds — and the
spring is the rainy season. In early days farmers had
little knowledge of a calendar. They sowed and reaped
when it seemed fitting to do so. The coming of the cuckoo
coincided with experience, and came to be their almanac-
date for certain operations — a signal convenient in advice
to the young, or to a newcomer; and as a rule hoped-for
showers followed the bird's advent. In the same way
old-fashioned Pennsylvania farmers used to connect corn-
planting time and the first-heard singing of the brown
thrasher.
Hesiod instructed his rural countrymen that if "it
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 225
should happen to rain three days in succession when the
cuckoo sings among the oak-trees, then late sowing will
be as good as early sowing" — doubtless good agricultural
counsel. Not more than a century ago English farmers
thought it necessary to sow barley when the earliest note
of the cuckoo was heard in order to insure a full crop.
Mr. Friend 11 reasons thus about this: "As the cuckoo
only returns to our shores at a certain time, it has been
customary to predict from his appearance what kind of
season will follow; and farmers have in all ages placed
great reliance on omens of weather and crops drawn from
this source. ... In Berwickshire those oats which are
sown after the first of April are called 'gowk's' [cuckoo's]
oats . . .
Cuckoo oats and wood cock hay
Make a farmer run away.
If the spring is so backward that the oats cannot be sown
until the cuckoo is heard, or the autumn so wet that the
hay cannot be gathered in until the woodcocks come over,
the farmer is sure to suffer great loss."
So much for these old maxims; and when British or
Italian immigrants became colonists in America, and
found cuckoos here, they continued the sayings, regard-
less of difference in climate and other circumstances. Our
species are not early migrants in spring, are poor guides
for planters, and seem to have no prophetic gift, yet they
are rain-birds because their ancestral relatives in India
were such 3,000 years ago.
CHAPTER XII
A PRIMITIVE VIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF
SPECIES
IF anyone should ask you how a particular bird came
to be blue or red or streaked, or how it happened
that birds in general differ in colors and other fea-
tures, "each after its kind," in other words how specific
distinctions came about, you, a liberal-minded and well-
read person, would undoubtedly answer that each and all
"developed" these specific characteristics. You might go
on to explain that they resulted from the combined influ-
ences of natural and sexual selection, to the latter of
which birds are supposed to be especially susceptible, and
thereby show yourself a good Darwinist.
But primitive thinkers, like children, are not evolution-
ists but creationists. They believe that things were made
as they are: if so, somebody made them. They are con-
vinced that no person like themselves or any of their ac-
quaintances could do it, so they attribute the feat to some
being with superhuman powers. This being is almost al-
ways the mythical ancestor, pristine instructor or "cul-
ture-hero," of the nation, tribe or clan to which the
thinker belongs ; and it is perfectly natural and a matter
of course to assume that he had magical functions and
supernatural powers. Next, some genius invents a story
to fit the case, and as anything is possible to such a being
as the hero it is adopted and passed into the tribal history
that the elders recount by the evening fire, and that every-
226
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 227
body accepts without suspicion or criticism. The He-
brews, for example, said that Adam, their "first man,"
"gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and
to every beast of the field; . . . and whatsoever Adam
called every living creature that was the name thereof."
As to his reasons for giving this name to one creature
and another to that, it has been whimsically explained that
he called the raccoon that because "it looked like a 'coon' "
— quite as good a reason as the legend requires.
Now the two questions at the beginning of this chapter
were, in fact, asked by a great variety of our aboriginal
Americans, the red Indians, and undoubtedly by the ab-
origines of most other countries ; but for the present let us
stick to North America.
When some bright-witted, inquisitive Iroquois young-
ster, hearing and seeing many birds on a soft June morn-
ing, asked his mother how it happened that they wore
such a diversity of plumages, she told him this story: In
the beginning the birds were naked, but some of them be-
came ashamed, and cried for coverings. (In those days,
of course, birds talked with one another, and even with
the wiser sort of men.) They were told that their suits
were ready but were a long way off. At last the turkey-
buzzard was persuaded to go and get them. He had been
a clean bird, but during the long journey had to eat much
carrion and filth, hence his present nature. Guided by
the gods he reached the store of plumages, and selfishly
chose for himself the most beautifully colored dress, but
as he found he could not fly in it he was forced to take
his present one, which enables him to soar most grace-
fully. Finally he brought their varied suits to the other
birds.
The Iroquois lad would be quite satisfied with this
228 BIRDS IN LEGEND
account of the matter ; but a boy on the opposite side of
the continent would get a very different explanation. He
would be told that Raven did it. Raven — or the raven —
was the mythical ancestor or culture hero, as ethnologists
would say, of the foremost clan of the Tlingit tribe,
whose territory was in southern Alaska. He was present
at the making of the world and its people, and did many
marvellous things. While he was at Sitka arranging
affairs in the new world he assigned to all the birds, one
by one, the place of their resort and their habits, and his
good nature is shown by the fact that to the robin and
the hummingbird he assigned the duty of giving pleasure
to men, the former by its song and the latter by its beauty.
By and by the birds dressed one another in different ways,
so that they might easily be recognized apart. They tied
the hair of the blue jay up high with a string, put a striped
coat on the little woodpecker, and so on. The Kwakiutl
coastal Indians of British Columbia deny this, however.
They say the birds did not select their own costumes, but
that one of their ancestors painted all the birds he found
at a certain place. When he reached the cormorant his
colors were exhausted and he had only charcoal left, hence
the cormorant is wholly black.
George Keith," who in 1807 was a fur-trader on the
Mackenzie River, gathered and recorded much valuable
material as to the customs and ideas of the Beaver
Indians of that region, who belonged to the Ojibway
family. In one of his stories Keith gives the Indians' ex-
planation of how certain birds got their colors: it was
during the time of a great flood. At that period all birds
were white, but lepervier (the sharp-shinned hawk),
l'emerillon (the goshawk), and l'canard de France
(mallard) agreed to change to a plumage in colors — how
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 229
it was to be done the Indians were unable to say. The
story proceeds:
Immediately after this event the corbeau [raven] made his
appearance. "Come," says l'epervier to the corbeau, "would you
not wish to have a coat like mine?" "Hold your tongue!" re-
joined the corbeau. "With your crooked bill is not white hand-
somer than any other color?" The others argued with the
corbeau to consent, but he remained inflexible, which so
exasperated l'epervier and the others that they determined to
avenge this affront, and each taking a burnt coal in his bill
they blacked him all over. The corbeau, enraged at this treat-
ment, and determined not to be singular, espied a flock of
etourneaux [blackbirds] and, without shaking off the black dust
of his feathers, threw himself amongst them and bespattered
them all over with black, which is the reason for their still re-
taining this color.
Further south, on Puget Sound, once lived the tribe of
Twanas, who held that in former times men painted
themselves in various hues, whereupon Dokblatt, their
culture-hero, who notoriously was fond of changing
things, turned these men into birds, which explains the
present diversity in avian plumage.
The Arawaks of Venezuela, however, account for this
matter by saying that the birds obtained their gay feathers
by selecting parts of a huge, gaudily colored water-snake
that the cormorant killed for them by diving into the
water; yet the cormorant, with great modesty, kept for
himself only the snake's head, which was blackish.
Most explanatory stories concern single kinds of birds,
and inform us how they got the peculiar features by which
we identify them with their names ; and here we get back
to the nearctic raven. A history of the exploits of this
personage — bird, bird-man or bird-god — who is the hero
of more tales than any other of the giants that flourished
230
BIRDS IN LEGEND
in the formative period of the northern Indian's world,
would fill a big book. 'The creator of all things and
the benefactor of man was the great raven called by the
Thlingit Yel, Yeshil or Yeatl, and by the Haida Ne-kil-
stlas. He was not exactly an ordinary bird but had . . .
many human attributes, and the power of transforming
himself into anything in the world. His coat of feathers
could be put on or taken off at will like a garment, and he
could assume any character whatever. He existed before
his birth, never grows old, and will never die." So Mr.
(now Admiral) Niblack, U. S. N., characterized this
supreme magician; 100 and Dr. E. W. Nelson 101 adds
that this creation-legend is believed by the Eskimos
from the Kuskoquim River in southern Alaska northward
to Bering Strait, and thence eastward all along the Arctic
Coast. The purely mythological relation of this widely
revered northwestern raven is thus summarized by
Brinton 27 :
This father of the race is represented as a mighty bird, called
Yel, or Yale, or Orelbale, from the root [Athabascan] ell, a
term they apply to everything supernatural. He took to wife a
daughter of the Sun (the Woman of Light), and by her begat
the race of men. He formed the dry land for a place for them
to live upon, and stocked the rivers with salmon that they might
have food. When he enters his nest it is day, but when he leaves
it it is night; or, according to another myth, he has two women
for wives, the one of whom makes the day, the other the night.
In the beginning Yel was white in plumage, but he had an
enemy ... by whose machinations he was turned black. Yel is
further represented as the god of the winds and storms, and of
the thunder and lightning.
It is plain that in studying the deeds and accidents
attributed to this American member of the sun-born
"fabulous flock" described in another chapter, it is often
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 231
difficult to separate Raven the demigod, from the sable,
kawing, cunning bird so conspicuous all over northern
Canada; and in this respect Yel differs from Rukh,
Simurgh, and the other similar figments of Oriental
fancies, in that he is modelled upon a real bird, rather than
on something utterly unknown to earthly ornithology.
A favorite tale with many variants describes how the
cormorant lost its voice. As the Haidas of Queen
Charlotte Islands tell it, Raven once invited the cormorant
to go a-fishing with him. The cormorant went, and
naturally caught many fish, while the Raven took none.
Then Raven, angry made the cormorant stick out its
tongue. 'There is something on it," quoth Raven, and
pulled the tongue out by the roots; and that is why
cormorants have no voice.*
Here Raven is plainly the supernatural, irresponsible
being of Totemic importance, who often presented him-
self as a man or in some other form, for he could assume
any shape he liked. Thus the Hudson Bay Eskimos relate
that Raven was a man who loudly cautioned persons when
moving a village-camp not to forget the deer-skin under-
blanket called "kak": so he got that nickname, and
ravens still fly about fussily calling kak! kak! The Tlingits
also have a story in which Raven begins the action as a
man, and ends plain bird — an outwitted one at that. Raven
was in a house and played a trick on Petrel, then tried to
get away by flying up through the smoke-hole in the
* The cormorant was once a wool-merchant. He entered into a
partnership with the bramble and the bat, and they freighted a large
ship with wool. She was wrecked and the firm became bankrupt.
Since that disaster the bat skulks about until midnight to avoid his
creditors, the cormorant is forever diving into the deep to discover
its foundered vessel, while the bramble seizes hold of every pass-
ing sheep to make up the firm's loss by stealing the wool. This is
an ancient European story quite as silly as the Haida one.
232 BIRDS IN LEGEND
roof, but got stuck there. Seeing this Petrel built a birch-
wood fire under him, so as to make much smoke. The
raven was white before that time, but the smudge
blackened him forever.
The Greenland Eskimos account for the change in the
raven from white to black by the story of its vexing the
snow-owl, which was its fast friend in the ancient days
before marvels became marvellous. One day the raven
made a new dress, dappled black and white (the summer
plumage), for the owl, which in return fashioned a pair
of whalebone boots for the raven, and also a white dress,
as was proper for ravens at that time ; but the raven would
not stay quiet while it was tried on. The owl shouted
angrily, "Sit still or I shall pour the lamp over you!"
Nevertheless the bird kept hopping about until the owl,
out of patience, picked up the soapstone saucer-lamp and
drenched him with the sooty lamp-oil. Since then the
ever-restless raven has been black all over.
The Haidas say that the crow likewise was originally
white, and that on one occasion Raven turned it black as
a spiteful sort of joke.
It is interesting to recall that in classic myth ravens
were once as white as swans and as large ; but one day a
raven told his patron, Apollo, that Coronis, a Thessalian
nymph whom he passionately loved, was faithless, where-
upon the god shot the nymph with his dart, but hating
the telltale bird
... he blacked the raven o'er
And bid him prate in his white plumes no more,
as Ovid sings in Addison's translation. Some accounts
say that one of Odin's messenger-ravens was white.
To this day the peasants about Brescia, in Italy, speak
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 233
of January 30 and 31, and February 1, as "blackbird
days," and explained that many years ago the local black-
birds were white; but in one hard winter it was so cold
these thrushes were compelled to take refuge in chimneys,
and ever since have worn a sooty plumage.
This belief that the sable brotherhood of the crow-tribe
was once white seems to be universal, and perhaps arises
in the equally general, albeit somewhat childish, feeling
that nothing is as it used to be; and coupled with this is
the similarly common feeling that every event or con-
dition ought to be accounted for. Thus we get a glimpse
at the psychology in these primitive stories of the reason
why this and that animal is as we see it. Skeat 7 found
among the Malays, for example, a legend that in the days
of King Solomon the argus pheasant was dowdily
dressed, and it besought the crow to paint its plumage in
splendid colors. The crow complied and gave the
pheasant its present beautifully variegated costume; but
when the artist asked for a similar service toward itself
from the pheasant the latter not only refused but spilt a
bottle of ink over the crow.
To return to the erratic, and usually mischievous career
of Yel, the Northwestern (raven) culture-hero, it is re-
membered that often, kindly or unkindly, he changed
sundry birds besides owls from something else into their
present form. For example, he sent a hawk into the
Tlingit country after fire. Previously the hawk's bill
had been long, but in bringing the fire this long beak was
burned short, and has ever remained so. Nelson 101
learned from Alaskan Eskimos why the short-eared owl
has so diminutive a beak, nearly hidden in the feathers of
the flat face. This owl, it appears, was once a little girl
who lived in a village by the lower Yukon. "She was
234 BIRDS IN LEGEND
changed by magic into a bird with a long bill, and became
so frightened that she sprang up and flew off in an erratic
way until she struck the side of a house, flattening her
beak and face so that she became just as the owls are seen
to-day."
Raven made woodpeckers (red-shafted flickers) out of
the blood that gushed from his nose after he had bruised
it ; and Haida fishermen now tie scarlet flicker feathers to
their halibut hooks "for luck." Their neighbors, the
Clalams, thought it better to use a piece of kingfisher skin
— and in my opinion their reasoning was the sounder of
the two. Perhaps it was Raven whom the Tshimshian
Indians of Nass River meant when they spoke of
"Giant's" treatment of the gulls. The Giant, as Pro-
fessor Boaz heard it designated, had some oolachans
(smelts) and stuck them on sticks to roast by his fire.
"When they were done a gull appeared over the Giant.
Then the Giant called him 'Little Gull/ Then many
gulls came, which ate all the Giant's oolachans. They said
while they were eating it qana, qana, qana! Then he was
sad. Therefore he took the gulls and threw them into
the fireplace, and ever since the tips of their wings have
been black."
The culture-hero of the Twana Indians of the Puget
Sound region was Dokibat, as has been mentioned, who
had a habit of changing things, turning men into stones
or birds, and so forth. A boy hearing that he was com-
ing, and fearing some unpleasant transformation, ran
away, carrying with him a water-box (used in canoe-
journeys by sea) with water in it. The water shaking
about sounded somewhat like pu-pn-pu when repeated
rapidly ; but as the boy ran wings came to him and he be-
gan to fly, and the noise in the box sounded like the cooing
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 235
of the wood-dove, which the Twans called "hum-o." A
man was pounding against a cedar-tree. Dokibat came
along and asked him what he was doing. "Trying to
break or split this tree," was the answer. Dokibat said:
"You may stop and go away, and I will help you." As
the woodman went wings came to him, also a long bill and
a strong head, and he became a woodpecker.
How the woodpecker got the red mark on the back of
its head, which is a characteristic of most species, is ex-
plained by the Algonkins thus, according to School-
craft: 102 Manabozho, the renowned culture-hero of the
Ojibways and their relatives, made a campaign against
the Shining Manito, and at last, finding him in his lair, a
mortal combat began. At length Manabozho had left
only three arrows, and the fight was going against him.
Ma-ma, the woodpecker, cried out: "Shoot him at the
base of the scalp-lock; it is his only vulnerable spot!"
(The Indians have many stories turning on this point,
and reminding us of that of Achilles.) Then with the
third and last arrow Manabozho hit the fatal spot, and
taking the scalp of the Shining Manito as a trophy he
rubbed blood from it on the woodpecker's head, which
remains red in his descendants. That the redheaded
species (Melanerpes torquatus), abundant in summer in
the O jib way country, is meant here is evident from the
further statement that its red feathers were thereafter
regarded as symbols of valor, and were chosen to orna-
ment the warriors' pipes, for no other woodpecker of the
region could furnish enough such feathers to answer the
purpose.
The Menominees, of southern Wisconsin, had a dif-
ferent story relating to the scarlet crest of another kind
of woodpecker. They say that Ball-carrier, who was a
23 6 BIRDS IN LEGEND
bad-tempered sort of fellow among their demigods,
promised the logcock, or big black woodpecker of the
forest, that if he would kill a certain Cannibal-Woman he
should have a piece of her scalp with its lock of red hair.
So the bird rushed at her and drove his chisel-like beak
into her heart. Then Ball-carrier gave her red scalp-lock
to the logcock, which placed it on his own head, as one
may see now. In Indo-European mythology woodpeckers
figure among lightning-birds, and the red mark on their
heads is deemed the badge of their office.
The need of accounting for notable features like this
in animals seems to have appealed to all sorts of people,
all around the world, in each case according to local ideas.
Thus an Arabic tradition current in Palestine accounts
for the fork in the tail of swallows by the fact that a bird
of this species baffled a scheme of the Old Serpent (Eblis)
in Paradise, whereupon the serpent struck at it, but suc-
ceeded only in biting out a notch in the middle of its tail.
Another example: Nigerian negros say that the vulture
got its bald head by malicious transference of a disease
with which a green pigeon had been suffering — a native
guess at the filth-bacteria to which modern zoologists at-
tribute the nakedness! Oddly enough, a folk-tale in
Louisiana, related by Fortier, 106 similarly explains the
baldness of our turkey-buzzard by saying it came from
a pan of hot ashes thrown at the vulture's head in revenge
for an injury it had committed on a rabbit — and "buz-
zards never eat bones of rabbits."
The Iowas account for the peculiar baldness of this
bird by a long story recounted by Spence 12 in which
their mythical hero Ictinike figures. Ictinike asked a
buzzard to carry him toward a certain place. The crafty
bird consented, but presently dropped him in a tall hollow
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 237
tree. Ictinike was wearing 'coonskins, and when
presently some persons came along he thrust their tails
through cracks in the trunk. Three women, thinking
that raccoons had become imprisoned in the tree, cut a
hole to capture them, whereupon Ictinike came out and
the women ran away. Then Ictinike lay down wrapped
in his furs as if asleep, and an eagle, a crow, and a magpie
came and began pecking at him. The buzzard, thinking
this meant a feast, rushed down from the sky, and
Ictinike jumped up and tore off its scalp, since which the
buzzard has been bald.
But many explanations of why birds are now so or so
make no mention of Ravens or Ictinikes, but just tell you
the fact. Thus the Eskimos of northwestern Alaska re-
late that one autumn day very long ago the cranes pre-
pared to go southward. As they were gathered in a great
flock they saw a beautiful girl standing alone near a vil-
lage. Admiring her greatly, the cranes gathered about
her, and lifting her on their wide-spread wings bore her
far up and away. While the cranes were taking her aloft
their brethren circled about below her so closely that she
could not fall, and with hoarse cries drowned her screams
for help. So she was swept away into the sky, and
never seen again. Always since that time the cranes have
circled about in autumn, uttering loud cries.
The Hudson Bay Eskimos tell their boys and girls
when they see the funny little guillemots by the sea-cliffs
and ask about them, that once a lot of children were play-
ing near the brink of such a precipice. Their noisy shouts
disturbed a band of seal-hunters on the strand below;
and one of the men exclaimed, "I wish the cliff would
topple over and bury those noisy children !" In a
moment the height did so, and the poor infants fell
238 BIRDS IN LEGEND
among the rocks below. There they were changed into
guillemots and dwell to this day on the crags at the edge
of the sea.
Another juvenile story explains that the swallows be-
came what they are by a change from Eskimo children
who were making "play-house" igloos of mud on the
top of a cliff. To this day the swallows come every sum-
mer and fix their mud nests to the rocks, recalling their
childish joy in the previous state of their existence.
Hence the Eskimo children particularly love to watch
these birds in their "igluiaks," which are said not to be
molested by the predatory ravens.
Once a long war was fought between the brants and
the herons, according to a Tlingit legend, but at last the
swans intervened and a peace was arranged. To celebrate
it the herons indulged in much dancing, and have been
dancers ever since. I am inclined to think this another
crane legend, because the few herons known in the Tlingit
country do not indulge in such antics, whereas the
cranes do "dance" a great deal in the mating-season.
These Indians, by the way, say that they learned the use
of pickaxes by watching a heron strike the ground with
its beak; and the suggestion of snowshoes was caught
from the ptarmigan, on whose feet grow in winter ex-
pansions of the toes that serve to make it easier for the
bird to walk on snow.
The ruffed grouse, the Ojibways declare, was marked
with eleven spots on its tail to remind him of the time
when he wouldn't do as he was told, and had to fast
eleven days as a punishment. On the other hand Mana-
bozho rewarded the kingfisher for some useful informa-
tion by hanging a medal (in color) about its neck; but in
bestowing the medal Manabozho snatched at the king-
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 239
fisher's head, intending to twist it off — a very character-
istic dodge of these treacherous old culture-heroes — but
only rumpled the bird's crest, so that it has been a ragged
sort of headdress ever since.
The extinct Chitimacha Indians of northern Louisiana
had a tale that a man set the marshes on fire, and a little
bird uprose through the smoke and remonstrated. The
man was angry and threw a shell at the bird, which
wounded its wings and made them bleed, and thus the
red-winged blackbird got its scarlet shoulders.
A familiar and active little shrike of the northern
border of South America is the kiskadee, with a con-
spicuous white mark on its head. The Arawaks say that
this radiant little songster, which has the same sort of
fierce hostility to hawks and other large birds as dis-
tinguishes our doughty kingbird, got tired of a war that
was going on among the animals, put a white bandage
around its head and pretended to be sick. The war
halted long enough to expose the fraud of the little mal-
ingerer, and kiskadees were sentenced to wear the white
bandage perpetually.
Arawak story-tellers also relate that the trumpeter
(Psophia) and a kingfisher quarrelled over the spoils of
war, and knocked each other into the ashes, which ac-
counts for the gray of their plumage. The nakedness of
the trumpeter's legs is owing to his stepping into an
ant's nest, and getting them picked clean. The owl dis-
covered a package among the spoil of the war that con-
tained only darkness, since which that bird cannot endure
daylight. It is interesting to compare with this the ad-
venture of the trumpeter current among the Maquiritares,
which is related elsewhere.
So the stories go on. The Pimas, for example, believe
240 BIRDS IN LEGEND
that the mountain bluebird was originally an unlovely
gray, but acquired its present exquisite azure coat by
bathing in a certain lake of blue water that had neither
inlet nor outlet. It bathed in this regularly for four
mornings. On the fourth morning it shed all its plumage
and came out with the skin bare ; but on the fifth morn-
ing it emerged from its bath with a coat of blue.
This tradition is somewhat sentimental, as befits the
sweetly warbling and beloved bluebird, which is not only
a favorite, but has a certain sacredness in the southwest ;
but often, in the majority of cases perhaps, a rough
humor tinges the history. Thus Manabush, a mythical an-
cestor of the Menominees, once assembled all the birds
by a subterfuge, and then killed several. The little grebe,
or "hell-diver," was one of those chosen for death, and
as it was a poor runner it was easily caught. Manabush
said contemptuously, "I won't kill you, but you shall al-
ways have red eyes and be the laughing-stock of all the
birds." With that he gave the poor bird a kick, sending
it far out into Lake Michigan and knocking off its tail,
so that the hell-diver is red-eyed and almost tailless to this
day.
I have restricted this chapter mainly to examples from
the folklore of the American Indians, but, were there not
danger of becoming tedious, many more might be quoted
from the fireside tales of other countries, especially
Africa. African traditions, however, can hardly be held
to account for the following explanations by some
Southern darkies as given by Martha Young 2 :
The bluejay was yoked into a plow by the sparrow, and the
necklace-like mark on his breast is the mark left by the yoke
worn in this degrading service.
The buzzard originally had a "fine plume sweepin' from de
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 241
top of his head," but lost it in a quarrel with a dog. "Sense
dat day Buzzard don't never miss fust pickin' out de eye of
ev'thing that he gwine eat," so that it cannot see to resist if it
is not quite dead.
Darkies say that the hummingbird lost her voice — "she choke
her voice clean out of her wid honey" — through being so greedy
when she first discovered the honey in flowers, by reason of
contracting a "swimmin' in de head" by incessant whirling, as
her poising on wings seems to the negroes. "She hav a notion
now that she los' her voice . . . deep in some flower. She's
al'a'rs lookin' fer dat los' voice. Flash in dis flower ! Dash in
dat flower ! But she'll nuvver, nuvver fin' it."
Charles G. Leland quotes in his Etruscan Roman
Remains 97 a note given him by Miss Mary Owen, of
St. Joseph, Missouri, that the negroes and half-breeds in
southern Missouri consider the redheaded woodpecker
a great sorcerer, who can appear as either a bird or as
a redman with a mantle or cloak on his arm. He is sup-
posed to be very grateful or very vengeful as his mood
requires. He sometimes bores holes in the heads of his
enemies, while they sleep, and puts in maggots which keep
the victims forever restless and crazy. He made the
bat by putting a rat and a bird together.
CHAPTER XIII
BIRDS AND THE LIGHTNING
NOTHING in nature, except perhaps the rising
and setting of the sun, has impressed mankind
more than the fearsome phenomena of a thun-
der-storm. Such a storm in the Rocky Mountains, or
among the Californian Sierras, is truly terrifying in its
magnificence, and it is none the less so in the Alps or
Himalayas or on the volcanic summits of Central
Africa. The lightnings dart about the darkly clouded
peaks, and the thunder-crashes leap from cliff to cliff
in echoes that stun one, for they seem like vast iron
missies hurled by Titanic strength, and rebounding from
crags that are falling in prodigious ruin — perhaps on
your head.
On the plains, too, such a storm may be fearfully
grand, for amid rolling thunders and a tremendous
downpour of rain come an incessant flash and sparkle
of lightnings that illuminate the prairie with a violet
flame almost blinding in its glare. A person who did
not comprehend the physical meaning of such a display
might well be excused for trembling in awe and terror —
moreover, the danger is real.
I believe that almost from the first there were wise
men, the philosophers of their time, who understood that
the clouds were fleeting masses of fog, that rain was
the water pressed out of them, and that the lightning
and its associated rumble were somehow as natural as
242
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 243
the blowing of the wind. The mass of wondering and
terrified people, however, could not think of the rush
and noise and glare of stormy weather otherwise than
as something produced by living beings of huge, mys-
terious and usually destructive power; and they were
as real to them, although invisible, as are the electric
currents and tremendous air-vibrations to us. Among
the aboriginal Chinese electricity was represented as
residing on the mountains in the form of birds, and
their Thunder-god is pictured with a bird's beak and
claws, and armed with a drum and hammer.
'The drama of mythology," De Gubernatis tells us,
"has its origin in the sky; but the sky may be either
clear or gloomy; it may be illumined by the sun or by
the moon; it may be obscured by the darkness of night,
or the condensation of its vapors into clouds. . . . The
god who causes rain to fall, who from the highest
heaven fertilizes the earth, takes the form now of a ram,
now of a bull; the lightning that flies like a winged
arrow, is represented now as a bird, now as winged
horse; and thus, one after another, all the shifting phe-
nomena of the heavens take the form of animals, be-
coming at length now the hero himself, now the animal
that waits upon the hero, and without which he would
possess no supernatural power whatever."
To the minds of the redmen in the eastern part of
the United States the violent storms frequent in sum-
mer were somehow produced by vague supernatural
beings spoken of as Thunder-gods; but on the open
prairies and plains of the West, where even more ter-
rific electric disturbances occur, and also along the
Northwest Coast and in Alaska, they were attributed to
birds of enormous size, who darkened the rain-clouds
244
BIRDS IN LEGEND
with their shadows and produced thunder by flapping
their wings and lightning by opening their eyes, shoot-
ing naming arrows, and so forth. Some tribes believed
in one such bird only, others in a family or flock of
them variously colored, while still others declared that
the agent was a giant who clothed himself in a huge
bird-skin as a flying-dress.
If one asked what any one of these creatures was like,
the answer usually was that it resembled a colossal eagle.
The Comanches and Arapahoes described it to Dr.
Mooney as a big bird with a brood of small ones, and
said that it carried in its claws a quantity of arrows
with which it strikes the victims of lightning. This
reminds us of the bird of Jove in classic fable, clutching
the javelins of his master, the Thunderer; and a comic
touch is that these southern Indians called the eagle
stamped on our coins by their thunder-bird's name,
innocently supposing that our national emblem was their
"baa," the lightning-maker!
The Mandans, a Dakotan tribe, say that the thunder-
bird has two toes on each foot — one before and one
behind; and the Algonquian Blackfeet represent it on
their medicine-lodges by simply drawing four black bird-
claws on a yellow shank. When it flies softly, as is usually
its way, according to the Mandans, it is not heard by
mankind, but when it flaps its wings violently a roaring
noise is produced. It breaks through the clouds to force
a way for the rain, and the glance of its fiery eyes
appears in the lightnings. "We don't see the thunder-
birds," a Winnebago Indian explained. "We see their
flashes only."
This terrifying creature dwelt on a remote mountain,
or on some rocky elevation difficult of access, and built
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 245
a nest as big as a village, surrounded by the bones and
horns of the great animals on which it preyed. Every
tribal district seems to have had at least one pair. The
Indians about Lake Superior believed that theirs were
at home on the beetling heights of that bold promontory
on the northern shore of the lake long celebrated as
Thunder Cape. This is, for natural reasons, a theatre
of electric action, which the Chippeways accounted for
by the fiction of a magic bird — quite as natural in its
way as is the meteorology. At any rate the redmen
feared to climb the mountain and prove their theory, for
they said men had been struck by lightning there in im-
pious attempts at investigating the bird-god — the old
story of religious interference with scientific curiosity.
These same people held that their thunder-bird sat on
her eggs during fair weather, and hatched out her brood
in the storm — which hatching was the storm.
"A place," says the ethnologist Mooney, 77 "known to
the Sioux as Waqkina-oye, 'the Thunderer's nest* —
. . . is in eastern South Dakota in the neighborhood of
Big Stone Lake. At another place, near the summit
of the Coteau des Prairies, in eastern South Dakota, a
number of large round boulders are pointed out as the
eggs of the thunder-bird. According to the Comanches
there is a place on upper Red River where the thunder-
bird once alighted on the ground. . . . The same people
tell how a hunter once shot and wounded a large bird
which fell to the ground. Being afraid to attack it alone
on account of its size, he returned to camp for help,
but on again approaching the spot the hunters heard
the thunder rolling and saw flashes of lightning shoot-
ing out from the ravine where the bird lay wounded.
On coming nearer the lightning blinded them so that they
246 BIRDS IN LEGEND
could not see the bird, and one flash struck and killed a
hunter. His frightened companions then fled back to
camp, for they knew it was a thunder-bird."
In contrast to this the Eskimos of the lower Yukon
Valley tell of a former man of their race who dared,
after others had failed, to raid the lair of and kill a
gigantic fowl that for a long time had preyed as a
"man-eater" on the village of their ancestors ; 'and they
have held this man in high honor as a hero to this day.
This conception of a thunder-and-lightning-producing
bird has a prominent place among the notions of the
native inhabitants of the northwestern American coast-
country, where the attributed characteristics and deeds
vary with local surroundings and tribal peculiarities. In
one place a storm was supposed to result from its
activity in catching whales; and a Chehalis legend has
it that Thunderbird sprang from a whale killed by
South Wind. As soon as it was born South Wind fol-
lowed it, and Ootz-Hooi, the giantess, found its nest
and threw the eggs down a cliff. From these eggs
sprang the Chehalis people. The Tlingit, of the South-
ern Alaskan coast-region, account for the great amount
of rain that falls in a thunder-shower by explaining
that the thunder-bird carries a lake on its back. A con-
ventional representation of the thunder-bird as it appears
to the Haidas of this Northwest Coast decorates the
title-page of this book.
The Salish Indians of the Thomson River region, in
southern British Columbia, believe that the thunder-
bird uses its wings as bows to shoot arrows, i.e., light-
nings. 'The rebound of his wings in the air, after
shooting, makes the thunder. For this reason the
thunder is often heard in different parts of the sky at
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 247
once, being the noise from each wing. The arrowheads
fired by the thunder are found in many parts of the
country. They are of black stone and of very large
size." The last statement may refer to meteoric stones,
or it may be purely fanciful. A common belief among
the farmer-folk of Europe is that the smooth, chisel-
shaped tools or weapons of prehistoric (Neolithic) men,
frequently turned up by the plow, and known technically
as "celts," are thunderbolts; but this is only incidental
to the present theme.
The raven is a hero-bird among the Cherokees, who
say that he became black by attempting to bring fire
from a hollow tree that had been set on fire purposely
by "the Thunderer" by means of lightning. The bird
did not succeed, and blackened its plumage forever.
In Japan the ptarmigan, a dweller on mountain-tops,
is called rai-cho, "thunder-bird," and is "sacred to the
God of Thunder," as Weston expresses it, adding that
"pictures of them are often hung up in farmers' cot-
tages as a charm against lightning."
Thunderstorms are usually accompanied by much
wind, and the common conception of birds as the agent
of wind, or the wind itself, has been exhibited briefly
in another chapter; it prevailed not only among our
American Indians but in various other parts of the
world, including South Africa — or did, when men were
less skeptical of such ideas than now. In ancient San-
skrit mythology the delicate white cirrus cloud drifting
overhead was a fleeting swan, and so also was it in the
creed of the early Scandinavians and to our wild Nava-
hoes — a good illustration not only of independent and
parallel images for an idea, but of the likeness of human
minds under great diversity of race and conditions.
248 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Black clouds were thought of by the Norse folks as
"ravens coursing over the earth and returning to whisper
the news in the ear of listening Odin," as Baring-Gould
expresses it. The immemorial resemblance traced be-
tween bird and cloud is not far-fetched: and recurs to
the modern poet as it did in olden times to the Psalmist
when he spoke of the wings of the wind. "The rush-
ing vapor is the roc of the Arabian Nights, which broods
over its great luminous tgg f the sun, and which haunts
the sparkling Valley of Diamonds, the starry sky. . . .
If the cloud was supposed to be a great bird, the light-
nings were regarded as writhing worms or serpents in
its beak. . . . The lightning-bolt, shattering all it struck,
was regarded as the stone dropped by the cloud-bird." 5 *
In the Kalevala Puhuri, the North Wind, father of
Pakkanen, the Frost, is sometimes personified as a
gigantic eagle.
These facts and considerations prepare the way for
legends that began to be told in the very beginning of
things, because then, and until yesterday, all ordinary
folks thought them true as well as interesting; and
they are repeated even now as curiosities of primitive
faith — stories of birds and plants called "openers."
The oldest, perhaps, is the Rabbinical legend of Solo-
mon, who desired to obtain a stone-breaking "worm"
(so the idea was even then ancient!) in possession of
Asmodeus, the Demon of Destruction. Asmodeus re-
fused to fetch it, and told Solomon that if he wanted
this magic creature (whose name was schamir) he must
find the nest of "the," not "a," moorhen and cover it
with a plate of glass so that the motherbird could not
get access to her young. This was done. When the
moorhen returned and saw the situation she flew away,
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 249
brought the schamir from its hiding-place, and was
about to lay it on the glass, which it would break; but
Benaiah, Solomon's agent, who lay in wait, shouted,
and so frightened the bird that she dropped the schamir,
whereupon Benaiah picked it up, as he had planned to
do. It was by aid of this "worm," which shaped the
stone-work for him, that Solomon was able to build
his Temple without sound of hammer or saw. Other
versions assert that a raven or an eagle was the bird,
and that the magic glass-breaker was a stone brought
from the uttermost East.
The story travelled to Greece, and there became at-
tached to the hoopoe, a small crested bird that figures
largely in south-European and African wonder-tales.
A hoopoe, runs the Greek story, had a nest in an old
wall in which was a crevice. The proprietor, noticing
the rent in his wall, plastered it over; thus when the
hoopoe returned to feed her young she found that the
nest had been covered so that she was unable to enter it.
Forthwith she flew away in quest of a plant called poa
(the springwort?), and having found a spray returned and
applied it to the plaster, which at once fell off from the crack
and gave her free access to her nest. Then she went forth
to seek food, but during her absence the master again plas-
tered up the hole. The object was again removed by means
of the magic poa, and a third time the hole was stopped and
opened in the same way.
The springwort and several other flowering plants were
credited in old times with a magical property in opening locks.
"Pliny records the superstition concerning it almost in the
same form in which it is now found in Germany. If any-
one touches a lock with it the lock, however strong, must
yield. . . . One cannot easily find it oneself, but generally the
woodpecker [according to Pliny, also the raven; in Switzer-
land and Swabia the hoopoe; in the Tyrol the swallow] will
bring it under the following circumstances: When the bird
250
BIRDS IN LEGEND
visits its nest the nest must be stopped up with wood. The
bird will open it by touching it with a spring-wurzel. Mean-
time a fire or a red cloth must be placed near by, which will
so frighten the bird that it will let the magic root fall."
The English antiquary Aubrey (1626-97) records an
anecdote of a keeper of a baronial park in Hereford-
shire who "did for exponent's sake drive an iron naile
thwert the hole of the woodpecker's nest, there being
a tradition that the damme will bring some leafe to
open it. He layed at the bottom of the tree a cleane
sheet, and before many houres passed the naile came
out, and he found a leafe lying by it on the sheet. They
say the moonwort will do such things." The moonwort
is a fern which was formerly reputed to have power to
draw nails out of horseshoes.
From such roots as these grew the superstitions and
legends innumerable of plants that would cure a snake
(another lightning-symbol) or other animal of wounds,
or even restore the dead. A tradition of the Middle
Ages is that two little birds were seen fighting till one
was exhausted. "It went away and ate of a certain
herb and then returned to renew the battle. When the
old man who witnessed the encounter had seen this done
several times he took away the herb on which the bird
was wont to feed, whereupon the little bird, unable to
find its plant, set up a great cry and died." It is a
foolish little story, but illustrative.
One reads of magic crystals, and of gems with mar-
vellous properties that would open mountains in which
princes or glittering treasures were hidden. A curious
example of this is related by Leland 97 anent the con-
stant and ordinarily fruitless hunt for treasure in ancient
Etruscan tombs, which went on in Italy for centuries.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 251
"When one would find a treasure," the peasants told Le-
land, "he must take the door of the house in which he
dwells and carry it forth into the fields at night until
he comes to a tree. Then he must wait till many birds
fly over him, and when they come he must throw down
the door, making a great noise. Then the birds in fear
will speak with a human voice, and tell where the treas-
ure is buried."
Much of this tinctures the mental life of many un-
educated persons to this day. They will tell you now
at Rauen, in Germany, that a princess is entombed alive
in the Markgrafenstein, and that she and her wealth
can be released only by one who will go there on a
Friday at midnight carrying a white woodpecker —
which would seem to make an albino of that species
well worth searching for! The woodpecker of old was
a "lightning-bird" because, among other reasons, it was
supposed to get fire by boring into wood, as did primi-
tive savages by means of the fire-drill; and its red cap
was not only a badge of its office, but a lightning-symbol
in general.
Let me illuminate this matter still more by quoting
the comments of John Fiske 98 on the mythical concep-
tions of this character that are so old, and so cherished
among the unlearned:
Among the birds enumerated by Kuhn [author of The
Descent of Fire] and others as representing the storm-cloud,
are likewise the wren or kinglet (French roitelet) ; the owl,
sacred to Athenae; the cuckoo, stork and sparrow; and the
red-breasted robin, whose name Robert was originally an
epithet of the lightning-god Thor. In certain parts of France
it is still believed that the robbing of a wren's nest will render
the culprit liable to be struck by lightning. The same belief
was formerly entertained in Teutonic countries with respect
to the robin. . . .
252 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Now, as the raven or woodpecker, in the various myths of
schamir, is the dark storm-cloud, so the rock-splitting worm,
or plant or pebble is nothing more or less than the flash of
lightning carried and dropped by the cloud . . .
The persons who told these stories were not weaving in-
genious allegories about thunder-storms, or giving utterance
to superstitions of which the original meaning was forgotten.
The old grannies who, along with a stoical indifference to the
fate of quails and partridges, used to impress upon me the
wickedness of killing robins, did not add that I should be
struck by lightning if I failed to heed their admonitions.
They had never heard that the robin was the bird of Thor:
they merely rehearsed the remnant of the superstition which
had survived to their own times, while the essential part of
it had long since faded from recollection. The reason for
regarding a robin's life as more sacred than a partridge's had
been forgotten; but it left behind, as was natural, a vague
recognition of that mythical sanctity. The primitive meaning
of a myth fades away as inevitably as the primitive meaning
of a word or phrase; and the rabbins which told of a worm
which shattered rocks no more thought of the writhing thun-
derbolts than the modern reader thinks of oyster-shells when
he sees the word ostracism, or consciously breathes a prayer
when he writes the phrase Good-bye.
CHAPTER XIV
LEGENDS IN A HISTORICAL SETTING
IT is not easy in preparing a book devoted mainly to
fable and folklore to sort out material for a separate
chapter on "legends/ ' A legend may be defined
as a narrative of something thought of as having
actually happened in connection with some real purpose
or place, but which is unsupported by historical evi-
dence. In many cases such narratives are quite in-
credible, but even so they may have a historically illus-
trative, a literary, or at least an amusing interest.
Stories of a considerable number of well-known kinds
of birds are in this way connected with actual persons,
or with verifiable incidents of the past, and hence may
be said to be "legends in an historical setting." A fair
example of them is the incident of the Capitoline geese.
Early in the third century before the Christian era
a horde of Gaulish invaders under Brennus over-ran
central Italy, and in 388 B. C. captured all of Rome it-
self except the lofty citadel called the Capitol, where a
Roman general officer, Marcus Manlius, held out with
a small garrison on the point of starvation. One night
the besieging Gauls, having discovered an unguarded
by-path, crept up the rocky steep, intending the surprise
and capture of the almost worn-out defenders. "But,"
says Plutarch, 94 in Dryden's translation, "there were
sacred Geese kept near the Temple of Juno, which at
other times were plentifully fed, but at this time, by
253
254 BIRDS IN LEGEND
reason of the Corn and all other Provisions were grown
strait, their allowance was shorten'd and they themselves
in a poor and lean condition. This Creature is by nature
of quick sense, and apprehensive of the least noise; so
that besides watchful through hunger, and restless, they
immediately discovered the coming of the Gauls; so that
running up and down, with their noise and cackling they
raised the whole camp."
Manlius sprang from sleep, aroused a body of soldiers
and repelled the attack. It was the beginning of an
ultimate victory over the enemy. Rome was saved,
and in recognition of it Manilus was given the honorary
title Capitolinus, and for a long time afterward the
incident was celebrated annually by a procession to the
Capitol in which a golden goose was carried. Livy also
tells us in his history that the prototype of this golden
symbol was a single sentinel goose never seen before,
hence a divine aid sent to Rome for the purpose by the
gods. It is interesting to note that
These consecrated geese in orders
That to the capitol were warders
And being then upon patrol
With noise alone beat off the Gaul,
as Hudibras has it, were "sacred" to Juno, for this was
before the time when she, having changed from the
status of simple wife to Jupiter (and a model to human
wives), had become the imperious and trouble-making
empress of later days, and had discarded the motherly
goose for the exotic, proud, and royally splendid pea-
cock. This is a capital example of the adaptive char-
acter of the assignment of birds to the various demigods
of the Roman pantheon; and it suggests the query
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 255
whether in some principal cases reverence for the bird
itself did not precede the conception of the divinity it
afterward typified.
Another tale of birds acting as sentinels explains how
the wren came to be so mortally hated by the Irish, whose
cruel "hunting of the wren" is described in another
chapter. According to Lady Wilde, 00 a student of Irish
folklore, this hatred is owing to the fact that once when
Irish troops were approaching to attack a part of
Thomas Cromwell's army (about 1650) "wrens came
and perched on the Irish drums, and by their tapping
and noise aroused the English soldiers, who fell on the
Irish troops and killed all of them." This is a variant
of a legend far older than Cromwell's campaigning;
and it is not the true explanation of the antipathy the
cruder Irish and Manxmen still feel toward this innocent
little songster, while at the same time they have a pecu-
liar tenderness for the robin.
A third parallel is found in the annoyance caused
the Scottish Covenanters. Many a meeting of pious
Presbyterians in some hidden, heathery glen of the misty
hills was discovered and roughly dispersed "because of
the hovering, bewailing plovers, fearful for their young,
clamoring overhead." The poet Leyden alludes to the
long-remembered grudge against this suspicious bird
when, speaking of the religious refugees on the moors,
he writes:
The lapwing's clamorous whoop attends their flight,
Pursues their steps where'er the wanderers go,
Till the shrill scream betrays them to the foe.
Returning to ancient history, two bird-stories of
Alexander the Great are delightful as illustrating how
256 BIRDS IN LEGEND
an independent and masterful intellect, even in that early
day above the Pagan superstitions of the time, might
with ingenuity and boldness bend the sanctions of
religion to his own ends without destroying them. The
first one is an incident recorded of Alexander's cam-
paign in Asia Minor in 334 B. C. His fleet was an-
chored in the harbor of Miletus, and opposite it lay the
fleet of the Persians. Alexander had no desire to disturb
this situation, for he meant his army, not the navy,
to do the work in view. One day an eagle, Jove's
bird, was seen sitting on the shore behind the Mace-
donian ships, and Parmenion, chief of staff, found in
this fact convincing indication by the gods that victory
was with the ships. Alexander pointed out that the
eagle had perched on the land, not on the ships, giving
thereby the evident intimation that it was only through
the victory of the troops on land that the fleet could have
value. As Alexander was commander-in-chief, this was
evidently the orthodox interpretation.
Two years later Alexander was one day laying out
on its site the plan of his foreordained city of Alex-
andria, in Egypt, and was marking the course of the
proposed streets by sprinkling lines of flour in the lack
of chalk-dust. 'While the king," says Plutarch, "was
congratulating himself on his plan, on a sudden a count-
less number of birds of various sorts flew over from
the land and the lake in clouds, and settling on the spot
in clouds devoured in a short time all the flour, so that
Alexander was much disturbed in mind at the omen
involved, till the augurs restored his confidence, telling
him the city . . . was destined to be rich in its resources,
and a feeder of nations of men."
The straight face with which Plutarch 94 recites these
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 257
and similar stones of hocus-pocus in the matter of in-
convenient omens is delightful; but the faith of the
common people was not so easily shaken. For example :
When the Sicilian-Greek army of Agathocles, Tyrant of
Syracuse in the third century, B. C, was facing near
Times a more powerful Carthaginian force, Agathocles
let loose a number of owls among his men, "who sud-
denly took great courage as the birds sacred to Pallas
settled blinking upon their helmets and shields" — and
they routed the bigger enemy. That was true religious
inspiration — as true as ever blazed in the heart of
Christian crusader; but it was a sacrilegous trick on
the part of Agathocles!
Just across the strait from Sicily, at Regium (Reg-
gio), was the home of the celebrated cranes of Ibycus.
Ibycus, a local poet, was being murdered by robbers
when he called on the cranes fluttering near by to give
witness of his death. Later, the murderers were one
day at the theatre, when they saw a flock of cranes, and
in fright whispered to one another: "The cranes of
Ibycus!" They were overheard, arrested and executed,
whence the proverb "the cranes of Ibycus" to express
crime coming unexpectedly to light.
The Wonderful Magazine, an amazing periodical
issued in London from 1793 to 1798, contained a story
that in 1422 a "Roman" emperor besieging Zeta took all
the sparrows his men could catch, and, tying lighted
matches to their feet, let them go toward the town.
But the citizens made a great noise, and the frightened
sparrows flying back set the Roman camp on fire and
so raised the siege. The reader may put his own esti-
mate on this bit of historical lore; and may discover,
if he can, where and what was Zeta.
258 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Arabs in Palestine tell how a bird was involved in
David's sin of coveting Uriah's wife. David, they say,
had shut himself up in a tower for meditation, when,
happening to look up, he saw just outside the window
a bird of amazing beauty — a pigeon whose plumage
gleamed like gold and jewels. David threw some
crumbs on the floor, whereupon the pigeon came in and
picked them up, but eluded David's attempt to capture
it. At last, to escape his efforts, it flew to the window
and settled on one of the bars. He pursued, but it
departed. It was then, as David followed the bright
creature with longing eyes, that he caught sight of
Madame Uriah in the bath — and was done for !
Among other excellent things in Hanauer's Tales
from Palestine 43 is the following report of Solomon's
contest with a dove:
"In the southern wall of the Kubbet 'es-Sakhra [at
Jerusalem], the mosque that now stands near the site
of the ancient Temple, on the right side of the door as
one enters there is a gray slab framed in marble of a
dark color. It contains a figure, formed by natural
veins in the stone, which is distinct enough to be taken
for a picture of two doves perched facing each other on
the edge of a vase. With this picture is connected a
tale . . .
"The great king Solomon understood the language
of beasts, birds and fishes, and, when he had occasion
to do so, would converse with all of them. One day,
soon after he had completed the Temple, as he was
standing at a window of the royal palace, he overheard
a conversation between a pair of birds that were sit-
ting on the housetop. Presently the male, who was
evidently trying to impress the female with his im-
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 259
portance, exclaimed : 'Solomon is a conceited fool ! Why
should he be so vain of this pile of buildings he has
raised? I, if I wished, could kick them all over in a
few minutes/
"The king, greatly enraged by this pompous speech,
summoned the offender into his presence and demanded
what he meant by such an outrageous boast. 'Your
majesty,' replied the bird, 'will, I am sure, forgive my
audacity, when I explain that I was in the company
of a female; since your majesty doubtless knows from
experience that in such circumstances the temptation to
boast is almost irresistible.' The monarch, forgetting
his anger in his amusement, said with a smile: 'Go your
way this time, but see that you do not repeat the offence,'
and the bird, after a profound obeisance, flew away to
rejoin his mate.
"He had hardly alighted before the female, unable to
repress her curiosity, eagerly inquired why he had been
summoned to the palace. 'Oh,' said the impudent
boaster, 'the king heard me tell you that if I chose I
could kick down all his buildings in no time, and he
sent for me to beg me not to do it."
"Solomon, who, of course, heard this remark also, was
so indignant at the incorrigible vanity of its author that
he at once turned both birds into stone. They remain
to this day as a reminder of the saying: 'The peace of
mankind consists in guarding the tongue.' '
But the stories of Solomon and his bird-friends are
many. He was evidently a jolly old soul, and tradition
says that when he travelled across the desert clouds of
birds formed a canopy to protect him from the sun.
The hoopoe, a high-crested bird that figures largely in
other fanciful tales of the East, tells wise Solomonic
2 6o BIRDS IN LEGEND
stories, and is still regarded by Saharan nomads as pos-
sessed of peculiar virtues. The great Jewish king, whose
reality is almost hidden under the legendary mantle, is
said to have chosen the hoopoe, the cock and the pewit:
the first because of its wit, the second in admiration of
its cry, and the third because, says Hanauer, it can
see through the earth, and could tell him where foun-
tains of water could be found. The last preference is
natural in an arid region, the pewit being a water-bird,
the familiar lapwing-plover; and as it annually migrates
through Palestine into Ethiopia it is reasonable that it
should be fabled to be the means of bringing Solomon
and the Queen of Sheba together, as is described in
Chapter XXVII of the Koran. It should be noted that
all of these birds are crested.
The veneration given to doves by the Mohammedans
at Mecca is accounted for elsewhere; but swallows are
held in almost equal reverence by both officials and pil-
grims at that great shrine of Islam, and build their
nests in the harain. This respect is explained by
Keane 14 as the result of a belief that they were the
instruments by which Mecca was saved from the Abys-
sinian (Christian) army that is known to have invaded
Arabia in the year of Mohammed's birth, and to have
been disastrously expelled. The tradition is that God
sent flocks of swallows, every bird carrying three small
stones in its beak and two in its claws, which were
dropped on the heads of the Abyssinians, and mirac-
ulously penetrated the bodies of men and elephants
until only one of the invaders was left alive. He fled back
to his country, and had just finished telling of the dis-
aster to the king when one of the swallows, which had
followed him from Mecca, dropped its pebble and killed
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 261
him too. The kernel of this dramatic story is in the
nineteenth section of the Koran: 50 "And he sent against
them birds in flocks (ababils), claystones did he hurl
down at them." The historical explanation is that the
Abyssinian invaders were destroyed by small-pox, the
pustules of which are called in Arabic by a word mean-
ing "small stones."
Of a piece with these traditions and the Rabbinical
tales of the Jews are the monkish legends preserved in
early British chronicles, such as that by the Venerable
Bede or by William of Malmesbury. The orthodox as
well as dissenters had trouble with birds. Among the
traditions of the celebrated Scotch-Irish missionary
Columba (Latinized from his baptismal name Colum,
"dove") is one that once in his ardent youth Colum was
trying to make by stealth in a church a copy of the
psalter in possession of the selfish king, Finian of Done-
gal, who had refused the young enthusiast that privilege.
A meddlesome stork, confined within the church, in-
formed the sacristan, and Colum was arrested. Never-
theless by divine aid he got his copy, helpful to him
afterward in his beneficent work in the Scottish high-
lands.
One of the prettiest of these old stories is that of
St. Kenneth and the gulls. 22 One day about A. D. 550
the blackheaded gulls, flying as usual along the coast of
Wales, and scanning the sea sharply for food or any-
thing else interesting to a gull, found floating in a
coracle — a round, wicker work canoe — a human baby a
day or two old, contentedly asleep on a pallet made of
a folded purple cloth. Several gulls seized the corners
of this cloth and so carried the child to the ledge of
the Welsh cliff where they nested, plucked feathers from
262 BIRDS IN LEGEND
their breasts to make a soft bed, laid the baby on it,
then hastened to fly inland and bring a doe to provide
it with milk, for which an angel offered a brazen bell
as a cup. There the blessed waif lived for several
months; but one day, in the absence of all the gulls,
a shepherd discovered the infant and took him down
to his hut and his kind wife. The gulls, returning from
the sea, heard of this act from the doe. They at once
rushed to the shepherd's cottage, again lifted the babe
by the corners of its purple blanket, and bore him back
to the ledge of their sea-fronting crag. There he stayed
until he had grown to manhood — a man full of laughter
and singing and kind words; and the Welsh peasants
of the Gower Peninsula revered him and called him
Saint Kenneth.
Somewhat similar is the legendary history of Coe-
magen, or Saint Kelvin, an Irish monk of the eighth
century, into whose charge was committed the infant
son of Colman, a Leinster noble. "Coemagen fed the
child on the milk of a doe which came from the forest
to the door of his cell. A raven was wont, after the
doe had been milked, to perch on the bowl, and some-
times would upset it. 'Bad luck to thee !' exclaimed the
saint. When I am dead there will be a famous wake,
but no scraps for thee and thy clan!' When very old
St. Kelvin moved into a forest hermitage, where the
birds came to him as companions. Once, while pray-
ing, his supplicating palms outstretched, a blackbird
(thrush) dropped her eggs into the hollow of his hands,
and he held his arms rigid until the chicks hatched. "
A curious parallel to the last incident is quoted by the
Baroness Martinengo-Caesaresco 20 "from an industrious
translator" of the book Tatchi-Lou-Lun, describing how
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 263
when a bird laid her eggs on the head of the first
Buddha, which she mistook for the branch of a tree,
he plunged himself into a trance so as not to move
until the eggs had hatched and the young were flown.
St. Bede the younger, a contemporary of Coemagen,
had a dove that used to come at his call; and an Irish
monk, Comgall, would bid the swans near his residence
come and cluster devotionally around his feet. Many
saints, the legends declare, had authority over birds,
and one, St. Millburg, abbess of Wenlock, in Shrop-
shire, kept them out of the farmers' crops by telling
them it was naughty to despoil the grain. Of old, ac-
cording to Canon Kingsley, St. Guthlac in Crowland
said, as the swallows sat upon his knee, "He who leads
his life according to the will of God, to him will the
wild deer and the wild birds draw more near."
The religious "hermits," so prevalent at that period,
were men who chose a more or less solitary life, quite
as much, I suspect, on account of their love of nature
as from purely devotional motives, and this was par-
ticularly true of those in Great Britain, exhibiting the
characteristic British fondness for animal life. There
was an early St. Bartholomew, for example, who in the
sixth century or thereabout dwelt in seclusion on one
of the Fame Islands off the northeastern coast of Eng-
land, and made friends of the gulls and cormorants of
the place. One of these he had tamed to eat out of his
hand, and once, when Bartholomew was away fishing,
a hawk pursued this poor bird into the chapel and killed
it. Brother Bartholomew came in and found the hawk
there with bloody talons and a shame-faced appearance.
He caught it, kept it two days without food to punish
it, then let it go. At another time, as he sat by the
264 BIRDS IN LEGEND
shore, a cormorant approached and pulled at his skirt,
then led him to where one of its young had fallen into
a crevice of the rocks whence the good man rescued it.
One of these rocky islets in the North Sea became
so famous during the next century that it has been
known ever since as Holy Isle, and the ruins of its
monastery and cathedral still remain and may be seen
from the railway train as it passes along the brink of
the lofty coast a little south of Berwick-on-Tweed. This
was the seat of the renowned Bishop Cuthbert of whom
many quaint stories are told, apart from the record of
his religious work. They attribute to his influence the
extraordinary gentleness and familiarity characteristic
of the eider duck, which is known to this day in North-
umbria as Cuthbert's bird. It was he, according to a
narrative of a monk of the 13th century, who inspired
these ducks with a hereditary trust in mankind by tak-
ing them as companions of his solitude when for several
years he resided alone on Lindisfarne. There is good
reason to accept this and similar traditions as largely
true, for a like ability in "gentling" birds and other
wild animals is manifested today by some persons of a
calm and kindly sort.
Early in the eighth century a monk of intensely
ascetic disposition, named Guthlac, retired to a solitary
hermitage on an island in the dismal morasses of Lin-
colnshire, which afterward, if not then, was called Croy-
land or Crowland. He was sorely tempted by the Devil
we are informed, and had many battles with "demons"
— native British refugees hiding in the fens; but in the
intervals of his fasting and fighting he got acquainted
with the wild creatures about him. "The ravens, the
beasts and the fishes," says the record, "came to obey
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 265
him. Once a venerable brother named Wilfred visited
him, and . . . suddenly two swallows came flying in . . .
and often they sat fearlessly on the shoulders of the
holy man Guthlac, and then lifted up their song, and
afterward they sat on his bosom and on his arms and
his knees. . . . When Guthlac died angelic songs were
heard in the sky, and all the air had a wondrous odor
of exceeding sweetness."
St. Kentigern, when a schoolboy, was wrongly ac-
cused of having twisted off the head of his master's
pet robin. He proved his innocence by putting the head
and body together, whereupon the robin came to life
and attended Kentigern until he became a great and
good man. His master was St. Servan, and the robin
was one that used to eat from his hand and perch on
his shoulder, where it would twitter whenever Servan
chanted the Psalms.
Here we encounter the mystical kind of story with
which those old chroniclers like to embellish their biog-
raphies of holy men, and there was no limit to their
credulity. Such is the tale of Carilef, a French would-
be hermit of Menat, in Auvergne, who thought he was
guided to set up a religious station because a wren had
laid an egg in a hood that he had left hanging on a
bush — a very wrenlike proceeding; and that was the
foundation of the monastery about which the city of
St. Calais grew in later times. Several other incidents
of this kind are on record, showing that the value placed
on any action by a bird that could be construed as a
divine message. It is written that Editha, one of the
early queens of England, persuaded her husband to
found a religious house near Oxford on account of the
omens she interpreted from the voice and actions of a
266 BIRDS IN LEGEND
certain magpie. Similarly the site for the abbey of
Thierry, near Rheims, in France, was indicated to St.
Theodoric, in the sixth century, by a white eagle cir-
cling around the top of the hill on which it subsequently
was erected; and this miraculous eagle was seen year
after year in the sky above it.
About that time Kenelm, son and heir of Kenulph,
king of Wessex, was seven years old. His sister, who
wanted to succeed to the throne in his place, procured
his murder. The instant this was accomplished the fact
was notified to the Pope, according to the Chronicles
of Roger de Wendover, by a white dove that alighted
on the altar of St. Peter's, bearing in its beak a scroll
on which was written
In Clent cow-pasture, under a thorn,
Of head bereft lies Kenelm, king-born.
The Pope sent word to England, the body was found in
a thicket over which hung a pillar of supernal light, and
was taken to Winchelcumb, in Gloucestershire, for
burial; and at the spot near Halesowen, in Shropshire,
where he was killed, Kenelm's Chapel was erected.
But the most mystical legend in which birds are a
part, is one familiar in Brittany. It is related of St.
Leonore, a Welsh missionary who went to Brittany in
the sixth century, to whom many fabulous powers and
deeds are attributed, the most comprehensible of which
Baring-Gould has put into verse. Leonore, with a band
of followers, had decided to settle in Brittany on a
desolate moor; but they had forgotten to bring any
seed-wheat, and were alarmed.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 267
Said the abbot, "God will help us
In this hour of bitter loss."
Then one spied a little redbreast
Sitting on a wayside cross.
Doubtless came the bird in answer
To the words the monk did speak,
For a heavy wheat-ear dangled
From the robin's polished beak.
Then the brothers, as he dropped it
Picked it up and careful sowed;
And abundantly in autumn
Reaped the harvest where they strewed. 21
Greater poets than Baring-Gould or even Bishop
Trench have found literary material in these monastic
tales. Witness Longfellow's Golden Legend, where he
sings of good St. Felix, the Burgundian missionary who
crossed the Channel, and in A. D. 604 converted to
Christianity the wild king of the East Saxons; and who
listened to the singing of a milk-white bird for a hun-
dred years, although it had seemed to him but an hour,
so enchanted was he with the music. No doubt myth-
mongers might discourse very scientifically on this and
some other of these episodes in the penumbra of his-
tory, but we will leave the pleasure of it to them.
None of these traditions of early bird-lovers and
teachers of kindness are so pleasant as are those inspired
by the gracious life of St. Francis. 22 A familiar classic
is his sermon to the birds when
Around Assisi's convent gate
The birds, God's poor who cannot wait,
From moor and mere and darksome wood
Came flocking for their dole of food.
268 BIRDS IN LEGEND
One of the prettiest Franciscan stories is that of the
saint and the nightingale as presented by Mrs. Jamie-
son; 105 and, by the way, antiphonal singing with birds
is related of several holy men and women of old :
As he was sitting with his disciple Leo, he felt himself
penetrated with joy and consolation by the song of the night-
ingale . . . and Francis began to sing, and when he stopped the
nightingale took up the strain; and thus they sang alternately
until the night was far advanced and Francis was obliged to
stop for his voice failed. Then he confessed that the little
bird had vanquished him. He called it to him, thanked it for
its song, and gave it the remainder of his bread; and having
bestowed his blessing upon it the creature flew away.
Longfellow has preserved in melodious verse that
legend of the Spanish Charles V and the swallow that
chose his tent as a site for its nest at a time when the
emperor —
I forget in what campaign,
Long besieged in mud and rain
Some old frontier town of Flanders.
Yes, it was a swallow's nest,
Built of clay and hair of horse's
Mane, or tail, or dragoon's crest,
Found on hedgerows east and west
After skirmish of the forces.
The headquarters staff were scandalized by the bird's
impudence, but Charles forbade their malice:
"Let no hand the bird molest,"
Said he solemnly, "nor hurt her!"
Adding then, by way of jest,
"Golondrina is my guest,
'Tis the wife, of some deserter !"
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 269
So unharmed and unafraid
Sat the swallow still and brooded,
Till the constant cannonade
Through the walls a breach had made,
And the siege was thus concluded.
Then the army elsewhere bent
Struck the tents as if disbanding,
Only not the Emperor's tent.
For he ordered as he went,
Very curtly, "Leave it standing."
So it stood there all alone,
Loosely flapping, torn and tattered,
Till the brood was fledged and flown,
Swinging o'er those walks of stone
Which the cannon-shot had shattered.
CHAPTER XV
SOME PRETTY INDIAN STORIES
NOT many of the stories about birds now or for-
merly current among the American aborigines
are of a pleasing character. They are fantastic
myths for the most part, as appears from many of the
incidents given elsewhere in this book; and often they
are so wildly improbable, incoherent, and unbirdlike as
to disgust rather than interest us. That is partly owing,
no doubt, to our difficulty in taking the native point of
view, and our ignorance of the significance the half-
animal, half-human characters in the tales have to the
redmen, with whom, in most cases, the startling narra-
tives pass for veritable tribal history. Their stories are
as foreign to our minds as is their "tum-tum" music
to our ears. Now and then, however, we come across
an understanding and pleasing legend, of purely native
origin, and touched with poetic feeling.
A favorite story among the central Eskimos, for in-
stance, is that of their race-mother Sedna, who was the
daughter of a chief, and was wooed by a fulmar (a
kind of northern petrel) who promised her, if she would
marry him, a delightful life in his distant home. So
she went away with him. But she had been ruefully
deceived, and was cruelly mistreated. A year later her
father went to pay her a visit; and discovering her
misery he killed her husband and took his repentant
daughter home. The other fulmars in the village fol-
270
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 271
lowed them, mourning and crying for their murdered
fellow, and fulmars continue to utter doleful cries to
this day.
Another Eskimo tale relates that a loon told a poor
blind boy that he could cure him of his affliction. So
the boy crept after the bird to a lake, where the loon
took him and dived with him into the water. Three
times they repeated their submergence, the last time
staying a long time under the water, but when the boy
came to the surface after the third diving he had good
eyesight. This seems one of the rare examples of a
tale told simply for its own sake, and free of any eso-
teric significance.
A very pretty legend, current among the Eskimos of
western Alaska, has been preserved for us by Edward
W. Nelson, 101 who spent several years, late in the
19th century, in studying the ornithology and eth-
nology of the Bering Sea region. It relates to the red-
polls, the most abundant and entertaining land-birds of
Alaska, where it would be a surprisingly hard heart that
was not touched by their companionship as winter closes
down on a dreary landscape of snow-drifts. Let me
quote Mr. Nelson's words:
At this season the stars seem each to hang from the firma-
ment by an invisible cord, and twinkle clear and bright over-
head. The sharp, querulous yelp of the white fox alone breaks
the intense stillness. A white, frosty fog hangs in the air —
the chilled breath of nature — which falls silently to the ground
in the lovely crystal handiwork of northern genii. In the
north a pale auroral arch moves its mysterious banners, and
the rounding bosom of the earth, chill under its white mantle,
looks dreary and sad. After such a night the sun seems to
creep reluctantly above the horizon, as though loath to face
the bitter cold. The smoke rises slowly and heavily in the
fixed atmosphere, and warm rooms are doubly appreciated.
272 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Soon small troops of these little redpolls come . . . flitting
about the houses on all sides, examining the bare spots on the
ground, searching the old weeds and fences, clinging to the
eaves, and even coming to the window-sills, whence they peer
saucily in, making themselves continually at home, and re-
ceiving a hearty welcome for their cheering presence. The
breast is now a beautiful peach-blossom pink, and the crown
shining scarlet. How this bird came to bear these beautiful
colors is told in one of the Indian myths . . . which begins
thus:
Very long ago the whole of mankind was living in cheer-
less obscurity. Endless night hid the face of the world, and
men were without the power of making a fire, as all the fire
of the world was in the possession of a ferocious bear living
in a far-off country to the north. The bear guarded his charge
with unceasing vigilance, and so frightful was his appearance
that no man dared attempt to obtain any of the precious sub-
stance. While the poor Indians were sorrowing over their
misfortunes the redpoll, which at that time was a plain little
wood-sparrow, dressed in ordinary dull brown, heard their
plaint — for in those days men and beasts understood one
another, — and his heart was touched. He prepared himself
for a long journey and set out toward the lodge of the cruel
bear. After many adventures ... he reached the place, and
by a successful ruse stole a living ember from the perpetual
fire which glowed close under the breast of the savage guar-
dian, and flew away back with it in his beak. The glow of
the coal was reflected from his breast and crown, while his
forehead became slightly burned. Far away he flew, and
finally arrived safely at the home of mankind, and was re-
ceived with great rejoicing.
He gave the fire to the grateful people and told them to
guard it well ; and as he did so they noticed the rich glow on
his breast and brow, and said: "Kind bird, wear forever that
beautiful mark as a memento of what you have done for us;"
and to this day the redpoll wears this badge in proof of the
legend, as all may see, and mankind has ever since had fire.
One might gather a considerable collection of his-
torical anecdotes relating to birds that in one way or
another aided the Indians of old to obtain or to preserve
fire, and some of them are noted incidentally elsewhere
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 273
in this volume; but few are as poetic and entertaining
as Mr. Nelson's contribution.
The late Charles G. Leland found among the Algon-
kins of Maine and eastward a great number of tales
that he put into his books. One or two of them are
about birds, and these he threw into verse and pub-
lished them in a volume entitled Kuloskap the Master.^
The longest and most romantic of these is the love-
story of the Leaf for the Red Bird (scarlet tanager),
quoted in part below:
In the earliest time on the greatest mountain
Lived merry Mipis, the little leaf . . .
Listens all day to the birds and the breezes,
And goes to sleep to the song of the owl.
Merry Mipis on a bright May morning
Was stretching himself in the warm sunshine
When he heard afar a wonderful music,
A sound like a flute and the voice of a maiden,
Rippling melodies melting in one.
Never before had he heard such singing.
Then looking up he beheld before him
A beautiful merry little bird-girl,
Dressed in garments of brilliant scarlet,
Just like his own in the Indian summer.
"O fairest of small birds," said merry Mipis,
"Who are you, and what is your name?"
Thus she answered: "I am Squ'tes,
The Little Fire. . . .
I have lived in the deep green forest,
Even as you have for many ages,
Singing my songs to K'musom'n,
Unto our Father the mighty mountain;
And, because he well loved my music,
For a reward he sent me hither
To seek a youth whose name is Mipis,
Whom he wills that I should wed."
This unexpected and rather unmaidenly avowal rather
274 BIRDS IN LEGEND
startled Mipis, and made him suspicious of some trick-
ery, despite the attraction of her charm; but Squ'tes,
"never heeding what the leaf thought," began again —
Pouring out in the pleasant sunshine
Her morning song. As Mipis listened
To the melodious trill he melted;
For the sweet tune filled all the forest,
Every leaf on the tree was listening. . . .
And as the music grew tender and stronger,
And as in one long soft note it ended,
Little Leaf said to her: "Be my own."
So in the greenwood they lived together.
One day both go to the Mountain and thank him for
their happiness ; and in the course of the visit the grand-
sire warns them not to go away from the Mountain,
for dangers fill the outside world, thus:
The little Indian boy Monimquess,
Who, armed with a terrible bow and arrows,
Shoots all of the little birds of the forest;
and —
Aplasemwesit, the Little Whirlwind,
Who never rests. He is always trying
To blow the leaves away from the branches.
So they built their nest on the great tree that grew
"in the safest place in all the mountain," and for a time
continued in bliss ; but Mipis could see from their lofty
home a far, beautiful country, and wanted to visit it.
So Red Bird took the discontented Little Leaf in her bill
and bore him away into the delightful lowland, where
again they built a home ; but here the Indian boy heard
the wonderful singing, and shot the singer, and Little
Whirlwind seized Mipis and took him to his grandsire,
the Storm, who resolved to keep Mipis as a prisoner.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 275
That night the Mountain dreamed of this, and sent his
son to demand Mipis, and the Storm gave him up, so
that soon Little Leaf was back on his safe mountain-
tree — but he lived in lonely grief.
His life was gone with the Little Fire,
And the fire of his life was all in ashes.
How then had it fared with the lost Red Bird ? When
she fell under the boy's arrow she was not killed but
sorely wounded ; and when the young Indian carried her
home, very proud of his prize, his grandsire said truly
that the bird must be kept captive. Red Bird recovered
rapidly, and one morning Monimquess was dismayed
to hear her singing as loudly as possible, "like a brook
to sunshine," as he thought, for he knew she was trying
to make herself heard by the Mountain, and that if she
succeeded destruction would be hurled upon the wig-
wam. At last, wearied with anxious thinking —
Down by the fire he lay on a bearskin
Smoking himself into silent sleep.
The door was closed, nor was there a crevice
Through which the Red Bird could creep to freedom,
When all at once she thought of the opening
Through which the smoke from the fire ascended,
Ever upward so densely pouring
Nobody dreamed she would dare to pass it.
As the head of Monimquess drooped on his shoulder. . . .
Softly the Red Bird rose, and taking
A birchen bucket filled it with water.
Dipping her wing in the water she sprayed it
Little by little upon the fire.
Little by little the fire, like Monimquess,
Sank to sleep, and the bright red flame
Lay down to rest in the dull gray ashes.
Out of the smoke-hole, in careful silence,
Flitted Squ'tes. . . .
276 BIRDS IN LEGEND
So the lovers were reunited. Then
. . . Squ'tes and Mipis
Lived all the summer upon the mountain,
Sung in its shadows and shone in the sunshine.
Still as of yore they are singing and shining;
And so it will be while the mountain is there.
A very curious feature of this delicate romance, which
reminds one of the love-story of the Nightingale and
the Rose, is the transposition of sex. To our minds
it would seem natural that the bird, as the most active
of the two characters, should take the male part and
the leaf the other; and it is false to fact that Red Bird,
as a female, should sing. The Indians must have known
that this was unnatural, yet their poetic sense arranged
it otherwise, just as the poets have pictured the nightin-
gale pressing her breast against a thorn, yet singing,
as only male birds do !
Elsewhere I have shown how important a part the
loon plays in the mythology and fireside tales of the
redmen of the Northeastern region of our country and
that of the Great Lakes. To the Algonkins of Maine
and eastward this bird was the messenger of their great
hero Glooscap, or Kuloskap, as Leland spells it with
careful accuracy when writing in the language of the
Pasamaquoddies ; and he has told in verse the story of
how this service was accepted by the willing bird. One
day when Kuloskap was pursuing the gigantic magi-
cian, Winpe, his enemy, a flock of loons came circling
near him, and to his question to their leader: "What is
thy will, O Kwimu?" the loon replied: "I fain would be
thy servant, thy servant and thy friend." Then the
Master taught the loons a cry, a strange, prolonged cry,
like the howl of a dog when he calls to the moon, or
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 277
when, far away in the forest, he seeks to find his master ;
and he instructed them to utter this weird summons
whenever they required him.
Now it came to pass long after, the Master in Uktakumkuk
(The which is Newfoundland) came to an Indian village,
And all who dwelt therein were Kwimuuk, who had been
Loons in the time before. And now they were very glad
As men to see once more the Master, who had blessed them
When they were only birds. Therefore he made them his
huntsmen.
Also his messengers. Hence comes that in all the stories
Which are told of the mighty Master the loons are ever his
friends ;
And the Indians, when they hear the cry of the loons, exclaim :
"Kimu elkomtuejul Kuloskapul"— the Loon is calling
Kuloskap, the Master.
Leith Adams 103 says: "Stories are told" — among the
Micmacs in New Brunswick — "how the snowy owl still
laments the Golden Age when man and all animals lived
in perfect amity until it came to pass that they began
to quarrel; when the great Glooscap, or Gotescarp, got
disgusted and sailed across the seas to return when
they made up their differences. So every night the owl
repeats to this day his Koo, koo, skoos. 'Oh, I am sorry,
Oh, I am sorry.' "
A quaint little legend comes from the Tillamooks,
whose home was formerly on the Oregon coast, where
the tides do not rise very much. In the beginning of
the world, it teaches, the crow had a voice like that of
the thunder-bird, and the thunder-bird the voice of a
crow. The latter proposed to exchange voices. The
crow agreed to this, but demanded that in return the
thunder-bird give her low water along the seashore,
so that she might more easily gather the clams and other
mussels, which was a part of a Tillamook woman's daily
278 BIRDS IN LEGEND
task. The thunder-bird therefore made the water draw
back a very long distance. But when the crow went out
on the waste of sea-bottom she saw so many marine
monsters that she was frightened, and begged the thun-
der-bird not to make the waters recede so far; and that
is the reason that now but little ocean-bottom is ex-
posed at ebb tide on the Oregon coast.
The Gualala Indians were a tribe of the great Porno
family that half a century ago dwelt happily in the
northwestern corner of Sonoma County, California, and
their staple food was the flour of crushed and filtered
acorns of several kinds of oaks. In their country, as
elsewhere in that State, the California woodpecker
(Melanerpes) is a very common bird, which has the
habit of drilling numerous small holes in pines and
other soft-wooded trees, and fixing in each an acorn —
a method of storing its favorite food against a time of
famine. The Indians understood this very well, and
in times of scarcity of food in camp they would cut
down the small trees and climb the big ones, and rob
the cupboards of the far more provident birds. "And
here," says Powers, 19 "I will make mention of a kind
of sylvan barometer. . . . These acorns are stored away
before the rainy season sets in, sometimes to the amount
of a half-bushel, and when they are wetted they pres-
ently swell and start out a little. So always, when a
rainstorm is brewing, the woodpeckers fall to work
with great industry a day or two in advance and ham-
mer them in all tight. During the winter, therefore,
whenever the woods are heard rattling with the pecking
of these busy little commissary-clerks heading up their
barrels of worms, the Indian knows a rainstorm is cer-
tain to follow."
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 279
The Chippeway Indians, as Schoolcraft noted, account
for the friendly spirit of the robin by relating that he
was once a young brave whose father set him a task
too cruel for his strength, and made him starve too long
when he had reached man's estate and had to go through
the customary initiation-ceremonies. He turned into a
robin, and said to his father: "I shall always be the
friend of man and keep near their dwellings. I could
not gratify your pride as a warrior, but I will cheer
you by songs."
This pretty fiction is noteworthy, when one recalls
the many instances in Greek and European myths and
poetry of men and women transforming themselves into
birds.
The Cherokees had an interesting story about the
wren, always a busybody. She gets up early in the
morning, they say, pries into everything, and goes around
to every lodge in the settlement to get news for the
birds' council. When a new baby is born she finds out
whether it is a boy or a girl, and reports to the council.
If it is a boy the birds sing in mournful chorus : "Alas !
The whistle of the arrow! My shins will burn," for
the birds know that when the boy grows older he will
hunt them with his blowgun and arrows, and roast
them on a stick. But if the baby is a girl they are
glad, and sing: "Thanks! The sound of the pestle!
At her home I shall surely be able to scratch where she
sweeps," because they know that after a while they will
be able to pick up stray grains where she beats the corn
into meal. 104
In the myths or folklore of the Pawnees a character
in several tales, as related by Grinnell, 105 is a little bird,
smaller than a pigeon. "Its back is blue, but its breast
280 BIRDS IN LEGEND
white, and its head is spotted. It flies swiftly over the
water, and when it sees a fish it dives down into the
water to catch it. This bird is a servant or a messenger
for the Nahurac." The Nahurac are an assemblage of
imaginary animals by whom many wonderful things are
done ; and it communicates to living men their wishes or
orders, and acts as a guide when men are summoned to
come or go somewhere. But this is perilously near the
purely mythical, and it is mentioned only as an example
of the widespread conception of birds as messengers
and interpreters.
I hope I may be pardoned if I add to this group of
Indian bird-stories one or two told in the Negro cabins
of North Carolina, and probably elsewhere, and written
down in Volume XI of the American Folk-Lore
Journal-, among many other tales of the out-door crea-
tures to which the rural darkies like to attribute human
attributes, and to use as puppets in their little comedies
of animal life, which are likely to be keen satires on
humanity. The one to be quoted is a parable of how
Ann Nancy (a spider) got caught in a tight place by
Mr. Turkey Buzzard, and how she escaped, for Mr.
Buzzard was going to eat her.
"But," says the narrator, "she beg so hard, and com-
pliment his fine presence, and compare how he sail in
the clouds while she 'bliged to crawl in the dirt, till he
that proud ful and set up he feel mighty pardonin' spirit,
and he let her go."
Ann Nancy, however, did not enjoy the incident, and
"jess study constant how she gwine get the best of
every creeter, ,, and particularly of the tormenting bird.
"She knew Mr. Buzzard's weak point am he stomach,
and one day she make it out dat she make a dining,
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 281
and Vite Mr. Buzzard an' Miss Buzzard an' de chillens.
Ann Nancy she know how to set out a dinin' fo' sure,
and when dey all got sot down to the table, an' she
mighty busy passin' the hot coffee to Mr. Buzzard an'
the little Buzzards, she have a powerful big pot o'
scalding water ready, and she lip it all over poor or
Mr. Buzzard's haid, and the po' ol' man done been
baldhaided from that day.
"An' he don't forget on Ann Nancy, 'cause you 'serve
she de onliest creeter on the topside the earth what Mr.
Buzzard don't eat."
LIST OF BOOKS REFERRED TO
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2. Young, Martha. Plantation Bird Legends. (New York,
1902.)
3. Worcester, Dean. The Philippines. (New York, 1901.)
4. Brinton, Daniel G. The Religions of Primitive Peoples.
(New York, 1897.)
5. Dorsey, J. Owen. Report U. S. Bureau of Ethnology,
1884-5. (Washington, 1888.)
6. McGee, W. J. The Seri Indians, in Report U. S. Bureau
Ethnology, 1895-6, Part I.
7. Skeat, William W. Malay Magic. (London, 1900.)
8. Gay, John. Poems. The Shepherd's Week. (Boston, 1854.)
9. Higginson, Thomas W. Army Life in a Black Regiment.
(Boston, 1870.)
10. Swann, James G. The Northwest Coast. (New York,
1857- )
11. Friend, Henry. Flowers and Flower Lore. (London, 1883.)
12. Spence, Lewis. Myths of the North American Indians.
(London, 1914.)
13. Doughty, Charles M. Wanderings in Arabia. (London,
1908.)
14. Keane, John F. T. Six Months in the Hejaz. (London,
1887.)
15. Layard, Edward L. The Birds of South Africa.
(London, 1875-6.)
16. Candler, Edmund. The Unveiling of Lhasa. (London,
1905.)
17. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture. (New York, 1920.)
18. Kay, Charles de. Bird Gods of Ancient Europe. (New
York, 1898.)
19. Powers, Stephen. The Tribes of California. (Washing-
ton, 1877.)
20. Martinengo-Caesaresco, Countess E. L. The Place of
Animals in Human Thought. (London, 1909.)
21. Baring-Gould, Sabine. Curious Myths of the Middle
Ages. (London, 1867.)
22. Brown, Abbie F. Book of Saints and Kindly Beasts.
(Boston, 1900.) Consult also "Lives" of St. Francis of
Assisi.
282
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 283
23. Ward, William Hayes. Seal Wonders of Western Asia.
(Carnegie Institution, No. 100.)
24. Bayley, Harold. The Lost Language of Symbolism.
(London, 1913.)
25. Dalton, Edward T. Byzantine Art and Architecture.
26. Sacred Books of the East, Pahlavi Texts, Vol. XXIV, 112.
27. Brinton, Daniel G. Myths of the New World. (New
York, 1868.) See also his American Hero Myths (1882).
28. Oswald, Felix. Zoological Sketches. (Philadelphia, 1883.)
29. Rothery, G. C. A B C of Heraldry. (Philadelphia, 191 5.)
30. Mallet, Paul H. Northern Antiquities. (London, 1890.)
31. Grosvenor, Edwin A. Constantinople. (Boston, 1895.)
32. Goldsmith, Oliver. A History of the Earth and
Animated Nature. (London, 1774.)
33. Browne, Sir Thomas. Inquiry into Vulgar Errors.
(London, 1846.)
34. Brewer, E. C. Handbooks, particularly "Phrase and Fable."
35. Wallace, Alfred Russel. The Malay Archipelago.
(New York, 1869.)
36. Lee, Henry. Sea Fables Explained. (London, 1884.)
37. Cook, Arthur B. Zeus. (Cambridge, Eng., 1914.)
38. Hulme, F. Edward. Natural History Lore and Legend.
(London, 1895.)
39. Walker, Margaret C. Bird Legends and Life. (New
York, 1908.)
40. Walton, Isaak. The Compleat Angler. (London, 100th
Edition, 1888.)
41. Aristotle. History of Animals. (London, Bohn, 1862.)
42. Harting, J. E. The Ornithology of Shakespeare.
(London, 1871). Compare Thiselton-Dyer's Folk Lore
of Shakespeare.
43. Hanauer, J. E. Tales Told in Palestine. (Cincinnati,
1904.)
44. Hudson, W. H. Birds of La Plata. (London, 1920.)
45. White, Gilbert. Natural History of Selborne.
46. Wilson, Alexander. North American Ornithology.
(New York, 1853.)
47. Swann, H. Kirke. A Dictionary of English and Folk
Names of British Birds. (London, 1913.) It contains
a useful bibliography, and quotes largely from the Rev.
C. Swainson's Folk Lore and Provincial Names of
British Birds (English Dialect Society, 1886.)
284 BIRDS IN LEGEND.
48. St. Johnston, Lt.-Col. T. R. The Islanders of the
Pacific. (London, 1921.)
49. Lyly, John. Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit. (London,
1868.)
50. Coues, Elliott. Birds of the Northwest. (Washington,
1874.)
51. Cruden, Alexander. A Complete Concordance to the
Holy Scriptures.
52. Laufer, Berthold. Bird Divination among the
Thibetans. (Leiden, 1914.)
53. Miller, Leo. In the Wilds of South America. (New
York, 1918.)
54. Gubernatis, Angelo de. Zoological Mythology. (New
York, 1872.)
55. Newton, Alfred. Dictionary of Birds. (London, 1896.)
56. Conway, Moncure D. The Wandering Jew. (New York,
1881.) See also his Solomonic Literature (Chicago,
1899.)
57. Watters, John J. The Birds of Ireland. (Dublin, 1853.)
58. Sykes, Ella. Through Deserts and Oases of Central
Asia. (London, 1914.)
59. Sale, George. The Koran (Alcoran of Mohammed.)
(London, 1825.)
60. Wilde, Lady Jane F. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms
and Superstitions of Ireland. (London, 1902.)
61. Smith, Horatio. Festivals. (New York, 1836.)
62. Wentz, W. Y. The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.
(London, 191 1.)
63. Jenner, Mrs. Henry. Christian Symbolism. (London,
1910.)
64. O'Connor, Vincent C. Travels in the Pyrenees.
(London, 1913.)
65. Bassett, Fletcher S. Legends and Superstitions of the
Sea. (Chicago, 1888.)
66. Elworthy, F. T. The Evil Eye. (London, 1895.)
67. Gostling, Frances M. P. Rambles about the Riviera.
(New York, 1914.) See also her books about the French
chateaux, and the Bretons.
68. Ball, Mrs. Katherine M. Decorative Motives in
Oriental Art. In Japan (magazine), New York, 1922.
69. Dryden, John. Ovid's Metamorphoses: ''Transformation
of Syrinx." (Boston, 1854.)
70. Bendire, Major Charles. Life Histories of North
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 285
American Birds, Vol. I. (Washington, Smithsonian In-
stitution, 1892.)
71. MacBain, Alexander. Celtic Mythology and Religion.
(Stirling, 1917.)
72. Frazer, Sir J. G. Golden Bough (series). The Scape-
goat (1913).
73. Waterton, Charles. Essays (London, 1870). Also
Wanderings in South America. (New York, 1910.)
74. Squire. Mythology of the British Isles. (London, 1905.)
75. Lanciani, Rodolph A. Pagan and Christian Rome,
(Boston, 1893.)
76. Williams, Samuel W. The Middle Kingdom. (New
York, 1883.)
yy. Mooney, James. Report U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, Vol.
XIV, 1892-3.
78. Broderip, W. J. Zoological Recreations. (London, 1849.)
79. Nuttall^ Thomas. Manual of the Ornithology of the
United States and Canada. (Cambridge, 1832.)
80. Heaton, Mrs. John L. By-Paths in Sicily. (New York,
1920.)
81. Irby, Col. Howard L. Ornithology of the Straits of
Gibraltar. (London, 1875.)
82. Jones, W. Credulities Past and Present. (London, 1877.)
83. Swanton, John R. Report U. S. Bureau Ethnology, Vol.
XXVI, 1904-5.. P- 454. u ^ ^ . u A
84. Hazlitt, William C. Dictionary of Faiths and folk-
lore. (London, 1895.)
85. Stevenson, Hamilton S. Animal Life in Africa. (London,
1912.)
86. Manat, James I. TEgean Days. (London, 1913.)
87. The Arabian Nights: Payne's edition (London, 1901.)
88 Costello, Louis S. The Rose Garden of Persia. (London,
1899), including "Flowers and Birds" by Azz' Eddin
Elmocadessi, "Jamshid's Courtship" by Firdausi, and
prose notes.
89 Polo, Marco. Travels: Yule's edition. (London, 1875.)
00 Davis, F. H. Myths and Legends of Japan. (N. Y., 1912.)
Consult also Joly, Henri L. Legend in Japanese Art.
(London, 1908.)
91. Leland, Charles G. Kuloskap, the Master. (New York,
1902.)
92. Thiselton-Dyer, Thomas F. English Folklore. (Lon-
286 BIRDS IN LEGEND
don, 1878.) Consult also his Folk-lore of Plants, and
his Folk Lore of Shakespeare.
93. Firdausi. The Shah Nameh: Atkinson's Translation.
(London, 1886.)
94. Plutarch. Lives: Camillus, Romulus, Alexander, Etc.
95. Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archeology, Vol.
viii, p. 80.
96. Bombaugh, C. C. Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of
Literature. (Baltimore, 1873.)
97. Leland, Charles G. Etruscan Roman Remains in
Popular Tradition. (London, 1892.)
98. Fiske, John. Myths and Myth-Makers. (Boston, 1872.)
99. Keith, George. Letters: in Les Bourgeis de la Com-
pagnie du Nord-Ouest. (Quebec, 1889.)
100. Niblack, Albert P. Report U. S. National Museum, 1888.
101. Nelson, Edward W. Birds of Bering Sea and the Arctic
Ocean. (Washington, 1883.)
102. Schoolcraft, Henry G. Algic Researches. (New York,
1839.)
103. Adams, A. Leith. Field and Forest Rambles. (London,
1873.)
104. Mooney, James. Report U. S. Bureau Ethnology, Vol.
XIX, 1897-8, p. 401.
105. Grinnell, George Bird. Pawnee Hero-Stories and
Folk-Tales. (New York, 1889.)
106. Fortier, Alce. Stories and Folk-Tales. (New York,
1889). Also, Louisiana Folk-Tales. (Boston, 1885.)
107. Jameson, Mrs. Anna B. History of our Lord as Ex-
emplified in Works of Art. (London, 1872). See also
her Legends of the Monastic Orders (1872), and her
Sacred and Legendary Art (1911).
108. Verrall, Margaret de G. Mythology and Monuments of
Ancient Athens. (London, 1890.)
109. Diodorus Siculus. Historical Library.
no. Villari, Pasquale. The Barbarian Invasion of Italy.
(New York, 1902.)
in. Fox-Davies, Arthur C. Complete Guide to Heraldry.
(London, 1909.)
112. Perrot and Chipiez. History of Art in Antiquity: Vol.
IV, Sardinia and Judea.
113. Seal of the United States: How it was Developed and
Adopted. (Washington, Department of State, 1892.)
INDEX
Abbey, founded by birds, 269
Adjutant Stork, stone in head of,
96
Aetites, or eagle-stone, 96
Albatross, raft -nest of, 76
Alectorius, a magic stone, 95
Alectromancy, 217
American eagle, 36
Ani, or Black Witch, see Jumbie-
bird.
Anka, mythical bird, 198
Arabian mythical birds, 193, 196
Ark, messengers from the, 99
Arthur, King, becomes a raven,
163
Arvenus, legend of Lake, 78
Asbestos, a bird's skin, 195
Augury and Auspice defined, 214
Babes in the Wood, story, 116
Bennu, a sun-symbol, 195
Bestiaries described, 58
Bird-myths, origin of, 226, 253
Bird-of -Paradise, legends of, 63
Bird-superstitions rare in United
States, 7
Birds, alleged hibernation of, 89
Birds as " Openers, " 240-253
Birds as pilots, 161
Birds as spirits, 10, 25, 189
Birds associated with monks and
hermits, 262-271
Birds becoming gods, 18
Birds changing into other birds,
92
Birds connected with Light-
ning, 242-253
Birds, fabulous, explained, 202,
208, 226
Birds, lucky and unlucky, 25
Birds of Assyrian seals, 202
Birds of the Bosphorus, 16
Birds riding on bigger birds, 81
Birds transport souls, 190
Birds, variety of accounted for,
226-241
Bittern, breast-light of, 79
Blackbird, red winged, 239
Blackbirds blackened by Raven,
229
Blackbirds once white, 233
Bluebird, mountain, 23, 240
Blue jay, legend of, 240
Bluejay visits the Devil, 166
Brahminy duck, sacred in Thi-
bet, 18
Buffon denies song to American
birds, 78
Bulbul, Persian nightingale, 48
Butcher-bird, alleged trick of,
79
Buzzard, turkey, features of,
227, 236, 241, 284
Chickens as weather-prophets,
221
287
288
INDEX
Chickens used in augury, 216,
223
Chimney swift, Josselyn's ac-
count of, 62
Chouans, named from owl's cry,
187
Cinamros, Persian myth, 205
Cock, alectorius of, 96
Cock, as Gaulish emblem, 44
Cock, barnyard, a sun-bird, 218
Cock, Christian legends of, 109,
151
Cock, stoned on Shrove Tues-
day, 123
Cormorants, legends of, 228, 231
Cranes carry away girl, 237
Crane's foot, origin, 170
Cranes transport small birds,
^3
Cranes war with Pygmies, 94
Crocodile -bird, legend of, 60
Crossbill, Christian legend of,
113
Crow, Chinese three-legged, 172
Crow, formerly white, 233
Crow, hooded, dread of, 165
Crow in Ghost Dance, 176
Crow, omens from, 213
Crows'-feet at eyes, 170
Crows visit the Devil, 166
Cuckoos as rain-prophets, 223
Cupid of the Gaels, 3
Curassow, legend of, 170
David beguiled by a pigeon, 259
Deluges, birds connected with,
98-108
Demonic birds, 52, 205
Devil's birds, 166
Direction, element in divina-
tion, 8, 175, 213
Divination by birds, 212-217;
trifled with, 257, 258
Dove and the Holy Grail, 137
Dove as bird of peace, 140
Dove, Christian legends of, 113,
i39
Dove guides Cortez's ship, 138
Dove instructs Pope Gregory,
133
Dove of St. Remi, 133, 137
Dove, revered in Islam, 135
Dove saves Genghis Khan, 141
Dove sent from the Ark, 101
Dove, symbol of Holy Ghost,
133, 134, 138
Dove, symbol of Ishtar, 127-132
Doves at Dodona, 130
Doves in Jewish sacrifice, 140
Doves in Solomonic legends, 259
Doves, prophetic, 5-9
Eagle, doubleheaded, 29, 33, 52
Eagle, emblem of St. John, 149
Eagle, golden, or war, 24, 35
Eagle, imperial, 30
Eagle-lecterns, origin of, 149
Eagle, legends of, 97
Eagle, Mexican harpy, 38
Eagle, myths about, 68, 73, 76
Eagle of Lagash, 28
Eagles, omens from, 213
Eagle-stone, or aetites, 96
Easter eggs, customs explained,
124
Eggs in mosques and churches,
54
Eskimo bird-tales, 273, 274
INDEX
289
Fairies traced to Morrigu, 165
Falcon, symbolism of, 1 50
Feng-whang. See Fung-whang.
Fish-hawk, legend of, 80
France, popular emblem of, 41-
46
Franklin compares eagle and
turkey, 37
Fung-whang, Chinese myth, 207
Garuda, Hindoo myth, 206
Gaul, name explained, 41
Genghis Khan saved by owl,
186
Ghost Dance explained, 177
Goatsuckers, cries of dreaded, 6,
15
Goldfinch, Christian legend of,
113
Goose and golden eggs, 66
Goose-bone fable, 222
Goose, golden Capitoline, 255
Goose growing on trees, 64
Goose in Buddhist myth, 67
Grebe, legend of, 240
Green fowl, Mohammedan, 1 5
Grouse, marks on ruffed, 238
Guan, legend of, 107
Guatemala, emblem of, 39
Guillemots, origin of, 237
Gulls offend Giant, 234
Hair, superstitions about, 9
Halcyon days, meaning of, 22
Harpies, Sirens, etc., 193
Hibernation of birds, 89
Ho-ho, Japanese myth, 208
Hoopoe, legends of, 153, 250, 261
Hornbill, superstitions about, 16
Hummingbird, hibernation of,
90
Hummingbird, riding a crane, 81
Hummingbird, voice lost, 241
Indian poetic story, 275-279
Jackdaw of Rheims, 157
Jay, Canada, gives warning, 4
Jumbie-bird, Ani, or Black
Witch, 189
Kamar, Persian myth, 206
Karshipta, Persian myth, 206
King, choice of by birds, 82, 206
Kingbird, riding a hawk, 81
Kingfisher, halcyon myth, 20,
234-239
Kingfisher, sent from the Ark,
102
Kiskadee, legend of, 239
Kite, Egyptian legend of, 151
Lapwing and Covenanters, 256
Lark, Laverock, funereal, 115
Legend, definition of, 254
Lightning attributed to birds,
243-253
Loon, origin of its cry, 279
Lucky birds, 25
Macaw as fire-bird, 41
Magpie, portents by, 171
Mexico, national emblem, 38
Migrating birds carried by oth-
ers, 81-88
Migration to the moon, 91
Moccasin flower legend, 6
290
INDEX
Monks, medieval and birds, 262-
271
Morrigu and her crows, 165
Nightingale, myths and legends,
48, 50
Number, important in divina-
tion, 8, 171
Nuns of Whitby, 88
Odin's ravens, 150
Omens trifled with, 257, 258
Ornithomancy, origin of, 5
Osage Indians, bird ancestry, 1 1
Osprey, legend of, 80
Ostrich eggs, use of, 54
Ostrich, errors pertaining to, 54
Ostrich plumes, symbolism, 153
Owein's ravens, 162
Owl, a Baker's daughter, 121
Owl a monarch's daughter, 183
Owl, Athenian, 180
Owl in medieval medicine, 185
Owl once a singer, 112
Owl once an Eskimo girl, 233
Owl saves heroes, 186, 258
Owls, Christian legends of, 121
Owls, superstitions about, 181,
187, 213, 258
Oystercatcher, why blessed, 1 1 2
Palm, associated with phenix,
198
Paradise-birds, 63, 64
Peacock feathers, indicate rank,
144
Peacock, feathers, superstitions,
148
Peacock, saves Chinese general,
187
Peacocks, legends of, 141-147
Pelican, errors pertaining to, 58
Pelican, Seri ancestor, 1 1
Pelican, symbolism of, 147
Pharaoh's chicken, 34
Pheasant, Argus, painted, 233
Phenix as a Christian symbol,
196
Phenix described, 191
Pigeons in church feasts, 125
Pigeons of Venice, 125
Pigeon shrine near Yarkand, 136
Polynesian bird-gods, 19
Quails, Israelitish legend, 93
Quetzal-bird, 39
Rabbit and Easter eggs, 1 24
Rain -birds described, 223
Rara avis (swan), 46
Raven as culture-hero, 228-234
Raven, characteristics of, 134
Raven, Dickens's "Grip," 156
Raven dresses the birds, 228
Raven feeds Elijah, 158
Raven feeds hermits, 164
Raven flag of Danes, 159
Raven, ghostly, 164
Raven, Mosaic view of, 1 58
Raven, myths concerning, 72,
105, 248
Raven once white, 168, 232
Raven, portents by, 169, 173,
213
Raven saves body of St. Vin-
cent, 164
Raven sent from the Ark, 100
INDEX
291
Raven's Hill and Barbarossa,
163
Ravens, Odin's messengers, 159
Redbreast, Christian legends of,
114
Redbreast covers corpses, 116
Redpoll, bringing fire, 274
Rhea, errors concerning, 55
Robin, American, singing, 282
Robin, European. See Red-
breast.
Roc (Rukh), Sinbad's discovery,
Sacred birds explained, 16, 24
Sagehen, Paiute story of, 106
Salamander as a bird, 196
Scapegoats among birds, 25
Scarlet bird of Taoists, 207
Schamir, Solomonic legend, 249
Seal of United States, 36
Semiramis, story of, 128
Sentinel-birds, stories of, 254,
256
Seven Whistlers, 13, 89
Shrike, errors regarding, 79
Shrove Tuesday customs, 123
Simurgh, Persian myth, 205
Smell, sense in birds, 75
Snow-owl blackens raven, 232
Souls brought by birds, 12
Souls carried away by birds, 13,
139, 148
Sparrow in Christian legends,
112
Speech by birds, 3, 10, 13
Stones possessed by birds, 95
Stork, as a migrant, 92
Stork, legends of, 112, 153
Stymphalia, birds of, 192, 194
Swallow, Eskimo origin of, 238
Swallow in Christian legends,
112
Swallow, omens from, 25, 213,
218
Swallow restores blindness, 96
Swan, black (rara avis), 47
Swan, death song, 76
Swan, omens from, 213
Symplegades, legend of, 131
Thibetan divination, 174
Thunder-birds described, 243-
248, 281
Thunder Cape, name explained,
245
Trochilus legend, 60
Trogon, or quetzal -bird, 39
Trumpeter, legends of, 107, 239
Tulare, legend of lake, 108
Turkey, Franklin's preference,
37
Turkey, Indian legend of, 106
Vulture, baldness explained, 227,
236, 241
Vulture, omens from, 213
Vulture revered in Egypt, 151
Vultures, Persian, 207
Vulture, Turkey. See Buzzard.
Wagtail, Ainu legend of, 103
War-eagle, American Indian,
35
Weathercocks explained, 151
Weather prognostics by birds,
217, 219, 282
292
INDEX
Whippoorwill as a prophet,
5,6
Winds as birds, 203, 206, 249
Woodpecker, Calif oraian, 281
Woodpecker, magical powers of,
250
Woodpecker, redheaded, 23, 106,
235, 241
Wren, Cherokee story of, 282
Wren, hunting of in Ireland, 118
Yel, culture-hero, 230
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