H04069 FOLK CUSTOM QUESTION - 11/4/04

H04069 FOLK CUSTOM QUESTION - 11/4/04 - HARDY FORUM ARCHIVES

____________________________________________________________________________

From: ROGERS@juniata.edu

Subject: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 8:09:37 AM PST

This question is not precisely Hardy related, but given the broad range of expertise on the forum, I thought I would toss it out there in hopes of an explanation.

Do you know anything about a custom, perhaps among hunters, or perhaps related somehow to Celtic mythology, of hanging the bodies of dead animals and birds from a tree--rather like a grisly Christmas tree? It showed up in a book we're reading in my Techology class, and the image has really captured my students' imaginations, but I can't really think of what it means. It might be some purely practical hunter thing (although in the book, the animals are rotting, so it's not simply just to bleed them out). I've thought of the Green Man and Celtic tree lore, but there's nothing that ties those things together with hanging the animals so far as I can tell. Any ideas?

Cheers,

Shannon

Shannon L. Rogers

Assistant Professor of History

200 I. Harvey Brumbaugh

Juniata College

1700 Moore Street

Huntingdon, PA 16652

(814) 641-3638

rogers@juniata.edu

==========

From: kgwilson@uottawa.ca

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 10:06:41 AM PST

I don't know if there are specific mythic origins to the custom --possible associations with crucifixion for example? But it was standard practice (and for all I know still is in the case of unprotected species) for gamekeepers to hang the bodies of predators -- foxea, badgers, crows, hawks -- on the game that they were preserving (at least until the shooting season opened!) in the vicinity of either their own cottages or the game enclosures, presumably on the presumption that it would scare off still living predators. It is an echo, I suppose, of hanging the bodies (either whole or parts) of executed criminals at prominent public sites in order to act as a warning to hoi polloi not to be tempted into the same crimes. In both cases the bodies were left to rot, as you describe.

Best, Keith

Keith Wilson

Professor of English/President, ACCUTE

University of Ottawa

70 Laurier Avenue East (Room 313)

Ottawa, Ontario

CANADA K1N 6N5

Tel: (613) 562-5800, Ext. 1160

Fax: (613) 562-5990

e-mail: kgwilson@uottawa.ca

==========

From: wwmorgan@ilstu.edu

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 10:30:19 AM PST

The part about the animals rotting is not familiar to me, but the general practice of hanging game--particularly fowl--until it "tenderizes" is still common in some places. I remember reading somewhere that in France a pheasant is allowed to hang until it changes color (darkens) and the meat softens. So without seeing the image, I would guess that it is, as you surmise, "some purely practical hunter thing."

best,

Bill

==========

From: schweikr@localnet.com

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 11:42:16 AM PST

There is a remarkable use of this practice in the Winterbottom

film adaptation of *Jude* in which, in the opening scene, crude

gibbets of rooks are seen in the cornfield Jude is supposed to

be guarding. The gibbets, of course, adumbrate the later hangings

of the children.

Bob Schweik

Robert Schweik

University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus

Department of English

State University of New York

Fredonia, NY 14063

USA

schweik@fredonia.edu

schweikr@localnet.com

==========

From: Charles.Anesi@wellsfargo.com

Subject: RE: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 12:22:06 PM PST

People still do this where I come from, but they do it to keep raccoons and rats and bears and skunks and coyotes and wolves from feasting upon the fruits of the chase (yes, we do have wolves in Wisconsin and Minnesota). A bear will tear his way into a wood shed and think nothing of it, so don't bother hanging your deer in there. Of course a bear can climb a tree, but he cannot shinny down the rope.

Another reason for doing this (regardless of whether any noxious critters are present or not) is that if a larger animal is suspended in this way after being dressed, and with the body cavity propped open, it will cool rapidly and decay will be averted.

Chuck Anesi

Charles.Anesi@wellsfargo.com

office 480-575-3478

cell 612-940-3345

==========

From: gary.alderson@btinternet.com

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 3:30:47 PM PST

And it wasn't just Jude's children who ended up hanged. The reference to his notorious ancestor's gibbeting recurs in the book.

Gary Alderson

==========

From: ROGERS@juniata.edu

Subject: RE: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 7:56:34 PM PST

Thanks, Bob--I mentioned that scene in class, but I still wasn't sure if it was a common custom, or if that particular bit was done for effect in the film, the rooks being a warning to other trespassers and demonstrating the farmer's essential cruelty and position against nature.

Shannon

Shannon L. Rogers

Assistant Professor of History

200 I. Harvey Brumbaugh

Juniata College

1700 Moore Street

Huntingdon, PA 16652

(814) 641-3638

rogers@juniata.edu

Robert Schweik

University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus

Department of English

State University of New York

Fredonia, NY 14063

USA

schweik@fredonia.edu

schweikr@localnet.com

==========

Resent-From: HARDY-L@csusm.edu

From: ROGERS@juniata.edu

Subject: RE: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 7:56:34 PM PST

To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu

Reply-To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu

Shannon

==========

From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu

Subject: RE: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 8:24:14 PM PST

I think, Shannon "with" nature.

Farmers work "with " nature. Well, relatively -- more so than the rest of us, anyway.

You know, that "Raw in tooth and claw" business.

Jude's problem is that "Nature's Law" isn't acceptable to him. He is an essential part of it (bringing forth young he can't support) but he cannot accept the "with" part.

Best

Rosemarie

==========

From: ann.whitlock282@btinternet.com

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 11:27:43 PM PST

The scene in the film may well have been a symbol of the cruelty of this particular farmer and his attitude to the rooks. The image of the corpses has a stark immediacy. Troutham is atypical of farming attitudes to the natural world among Hardy's rural characters; most show both compassion and practical care for the creatures that they tend.

His inhumanity is further defined by the thrashing he gives Jude with his rattle.

The little episode forecasts the gloomy inevitability of Jude's decline and death and the cruel suffocation of both compassion and hope by external forces.

Jude feeds the rooks out of kindness for their state, and because 'a magic thread of fellow feeling united his life with theirs. Puny and sorry as their lives were, they much resembled his own.'

After the thrashing, Jude walks on tiptoe among the earthworms taking care not to tread on any of them.

Ann Whitlock

==========

From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 5, 2004 5:02:40 AM PST

There is a modern scarecrow device which doesn't use the traditional crow --highly effective (for anyone beset by deer etc). It is a water blaster and it works by motion detector: it gives out a short sharp burst of cold water. Unfortunately I can't use one because I have 3 cats and 4 chickens and I want to keep them.

Rosemarie

==========

From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 5, 2004 5:20:23 AM PST

Good point -- although the narrator is ambivalent on this matter. Challow, for instance, thoroughly approves Arabella's pig killing skills in a scene which seems (to this reader) gratuitously brutal. Narratorial ambivalence also inflects Arabella's words to Jude. Following her "Red in tooth and claw" performance a rather typical Hardyan observation ensues: "Thank God he's dead," cries Jude. "What's God got to do with such a messy job as a pig killing..." retorts Arabella.

Cheers,

Rosemarie.

At 02:27 AM 11/5/2004, you wrote:

===========

From: kgarthe@wmf.org

Subject: Not Folk Custom...Jude

Date: November 5, 2004 9:01:33 AM PST

Since Jude has come up, I'd like to address what motivated me to join this list. At the beginning of last summer I read a couple of Hardy novels. It seemed an important thing to do.... I hadn't read a Hardy novel since high school though I've always been a reader of his poetry.

First, I read the Mayor of Casterbridge (which should be required reading if there still is such a thing), then I read Jude. Jude overwhelmed me with its gorgeous descriptions of the Wessex countryside and imagining what it must have been like to walk to one's destinations. The pastorale of Jude dovetailed with the then current issue of TriQuarterly which took "The Pastoral" as its theme in an often politically oriented critique...and also with an article I'd read about the contemporary demise of British farming and British landscapes that appeared several years ago in the London Review. Jude opened a huge sweep through history and Hardy's descriptions of architecture led me to research British Cathedrals (online), even to reading the Magna Carta (I think there's a copy at Salisbury).

Jude is coming back to me as I write.

Jude was a remarkable and unique person, yet his disappointment is an Everyman tale, inasmuch as any everyman/woman is dedicated or striving. The era's hypocrisy and social cruelty were steeped in historic particulars but morph quite well to contemporary life. Briefly, the novel had a great trajectory but at some point began to waffle and dilute as Jude, always full of possibility, grew enervated and seemed to be hitching his star to some kind of doom before doom even really got started. When the children died I was appalled - not because they'd perished, but because Hardy seemed to have abandoned every ethic he'd established, abandoned himself, even. He took a tawdry, sensationalistic turn. Further, it didn't even make sense that the children existed in the fist place given Susan's sustained frigidity. Nothing had developed that I could see and Hardy seemed to have traveled the distance from Gainsborough's Blue Boy to some wide-eyed Keene moppet - a novel idea perhaps, yet I doubt that was his intention. Jude had been masterful.

I didn't finish the book. I felt tricked and was absolutely through with it. Meanwhile, to an idiotic question like "Who from the past would you most like to have a conversation with" my answer (one answer, anyway) would be Hardy - so that I could ask about Jude.

I very much enjoy the list and appreciate even the most didactic moments. Just received the Briggs book on fairies in English literature, thanks for the tip.

Karen Garthe

==========

From: patrick@prassociates.co.uk

Subject: RE: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 5, 2004 9:31:38 AM PST

I well recall seeing gamekeepers' (and others) gibbets with the carcasses of what they thought of as vermin hanging on fences and similar structures when I was younger. I am sure this still continues to some extent.

I suspect the main point was not some ancient ritual, but to indicate to the boss how many of these enemies of the game, or the farm stock, had actually been killed and to show that the gamekeeper was doing his job properly.

Rooks, incidentally, are somewhat ambigous birds that tend to eat grain during part of the year and insect pests at other times and farmers have often puzzled as to whether they are friend or foe. I am sure TH would have been aware of this. The breasts were also eaten in the past and old country cookery books sometimes feature recipes for rook pie.

Patrick Roper

==========

From: michael@perceptivecreation.co.uk

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 4, 2004 11:33:12 PM PST

I don't know about folk custom, but certainly subscribe to the "example to other pests" approach. One local farmer (Somerset) strings up shot magpies round his asparagus beds, as a warning to others - and keeps a trapping cage which often tempts them in.

How successful these "hangings" are, I don't know however!

Michael Barry

==========

From: ROGERS@juniata.edu

Subject: RE: Possible folk custom question--Thanks!

Date: November 8, 2004 7:58:17 AM PST

To all who responded to my query (and who moved it to the next level in incorporating a debate on Jude), I'd like to offer my heartiest thanks. I've never seen anything like strung up beasties (for which I'm very grateful) as deterrents, so I had no firm frame of reference. Thanks for expanding my knowledge of country farming and hunting customs. Once again, I amazed and delighted by the depth and breadth of wisdom among Forum members.

Cheers,

Shannon

Shannon L. Rogers

Assistant Professor of History

200 I. Harvey Brumbaugh

Juniata College

1700 Moore Street

Huntingdon, PA 16652

(814) 641-3638

rogers@juniata.edu

===========

From: jean_e_smith@hotmail.com

Subject: RE: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 11, 2004 1:09:23 AM PST

Dear Shannon

I'm not sure of the reliability of the book unfortunately but Tony van Renterghem's 'When Santa was a Shaman' Llewellyn Publications, 1995) claims that in ancient times animals were hung in trees after the hunt and then the tree was set alight as a sacrifice.

An interesting idea but he doesn't say how he knows!

Best wishes

Jeanie

==========

From: ann.whitlock282@btinternet.com

Subject: Re: Possible folk custom question

Date: November 11, 2004 3:17:10 AM PST

To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu

Reply-To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu

One reliable detailed source for this topic is likely to be in the writing of John and Caitlin Matthews. They have a Shamanic practice in Oxford, and lecture widely on such topics as the one discussed here.

I have just come across one of their books called 'Santa Claus was a Shaman' in researching the topics raised in this discussion.

The advertising extract from the book indicates that it might shed some light on Shannon's original question.

I've put it on my 'books to buy list'just out of curiosity.

Ann Whitlock

==========