Some Notable Life-Histories in Zoological Folklore (article)

Some Notable Life-Histories in Zoological Folklore (Frank G. Speck and John Witthoft, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 60 / No. 238, 1947).

I seem to be attacking a lot of old articles lately. I actually like them better than modern scholarship. There seems to be less preening, and less attention paid to the cutthroat attempts to overcite experts and undermine colleagues. Plus, the slightly-archaic language is refreshing for some reason.

(Side note: I was recently reading C. J. Guiguet's 1953 paper "An Ecological Study of Goose Island", which documents his surveys on the outer coast of Heiltsuk territory in 1948. He concludes the introduction with the following statement, which I found to be totally delightful and to represent a collegial spirit that seems to be totally missing from modern academia:

"I am especially grateful to Mr. P. W. Martin whose intimate and practical knowledge of the British Columbia coast and its fauna, whose skill at navigation and seamanship, and whose affable good fellowship, combined to make the Goose Island expedition both profitable and pleasant."

How is that not the loveliest thing you've read? And in an academic/scientific paper, no less!)

So, this article suggests that a number of apparently metamorphic animals that are or were believed to exist around the world are actually reflections of transformation stories in indigenous folklore.

A number of examples are cited, which point to species commonly understood to be biologically linked due to the intrusion of mythological beliefs into scientific thinking. These examples are meant to stand as "a demonstration of the existence in both the old and new world of a specific type of folk tale, a transformation motif explanatory of certain coincidences in natural history".

That is, species with notable life histories become ingrained in indigenous folklore due to things like confusion of similar species or species that share notable characteristics; extrapolation from conincident behavioral and life history similarities; and lost connections between two species held, for unknown reasons, to be mythologically linked.

Almost all of the examples cited are from the tribal Americas or relatively "untamed" parts of the world, and all of them involve the mythological transformation of one animal species into another animal species. With one exception.

That exception is the barnacle goose, which is also the only example from Europe to be included in the article. The barnacle goose is an "explanation by metamorphosis for the sudden appearance of large migratory flocks of geese". The barnacle goose is also interesting to me as the counter-example given by Mandeville when he's presented with the oddity of the vegetable lamb. In what basically amounts to a cross-cultural pissing contest of "my home has weirer things than your home", the barnacle goose allows Mandeville to coolly say "hey man, that lamb-sprouting tree is pretty sweet, but I'm unfazed - after all, I've seen birds grow on trees".

But the barnacle goose and the vegetable lamb share something else in common: they both represent a halted transformation from plant-to-animal or animal-to-plant, a cross-kingdom hybrid of fantastical weirdness. Unlike all of the other examples cited in the article, and all the fantastical creatures that punctuate Mandeville's Travels, these two funny beasts link completely different worlds.

So how do you understand them? Are they plants, or are they animals? Are they some third thing that I can't name because it no longer exists in my psyche or my science or my culture? Who knows?

Well, Gerard, author of a 1597 herbal, might know. He writes in his herbal:

"There are in the north parts of Scotland certain Trees, whereon do grow Shellfishes, etc., etc., which falling into Water, become Fowls, whom we call Barnakles; in the North of England Brant Geese; and in Lancashire Tree Geese, etc."

Trees sprout shellfish that produce birds, and the resulting anomaly is deemed appropriate fodder for an herbal.

I'm not so good at drawing categories, but neither am I able to wantonly mismatch a whole zoo/herbarium full of species in order to produce a creature worthy of comment.

More on barnacle geese later when I (re)read the chapter from "Before Disenchantment"!