CHAPTER 10
FIRE-BIRDS
The Robin & the Wren
ONLY in Britain, and particularly in England, is the robin a universal favourite, though it is prominent in the folklore of north-western France and rather less so, of Germany. It has pet names in several north European countries. Modern beliefs about the bird cannot be traced to Greek or Latin sources and even its name in classical Greek is not certainly known. The association between the robin and the wren in folklore, the reciprocity of their traditions, and the general approximation of the areas in which the two birds were, and are, honoured, suggest that both came into prominence in the same cultural milieu.
All over the British Isles disaster is said to follow the ill-treatment of the robin. In Bucks it was believed that he who broke a robin’s leg or wing would fracture his own leg or arm. The consequence of breaking the eggs would be the breakage of something belonging to the culprit. Similarly on Dartmoor it was said that taking a robin’s nest was bound to be followed by the smashing of one’s own crockery. In Wales a person who stole the eggs was in danger of becoming a victim of witches or of the devil. Irish folk were convinced that if anyone killed a robin a swelling would appear on his right hand, and in Suffolk a schoolboy’s bad writing was explained as due to a robin having died as he held it. Similar beliefs were held in Germany and Czecho-Slovakia. Of swallows, too, it was said in England:
And if in any’s hand she chance to die,
‘Tis counted ominous, I know not why.
The hand of a person who killed a robin would always shake. A West Riding miner is recorded as having said: “My father killed a robin and had terrible bad luck after it. He had at that time a pig which was ready for pigging: she had a litter of seven and they all died. When the pig was killed the two hams went bad! Presently three of the family had a fever, and my father himself died of it!” The long arm of coincidence need not be invoked to explain these disasters. Probably the pigs were suffering from trichinosis and the illness of the farmer and his family was due, not to the dead robin but to living round worms.
In Yorkshire and Germany alike there were traditions that the cows of the man who killed a robin would give bloody milk, and the Tyrolese believed that epilepsy would follow interfering with the nest. As recently as 1944 a Herefordshire man declared that a cat which ate a robin would lose a limb—though it is correctly believed in the countryside that, as a rule, cats will not eat robins.
The robin is coupled with the wren in a great many admonitory rhymes, such as:
Devon. Kill a robin or a wren,
Never prosper, boy or man.
Essex. The robin and the redbreast,
The robin and the wren,If ye tak’ out of the nest
Ye’ll never thrive again.
Herefordshire. The robin and the wren
Are God Almighty’s cock and hen;The swallow and the swift
Are God Almighty’s gifts.
Lancashire. The robin and the wren
Are God’s cock and hen,The spink and the sparrow
Are the de’il’s bow and arrow.
When Welsh boys carried around a wren at the New Year they sang with delightful inconsistency:
Cursed is the man
Who kills a robin or a wren.
There was also a saying,
Tom Tit and Jenny Wren
Were God Almighty’s cock and hen.
Two of my neighbours, one a distinguished graduate, were surprised to be told that robin and wren are not male and female of one species. “Tom Tit” is a local name for the wren still used in East Anglia. An old belief that the wren is the tit’s paramour may be due to confusion between the two names. A ballad quoted by Herd and Chambers was based on these matrimonial—or, perhaps, etymological, complications. In it the robin admits to the wren that he gave a ring to the “ox-ee.” The theme of the bird wedding is widespread in European folk songs. There is also a Japanese version (B 282ff; Type 224).
In the East Riding, the companions of a lad known to have robbed a robin’s nest would gather around him, pointing their forefingers, hissing and booing. Then they sang:
Robin takker, robin takker,
Sin, sin, sin.
The friendly regard for the robin has not prevented its being widely considered a bird of ill omen. In Leicestershire and Rutland it was thought unlucky for one to enter a house, though elsewhere this event was considered propitious. According to Scottish sayings a wren around a house brings luck. In Suffolk an intruding robin was an omen of death, and it was believed in Wales that a robin singing on the threshold presaged illness or death. At Hurstpierpoint School there is a tradition that if a robin sings on the altar of the chapel one of the boys will die. By a coincidence this sequence actually occurred some years ago—but robins not infrequently enter churches and occasionally nest in them. A robin tapping on a window was widely regarded as a portent of disaster, and all over England there are people who are apt to feel frightened when any bird, mistaking its reflection for a rival, flutters at a window pane. The death of T. E. Lawrence in a motor cycle accident was connected by a friend he had been visiting with the tapping of a bird on the window. The superstition is due to fear inspired by an unnatural happening interpreted as having personal relevance. In Bucks the plaintive piping of a robin was thought to foretell death, and in other parts of the country it was considered ominous for a sick person to hear the bird singing. Perhaps the apparently sad cadences of the robin’s autumnal song encouraged such ideas.
Since killing a robin presaged misfortune, it is not surprising that caging the bird was to invite disaster. A would-be poet, J. H. Pott, writing in 1780, warned his readers:
For ever from his threshold fly,
Who, void of honour, once shall try,
With base inhospitable bread,
To bar the freedom of his guest;
O rather seek the peasant’s shed,
For he will give thee wasted bread,
And fear some new calamity
Should any there spread snares for thee.
Blake’s lines on the same theme are well known.
The robin has long been regarded as a weather prophet but popular beliefs disagree. Aldrovandus stated that it predicted rain, and a robin “shrieking” on a hedge was said to foretell bad weather. In East Anglia the rhyme runs:
If the robin sings in the bush,
Then the weather will be coarse;
If the robin sings on the barn,
Then the weather will be warm.
As a boy in Ulster I was told that a robin singing on high branches foretold fine weather. This is also believed in Northumberland, a region from which emigrants went to Ulster during the Plantations. Perhaps these beliefs are due to the song being uttered from higher perches during the breeding season than in autumn and winter when the bird is not so ardent and the weather is more inclement. In Scotland, if a robin frequented the immediate neighbourhood of a house in autumn, the inhabitants expected an early or severe winter, while in south-east Ireland a redbreast entering a house foretold snow or frost. No doubt these notions arose from ex post facto interpretations of the movements of robins seeking food in hard times. The principal significance of this weather-lore may lie in its indicating that in popular belief the bird once had mysterious powers. As we have noted, influence over the weather is apt to be the last aspect of the power attributed to it which a bird relinquishes—as it is sometimes the first magico-religious capacity with which it is credited.
Birds already regarded as possessing supernatural powers often acquire an accretion of superstitions as a consequence of the numinous feelings they arouse. Examples of this are provided by the ballad of Cock Robin and the legend concerning the bird’s solicitude for the dead. The nursery rhyme and the tale of The Babes in the Wood both associate the robin with funeral rites, though they belong more to literature than to oral lore, and therefore will not be discussed in detail here. The notion of birds impersonating human beings, which is the motif of the rhyme, is not far removed psychologically from the impersonation of birds and beasts by men, which has had a continuous history from the Palaeolithic to the present day. This has already been sufficiently commented upon, so far as visual art is concerned, but it may be noted that in The Birds of Aristophanes (editio princeps 1486), a play in which the drama has not yet emancipated itself from ritual, we have a literary example, analogous to some visual representations, of a transitional form between the magico-religious and the secular (Plate 29).1 In some respects the burlesques of “The Birds’ Mass” by mediaeval goliardic wandering scholars recall the spirit of Aristophanes’ play. The most elaborate example of “The Birds’ Mass” is La Messe des Oisiaus by Jean de Condé (c. 1275-1340) sung in honour of Venus. This was an outcome of the bird debate, a literary device which had a considerable vogue in such works as The Owl and the Nightingale written 1189-1217 by Nicholas or John of Guildford. Both are developments of the Court of Love literature. The theme is given a religious turn by Skelton in The Harmony of Birds and Lydgate in The Devotion of the Fowls. In Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparrowe, written before the end of 1508 the birds invited to the sparrow’s funeral come,
With dolorous songs funeral,
Some to sing and some to say,
Some to weep and some to pray,
reminding us of the birds “sighing and sobbing” for poor Cock Robin. Skelton tells us,
Robin Redbreast
He shall be priest,
The requiem Mass to say.
The swallow hallows the hearse, the popinjay and mavis respectively read the Gospel and Epistle, and so forth. Herrick’s To the Lark continues the motif:
Sweet singing lark
Be thou the clerk
And know thy when
To say, Amen.
In The Marriage of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren we have:
Then on her finger fair
Cock Robin put the ring;
‘You’re married now’ says Parson Rook;
While the Lark amen did sing.
Herrick in The Wassaile represents the cock and hen as saying Amen. Skelton and Drayton both refer to the wren as “Our Lady’s hen.”
There is, however, another tradition of bird officiants at ceremonies, apparently very ancient, which has a definite bearing on the origin of the ballad concerning the death of Cock Robin. An old German rhyme runs as follows:
Who is dead? Breadless.
When will he be buried?
On the evening of the day after tomorrow
With spades and with shovels.
The cuckoo is the gravedigger,
The stork is the bell-ringer,
The lapwing is the clerk,
With all his sisters and brothers.
Another version from Latvia was sent to me by my friend Mr. John Millers:
One herdsman died, the others cried.
The Pig dug the grave on a high hill;
The Tit carried the news to his parents;
The Goat mounted to heaven to ask forgiveness;
The Woodpecker carved a cross on a fir tree;
The Cuckoo tolled in a crooked birch;
The Fly preached the sermon:
All the birds said the funeral prayers;
Their words mingled in the tiny twigs.
In a rhyme current some eighty years ago in Languedoc, four ravens ring the knell, the cat carries the coffin and the partridge wears mourning.
To account for the similarities and differences in these rhymes one must postulate some early form or forms which, variously modified, established themselves in widely separated regions.
Although the earliest printed version of The Death and Burial of Cock Robin dates from about 1744, there is what might be an illustration of it in a fifteenth century stained glass window at Buckland Rectory, Gloucester (Fig. 81). However, apart from the design consisting of a robin-like bird transfixed by an arrow, there is no evidence for or against its being connected with the nursery rhyme.
We may infer that The Death and Burial of Cock Robin probably took its present shape in the hands of a ballad-maker who used a framework of traditional material.
The earliest literary reference to the robin’s care for the dead is in Lupton’s Notable Things, which appeared in 1579: “A Robbyn read breast, fynding the dead body of a man or woman, wyll couer the face of the same with Mosse. And as some holdes opinion, he wyll couer also the whole body.” The manner in which this is phrased suggests that the author is here quoting oral lore and not relying, as he usually did, on written sources. In The Owle Drayton wrote:
Covering with moss the dead’s unclosed eye,
The little redbreast teacheth charity.
When Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline about a year later, his reference to the robin “with charitable bill” covering the dead may have been inspired by Drayton’s lines rather than by Lupton’s comment. Herrick’s robin which brought leaves and moss to cover the sleeping Amarillis may well carry a reminiscence of Drayton’s bird. Although the earliest copy of The Children in the Wood dates from late in the seventeenth century there is a reference of 1595 to it (Fig. 82). Of the dead children we are told:
From any man receives,
Till robin redbreast piously
Did cover them with leaves.
Did cover them with leaves.
The robin’s role as “The Sexton of the Wood” in the anonymous Pleasant History of Cawood the Rook (1640) is in the tradition of bird officiants which has already been discussed.
None of the continental references to the covering of corpses by the robin is early enough to preclude the tradition having been derived from English sources but in Brittany it is a popular belief that the robin sings sorrowfully near a body until it is buried.
It is easy to reconstruct how the idea of the robin acting as sexton arose. The bird is very inquisitive, perching around and singing near any strange object. It also carries leaves and moss to its nest in woods where any dead body lying on the ground is likely to be that of a murderer’s victim. Such observations had only to be linked with the tradition of birds officiating at funerals to provide a theme to stimulate poetic imagination for several generations.
Although these themes, the robin’s death and its ministry to the dead, are probably the best known lore they must both be considered rather late and adventitious accretions attached to what Donne called “the household bird.” It is more likely that the robin’s boldness in Britain, as compared with its behaviour on the continent, brought it into popular favour than that superstitious regard for it rendered it “tame,” though, of course, immunity from human persecution over a long period may cause bold birds to become even more fearless. The character which caught people’s attention was the red breast. From at least as early as the time of Neanderthal man, who placed red ochre or haematite with his dead, to the present day, the colour red, associated as it is with blood, has been connected with life-giving powers. A sick Australian aborigine is rubbed with a mixture of red ochre and fat, and a Chinese bride is arrayed in brilliant red. But red has another association which has given rise to an immense range of symbolism. It is the colour of fire. Ever since man learned to use fire—and this dates from not later than the time of Peking man—it has been to him a good servant but a bad master. It gives light and heat, but on the wings of the thunderstorm death and destruction may be borne. Those practitioners of esoteric arts, the metal workers of the Bronze and Iron Ages, knew how to make fire do their bidding, but the power they had enslaved might run amok and reduce a village to ashes.
FIG. 81. Glass painting in Buckland Rectory, Gloucestershire. The bird is represented with the markings of a robin and is shown pierced by an arrow. (After Woodforde, 1944).
FIG. 82. Woodcut from the Roxburghe Ballads showing robins strewing leaves on the bodies of the babes.
It was to this mysterious, equivocal power that the robin’s red breast showed that it was allied, and hence there are strange, primitive elements in the bird’s folklore. In Scotland it used to be said, that it was a sin to kill a robin because “he had a drop of God’s blood in his veins,” while in Brittany, according to Souvestre, writing in 1838: “On assure que le bon Dieu l’appelle dans son paradis pour lui suçer le sang, lorsqu’il s’en trouve incommodé.” The Bretons say that robins which have been to fetch fire can speak Latin and sing:
Cusse, cusse, cusse, cusse,
Istine spiritum sanctum tuum,
Il y a dix bons dieux.
Such ideas suggest that pagan notions about the bird have been incompletely Christianised.
We might have expected the robin to acquire its reputation as a fire bird by virtue of its glowing breast, yet although this badge has undoubtedly contributed to its being associated with fire, folklore indicates that its fire associations may have been transferred from the wren. In some traditions either the robin or the wren may take the place of the other. Thus Rolland states that in France, “on Candlemas Day a cock robin is killed, spitted on a hazel twig and placed before the fire. Immediately it is in position this improvised spit begins to turn.” Lupton wrote: “It is much to be marvelled at the little bird called a Wren, being fastened to a stick of hazel newly gathered, doth turn about and roast itself.” There may be a reference to this custom in the Waterford Wren Song:
On Christmas Day I turned the spit,
I burned my fingers, I feel it yet:
Between my finger and my thumb
I eat the roast meat every crumb.
Perhaps the game of “Robin’s alight,” played in Cornwall, is derived from some such practice. The players, sitting by the fire, pass a whirling, burning stick from one to another. The person holding the stick when the flame expires pays a forfeit. A similar game was played in Scotland.
In Guernsey there was a widely accepted belief that the robin brought fire to the island from across the sea. According to another legend the wren fetched water from the mainland—a notion so gratuitous that we may suspect the perversion of an earlier tradition. There are many similar tales of a bird or other creature bringing fire to islands in the South Seas and elsewhere. Elements in these stories reveal that the legends probably embody historical fact to the extent that they record the carrying of fire from island to island by early voyagers. These Guernsey stories tell us that the legends rather than the birds travelled across the sea.
On the continent the fire-fetcher is the wren rather than the robin, though there is a Breton legend that the robin went to get a fire-brand from hell. In Jutland and Champagne the story of the eagle-wren rivalry ends with a reference to the wren’s scorched appearance being due to its having flown too near the sun. From Normandy comes the tale that the wren offered to bring fire for man but had its feathers burnt off in the attempt. The owl was the only bird which did not offer feathers to clothe the poor wren, so ever since the owl has been ostracised by the other birds. A Breton legend explains that the eagle, king of birds, condemned the owl to lurk in a hole by day because of its uncharitable behaviour. It will be noted that, as in some of the flight competition legends, the owl and the wren are at enmity. A related French story explains the robin’s ruddy breast as due to its having hurried so quickly to aid the burning wren that it became scorched. In another Norman version the wren volunteers after the lark refuses to fetch fire, and the bat is condemned for not providing any feathers for the naked wren. According to a legend from Lorient, the robin helps to bring fire by snatching it from the blazing wren and passing it to the lark, who brings it to earth. The robin’s singed breast witnesses to its heroism on this occasion. In another Lorient legend, also recorded from Haute-Bretagne, the wren fetches fire, not from heaven but from hell, and is scorched while escaping through the key-hole. There is a French tradition that if a wren’s nest is destroyed, the bird will set the house or barn on fire, and in Wales it was said that if you killed a robin your house would be burned down.
The hero of the Welsh version of the fire-fetching legend is the robin, but instead of bringing fire or water to men, he flies with water to quench hell’s flames: “Far, far away is a land of woe, darkness, spirits of evil and fire. Day by day does the little bird bear in his bill a drop of water to quench the flame. So near to the burning stream does he fly, that his dear little feathers are scorched, and hence he is called Bronrhuddyn (i.e. breast burned or breast scorched). To serve little children the robin dares approach the infernal pit. No good child will hurt the devoted benefactor of man. The robin returns from the land of fire, and therefore he feels the cold of winter far more than his brother birds. He suffers in the brumal blast: hungry he chirps before your door. Oh! my child, then in gratitude throw a few crumbs to poor Redbreast.” The sentimentalisation of the story indicates that it has been modified from an older version and the description of hell shows Christian influence.
Thus, now the wren, now the robin, figures in these tales, and it might seem that the explanation is to be found in the rhymes recording them to be cock and hen of the same species. But primitive people are usually excellent naturalists, expert in identifying birds, so it is unlikely that the confusion of the two species was due to inaccurate observation. If not, it may well have arisen, like many other strange conceptions, as a rationalisation to meet subconscious emotional demands. These confusions, substitutions of one bird for another, and the identification of robin and wren as male and female of the same species, can best be explained as due to the fusion of two cultural traditions—one in which wren ritual was prominent, and another, localised particularly in northern France and Britain, in which the robin received special honour. On this hypothesis the Breton song, “Les noces du roitelet” and our own nursery rhyme, “The Marriage of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren” proclaim the marriage, not merely of two birds but of two streams of culture. Again, if the “robin” tradition were particularly strong in Britain and the “wren” tradition identified, as we have shown, with a cultural invasion from the Mediterranean, we would have an explanation why, in the Channel Islands lying between Britain and the continent, the role of fire-bringer was transferred from the wren to the robin. Here, the wren, though without status as fire-bringer, is not completely ousted but is honoured, somewhat incongruously, as a water-carrier. A compromise has been effected. Both are culture-heroes (Plate 31).
The robin may have acquired its reputation as a fire-bringer from the wren, but the wren cannot have inspired the motif. It possesses hardly any of the attributes which proclaim the connexion of a bird with fire. Although it is somewhat ruddy, like the weasel, squirrel and fox which were hunted in a ritual way at Midsummer, its appearance and habits do not suggest an association with fire. Neither the robin nor the wren flies up to heaven like the swallow, nor does either make thunder like the woodpecker and snipe. Undoubtedly the fire-bird conception is extremely ancient and the legend has been transferred from one species to another throughout millennia, the myth accommodating itself to the local fauna as it travelled (Plate 19).
These and other fire myths can be grouped regionally according to their special characteristics—an indication that there has been cultural diffusion over wide areas. Thus in South America the fire-bringer is frequently an amphibian—explicable when we remember that a number of species of toad and frog have red markings. The myths of the origin of fire from the toes of a goddess are too fantastic to have arisen independently in the Marquesas and New Zealand. Similarly, the appearance of the dog in the fire-myths of New Guinea and Melanesia is most plausibly explained as reminiscent of the time when men with a knowledge of fire-making, accompanied by their dogs, reached these islands. Moreover, the association between the fire-bird and the flood in various parts of the world can hardly be due to independent invention. The lineage of our west European fire-birds can be traced to very remote times and distant places.
The Swallow
As fire-bringers the robin and wren have a reputation only in western Europe. In eastern Europe and Asia fire is fetched by the swallow or, sometimes, another bird. The Walloons seem to be the most westerly folk who credit the swallow with this achievement, though in Germany there is a tradition that it protects the house from fire and storms. It shares honours with the wren, for it is said that when the swallow was fetching fire from heaven a hole was burnt in its tail, but the wren seized the fire and brought it to earth at the cost of losing its own feathers. The story ends with the owl refusing to supply any of its own plumage and thereby earning the detestation of other birds. Thus the swallow, like the robin in northern French stories, might be styled an auxiliary fire bird—a hint that in this tale a compromise has been reached in regard to the prominence to be given to two birds, each with a claim to be the hero, one eastern, the other western. We may have a reminiscence of their rivalry in the legend that, after the altitude competition, the eagle set the swallow to guard the wren.
Further east the swallow does not share its glory. In one Lettish story the devil throws a firebrand at it as it flies off with fire—hence its red markings and forked tail. In another, the sparrow, who guards fire for the devil, chases the swallow as it carries fire to man and plucks some feathers from its tail. In yet another we are told that the swallow fetched heavenly fire after the Deluge when all fires had been extinguished. A strange story, which occurs in several variants, describes how the spider brought fire while the devil slept. The swallow escaped with it, leaving some feathers in the devil’s claws.1 The Buriats of southern Siberia attribute the swallow’s forked tail to the injury inflicted by an arrow shot by Tengri, the sky-being, as the bird carried fire to man. In Turkey Jews say that the swallow brought water to quench the fire consuming the temple in Jerusalem—a story resembling the Welsh robin legend. The valiant bird has remained blackened, as if by smoke, ever since. We seem to have an echo of the same theme in a story from Ceylon which tells of the swallow-tailed flycatcher fetching fire from heaven. The crow dipped its wings in water and extinguished the flames. Hence these birds are always at enmity. There are rather similar legends in North America among tribes such as the Tsimshians of British Columbia and the Pawnees whose cultures bear traces of influence from Eurasia. In Australia and the Admiralty Islands also there are tales of bird fire-bringers.
The swallow has high qualifications as fire-fetcher—it flies high and has red markings as well as smokey blue plumage. The robin has only its red breast and the wren slightly rufous plumage to suggest affinities with fire. It seems probable that if, as appears likely on general grounds, the conception of a bird fire-bringer diffused into Europe from elsewhere, the swallow was the original culture hero and in the course of time the robin and the wren became its surrogates. Popular sentiment protects the swallow from disturbance throughout most of Eurasia and North Africa.
The swallow is also connected with water and fertility. These associations are not as contrary as they might seem, for, as Dumézil has pointed out, there is a close connexion between fire- and vegetation-rites. In ancient times Isis was said to have taken the form of a swallow. Elliot Smith maintained that the antipathy between the dragon and this bird in Chinese mythology could be traced to Egyptian ideas. In the east the dragon is, basically, a fertility symbol. The Chinese say that it is fond of roasted swallows. Anyone who has made a meal of swallows should avoid crossing water as the dragon lurking in the deep might be tempted to attack. Chinese threw swallows into water to attract the attention of the divine powers when they prayed for rain, and to this day the birds are considered lucky and propitious. Nesting ledges are provided on houses, even in the narrow, thronged streets of Canton, and throughout most of China there is a strong feeling against taking the eggs. An offering to the Genie of the households used to be made on the day of the arrival of the swallows to secure the fertility of the women, and one of the Odes describes how Heaven decreed that the swallow should come down and give birth to the Shang dynasty—referring to the egg swallowed by their ancestress which brought about her pregnancy. The most modern form of the Chinese character for “sacrifice” corresponds to “spirit” plus “swallow on its nest.”
In England it is widely believed that it is lucky for swallows or martins to build under the eaves:
The martin and the swallow
Are God Almighty’s birds to hollow (hallow).
By a decree of 1496 storks and swallows were protected in Milan. Not only in this country but also in France and Italy swallows flying low are said to foretell rain. Similar beliefs were held by Greeks and Romans. The birds hunt their prey near the ground or water in dull weather when there are few thermals to carry insects into the air.
In The Art of Love Ovid remarked,
The gentle swallow no one seeks to take,
But in what place she will her nest may make;
FIG. 83. Greek vase painting showing a man and two boys greeting the first swallow in spring. (After Reinach, S. 1899. Répertoire des vases peints).
and Aelian stated that the bird was sacred to the household gods. Perhaps Gerard Legh in his Accedence of Armorie (1562) was expressing an elaboration of this tradition when he wrote: “Wheresoever he breedeth, the goodman of the house is not there made cockolde, what day soever he be married on.” But such beliefs were not universally held. In the Irish saying that the swallow is the devil’s bird and the Scottish tradition that it has “a drap o’ the de’ils blood in its veins” we have further examples of the ambivalence of bird beliefs. However, some confusion with the swift—the devil-bird—may have occurred. In classical times, and more recently in parts of France, Germany and England the swallow was sometimes regarded as of evil omen. In general, however, it was a propitious species among the Greeks. On a black-figured vase, now in the Vatican, a man and two boys are seen welcoming the first swallow. A boy says, “Look, there’s a swallow;” the man cries, “By Herakles, so there is:” the other boy shouts, “There she goes,” and then “Spring has come.” (Fig. 83). Athenaeus (360c) quotes the song with which the Rhodians welcomed the swallow, and still in spring Greek and Macedonian children go through the streets carrying a wooden swallow, singing and soliciting gifts (Plate 24). The joyous spirit of these ballads is exemplified in lines from a Macedonian swallow song:
March is come, he is welcome;
The blossoms burst forth, the land is filled with scent.
Out with fleas and bugs, in with health and joy.
The ritual is so similar to the procedure of the Wren Boys that it is tempting to believe that here, and in the related Crow Song ceremonial, we have traces of the cultural influence from the East which developed into the Hunting of the Wren in western Europe.
The traditions of the swallow’s stone and the swallow’s herb need not be discussed in detail. So far as Britain is concerned they belong rather to literary lore than folklore. Pliny, Albertus Magnus, Avicenna and other scholars speak of the stone to be found in the belly of a young bird at or before the August full moon. It was considered effective in warding off epilepsy. In Normandy and Brittany such stones were credited with power to cure blindness. One of the prescriptions for obtaining them is very similar to that already mentioned for securing springwort. In France and Germany it was said that the magpie knew the secret of the springwort. Magpie concoctions were prescribed for epilepsy. Doubtless all these traditions concerning the stone and the herb are ultimately derived from eastern legends. As the swallow’s herb, celandine, was used by the bird, according to Pliny (viii, 27), to restore the sight of its young, it appears that these tales are related to beliefs concerning the eagle’s stone as well as the swallow stone and the woodpecker’s herb see earlier. The Elizabethan dramatists, having a taste for curious items of unnatural history, liked to mention such things. Chester, in Love’s Martyr, refers to,
The artificiall nest-composing swallow
His yong ones being hurt within the eies
He helps them with the herb calcedonies.
Swallows were used medicinally in China and England. Lei Hiao (420-477 A.D.) gives the following recipe: “To use dragon’s bone, first boil some aromatic herbs. Wash the bone twice in hot water, then reduce it to powder and place it in bags of thin stuff. Take two young swallows and, after removing their entrails, stuff the bags into the swallows and hang them over a spring. After one night take the bags out of the swallows, remove the powder and mix it with a preparation for strengthening the kidneys. The effect of such a medicine is as if it were divine.” Cyranides recommended swallow medicine for epilepsy and Willughby, in the Ornithology (1678) tells how to cure this disease with a concoction of 100 swallows, one ounce castor oil and white wine. A rather similar prescription appears in Mistress Jane Hussey’s Still-room Book (1692):
How to make my Aunt Markam’s swallow-water. “Take 40 or 50 swallows when they are ready to fly, bruise them to pieces in a mortar, feathers and all together you should put them alive in to the mortar. Add to them one ounce of castorum in pouder, put all these in a still with white wine vinegar. Distill it as any other water …You may give two or three spoonfuls at a time with sugar.” This barbarous concoction “is very good for the passion of the heart, for the passion of the mother, for the falling sickness, for sudden sounding fitts …for the dead palsie, for apoplexies, lethargies and any other distemper of the head. It comforteth the brains …”
Belief in swallows as remedies for epilepsy goes back to the notions of classical writers who associated the bird with frenzied or unintelligible speech because of its rapid twittering, as in the myth of Philomela and elsewhere (Lycophron, 1460; Aesch. Ag. 1050; Aristoph. Ran. 93). Euripides (Alcmena fr. 91) commented on the bird’s fondness for ivy—a mythical notion due to its being the plant associated with the rites of Dionysos. We are reminded of the history of the belief that the eggs of owls and storks cured drunkenness. By association the swallow was caught up into the same circle of beliefs. Pliny remarked (xxx, 51), on the authority of King Orus of Assyria, that swallows are potent against inebriation and the bites of mad dogs (xxxviii (10) 43, xxix, 26).
This discussion shows how the swallow’s most striking characteristics have given rise to different groups of associations. Its migration and liking for feeding over water account for its connexion with spring observances and fertility, its red breast is the characteristic which links it with fire traditions, its twittering suggested its prescription for affections whose symptoms are incoherence or frenzy. So, as with so many other birds prominent in folklore, by false but in their way plausible inferences, fantastic associations arose and were transmitted for centuries because men are apt to cling to ancient beliefs until, or even after, they are demonstrably untrue. But irrational notions sometimes serve a useful purpose, enabling people to live more integrated lives than they would be able to do without them. It may seem ridiculous that the swallow’s chattering should ever have been regarded as indicating how the bird could be used medicinally, but we should not forget that underlying the mistaken inferences involved, was the sound belief, which led eventually to progress in medicine, that, could men discover clues by which to identify the appropriate minerals, plants and animals, their healing virtues could be exploited.