Of Beasts that Gloat and Plunder

The Twa Corbies, preparing to dine on the dead knight below, from “Some British Ballads,” 1919, by Arthur Rackham, (Wikimedia Commons).

At least twice, in the past thousand years (or so), a writer has observed that in war, men can act so much like beasts, that beasts themselves start to seem to act like men. The two writers include philologist and author, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the anonymous poet of a snippet of narrative poetry describing a battle fought in 991 C.E. Tolkien translated and provided explanations of the medieval Englishman’s words and then went further, writing an epilogue to that long-dead poet’s work for the stage. In it, Tolkien delves into themes and linguistic details from the poem by weaving them into his own writing. Gloating birds and wolflike men blend together in Tolkien’s The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.

In a text so interested in the behavior of scavengers, the admonishment not to crow over an unjust killing stands out. Two loyal retainers of the proud earl Beorhtnoth search for his body among scores of English and Viking dead, an act necessitated after Vikings massacred Beorhtnoth’s English defense force earlier in the day in a battle known to us from history and the remnants of a narrative poem called The Battle of Maldon. The scene is eerie. Tolkien calls for the stage to remain in darkness other than the small light of a searcher’s dark lantern. The ground is covered in piles of men and severed limbs. The more timid searcher starts and calls out in fear repeatedly. His comrade offers cold comfort: “The wolves don’t walk as in Woden’s days…If there be any, they’ll be two-legged.”

The comment is prescient, as comments often are in dramas, and the heroes shortly find themselves in a struggle with plunderers, which ends with the timid man dispatching one of the graverobbers. He shouts his success and his companion chides him for responding too aggressively: “Why kill the creatures, or crow about it?” There are no literal crows in his text, but there are in The Battle of Maldon, and in his notes to the poem, published in June under the title The Battle of Maldon, Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Tolkien responds to the appearance of the carrion birds, along with their typical brethren in Old English poetry, the eagle and the wolf.

Tolkien writes that ravens, eagles and wolves trailed armies and became particularly active on the eve of a battle. Their appearance together, in these circumstances in Old English poetry, is so common that the animals are referred to as “beasts of battle” and their mention before battles became formulaic in poems including any sort of large-scale fighting. Perhaps Tolkien noticed the human qualities the old poets gave the animals. In Aaron K. Hostetter’s translations, the wolf “chant[s] his warsong,” and is joined by the eagle in the poem Elene. The three animals “divide up the carrion” in The Battle of Brunanburh. The slaughtered dead are “a pleasure to wolves, a comfort as well to the slaughter-greedy birds” in Judith. The animals are “eager,” “greedy,” and “rejoice” in the bloodshed.

Of course, Tolkien had a favorite beasts-of-battle passage, and states that it is the Beowulf-poet who “really tunes his imagination on the conventional trappings” of the motif. Tolkien’s own translation of the passage, from his translation of Beowulf, runs thus: “Nor shall the music of the harp awake the warriors, but the dusky raven gloating above the doomed shall speak many things, shall to the eagle tell how it sped him at the carrion feast, when he vied with the wolf in picking bare the slain.” Here the animals reach their most anthropomorphized with the raven becoming the narrator of his own boastful story. The raven, eagle and wolf are in competition for the choicest bits. Returning to Tolkien’s character accused of “crowing” about killing the graverobber, it seems that Tolkien was interested in the semantic possibilities of the word crow, here in an idiom that suggests that crows are braggarts, as the Beowulf-poet suggested.

Wargs, Wolves and Criminals

Illustration from “Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf,” 1899 by Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin. (Wikimedia Commons).

Tolkien was also interested in the word wolf, particularly as it applied to wolfish men, and here also he seems to have taken some inspiration from the Maldon-poet, who describes the ravening Viking warriors as waelwulfas, or “slaughter-wolves” as they rush unheeding through the surf at Beorhtnoth’s assembled warriors. Recall also Tolkien’s character warning his comrade of two-legged wolves, which come in the form of English graverobbers, instead of Danish sea-pirates. However, as the Vikings arrived specifically to plunder the English coast and even offer to leave if paid off, is there much of a difference in motive between the Vikings and the native robbers?

It should be noted that waelwulfas, though literally means slaughter-wolves, conveyed the poetic meaning of warriors, and similar compounds meant to convey warriors can be found in other extant texts, such as heorowulfas, “sword-wolves” or “battle-wolves” used to describe pharaoh’s soldiers in the Old English version of the Exodus story. The word wulf itself was a popular name for men in Old English poetry and features in many compounds. Two men, Wulfstan and Wulfmaer, fight on the English side in “The Battle of Maldon.” Consider also Beowulf, perhaps the most famous -wulf of all.

Linguistic anthropologist and Tolkien aficionado Marc Zender suggested that Tolkien showed interest in the etymologies of the words crow and raven in his more popular fiction, The Lord of the Rings. In a lecture I attended at Harvard University in 2011, Zender pointed to Tolkien’s invention of a word for crow in Sindarin Elvish: crebain, a plural form from which close-readers of Sindarin can assume the unattested singular form, craban. For raven, the old Germanic languages have hrabn-, hrafn, and hraefn. Curiously, even though craban seems closer to the Germanic words for raven, Tolkien glosses the word as crow in English. Like the camp-following ravens of Old English poetry, Tolkien’s crebain take on a militaristic posture by traveling in “regiments.” Tolkien uses the word regiments twice to describe their movement, eschewing the English expression, murder of crows. The ominous birds appear in the chapter titled “The Ring Goes South,” in the second book of The Fellowship of the Ring.

The editor of Tolkien’s The Battle of Maldon, Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Peter Grybauskas, also points out that Tolkien had an interest in the older forms of the word wolf, inventing warg from Old Norse vargr or Old English wearg, which are words that could mean wolf or human outlaw, or criminal. Tolkien’s wargs certainly seem inspired by the beasts of battle passages. In The Hobbit, the wargs work with the goblins and “shared the plunder” with them. The wargs speak a “dreadful language” and, using human-like ingenuity, set guards below the company of dwarves in the tree before Gandalf frightens them off in the chapter titled, “Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire.”

Finally, Tolkien himself suggests a direct link between the gloating raven of Old English poetry and birds of the folk tradition that brings us the ballads, “Three Ravens” and “Twa Corbies,” including this stanza:

Twa Corbies

Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane

And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een,

Wi’ ae lock o’ his gowden hair

We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

The songs are about crows or ravens discussing the eating of a knight and seem to relate to one another in that they both refer to the knight’s hawks, hounds and lady, who in “The Three Ravens” version protect the knight’s body, but in the “Twa Corbies,” have abandoned his body to the crows.

Statue of Byrhtnoth in Maldon, made by John Doubleday. The text of The Battle of Maldon refers to the doomed leader by the West Saxon spelling in which the only existing manuscript of the poem is written. Tolkien amended the spelling to Beorhtnoth to reflect the East Saxon dialect that scholars believe the poem was originally written. (Source: Wikipedia.)

But in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and in history, the doomed earl is not left to scavengers. In the manner of Tolkien’s more famous work, loyal and loving followers stand by his side to the death and even after. The two men retrieve Beorhtnoth’s body from the pile of corpses that cover him. He lies beneath the men who fought first to support him, then avenge him, and the Viking dead they took with them. The searchers carry his heavy bulk to a wagon bound for the monks who will tend to him, and lay him to rest, singing over his bones. Evil men and beasts exist in Tolkien’s works, but they are often overcome by loving friends, who fight on when hope seems dimmest. In this they embody the most famous quote from The Battle of Maldon, a speech by an aged servant determined to fight to the death to stand with his leader: “The mind must be harder, the heart braver, courage greater, as our might diminishes.”

In Practical Mythology, Ben Hellman writes about the intersections of society, art and folklore. If you know of a story that suits Practical Mythology, email the idea to newenglandbard@gmail.com.

Fright Club: On the Equality of Monsterkind

“It’s no use, dear boy. The shadmocks aren’t going away. We have to learn to live with them.” My impression of how the fictional world of R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s The Monster Club may have come about. (Stock image, dated 1884, titled “Moonshine” and edited by the author’s talented wife.)

In a hot moment of confrontation between members of the club, one monster questions another’s pedigree and we can see a brawl threatening. Just then a “dignified ghoul” condemns the insult and recalls the members to their creed: “Gentlemen, please...I would request everyone to remember the club’s irrevocable rule: ‘All monsters are equal’.” And as in a melodramatic light opera they sing a rousing round of the Monster’s Anthem, dampening the eyes of more than one.

It is in scenes like this from R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s clever omnibus novel,

The Monster Club, that it is hard for me not to imagine an entire history, running parallel with that of Great Britain, in which all of the odd categories and subcategories of monsters, after generations of mutual animosity, had to agree to accept one another in uneasy fraternity in order to thrive in the world hunted by humans. The British class system and multitude of cultural backgrounds and ancient animosities find themselves humorously at home in this collection of short horror stories set at the end of the twentieth century in a club where the both the old and new elite monsters of the British Isles rub shoulders.

In The Monster Club Chetwynd-Hayes has written a mischievous love letter to British society and English humor. The stories often play on class differences, and that loveable flaw in the English character: its impulse toward civility and good-fellowship. It begins when the protagonist of the frame story, unable to risk insult, is pressured into an invitation to a vampire’s private club. This is after the vampire takes advantage of his kindness and steals a drink from him. It seems a very English thing to do, like the Saxon Earl Byrhtnoth, who, in 991 CE, was goaded out of his strategic military advantage by a Viking warchief because it was not very sporting. Byrhtnoth and his men were, of course, all slaughtered in the Battle of Maldon. The problem with wily Viking chiefs and these monsters, it seems, is that they are so jolly polite.

The question of social rules and proper etiquette is often the point upon which the tales pivot. In one tale a freshly-bitten werewolf must learn to behave properly in the home of the parents of the young vampire who loves him. In another, a young man comes into his monstrous inheritance and “parboils” the heartless beauty who tormented him when he believed he was only an ugly human. I may go too far in thinking that Chetwynd-Hayes had Dickens’s Pip and Estella in mind with this pairing, but in another tale when the son of a country estate’s former cowherd returns as the cold, millionaire lord of “Withering Grange,” and his trophy wife is stolen by son of the monstrous servants, it is clear that Chetwynd-Hayes was considering the class-oriented literature of his land.

I was compelled to give a chance to this forty-seven-year-old text—by an author I had not heard of—because of a foggy memory of a creature from a film I had seen in the early 1980s: a ghoul that whistles. It turned out to be an adaptation, of the same title, of Chetwynd-Hayes’s book, starring Vincent Price and John Carradine, late in their careers. (I read that Christopher Lee turned down a role upon hearing the title!) I had remembered moments from that marvelously dated and deliciously horrible film for years and, given the free time over the holidays, was finally able to research whether there was, in fact, a creature from traditional folklore, that met that description. I discovered that the shadmock was Chetwynd-Hayes’s creation and that it didn't stop there.

1981 Film Adaptation

Price and Carradine and one of the better-looking makeup effects in a werewolf. The film is fun to watch if one has a sense of humor, as it is in parts both moving and ridiculous, but Chetwynd-Hayes’s book is better.

Chetwynd-Hayes seems to have known that readers like me would be skeptical of his silly-sounding hybrid monster coinages: werevamp, vamgoo, maddy, shaddy, raddy. He built a few ingenious defenses of the creatures. A vampire complains that horror films have taught humans how to thwart them, and this is true of the werewolf as well. But no one is ready for a shaddy. Not even a vampire is equipped to take one on, as seen in one tale. The Monster Club’s central rule, that all monsters are equal, seems to anticipate a newcomer’s objection to Chetwynd-Hayes’s new creations, as well as teach us that the monsters we’ve grown up with have decided that it’s better to accept the newcomers into the fold. Chetwynd-Hayes seems to tell us that it is important we learn about his creatures if we know what is best for us. As the ill-fated Rev. John Barker puts it: “Monstrumology. A much neglected line of research which is unfortunately often treated with derision by the uninformed.” Barker is immediately mocked as insane by a character who is soon killed by the creatures he doubts. But they kill Barker first, so knowledge is not always an aegis against the monsters.

A Monster Family Tree

A poster made for the 1981 film to help explain the new monsters of British horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s The Monster Club.

A new creature is like catnip for me and creature categorizations—fantasy beasts collected into any format suggesting empirical knowledge—is irresistible. I was a little let down to discover that shadmocks weren’t “real” folklore. But I kept finding new reasons to continue reading. For instance, Chetwynd-Hayes’s rule of monsterdom: “Vampires—sup; Werewolves—hunt; Ghouls—tear; Shaddies—lick; Maddies—yawn; Mocks—blow; Shadmocks—only whistle.” With this piece of fictional gnomic wisdom, my curiosity was piqued and I am grateful for the clever read it provided me over the dark nights between the solstice and Christmas.

If I appreciate Chetwynd-Hayes’s cleverness and storytelling, it was the polite, period voice of the text that disarmed and continually delighted me. Consider his opening apology: “I would like to stress that the Monstereal Table which can be found on page 54 is only intended as a rough guide to the breeding habits of modern monsters…Doubtless if the serious student of Monstrumology keeps his eyes open, he will discover many strange mixtures walking about in our public places or strap-hanging in the underground.” Chetwynd-Hayes’s sense of humor also won me: “Donald McCloud, despite his Scottish name, had a heart as big as the world.” And perhaps, just as the various cultures and classes of Britain have had to learn to appreciate one another and create a modern society in the twentieth century, its monsters too have found it necessary to take in their upstart cousins. Chetwynd-Hayes inherited vampires, werewolves and ghouls and bequeathed us the ridiculously-named werevamps and vamgoos, but it is worth it to read about Chetwynd-Hayes’s most original and terrifying creations, including that whistling ghoul, the shadmock.

Timely Lessons from the Land of the Coming of the Light

Just before dawn, Rockport, Maine August 26 (photo by author). The Native tribes of New England formed the Wabanaki Confederacy. According to resources from the Abbe Museum of Bar Harbor, ME, the word Wabanaki likely comes from the Passamaquoddy word ckuwaponahkiyik, meaning, “the people of the land of the coming of the light.” Wabanaki territories then are often referred to as the Dawnland in English.

Native New England folk tales have an eerie way of addressing the problems that plague the country today. From the Gluskabe tales we learn that it is wrong to hoard resources, to overhunt or overfish. From the tale of the Corn Mother, we learn that we should sacrifice our needs for the good of the community. From another Gluskabe misadventure, we even get a warning that we shouldn’t mess with the climate because it will destroy the environment. We seem to need these tales now, tales that encourage a different kind of behavior, and with the publication of a new text by partners from academia and the Penobscot community, we have the best curated book of Native New England tales that I have found.

“Still They Remember Me”

“Still They Remember Me,” with a photograph of Penobscot tale-teller Newell Lyon, from University of Massachusetts Press.

“Still They Remember Me” is a collection of tales of the Wabanaki culture hero Gluskabe in a bilingual edition, collected by anthropologist Frank Speck from Penobscot storyteller Newell Lyon in the early years of the 20th Century. The new text was a collaboration between Penobscot language master Carol A. Dana, University of Maine English professor Margo Lukens and University of Southern Maine linguist Conor M. Quinn. It presents thirteen tales of Gluskabe, many of which read to me like the solution to the environmental and economic messes created by a culture that encourages taking and hoarding as much as we can from the planet and not worrying about long term consequences.

The opening tales of Gluskabe’s youth and education present him solving problems in ways that are convenient for him, but bad for everyone else who would follow. The dual-language layout of the text reads almost phrase-by-phrase, allowing the reader to digest Gluskabe’s every thought and action. It is sometimes difficult for him to find game while hunting, so he tricks all of the animals in the world to get into a bag so he can reach in whenever he wants and have one. It is sometimes difficult for his grandmother to catch a fish, so he gathers all of the fish in the world into a small enclosure. The text also gives us the full weight of Gluskabe’s grandmother’s responses to these projects: “My grandchild, you did not do a good thing at all...how will our descendants live in the future since we have as many fish as we want?” And Gluskabe undoes what would be good for him and his grandmother for the good of the people who come after them, a quaint notion. These tales see Gluskabe grow from a young person who is self-centered and self-motivated, into a figure who works to make the world better for his descendants.

Natives, Colonists and the Creation of an American Literature

I will write another piece on some interesting anecdotes from Lisa Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin, a real historian’s history, but it touches on the role Wampanoag people of Massachusetts played in some of the earliest publishing on this continent and features a Greek myth written by a Native scholar filtered through Puritan sensibilities. Brooks is Abenaki and encouraged the writers of “Still They Remember Me” to publish with University of Massachusetts Press. Brooks is also an editor of the series Native Americans of the Northeast, which the volume is a part of.

Another prescient tale I read this summer, a tale referred to in Speck’s Penobscot Man, but not “Still They Remember Me”, is from an historical anecdote in Lisa Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin. Brooks’s text interprets a tale from a land deed signed by a Native female leader in the 1600s who hoped to share the value of sharing with the English colonists who wanted to settle in the lands of her people. Brooks writes that Warrabitta, in a 17th Century agreement with English settlers in Caskoak, Casco Bay on the Maine coast, near Portland, referred to the tale of the Corn Mother, who told the people to break up and plant her body. In the story, her flesh turned to corn and her bone tobacco. The agreement required the English settlers to give a bushel of corn back to the community, an expectation of all Native families to ensure the survival of the community. Warrabitta referred to the Corn Mother to reinforce the value of all goods being shared equally, her attempt, writes Brooks, to integrate the colonists into her society and the economic system that best ensured the survival of her people, to “divide among you the flesh and bone of the first mother...and let all shares be alike.”

I went to a cookout on Labor Day and saw parents encourage their little boy to share a toy helicopter with another. It was an anthropological moment. He had just told the other little boy that he was using it and the other child began to cry. The parents of the boy with the helicopter coached him to try telling the other child that he could have it in five minutes. They wanted him to share, to learn the value of sharing. My parents encouraged me to share and I think most American parents have tried to do the same. This tells me that sharing really is a practice that Americans value, at least in their homes and within their families and circles of friends. It seems incongruent to me that we would teach our children to be kind and welcoming to others with their belongings, but then tolerate our corporations and the wealthiest among us to hoard resources while fellow citizens live in squalor. We could live the way Warrabitta suggested, the way Gluskabe’s grandmother taught him and the way our mothers and fathers and grandparents taught us.

I came upon these texts and tales in an attempt to find the earliest attested Native tales of New England. I read and reviewed three texts by indigenous authors a year ago and was only able to find local Native people to consult with on the tales months after it was published. They warned me that just because a tale was published by indigenous people did not make it necessarily an ancient tale, that folk tales from the Old World may have colonized oral traditions here. The tales from “Still They Remember Me” were taken from the published text and field notes of Frank Speck, who published the tales in 1918 as Penobscot Transformer Tales. Speck also produced the thorough and useful ethnology Penobscot Man, in which he also connects certain tales to tribal names and practices. While the tales themselves have been available and free to read online, “Still They Remember Me” includes updated research on the Penobscot language and is much easier to read than the old Speck pdf. Having read the first five tales to my wife during our trip back from Penobscot Bay, I can report that in the phrase-by-phrase format, the tales sound very much like ones you would read to a very small child, which endeared them more to me than when I first encountered them. My one caveat is that the purpose of teaching the Penobscot language is the controlling factor in the layout of the text and this may not be everyone’s cup of tea. For a language nerd like me, it’s delightful, but I’ve already reformatted this translation of the tales to share with my American literature class. Most of them would navigate between the lines without much trouble, but for kids with reading difficulties or trouble adapting to new visual layouts, what is a hiccup for most people could make the process more difficult than I’d like. Then again, it could be a worthwhile challenge for us, but I’ll take the easier path with new material.

A Bilingual Edition

Screen shots of the actual layout of “Still They Remember Me” as the pages appear in the text, with Penobscot phrases broken into their constituent parts on the left and the English translations on the right. It would be even more interesting to me if Penobscot were related to any of the languages I’ve studied, but it is a fascinating and valuable text nonetheless.

The Penobscot people of Maine belong to a group of tribes referred to as the Wabanaki Confederacy, comprised of the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Micmac and Abenaki tribes, which speak distinct, but related languages of the Algonquian language family. Authors Dana, Lukens and Quinn also recently presented a map of traditional Penobscot lands in Maine with Penobscot place names, several of which, in the Penobscot Bay area, refer to a tale of Gluskabe’s moose hunt, a tale told in “Still They Remember Me.” In the story, Gluskabe must put an end to a supernaturally large moose that is terrorizing a village. He chases the moose to Penobscot Bay and leaps across the water, leaving the impression of his snowshoe on a set of rocks in Castine. He kills the moose and part of it can be seen in nearby Cape Roshier, a piece of land referred to as the rump of the moose in Penobscot. Gluskabe throws the moose’s entrails to his dog between two small islands in the bay, an old canoe portage where the rocks are streaked with white, likely the quartzite veins I found at the snowshoe landmark, thought to look like the strings of Gluskabe’s giant snowshoe. I found these locations using the murky details from an old essay by anthropologist Bill Haviland and only discovered the map and “Still They Remember Me” by phoning Castine’s historical society and getting the tip to look for a webinar that had occurred a few months earlier. I have not found copies of the map online.

A Storied Bay

A screenshot of a webinar presenting a map of the landmarks in Penobscot Bay of the place names associated with Gluskabe’s moose hunt from “Still They Remember Me.” The names on this map (labeled in black) are English translations of the Penobscot names. The green text helps relate the locations to the story.

My Wild Moose Chase

A photo-journal of my trek to Dyce Head with my wife and dog to find Gluskabe’s footprint: Dyce Head Lighthouse (now a private residence); Beatrice on the publicly accessible footpath, narrow and very rocky in places; the dauntingly steep set of stairs to the rocks; my foot on Gluskabe’s snowshoe imprint; the quartzite veins that are meant to represent the netting of the snowshoe; Beatrice on the hunt for Gluskabe or perhaps his dog!

A (More) Normal School Year?

I spent my summer studying and trying to learn more about Wabanaki tales and have accumulated more material than makes sense to squeeze in here. I would also like to write about how my high school readers respond to the tales from “Still They Remember Me” and come to a better understanding of a version of the Orpheus myth that a Wampanoag Harvard scholar wrote in 1663. A synergy between work and blog could allow more writing this fall. As a public high school teacher, I was able to maintain a robust blog during the COVID 2019-2020 school year largely because our schedule slowed my district down to about half pace. After my summer off from publishing, I will have to take this school year a step at a time while I see what kind of a pace I am able to research and publish articles. At the moment, I’m still on a journey of discovery with Native New England folklore and expect more pieces on this topic.