The goal of this project is to highlight the importance of birds, in both literature and in life, now and during medieval times. I chose this topic because I have always been interested in birds. Birds are always noticeable, visibly and/or sonically, but this ubiquity actually tends to make them less noticeable, or easily dismissable. People may not understand the importance of birds in literature, because they tend to ignore them in real life.
Mourning Dove
Almost all species of birds have fascinating folklore surrounding them, developed by peoples since the beginning of humanity. For starters, birds can fly, which is incredibly fascinating, especially if you were an early human. It’s not that difficult to imagine early humans worshiping birds, especially the big ones. This admiration of birds has been lost among the vast majority of people today. Perhaps this loss of admiration has to do with the ever-increasing noise pollution of our modern world, or the fact that people are busy doing things like, say, filling out Microsoft Excel documents inside of office buildings, but the fact of the matter is that birds are just easier to ignore than they were hundreds of years ago.
Northern Flicker (Yellow-Shafted)
Oftentimes, stories were told about birds to explain something in the world that was otherwise inexplicable. A good example of these kinds of stories are all the folklore about crows. Crows mean different things to different groups of people depending on which direction they’re flying, or how many there are, or what time of day they are seen. From symbolismandmetaphor.com, Jessica (no last name given) states that seeing two crows can mean change is coming, or healing will occur, or… kind of anything. They could mean good luck, or bad luck, or a baby is coming, or a death is coming, depending on who you ask. This knowledge may be a useful context if one is reading literature from a part of the world where they believe certain things. With crows, the amount of folklore and superstition is so great that a specific knowledge of where the writing comes from can be immensely helpful for figuring out the symbolism of crows. With that said, simply knowing that crows hold so much superstition (without knowing exactly what) is also helpful.
Northern Cardinal
Another archetypal story about birds is one that explains either the bird’s actions or physical appearance. For example: a Cherokee tale about cardinals says that they got their bright red color after helping out a wolf, who leads the male cardinal to a magic red puddle, where he jumps around and covers himself everywhere but the beak. When the female cardinal comes along, the puddle is mostly dried up and that’s why female cardinals only have a touch of red. This story is part of a long tradition of Native American stories which personify animals and give them specific traits for the whole species; wolves and raccoons are tricky, foxes are sneaky, etc.
Most people know that foxes are meant to be cunning, but what about the various traits associated with birds?
Blue Jay
In medieval literature, this same tradition of assigning human traits to animals is very common. Whalen and Bruckner in their essay in A Companion to Marie De France, state the following:
“Birds appear in 27 of the 102 fables gathered together in Marie’s col-
lection.They offer a representative cross-section of character types and
themes, from predator to victim, from kingship and justice to honor,
treason, and deception, as the strong and the weak struggle over food,
power, and place” (p. 158).
Knowing the traits commonly associated with birds during medieval times can help the reader understand messages trying to be conveyed that may not be actually in the text.
Common Loon
Similar to attributing human traits to animals, sometimes animals are linked to entire races of people. Erika Harlitz-Kernis, an adjunct instructor at Florida International University in Miami states very clearly, “To see the antisemitism of medieval bestiaries, look for the owl.” She explains that medieval Christians thought of owls as being vile and bringing death. They also thought of Jews as being sinners. An old parable goes “Just as the owl avoids the light of day, the sinner avoids the light of Christ.” Bestiaries are collections of fables about actual or mythical animals and were widely used in medieval times. The images and stories in bestiaries carried a lot of weight which was a useful way to spread the antisemitism of the day.
Over the ages humans in every part of the world have noticed and embraced the beauty and mystery of birds. Learning about the folklore of birds is a way to gain insight into both literature and life.
Bibliography
symbolismandmetaphor.com
Whalen, Logan E., and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner. “Chapter 6.” A Companion to Marie De France Edited by Logan E. Whalen, Brill, 2011, pp. 157–186.
Photos by Garrett Happ
Sprockets and Springes 