From Archae, #4 (1993)
The Frog King: On Legends, Fables, Fairy Tales and Anecdotes of Animals.
The Parliament of Animals: Anecdotes and Legends from Books of Natural History 1775-1900.
Animals. Sax calls them “ultimately unknowable and mysterious creatures.”
As ancient as the earliest pictorial art, as early as magic- making ritual mime, from which stories might have arisen in the first dim days of language, the human attitude toward animals was a pivotal factor in humankind’s at tempt to imprint itself upon a threatening world. Humans had to deal not only with natural forces vagaries of climate, the change of seasons, cataclysms, eruptions, even the simple occurrence of night and day—but with the fact that they shared the world with animals.
Some primitive peoples worshipped animal deities, distancing themselves in the process and projecting human traits upon the animals. Some of them attired them selves in symbolic costumes and assumed the totems of animals whose characteristics they wished to acquire: the power of flight, for instance, or ferociousness.
Knowledge accumulated and stories grew. Stories were needed to create boundaries in a boundless world, to forge cohesion in a chaotic world, to define our identities by telling ourselves what we were not. Sometimes the word itself became the object. There were myths which dealt with the unintelligible, fables which dealt with behavioral questions, folk tales to reflect culture, fairy tales which spoke of a timeless, enchanted universe, and legends and anecdotes to recount historical events. The stories changed constantly, were never factual but were always true. In time stories were written, lifted from one venue to another, plagiarized, attributed or not. And almost any story could be made to support a number of widely disparate interpretations.
Jump ahead to the nineteenth century, the time with which Boria Sax deals in two fascinating studie. By the Victorian Age one would have had to be a skilled literary critic, anthropologist, historian, psychologist, theologian, sociologist, linguist, geographer, philosopher, and political scientist to disentangle the strands of animal lore and human ethos. And Sax makes good reference to these disciplines. But, Sax says, there was a new factor: the popular science of natural history which consisted 0 observations of the behavior of various animals. Travelers were reporting marvelous, awe-inspiring and frequently unreliable anecdotes for the edification and titillation of the masses, rather like our ubiquitous urban legends. According to Sax, “Stories found it’ natural history books the mythology of an era that imagined itself comrnitted to rationality’
The anecdotes in such books were considered remark able. Animals could talk! Animals, especially beavers and elephants, had sophisticated self-governed communities. Animals practiced fidelity, parental affection, died from devotion, had burying grounds, and exhibited extraordinary reasoning power. But if we can’t really know the animals, Sax muses, and we can only impute to them anthropomorphic capabilities, how do we really know if these things are as remarkable as they seem? “If these stories are true,” he asked himself when he first came across an old volume which belonged to his grandmother, ‘why don’t we hear of such things... The stories in these anecdotes have varying degrees of credibility, but almost none can be disproved... What untapped potentials might, perhaps, exist?” He goes onto postulate that observations of animals in those early, prehistoric times might even have inspired humans to specialize in tasks such as hunting, weaving, or the making of tools.
In 1927, the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote, “My suspicion is that the universe is nor only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
In these slim volumes are to be found the results of a scholar’s research into a subject that piqued his curiosity. There are extensive, useful bibliographies and a learned discourse on the history of animal stories. For the generalist, the books also include a delightful selection of the author’s favorite anecdotes, conveniently arranged by animal and topic. And more: Boria Sax is a poet. He has imagination and daring enough to take us on a spin out of control into a metaphysical world.
The reviewer, LauraJ Bobrow,
is a professional storyteller