To these familiar and loved harbingers from the south should be added
yet another welcome friend who comes to us in the rear-guard of the
Spring, though, rather, we should say he becomes visible now, for the
Bat has never crossed the seas. The house-martin has not had time to
forget the sands of Africa before her wing has dusked the white pansies
on the sunside of old redbrick English manors: but the bat has only to
stretch his far stronger yet incalculably less enduring pinions and
then loop through the dusk from ivied cave or tree-hollow or the sombre
silences of old barns, ruined towers, or ancient belfries sheltered
from rain and wind.
The Awakening of the Bat ... yes, that too is a sign that Spring has
gone by, singing on her northward way and weaving coronals of primrose
and cowslip, or from her unfolded lap throwing clouds of blossom on
this hawthorn or on this apple-orchard, or where the wind-a-quiver
pear leans over the pasture from the garden-edge, or where in green
hollows the wild-cherry holds the nest of a speckled thrush. She will
be gone soon. Before the cuckoo’s sweet bells have jangled she will be
treading the snows of yesteryear. But no, she never leaves the circling
road, Persephone, Earth’s loveliest daughter. Onward forever she goes,
young, immortal, singing the greening song of her ancient deathless
magic far down below the horizons, beyond the lifting line of the ever
upwelling world. And already Summer is awake. She hears the nightjar
churring from the juniper to his mate on the hawthorn-bough, and in the
dew among the green corn or from the seeding pastures the _crek-crāke!
crek-crāke!_ of the ambiguous landrail. This morning, when she woke,
the cushats were calling from the forest-avenues, the bumble-bee droned
in the pale horns of the honeysuckle, and from a thicket newly covered
with pink and white blossoms of the wild-rose a proud mavis saw her
younglings at last take flight on confident wing.
A good symbol, that of the Awakening of the Bat. Darkness come out
of the realm of sleep and dreams: the realm itself filled with the
west wind and the dancing sunlight, sleep put away like a nomad’s
winter-tent and dreams become realities. Often I have wondered how it
is that so little is commonly known of the bat-lore of our own and
other races. Doubtless there is some book which deals with this lore.
There may be some familiar one for aught I know, but I have never met
with or heard of it.
Recently I tried in vain to get some such book dealing with the
folklore and mythology of the bat. And yet in the traditional lore
of all countries there are many allusions to this ‘blind bird of the
dusk.’ The Greeks, the Romans, the Celts of Europe, the westering
Gaels, had many legends and superstitions connected with it. To-day
the Finn, the Magyar, the Basque and the island Gael keep some of the
folklore that has ebbed away from other nations, or become confused or
remembered only by old folk in old out-of-the-way places. Somewhere I
have notes of several bat-legends and fragments of bat-lore collected
once for a friend, who after all went ‘to hunt the bat’ before he could
use them. That was the phrase which started the quest. He had read
it, or heard it I think, and wrote to me asking if I had ever heard
the phrase ‘to hunt the bat’ as synonymous with death. I have heard
it once or twice in the last few years, and once in a story where the
teller, speaking of an outlaw who was a great deer-hunter in the wilds
of Inverness, was found dead ‘with the fork of an ash-root through his
breast, pinned like a red fox he was, and he by that time hunting the
bat in the black silence.’ It would be inapposite, here, to linger on
this theme, but I am tempted to record one or two of these bat-lore
fragments which I recall: and perhaps, from the scarcity of such
traditional flotsam and jetsam, some readers and bat-lovers may be
interested.
The bat, commonly called in Gaelic _an ialtag_, or _dialtag_, though
even in the one Shire of Argyll at least six other common names
might as likely be heard, is occasionally poetically called the
_Bàdharan-dhu_, the dark wandering one. I remember being told that
the reason of the name was as follows. In the early days of the world
the bat was blue as the kingfisher and with a breast white as that of
the swallow, and its eyes were so large and luminous that because of
this and its whirling flight its ancient name was a name signifying
‘flash-fire’--though now become, with the Gaelic poet who told me this,
_dealan-dhu badhalaiche choille_, ‘the little black wandering flame of
the woods.’ But on the day of the Crucifixion the bat mocked at the
agony of the Saviour, and while the redbreast was trying to pull out
a thorn, now from Christ’s hand, now from His foot, the bat whirled
to and fro crying, ‘See how lovely I am! See how swift I am!’ Christ
turned His eyes and looked at it, and the blue and the white went out
of the bat like the ebbing wave out of a pool, and it became blind and
black and whirled away till it met the rising of night and was drowned
in that darkness for evermore. And that is why the bat is seen in the
dusk and at night, and wheels to and fro in such aimless wandering
flight, with his thin almost inaudible voice crying, ‘See how blind I
am! See how ugly I am!’
From the same source I had _dealan-dhu bais_, the little black flame
(or flash) of death, and a still stranger note to the effect that bats
are the offspring of lightning and smitten trees: the connection being
more obvious to Gaelic ears, because _dealan-bàs_ is one of the names
of lightning.
The other name I heard as a child, and it long puzzled me.
_Beuban-an-Athar-Uaibhreach:_ literally, the malformed one of the
Haughty Father. Now why should the bat be called _beuban_, a thing
spoiled, wilfully malformed? ‘An t’ Athair Uaibhreach’ (of which _an
athar_ is the genitive) is one of the evasive names used by the Gael
for Satan ... for that proud and glorious angel, the Father of Evil,
who fell from his high estate through inconquerable pride. Why, then,
was the bat the malformed creature of Satan? It was years afterwards
before I had the story told me, for my old nurse (from whom I heard
the phrase) did not think the tale fitting for a child’s ears. When
Judas hanged himself on a tree, so the tale ran, and his soul went out
lamenting on the wind, the Haughty Father flung that wretched spirit
contemptuously back into the world. But first he twisted it and altered
it four hundred and forty-four times, till it was neither human nor
bird nor beast, but was likest a foul rat with leathern wings. ‘Stay
there till the last day,’ he said, ‘in blindness and darkness, and
be accursed for ever’ ... and that is why the bat (the _triollachan
dhorchadas_, ‘the little waverer of the dark,’ or _triollachan
fheasgair_, or little waverer of the dusk, as a more merciful legend
has it) flies as he does, maimed, blind, accursed and feared, and
shrieking in his phantom voice _Gu la’ bais! Gu la’ bais!_ (‘till the
day of death’ ... _i.e._, the Last Day).
In some parts of Argyll the bat is said to live for three generations
of an eagle, six generations of a stag, and nine generations of a man.
With less poetic exactitude I have been told that it lives thirteen
years in flight and thirty-three years in all! ... though equally
authentic information avers that the average life of the bat is
twenty-one years. A forester told me once that he did not think any bat
lived longer than nine years, but he thought fifteen as likely as nine.
On the other hand, he himself spoke, and as though for all he knew it
might well be so, of an old tradition that a bat lives to a hundred
years. This, I may add, I have heard again and again. The other day a
fisherman from the island of Lismore gave the unexpected answer: ‘How
old will the _ialtag_ be? Well, now, just exactly what the age of Judas
was the hour he kissed Christ and betrayed Him, and not a day more
and not a day less.’ Nothing explicit as to that, however, could be
obtained. A gardener told me once a rhyme about how to get at the age
of man, but I have forgotten it except that it was to the effect that a
_losgunn_ (a toad) was twice the age of an _easgunn_ (an eel), and that
a _dialtag_ (bat) was twice the age of a _losgunn_, and that _am fiadh_
(the stag) was twice the age of a _dialtag_, ‘and put ten to that and
you’ll have the allotted age of man’ [_i.e._, an eel is supposed to
live about seven years to seven and a half years: a frog or toad to
about fifteen: a bat to about thirty: a deer to about sixty. I should
add, however, that my informant was not sure if in the third instance
it wasn’t a _iolair_ (eagle) instead of a deer].
One of the strangest English names for the bat (among over a score only
less strange) is the Athern-bird--a Somerset term, I believe, whose
meaning I do not know.
But now to return to the rear-guard of Spring of whom we spoke first.
Yet the folklore of the house-martin is so familiar that it need not
be alluded to. We all know that it is time to think of summer when the
martin clings once more to her last year’s clay-house under the eaves.
It is when the wild-doves are heard in the woods that one realises the
Spring-Summer borderland is being crossed. When the cushat calls, all
the clans of the bushes are at home, runs a Highland saying: meaning
that every mavis and merle and finch is busy with hatching the young
brood, or busier still feeding the callow nestlings. But when the voice
of the turtle is heard in the land, then Summer has come over the sea
on the south wind, and is weaving roses for her coronal and will be
with us while we are yet unaware.
What a quantity of old lore one might collect about the dove, and
as for the allusions in ancient and modern literature they must be
legion--from the familiar Scriptural phrase about the turtle to
Chaucer’s ‘the wedded turtil with her heartë trewe,’ from Greek myth or
Roman poem to Tennyson’s ‘moan of doves in immemorial elms.’ Doubtless
much of the dove-lore is so well known that it would be superfluous to
repeat it here. As the symbol of peace, of the Spirit, the dove herself
is universally familiar. The turtle is also a symbol of mourning,
and of old, as among the oak-groves of Dodona or before the fane of
Hierapolis, was held sacred as the bird of prophecy, of the soul, and
of the life after death. It is because of the loving faithfulness of
the cushat that this bird was long ago dedicated to Venus; and it was
because Venus presided over both birth and death that the dove became
associated of old with scenes so opposite as marriage festivals and
funeral rites. We are all familiar with the legend that the soul of a
dying person may be seen departing like a flying dove, and so it was
that even a tame pigeon came to be an unwelcome sight at the window
where any one lay in serious illness. In a word, the peasant-invalid
might take the bird to be a death-messenger, the bird of the grave. The
most singular of these folk-superstitions, I think, is that in whose
exercise a living pigeon used to be placed on the head of a dying man
in order to attract the pain to the bird and so ease the sufferer. One
wonders what became of the unfortunate pigeon.
The strangest of the northern legends is that Swedish one which makes
the wild-dove the confidant of Baldur, the Scandinavian god of song
and beautiful love, before he died ‘the white death’ when the ancient
world receded for ever at the advent of Christ. Still do they murmur
in the woods of the immortal passion, the deathless love of the old
gods, they who long ago passed away one knows not whither, with Baldur
going before them harping, and singing a strange song. One Gaelic
poetic name for the cushat is poetry itself; _Caoirean-na-coille_, ‘the
murmur of the woods.’ The subtlest legend is that old world Finnish
identification of Aino the dove-maiden and Vaino, the male-Venus of
the North, like Venus sea-born, like Venus the offspring of Zeus and
Destiny, and as Aino or Vaino now the singer, now the presiding deity
at marriage festival or during the lamentations for the dead.
How little we know of this Vaino of the _Kalevala_, or of that not
less mysterious ancient Teutonic nature-god Wunsch, or of our Gaelic
Angus Og, son of heaven and earth; each of whom has the wild-dove for
his own, his symbol and his mortal image. Each wove grass and plants
and greenness of trees out of the earth and the rain, out of the
sunshine and the wind; each spun flowers out of dew and moonlight and
the rose and saffron of dawns and sunsets. Each, too, created strength
in the hearts of men and power in their bodies, and wove beauty on the
faces of women and children. Each became, thus, the god of happiness,
of youth, of joy. And to each, finally, the doves were dedicated as
their sacred birds, their mortal image among the illusions of the
world. So here we pass back, pass away from the later tradition of
mourning and death, to the old joyousness of Spring, of Spring who
creates grass and plant and flower, the strength of men and the beauty
of women and the gladness of children, Spring who turns when the
apple-blossom fades and lets loose the doves of Summer.