‘The dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy
juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the
tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet
dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the
moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars
pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their
tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.’
With these words I ended my preceding article, ‘The Coming of Dusk.’
There was not space there to speak of other, of so many of those
nocturnal things which add so much to the mystery and spell of the
short nights of summer: the arrowy throw of the bat, a shadowy javelin
flung by a shadowy hand against a shadowy foe; the nightjar, the dusky
clans of the owl, moonrise at sea or among pinewoods, the dance of
the moths round certain trees, the faint woven cadence of the wheeling
gnat-columns, the sudden scream of the heron or the wailing of seafowl,
or the mournful noise of the moon-restless lapwing, wind in the grass,
wind in the hollows of woods, wind among the high corries of the hills.
These and a hundred other sounds and sights fill the summer-darkness:
the hill-fox barking at the moonshine, the heather-cock in defiance
of alarm, deer panting among the bracken, the splash of herring or
mackerel on the moonlit breast of the bay, dogs baying a long way off
and from farmstead to farmstead. One could not speak of all these
things, or of the hundred more. In the meadows, in woods, on upland
pastures, from beech-thicket to pine-forest, on the moors, on the
hills, in the long valleys and the narrow glens, among the dunes and
sea-banks and along wave-loud or wave-whispering shores, everywhere the
midsummer-night is filled with sound, with fragrance, with a myriad
motion. It is an exquisite unrest: a prolonged suspense, to the dayworn
as silence is, yet is not silence, though the illusion is wrought
out of the multitudinous silences which incalculably intersperse the
continuous chant of death, the ceaseless hymn of life.
Everywhere, but far north in particular, the summer night has a
loveliness to which the least sensitive must in some degree yield,
creates a spell which must trouble even a dulled imagination, as
moonlight and the faintest rippling breath will trouble unquickened
pools into a sudden beauty. It is a matter of temperament, of mood and
circumstance rather, where one would find oneself, at the rising of
the moon, in the prolonged twilights of summer. To be in a pinewood
shelving to a calm sea breaking in continuous foam: or among mountain
solitudes, where all is a velvety twilight deepening to a green
darkness, till the sudden moon rests athwart one hill-shoulder like a
bronze shield, and then slowly is lifted and dissolves into an amber
glow along all the heights: or on great moors, where one can see for
leagues upon leagues, and hear nothing but the restless crying of the
curlew, the screech of a heron, the abrupt unknown cries and fugitive
sounds and momentary stealthy rustlings of nocturnal solitudes.
Or, again, on a white roadway passing through beech-woods: or on a
gorse-set common, with the churring of a nightjar filling the dusk
with the unknown surge and beat in one’s own heart: or on the skirts
of thatched hamlets, where a few lights linger, with perhaps the loud
breathing and trampling of cattle: or in a cottage-garden, with
mignonette and cabbage-roses and ghostly phlox, or dew-fragrant with
musk and southernwood: or in an old manor-garden, with white array of
lilies that seem to have drunk moonlight, and damask and tea-rose in
odorous profusion, with the honey-loving moths circling from moss-rose
to moss-rose, and the night-air delaying among tall thickets of
sweet-pea. Or, it may be, on quiet sea-waters, along phantom cliffs,
or under mossed and brackened rocky wastes: or on a river, under
sweeping boughs of alder and willow, the great ash, the shadowy beech.
But each can dream for himself. Memory and the imagination will create
dream-pictures without end.
Of all these midsummer-night creatures alluded to here or in the
preceding article there may be none more allied to poetic association
than the nightjar, but surely there is none more interesting than
the owl itself, that true bird of the darkness. That phantom-flight,
that silent passage as from the unseen to the unseen, that singular
cry, whether a boding scream or a long melancholy hoot or a prolonged
too-whoo, how blent they are with one’s associations of the warm husht
nights of summer. But is not the nightjar also of the same tribe?
Fern-owl is a common name; also jar-owl, heather-owl. I have heard it
called the heather-bleat, though probably that name commonly indicates
the snipe. How well I remember from childhood that puzzling riddle
“_The bat, the bee, the butterflee, the cuckoo and the gowk,
The heather-bleat, the mire-snipe; how many birds is that?_”
I was never ‘taken-in’ by the first three, but as I had been told or
had somehow discovered that the cuckoo was often companioned by the
meadow-pipit I thought the latter must be the ‘gowk.’ So I guessed
‘four,’ taking the heather-bleat to be the nightjar: and it was long
before I discovered that the answer was two, for only the cuckoo and
the snipe were really named.
I wonder how many names the Owl has! Those alone which, like the
archetypal name, derive from the old root-word _ul_ (to howl or
hoot or screech), must run to some thirty to forty at least, from
the Anglo-Saxon ‘hule’ and later ‘ullet’ to the familiar ‘hoolet’
or ‘hoolit’ or ‘howlet,’ or, again, the still current south English
‘ullud,’ ‘ullot,’ or ‘ullyet.’ We have many Gaelic names also, as
(for the snowy or barn owl) ‘cailleach-bhan,’ the white auld wife,
or ‘cailleach-oidhche,’ the night-witch; or (for the tawny owl)
‘bodach-oidhche,’ the night-bogle; or (for the screech-owl) the
onomatopœic ‘corra-sgriachaig,’ or several terms meaning ‘long-eared’
or ‘horned’; and three or four designations, either onomatopœic, as
perhaps ‘ulacan’ (though both in sound and meaning it is the same as
the southland ‘hooligan’), or adaptations of the Teutonic root-word, as
‘Olcadan’ or ‘ullaid.’ The name ‘yogle’ may be heard along the Lothian,
Yorkshire, and East Anglian coast-lands, and is doubtless a ‘lift’ from
the Danish ‘Katyugle’ or ‘Katogle’: indeed ‘catyogle,’ ‘catogle,’ and
‘catyool’ (with the quaint by-throw ‘cherubim’) occur in several parts
of England. In Clydesdale I have often heard the horned owl called the
‘luggie’ (long-ears). Some names with probably only local meaning I
do not understand, as for example, the ‘Wite’ (not the adjective, but
possibly the old word for churchyard and even church); the ‘padge’ or
‘pudge’ of Leicestershire; the Jack-baker, billy-wix, and the eastland
‘will-a-wix.’ (Is this the cry of the young owl awaiting food?)
The ‘jilly,’ which I heard once at or near Windermere, is probably
a corruption of the Gaelic ‘gheal’ (white), as many north-Celtic
names survive in that region. Our commonest name in the Highlands is
‘comhachag’ (co-achak) probably as onomatopœic a term as ‘cuach’ or
‘cuthag’ (coo-ak) for the cuckoo, or ‘fitheach’ (_fee-ak_) for the
raven. It is said that the longest poem on the Owl in any language is
in Gaelic. The _Oran na Comhachaig_ or Song of the Owl was composed by
an aged Highland bard named Donald Finlay somewhere about three hundred
years ago--about 1590 says one local account, though I do not know on
what authority: _a rinn Domhnull Mac Fhionnlaidh nan Dan, sealgair ’us
bard ainmeil Abrach, mu thiomchioll 1590_ (done by Donald Finlay of the
Songs, the celebrated Lochaber huntsman and poet, in or about 1590). I
have again and again heard the second of its sixty-seven--in another
version seventy--quatrains quoted in support of the theory that an owl
lives at least a hundred years; some are credited with far greater age:
“_’S co-aoise mise do’n daraig,
Bha na fhaillain ann sa choinnich,
’S ioma linn a chuir mi romham,
’S gur mi comhachag bhochd na sroine._”
(I am old as the oak ... lit. ‘the ancientness upon me is that of the
oak’ ... whose mossy roots spread wide: many a race have I seen come
and go: and still I am the lonely owl of Srona.)
In every country the owl is a bird of mourning. It is also the bird
of night pre-eminently (what a pity the old-English owl-light as a
variant for twilight has become obsolete); the bird of moonlight or the
Moon; the bird of Silence, of Ruin, of the Grave, of Death. In some
places a dead owl is still transfixed to the outside of a door, to
avert lightning. Perhaps it is for the same reason that a caged owl is
held to be a dangerous co-inmate of a house during a thunderstorm. A
thousand legends have woven this sombre raiment of associations, though
the owl’s only distinction from other birds of prey is that it can
see in the dark and is nocturnal in habit. It loves solitary places,
because there undisturbed, but is not all darkness solitary? In Syria
the peasant calls the owl ‘the mother of ruins,’ which is poetically
apt, as is the German ‘the sorrowing mother,’ but our northern
‘night-witch’ and the grim Breton ‘soul-harrier’ (surely a survival of
the Greek idea of the owl as a soul-guide) are unjust to an inoffensive
bird whose concern is not with souls and graves and ruins but with
rats and mice. A German naturalist has even, I remember, written to
prove that the owl is pre-eminently a bird of love, of single-hearted
devotion, ‘the dove of the night’: and there is a Danish poem about
‘the Silver-Spinner’ weaving a thin invisible web in the dusk wherein
to entangle and bring close the hearts of lovers. Old Donald Finlay of
the Songs must have had some such idea in his mind when in his Song of
the Owl he makes the bird say in effect, ‘I may be old and forlorn, but
am not to be blamed for that: neither of rapine nor of lies have I ever
been guilty: is there a grave anywhere that I have ever violated? and
to the mate of my choice have I ever been faithless?’
This name of the Silver-Spinner, however, though often in Germany,
Scandinavia, and our own country associated with the poetic legend
alluded to, is really a romantic derivative from the ancient connection
of the small owl with the Maiden Maid goddess who presided over
spinning as one of her foremost womanly attributes. ‘The Woman’s
Bird,’ as the small owl is sometimes called, deserves the name, for
in almost every language ancient and modern, except English and
Finnish, its name is feminine. The sacred bird of Athens or the Lesbian
Nyctimenê is still ‘the woman’s bird’ among the Australian aborigines:
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Icelandic, Vendish, German, French,
Hungarian, all afford the same sex-indication. The great white owl,
however, is the bird of heroes, wanderers, the night-foray, war,
lightning, desolation, solitude, and death. It is said, I know not how
demonstrated or traced, that the name Ulysses is but the variant of
the Etruscan _Ulixé_ or Sikulian _Oulixes_, words supposed to indicate
the ululation of the owl’s cry (in Italy I have heard the name of the
sweet and plaintive little _aziola_ or _aziolo_ derived from the same
source): and that it was given to the Homeric hero because he was the
first to adventure sea-voyaging on moonlit nights, because he too was
a night-wanderer. But unless Ulixé or Oulixes be older than the Greek
name, what of Odysseus? In like fashion some speculative philologists
derive ‘Pallas’ from the Turanian owl-name _Pöllö_.
I heard a singular fragment of owl-folklore once on the island of
Arran. The narrator said the white owl had seven distinct hoots,
but all I need recall here is that the seventh was when the ‘Reul
Fheasgair’ ceased to be the Evening Star and became the ‘Reul na
Maidne,’ the Day-Star. Was this a memory of some myth associating the
owl with the otherworld (or darkness or moontide or Night) disclosed
every eve at the opening of the Gates of Dusk?... the time of sleep and
dreams, of strange nocturnal life, of silence and mystery, between the
soft white fire of the Vesper Star, the star of Labour as the Bretons
call it, meaning that with its advent the long day’s labour ceases, and
its cold serenity when it has climbed the ramparts of the midsummer
night, and, as Phosphoros, the Day-Star, Son of the Morning, flashes
like a lance-point against the milky onflood of the dawn?