FISHING WITH THE HAIR OF THE DEAD
This chapter owes its birth to a passage of intrinsic interest but
gruesome nature.
Before quoting or dealing with it, I may be allowed a few words as to
my running it to ground and the curiosity it excited among Angling
scholars.
Some years ago I read in an article that “fishing with the hair of a
dead person, ἔδησεν νεκρᾷ τριχὶ δέλεαρ, was practised by the Egyptians,
as is shown by discoveries during the last thirty years.” No authority,
no reference was given. “Thirty years” opened up a search too extensive
to waste on an anonymous statement.
Even so this fishing with an unknown gut, dead men’s hair, kept
worrying me. Aristotle and others had written of the use of horse-hair,
but none of my friends or I had ever come across this Egyptian tackle.
A great authority suggested that it was possibly taken from a body of
which the hair continued to grow after death, and thus possessed much
value because of length and strength.
Instantly floated before us visions of obtaining by a new _Rape of the
Lock_ this most desirable gut. Two nefarious courses were discussed.
First, to rifle the coffin of Edward I., which when last opened in Dean
Stanley’s time revealed (_teste_ the Verger) long hair still growing.
Second, to raid the tomb of the Countess of Abergavenny (_née_ Isabella
Despencer) in Tewkesbury Abbey, in which (to use Canon Ernest Smith’s
words) “at the restoration of the Abbey in 1875 was disclosed bright
auburn hair, apparently as fresh and as plentiful, as when the body was
buried four and a half centuries ago.”[878]
Do the Sagas or other ancient Scandinavian literature, in which
descriptions of fishing frequently figure, allude to such use of dead
men’s hair? Two of the foremost Scandinavian scholars could recall
none. _The Kalevala_—the great Finnish epic—yielded no help.
Nearest comes the account of “Gunnar’s Slaying” in _Story of the Burnt
Njal_.[879] After his bowstring has been cut by his foe, Gunnar said
unto his wife, Hallgerda, ‘Give me two locks of thy hair, and ye two,
my mother and thou, twist them together into a bowstring for me.’ ‘Does
aught lie on it?’ she says. ‘My life lies on it,’ he said; ‘for they
will never come to close quarters with me, if I can keep them off with
my bow.’ ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Now will I call to thy mind that slap in
the face thou gavest me,’ and refused him her hair.
Gunnar, just ere he falls, sings:
“Now my helpmeet, wimple hooded,
Hurries all my fame to earth.
Woman, fond of Frodi’s flour
Wends her hand, as she is wont.”[880]
The passage containing the Greek words quoted in the article was
eventually discovered on p. 82 of _Fayum Towns and their Papyri_, by
Grenfell, Hunt, and Hogarth.
καὶ δὴ χθόνα δυσπράπελον φθάσας
ασχήμονας ἦλθε παρ’ ἠόνας
ἒνθεν δὲ πέτραν καθίσας ὅτε
κάλαμον μὲν ἔδησεν νεκρᾷ τριχὶ
δέλεαρ δὲ λαβὼν καὶ ψωμίσας
ἂγκιστρον ἀγῆγε βύθει βυθῷ
* * * * *
ὡς δ’ οὐδὲν ὅλως τότ’ ἐλαμμένον[881]
I subjoin a translation:—
“And so hastening over the rugged ground he came unto the unsightly
shores, and there seated on a rock tied the rod with dead hair, and
taking bait and feeding with little morsels, drew the hook along (or
up and down) in the deep pool. But as naught was caught,” and as αὕτη
μὲν ἡ μηρινθός οὔδεν ἔσπασεν,[882] both in its literal and proverbial
sense held true, he returned to the place whence he came, the place of
corpses.
The Editors’ introduction to the Papyrus runs: “The matter of the poem
is hardly less remarkable than the manner in which it was written down.
The subject is the adventures of a man whose name is not given. After
some talk, the hero proceeds to a place which is full of corpses being
devoured by dogs. He then makes his way to the sea-coast and proceeds
to sit down on a rock, and fish with Rod and Line. He did not, however,
succeed in catching anything: we then revert to the corpses, the
gruesome picture of which is further elaborated. The language and style
of the composition, the literary qualities of which are poor enough,
clearly show its late date, not posterior to the second century.”
I am indebted to Professor Grenfell for further information. “The
Papyrus,” he writes me, “is certainly a poem describing the descent of
some one to the under-world.” An Austrian, A. Swoboda,[883] wrote an
article to show that it belonged to a Naassene[884] psalm describing
the descent of Christ to Hades. The beginning of a poem on this
subject, in the same metre as the Papyrus, is known from Hippolytus,
_Refutatio Hereticorum_. The second column of the Papyrus seems to be
an address to a Deity, and would fit in with Swoboda’s theory.
“The composition being, in any case of a mystical and imaginative
character, I do not think the description of the fishing incident is to
be regarded as in any way real, and, from the fisher’s point of view,
it is not to be taken literally. _No parallel for the use of dead men’s
hair in fishing has ever been suggested._ In none of the Papyri are
there any details about the modes of Angling. Ἔδησεν, which I should
translate _tied_, has been generally supposed to refer to the angler’s
line, and considering the composition is poetical, this seems the
natural interpretation.”
This coupled with the Introduction to the Papyrus appears to shatter
the statement that fishing with the hair of a dead person was practised
in ancient Egypt. But although in such a mystic adventure as a Descent
to Hades all is possible and all is pardonable, the passage can hardly
from its extremely abrupt and casual mention of hair be regarded as
heralding in the use of this substance as a quite new adjunct to
fishing. It partakes of the nature of a simile.
If it be true that an ancient simile was intended to throw light from
the more familiar on the less familiar, but never to illustrate the
moderately familiar by the wholly strange, one might, despite the
absence of all reference to such tackle in the representations or in
classical writers, possibly argue that lines made of the hair of the
dead were known and were used by the Egyptians. The substitution of the
hair of a dead person for the hair of a horse may be but a bold and not
ineffective attempt to heighten the mysticism of the picture.
Apart from the pleasant gain which the quest and the running down of
this hare in “a mare’s nest” (to mix metaphors boldly) entailed, one’s
only real satisfaction is that the Egyptian angler, notwithstanding his
gruesome gut and loathsome bait, caught NOTHING!
FOOTNOTES:
[878] Aristotle (_H. A._, III. 11), states that the hair does grow in
dead bodies. Since his time many descriptions of remarkable growth
after death have been published, and many people believe that such
growth does take place. Erasmus Wilson pronounces that “the lengthening
of the hairs observed in a dead person is merely the result of the
contraction of the skin towards their bulb.”
[879] Blakey, _op. cit._, 207, states an engraving was found at
Herculaneum “representing a little Cupid fishing with the ringlets
of her (_sic_) hair for lovers.” So far I have failed to track this
hermaphroditic representation, nor is Sir C. Waldstein aware of its
existence.
[880] Translated by Dasent. _Frodi’s flour_ = gold.
[881] Professor Grenfell tells me that ὃτε here has no connection,
unless the main verb came in line 16, where there is a lacuna, but
the traces do not suggest any verb. He also approves my rendering of
ψωμίσας having the sense of “baiting the swim” with bits of flesh from
the corpses.
[882] Aristophanes, _Thesm._, 928. Cf. also _Wasps_, 174-6.
[883] _Wiener Studien_, XXVII. (1905), pp. 299, ff.
[884] Or early Gnostics, also called Ophites, who honoured serpents.