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| Rouen, BM ms. 3028, 89v |
National
Squirrel Appreciation Day came and went, as it always does, with me in the
yard, hiding my nuts, and missing my chance, again, to tell the squirrels of
America how much I love them.
Sorry, little guys! You’ll have
to make do with this, days in the making, a squirrel post so long you may want
to bury bits of it to read later.
PETS
Squirrels are a good subject for pet
studies because domesticated squirrels are obviously just pets – although I’m
prepared to pretend to be shocked when you tell me about your guard squirrel –
and because domesticated squirrels strike most of us as an anomaly. Newspapers
periodically run stories on cab drivers and other local characters who pal around with squirrels (a
sample), but otherwise, to find a land where the squirrels are still
chained and tamed, we might have to visit Southern
Italy, where I'm told they're sold in petshops.
Eighteenth-century paintings of
children with chained squirrels are not all that uncommon. The Brooklyn
Museum has one, the New York
Historical Society another, the Museum
of Fine arts in Boston still another, and the list scampers on to include one
by Thomas Hudson, with a boy whose perhaps too wizened face
recalls nothing so much as John Malkovich’s. More are collected in this much-plagiarized blog post. One
famous champion of slavery, Robert E. Lee, loathed his sister Mildred’s pet
squirrel, named Custis Morgan, while the founders of the country he sought
to destroy were themselves also mixed up variously with squirrels: in 1772, Paul
Revere himself billed one client for a silver chain for a squirrel, while Benjamin
Franklin wrote a mocking epitaph for another, named either Mungo or Skugg.
Earlier examples not having to do
with America’s Founding Fathers, include Aelbert Cuypt’s Portrait of the Sam Family before
the Town of Bacharach (1653), where little Abraham Sam clutches the
chain of his little squirrel, and Francesco Montemezzano’s
of a woman and hers, in 1575. Later pet squirrels include Bonnie, painted by
Joseph Decker in various wild settings, in The Seated Squirrel and another, called either Their Winter Hoard or, outrageously, The Gluttons. The poet Christian Friedrich Hebbel’s squirrel, Lampi (or Schatz), mourned
deeply, may be
pictured here, living and chained to his kennel.
As for the real goods, the
medieval pet squirrels, we have enough to assert, with small confidence, that
people kept squirrels for pets, with more frequency, per capita, than they do
now. We have a fifteenth-century love ring, French or English, whose inside
engraving features a woman with a leashed (metaphorical?) squirrel, at the
British Museum; or this page from a mid
fourteenth-century Quest for the Holy
Grail, whose right margin pictures, naturally enough, a squirrel
cleverly chained to its pole, perched atop its little squirrel house, thinking,
one presumes, about the Arthurian court’s coming doom. A similar squirrel
kennel shows up in an early fourteenth-century Flemish Psalter (MS Douce 5),
while the Hours
of Anne of Bohemia (1382-1384) have a squirrel with its kennel, no pole,
and in the Luttrell psalter, an
unchained, unkenneled squirrel, wearing a bell (and later, in the same
manuscript, a squirrel riding
the shoulder of lady in a wagon). The early fourteenth-century Ormesby Psalter also has a lady with a squirrel in her
hand, as does one
of the Chertsey Tiles, dating to the last decade of the thirteenth century. Even more medieval (and early modern) squirrels, mostly undomesticated, are collected by this extraordinary
post.
Squirrels, like other small
animals, seem to have been kept mainly by women and, in later centuries,
children, though we know of plenty of men from the later eighteenth century on
not afraid to give squirrels their love: in addition to Hebbel, there’s the pet
squirrel in the third volume of Hal
Willis’s delirious medievalist novel Sir
Roland; there’s also I. W.
Sickels, who wrote in 1903 that "the
male squirrel is always more or less treacherous,” and observed that a pet
squirrel will often hide its nuts "in the pockets of your coat, vest, or
pantaloons, or between your collar and neck”; and even John Huston, whose
little Pachito,
normally a placid chap, once bit the producer Ray Stark.
What’s harder to come by,
however, are written accounts of medieval domestic squirrels. To be sure,
monastic visitation records complain about nuns keeping squirrels, among other
animals (for example, Eileen Power, here;
or Archbishop
Eudes in mid thirteenth-century Rouen, [also
here], whose contempt for pets merits nothing less than his being
immortalized as an operatic, or Disney, villain). But without easy access to
the Acta Sanctorum (thanks CUNY!), it’s hard to find the stories about squirrels
that would be preserved, no doubt, in hagiographic records of grief, trauma,
and healing (think of St Cantilupe, who once resurrected a pet dormouse! n5,
here).
It’s hard, as well, to find
squirrels, because they’re so blessed with names. Which brings me to my second
point:
SQUIRRELS, SCAMPERING LATIN, AND
WORD ORIGINS
The problem with squirrel
research is knowing what to call them. The base form in Latin – sciurus – throws
off a mess of possibilities: scira,
scuirus, scurulus, scuriolus,
quirolus, squiriolus, squiriolis, escorion, escuratus, escurellus, exquirium,
squirio, escurellus, aspriolus, esperiolus, espirio, expereol, pirolus, pirulus, pyrolus,
speriolus, spiriolus, spiriculus, spirgulus, and asprigulus. I’ve found these
mostly through searching the Monumenta
Germaniae Historica and Louis Gauchat’s article, below. With no small trepidation, I
can also cite cirogrillus, to
some, a squirrel, to
others, a hedgehog.
This proliferation raises a
question of just what counts as a Latin word: obviously, despite having learned
Latin as a second language, our writers had some freedom with this noun that
they don’t have with, presumably, verb endings. Latin may be a deadish
language, but through its pile of corpses scampers the ever-transforming
squirrel. All that makes these words specifically Latin are that they’re used with
a Latin grammar and vocabulary that made it readily distinguishable from the common tongue (which may nonetheless have used precisely the same word
for “squirrel,” unless it was a region that preferred eichhorn, eichörnchen, or
acquerna).
One final point here: the origin
of the word squirrel is, they say, in the Greek σκίουρος, σκιά shade + οὐρά
tail. This etymology appears wherever squirrel etymologies are likely to be
found: in the OED, in the Deutsches
Wörterbuch, and so too in this arm of the French
state. Centuries old, the proposal may have first been suggested by Conrad Gesner’s mid
sixteenth-century Historiae animalium:
Graecum nomen
est animalculo datum à cauda, qua supra dorsum reflexa se tegit & inumbrat…ut
pedes hominibus illis quos sciapodes fabulose nominant
The Greek name
of this little animal is given from its tail, which it bends around above its
back and covers and shadows itself…like the feet of those fabulous men that they
called “sciapods.”
As fabulous as this is, Gesner
might have been wrong, as might everyone who followed. There’s little surprise that
no one’s bothered much to correct him, since, in the humanities, the squirrel
tends attract no more than its due interest. It may nonetheless be worth noting that, a century
ago, Gesner met his match in a skirmish that might be refought, if etymologists
see fit, once again, to take up the banner of accuracy.
Louis Gauchat’s 1909 “Les noms
gallo-romains de l’écureuil” (available in Volume 2, here)
calls the “shade tail” origin an “idée
bizarre,” and cites as support, “entre autres,” Schader’s 1901 Reallexikon
der indogermanischen Altertumskunde (whose later versions you
might check for me) (meanwhile, the OED et al. might check the 1903 Universal
Cyclopaedia and Atlas). The Reallexikon
suggests that the word might come, more naturally, from scéri, fast or agile, while also pointing out the importance of the
root preserved in the Slavic véverica
(consider the Welsh wiwer,
for example), as this element appears in the Anglo-Saxon ácweorna (Gauchat 194). At the least, the OED might hint at some
other possibilities!
ONE LAST SQUIRREL FACT: SQUIRRELS
ACROSS THE WATER
At the Twitter, the great Matthew
Harrison gifted me
with Topsell on squirrels:
They growe
exceeding tame and familiar to men if they be accustomed and taken when they
are young, for they runne vp to mens shoulders, and they will oftentimes – it
vpon their hands, creepe into their pockets for Nuttes, goe out of doores, and
returne home againe, but if they be taken aliue, being olde, when once they get
loose, they will neuer returne home againe, and therefore such may wel bee
called Semiferi [semi-wild] rather
than Cicures.
They are very
harmeful, and wil eat al manner of woolen garments [and
scamper across all manner of power lines], and if it were not for that
discommidity, they were sweete-sportful-beastes, and are very pleasant
play-fellowes in a house.
Topsell is one of many who
repeats this legend:
The admirable
witte of this beast appeareth in her swimming or passing ouer the Waters, for
when hunger or some conuenient prey of meat costraineth her to passe ouer a
riuer, shee seeketh out some rinde or small barke of a Tree which shee setteth
vppon the Water, and then goeth into it, and holding vppe her taile like a
saile, letteth the winde driue her to the other side, and this is witnessed by Olaus Magnus in his description of Scandinauia, WHERE
THIS IS ORDINARY AMONG SQUIRRELLES … [my emphasis]
Olaus
Magnus is indeed one source for this, as is, in later years, Carl Linnaeus,
who, under
sciurus, observes briefly that “Cortice interdum
navigat,” and, in much later years, Squirrel Nutkin.
Olaus’s contemporary Conrad
Gesner also remarks on sailing squirrels, and, in my period, we have, in
the fourteenth century, Conrad
of Megenberg, and, in the thirteenth, Vincent of
Beauvais and Thomas
of Cantimpré’s roughly contemporary encyclopedias (the later being
adapted into Dutch verse: “ende sitter op, alst in een scip ware, / ende
metten staerte seyltet over dare”).
Here the trail goes cold: I’ve
lost my nuts, because earlier medieval works of natural science either
say nothing about sailing (Albert the Great and Hildegard of Bingen), or,
shockingly, not the least thing about squirrels (Isidore, Bede, Rabanus). Why this
story begins to be written down only in the thirteenth century is a mystery
that could – and perhaps should – be solved only with a grant, or endowed
chair, worthy of this great labor.
Thanks to the following for help and encouragement with this post. You may not have known this was coming: Irina Dumitrescu, Matthew Harrison, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Elaine Treharne, and "bxknits."
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