Birdscapes by Jeremy Mynott

Author:Jeremy Mynott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

42. Cranes of the world on stamps. Top: Siberian white (Russia), black-necked (China), sarus (Burma). Middle: white-naped (North Korea), common (Romania), red-crowned (Japan). Bottom: black-crowned (Niger), demoiselle (Turkey). In P. J. Lanspeary, The World of Birds on Stamps (1975)

Manufacturers understand its commercial value too and you see similar images emblazoned on articles as various as clothes, crockery, carpets, and wallpaper. Things get more complicated, however, when religious symbols are also involved. Have you ever thought, for example, about the curious appearances of different species in the familiar carol “On the First Day of Christmas”? It starts off harmlessly enough with twelve drummers drumming and eleven lords a-leaping, and one can’t really have an ornithological problem with seven swans a-swimming or six geese a-laying. You begin to get suspicious, though, when you come to four calling birds (which birds are calling?) and three French hens (why French?). And you may be positively mystified when you reach two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree. As we all know, you don’t get turtle doves in Britain at Christmas—they are summer visitors, usually arriving in Northern Europe in May. As for the partridge, this is presumably a common (or “grey”) partridge since this is a traditional carol and the red-legged (or “French”) partridge was an introduced species that didn’t breed in Britain until 1790; on the other hand, the French for “partridge” is perdix and if you pronounce that in French it does sound rather like “pear tree.” Anyway, I’ve never seen a partridge on top of a tree of any kind, let alone a pear tree. Poetic licence? No, it’s more interesting than that. One theory is that all the twelve “presents” are really religious symbols and the whole carol is in a kind of code because it was composed at a time when it was dangerous to express a public commitment to Catholicism. Then it all makes sense: the twelve drummers are beating out the twelve doctrines in the Apostles’ Creed, the eleven pipers are the eleven faithful apostles spreading the word, and so on, down to seven beautiful swans as the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, six laying geese as the six days of creation, five gold rings (maybe ring-necked pheasants?) as the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch), four colly birds (the old country name for blackbirds) as the four evangelists, three French hens as the three virtues, and two turtle doves as the two Testaments. Finally, the partridge is lifted aloft as the resurrected Christ, and that draws on an even older Greek myth in which Athena (who was the goddess of pear trees among many other things) raised from the dead her lover Perdix (the Greek name for a partridge) and carried him to heaven in the branches of a pear. That’s already a heady mixture of the pagan and the Christian.

But the manufacturers won’t leave it at that. I saw a fancy gift tin of biscuits one recent Christmas with the cover illustrated in plate 7c.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.