Blind Heretics Under Ground - Excerpts from the cultural history of the mole

I cannot choose: sometime he angers me
With telling of  the moldwarp and the ant
- William Shakespeare, Henry IV, part 1, Act 3, Scene 1

Outside my office windows, the moles are waging war against the campus caretakers. It all started a few weeks ago, and when I got to the office in the morning I noticed that five-six mounds of modest size had appeared in the course of the night. I assumed right away that these were erected by moles, although it might well be gophers - they mostly work at night and I have not yet seen one. The mounds were levelled in a few days by one of the caretakers, but the very next day five-six more mounds had appeared, and these are the ones that can be seen on a picture far below in this blogpost. The second series of mounds were later levelled too, but they were replaced shortly thereafter by a total of about ten mounds, plus some smaller ones which I only noticed today closer to the office wall. All of these third-series mounds were levelled today, but only a few hours after that I noticed that a small mound had actually appeared in the same spot as a cluster of two-three mounds, and I wonder how many will be erected in the course of the night.  This ongoing conflict prompted me to write this blogpost.

De talpa - chapter heading for the mole

Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.080, Thomas Cantimpré, De Natura Rerum, c.1290

Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

In the Middle Ages, the learned world did in general not take kindly to the moles. Like all animals included in medieval bestiaries, the mole was endowed with a spiritual, allegorical meaning which made it serve as a model for mankind - in this case a model to be shunned, as we shall see.

Two of the oldest descriptions of the mole, one of which would influence descriptions in bestiaries centuries later, can be found in book twelve of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. One description can be found in chapter 2, paragraph 39, where Isidore says that "The mole (furo) is named from 'dark' (furvus), whence also comes the word 'thief' (fur), for it digs dark and hidden tunnels and tosses out the prey that it finds" (Barney et.al. 2006: 254). There is good reason to be somewhat skeptical about Isidore's etymological connection here.

In the next chapter of book 12, or more precisely in chapter 3, paragraph 5, there is another description of the mole, and - as we can see from the chapter heading of Thomas Cantimpré's De Natura Rerum above - this was the descriptions transmitted by later commentators. Here, Isidore writes that "The mole (talpa) is so called because it is condemned to perpetual blindness in the dark (tenebrae), for, having no eyes, it always digs the dirt, and tosses out the soil, and devours the roots beneath vegetables" (Barney et.al. 2006: 254). I do not know how come there are two description translated as belonging to the same animal, but it might be that Isidore are describing both the gopher and the mole in this part of the book.

Mouse stealing the host, and an innocent mole

MS Royal 12 C XIX, bestiary, England, 1st quarter of the 13th century

Courtesy of the British Library

Commentators after Isidore also added an allegorical explanation, In one English thirteenth-century bestiary, MS. Bodley 764, for instance, the natural description of the mole follows the standard set by Isidore, and then finishes with the following exposition (translated by Richard Barber):

The mole, condemned to perpetual blindness, is the image of pagan idols, blind deaf and dumb; or even their worshippers, wandering in the eternal darkness of ignorance and folly. Isaiah writes of them: 'In that day a man shall cast his idols ... to the moles and to the bats' [2:20], that is, the blind shall worship the blind. The mole is also the symbol of heretics or false Christians who, like the eyeless mole which digs in the earth, heaping up the soil and eating the roots beneath the crops, lack the light of true knowledge and devote themselves to earthly deeds. They serve the desires of the flesh zealously, and succumb to the lure of pleasure, while they try in every way possible to gnaw at the roots of all that is good.

The Vulgate does indeed speak of bats and moles as symbols of the wasteland, and the imagery is a typical biblical topos where one or two types of wild animals become a synechdoche for the antithesis of civilization. With the desolate imagery of Isaiah in mind, it is easy to see how the mole came to have such an unfavourable standing in the reading of the book of the universe, and how the mole came to be a counter-example to proper Christians.

Mole and company

MS Royal 13 B VIII, Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hiberniae, England, c.1196-c.1223

Courtesy of British Library

On the next stop in this itinerary of cultural history, we come to early modern Norway, where the mole seems to have held a very different position in the popular imagination than that offered by the exegetical parts of medieval bestiaries. In Norwegian, the mole is called "muldvarp", a name that is etymologically linked to the moldwarp of Shakespeare's time, and which comes from German "Maulwürfe", or mold-thrower (werfen = to throw).

In the popular Norwegian imagination, the mole was seen as a bringer of fortune - much to the misfortune of the animal itself, if we are to believe a collection of magic formulas and remedies gathered by Dr. A. Christian Bang in Norske Hexeformularer og Magiske Opskrifter (Norwegian witch formulas and magical remedies). There are two remedies by which moles are believed to improve a person's luck at cards, and both of them have dire consequences for the mole.

According to one of these remedies, recorded about 1770, (Bang 1901-02: 222-23) one must take a living mole and kill it by striking a big pen-knife to its neck. Once this is done, the mole must be placed in a clean pot or other type of clean vessel, and the body of the dead animal must then be burned to powder. No liquid is to be added. This powder is then to be sprinkled into the right shoe of the player, and this will ensure his fortunes at the table. The remedy concludes with the words "one dare not doubt upon this", which suggests that the rhetoric of conviction has not changed all that much these past centuries.

Another remedy, recorded in 1790, is perhaps even more cruel to the poor animals. Again, the mole in question must be alive when it is caught, and the person wishing for luck in games must then bite off the right foot and then release the animal. The foot of the mole is then to be kept in a piece of paper, and it must not touch the earth lest its luck-bringing power goes away. Nor must it be revealed to any other person, presumably for the same reason. To such an extent must the mole-foot be kept a secret talisman, that if the player is in a game which requires a partner, then the mole-foot must be given to the partner's pocket without the knowledge of the partner.

Fortunately, moles are quite rare in Norway and not easy to come by.

Towers of the mole empire

SDU Campus, Odense

In modern popular culture, the moles have largely been depicted in more favourable terms. In fact, modern literature and film is rife with friendly and more or less anthropomorphic moles. For instance, we have the Mole, the protagonist in Zdenek Miler animated children's tv-show from Cold War Czechoslovakia. In British literature we have the kind Mole of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, or the companion of Badger in Colin Dann's The Animals of Farthing Wood, not to mention the moles of Brian Jacques' Redwall novels, who all speak in a dialect very similar to that of the West Country. Indeed, there is even a series of fantasy novels centered entirely on the moles, namely William Horwood's Duncton Woods.

As a final installment in this eclectic mix of cultural history, I also want to mention one piece of popular culture which appears to have had some resonance, namely the 1956 science fiction movie The Mole People, where a people of humanoid mole men are enslaved in a subterranean kingdom ruled by albino descendants of the old Sumerians.

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Bibliography

A. Christian Bang, Norske Hexeformularer og Magiske Opskrifter,  A. W. Bröggers Bogtrykkeri, Kristiania, 1901-1902

Richard Barber (editor and translator), Bestiary, The Folio Society, 1992 (this is an abridgement)

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, edited and translated by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, Cambridge University Press, 2006

T. H. White (editor and translator), The Book of Beasts, Dover Publications, 1984



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One kiss more - Shakespeare, Verdi and Italian intertextuality

 As readers of this blog will know, I am a big literature enthusiast. My enthusiasm extends quite widely and I'm not very picky in my choice of reading. I generally tend to shy away from ideas about lesser and greater literature, because although I do think some literary expressions deserve a greater longevity than others, few things are as destructive to reading than to construct artificial divisions which exclude books because of some increasingly ancient canon. For that reason, I think great literature lies in execution rather than in form, and I maintain that some of my greatest literary experiences have been with comic books.

When I was little I grew up with Norwegian translations and editions of Italian stories of Donald Duck. These stories were compiled in pocket books and became a part of the Norwegian literary landscape in 1968. By that time, the Italian home production of Disney stories had been going on for more than ten years, and Italian comic book writers and artists had increasingly found their own voices in this format. Already in the 1950s there were made Donald Duck stories which imitated famous works of literature, such as Orlando Furioso and Doctor Faustus, to mention only a few. In future blogposts I will probably go into greater details, but here I want to highlight a minor case of delightful intertextuality in these stories.

Front page of  I Classici della Letteratura, vol. 38 

A few years back, the publishing house Corriere della Sera began a collected edition of literary parodies from the Italian Disney production, and the first edition reached 30 volumes in hardback. The second edition counted 40 volumes in paperback, with a slightly different order than in the first edition. In my attempts to learn Italian, I started to buy in a few of these volumes after I came to realise that many of the stories I had grown up with in Norwegian translation were often heavily abbreviated to suit the allotted page number in each pocket book. To read these familiar stories in the original language has been a great pleasure to me, and it has also given me great joy to embark on stories which have not been translated into Norwegian and which were completely new to me.

One of these volumes is the one shown above, a volume collecting three works by William Shakespeare, the first of which is the tragedy of Hamlet, King of Denmark with Donald Duck - or Paperino - in the lead role. The adaptation of the story was done by Giangiacomo Dalmasso and Giovan Battista Carpi, and it ran in three parts in the Italian Mickey Mouse magazine Topolino - Mickey's Italian name - in 1960: volume 226, 227 and 228, issued on January 10, January 25 and February 10 respectively.

The adaptation deviates significantly from the Shakespeare's version and necessarily so, most of all because this is a story for children played out by practically immortal characters, so the violence and the murders of the original are left out. However, several features of the play are retained: Prince Hamlet meets a king's ghost, the crown of the kingdom is usurped, and a Norwegian king - of sorts - makes an entrance.

As often is the case with these adaptations, there is a frame narrative which serves to justify the adaptation itself. As the above opening shows, Donald is taking a bath as the narrative begins and this leads to a sequence where he injures his head, confining the unlucky duck to the bed where he is given a copy of Hamlet.

The Duck household's edition of Hamlet

Reading Shakespeare's tragedy shapes the subsequent dream of the bed-ridden Donald, and in this dream the story unfolds within the framework of the Disney universe. As stated, there are many changes to the story and it reads perhaps more as a cloak-and-dagger castle intrigue than a deep psychological drama. The atmosphere is very dark, as can be seen below where Hamlet enters the treasure chamber of his uncle Scrooge (Paperone in Italian). This page also shows the ingenious playfulness of the writers and artists, as is evidenced by the coat of arms of Scrooge which bears the legend sola in auro exultatio, which can be roughly translated as "only in gold do I rejoice".

This playfulness is made manifest already in the opening page, and this is the very reason why I decided to write this blogpost. As seen above, the story opens with Donald in the bath, singing some lines in Italian. These lines are not just any lines but most likely selected carefully, resulting in a very beautiful intertextuality which gives a friendly nod not only to Shakespeare himself but also to the cultural legacy he inspired.

The lines sung by Donald comes from the opera Otello by Guiseppe Verdi, and these are the last lines of Othello as he smothers Desdemona in a jealous rage, heartbreakingly asking for "un bacio ancora", one more kiss. In other words, right in the opening of an Italian adaptation of Prince Hamlet, the mood is set by the performance of lines from an Italian opera based on another play by Shakespeare, an intertextuality which gave me great pleasure. For readers of this particular volume, moreover, the intertextuality becomes increasingly complex since the adaptation of Hamlet is followed by an adaptation of Othello, written by the very same author behind Amleto, Giangiacomo Dalmasso.

Othello as re-imagined by Giangiacomo Dalmasso & Giorgio Bordini
First published in Topolino, vol.851, March 19 1972

Desdemona and Othello the blackamoor

One of very few instances where an Italian Disney character has been portrayed as black

As I was growing up, I never read either of these adaptations so this has been my first encounter with them. Yet the many adaptations I did read made me familiar with a wide range of world literature, even though some of these works remained elusive to me until I reached adulthood. Nonetheless, I treasure these stories more now than ever, because as I learn more about world literature the more I see how beautifully and elegantly these adaptations are wrought.

Un bacio ancora as performed by Enrico Caruso

He has also been parodied in a Paperino comic - as a singing whale performing Figaro