Towards a Critical Anthology of Pre-Modern Bosom Serpent Folklore

Abstract

We present a preview of our work for a critical anthology of medieval and pre-medieval fantastic folklore narratives about animals in the human body. These are generally referred to among English-speaking scholars as ‘bosom serpent’ legends. In particular, we provide here two of the most ancient texts from the section of the anthology on medieval Scandinavia. We also offer two little-known narratives, a medieval Latin saint’s life and one from the Byzantine Greek world.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees and Simon Young for suggestions that helped improve this article, Jessica Hemming for critical comments in the editing process, Tommaso Braccini for providing the Greek translation, and Luca Taglianetti and Daniel Sävborg for helpful comments on the Old Norse section.

Notes

1 For the reasons for this technical term in folkloristics, see the explanation by Bennett (2005, 3–4). The phrase ‘vaginal serpent’ for the reptile which enters through the vaginal opening was first used by Rosan Jordan de Caro in reference to legends popular among Mexican-American women in Texas (Jordan de Caro 1973; Jordan 1985). This is a pattern, however, that one can find in a range of pre-modern sources: see Ermacora (2015a, 275–77; 2015b, 100 and 107) for parallels from Italy, Spain, Japan, and India.

2 Recent literature includes, inter alia, Cattermole-Tally (1995), Bondeson (1997, 1998), Hartmann (1998), Renard (1998), Bennett (2005, 3–22), Knoeff (2009), Le Quellec (2012, 70–85 and 221), and Ermacora (2015a, 2015b, 2017).

3 Bosom serpents have been examined as imaginary parasites in folkloristics, the history of medicine (Bondeson 1997, 1998), parasitology (Hoeppli 1959), and ethnology (see the large survey by Clements 1932). Bosom serpents are also studied as the delusional syndrome of internal zoopathy in psychopathology and cross-cultural psychiatry (Ermacora 2017). There has been, depressingly, little dialogue between these disciplines.

4 We agree, in principle, with Gillian Bennett’s remarks: ‘no way of arranging these texts is entirely satisfactory. It’s impossible to keep to any arrangement with much consistency, and no order [save chronological order] casts better light on the complex than any other’ (Bennett 1991, 3).

5 For a detailed analysis of some bosom serpent instances from the classical and medieval world (including Arab), see Ermacora (2015a, 2015b, 2017).

6 We are hamstrung by an only mortal knowledge of ancient and living languages, and while we have, to date, found dozens of sources, we expect to increase our total in the next months. We would ask scholars kindly to bring material to our attention at the following email address: [email protected].

7 Slone follows here one of a confusingly varied range of conventions among folktale scholars: new motifs created after Stith Thompson’s original Motif-Index of Folk-Literature may have a plus-sign (+) added, in accordance with Thompson’s own advice to future index-makers (Thompson 1955–58, 25, volume one (A–C), 1955. See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Motif-Index_of_Folk-Literature/Volume_1). The same numbers, however, were previously given by Thompson, in reference to Indian folklore, as B765.5 ‘Snake crawls out of sleeper’s mouth’ and G328 ‘Rectum snakes. Snakes which creep into living man and devour him’.

8 A tenth-century carving on a stone cross fragment from Kirk Andrea, Isle of Man, a scene on the wooden portal from the stave church of Austad in East Agder, Norway (dated c. 1200), and a later image on a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century drinking-horn from Mo, Telemark, may very well depict the scene of King Gunnarr penetrated or bitten internally by a snake (Ward 1972, 114–15; Guðmundsdóttir 2012, 1016, 1025 and 1027–30; 2015, 351, 353–54, 356, 358 and 369, with photographs of the images).

9 See also Kahle (1906), in which the author relates an Armenian fable, apparently a parallel of Ingibjǫrg’s thirst cure, induced by an inspired person; but in this case the fable is not a bosom serpent story.

10 Valcárcel (1982, 42, n. 42) and Lappin (2002, 126, n. 58) report other medieval bosom serpent miracles as folkloric parallels to the story of the woman and the serpent.

11 Around 1400, someone wrote a Castilian version of this Vita, preserved in two manuscripts, E aun sanó a una muger de una serpiente que tenía en el vientre (He also healed a woman who had a snake in the belly) (Dutton 1978, 272, edition of text from MS Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, 12.688; our translation).

12 See also, with fewer details, Sebastián de Vergara (1736, 90–91) (also quoted by Gélis 1992, 175, in connection with Dominic and the snake). The iron bar seems to have survived to much later times (Férotin 1897, 360; del Álamo 1953, 334, n. 9; Valcárcel 1982, 509, n. 5; Palacios 2000, 292, n. 982). The scene of the miracle is also remembered on a medallion in the eighteenth-century altar of the saint’s chapel in the abbey of Silos (del Álamo 1953, 334, n. 9; Valcárcel 1982, 509, n. 5; Palacios 2000, 292).

13 As might also be the case with Dominic of Silos, known as el redemptor de cautivos (the redeemer of captives [of the Moors]), ‘the specific association of iron with St Leonard derive[s] from his function as a liberator of captives who, as the miracle stories state, were frequently confined by means of iron restraints’ (Cassidy-Welch 2003, 59).

14 The enigmatic Carinthian iron snake has been examined together with the post-medieval bosom serpent folk custom of the so-called Gebärmutter-Kröte (uterus-toad) (see Andree 1904, 156, table 32, fig. 140; Kriss 1929, 62; Kriss and Kriss-Rettenbeck 1957, 24 and 46; Steinmann 1973, 245). The information is taken up from Kriss by several subsequent authors including Jacoby (1932, 13) and, from there, by Bondeson (1997, 28). Notably, Andree also mentions an Austro-Bavarian bosom serpent story, dated 1513, contained in a registry, started in 1505, of alleged miracles in the church of St Wolfgang im Salzkammergut (Upper Austria). This is an important pilgrimage site founded by St Wolfgang of Regensburg (c. 934–94). The father of a boy who had a serpent in his stomach for five years invoked God and St Wolfgang and promised, on its expulsion, an offering (whose nature is not specified) and a pilgrimage to the church (Wasner 1599, 144v–45r). For the story from Valence, original Latin text in Martene and Duran 1717, col. 1701 (see also Sigal 1983, 23–24).

15 See, for example, Ermacora 2015b (80–81 and 103–104) for another sixth- or early seventh-century Byzantine instance: Vita S. Symeonis Iunioris Stylitae (Life of St Symeon the Stylite the Younger), chap. 136 (original text and French translation in Van den Ven 1962a, 128; 1962b, 153).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Davide Ermacora

Davide Ermacora is currently finishing his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Turin, Italy, and at the Lumière University, Lyon 2, France. His dissertation, a cross-cultural study of pre-modern folk narratives of animal infestation of the human body, is entitled: ‘“A Snake Called Argès Slithered into His Mouth”: the Bosom Serpent Story-Complex (Folklore, Religion, Medicine and Ethnology) from Hippocrates to Erasmus of Rotterdam’.

Roberto Labanti

Roberto Labanti is an undergraduate student in History at Alma Mater Studiorum—University of Bologna, Italy. He is a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) and the Italian Oral History Association (Associazione Italiana di Storia Orale, AISO), and he collaborates with the Italian Centre for Collecting Contemporary Rumours and Legends (Centro per la Raccolta delle Voci e Leggende Contemporanee, CeRaVoLC) in Alessandria. He is a regular contributor to the Italian skeptical magazine, Query.

Andrea Marcon

Andrea Marcon received a Master’s degree in Library Science from University of Udine, Italy. He is currently librarian at the Library of the Seminary of Pordenone, and corresponding member of the Pio Paschini Institute in Udine and Editorial Coordinator at Accademia San Marco of Pordenone.