The Mystery of St Cuthbert’s Ducks: An Adventure in Hagiography

Abstract

‘St Cuthbert’s duck’ is a folk name for the common eider (Somateria mollissima). The saint’s affinity for the black-and-white ducks has been accepted uncritically for centuries. For such a well-documented saint, however, his ducks are strangely absent from early records. His near-contemporary hagiographers, including the Venerable Bede, make no mention of waterfowl. The enduring association begins almost five centuries after his death in a piece of twelfth-century folklorismus.

Notes

1 For further information on the common eider, including audio recordings of their striking vocalizations, see http://www.eiderco.co.uk/eidercall.html and http://www.rspb.org.uk/discoverandenjoynature/discoverandlearn/birdguide/name/e/eider/.

2 Alan Dundes succinctly defined folklorismus as ‘the commercialization of folklore’ and added that it ‘often results in fakelore’ (Dundes 1985, 15). His definition need be only slightly amended for a twelfth-century context: the exploitation of folklore for promotional purposes.

3 The island is also known as House Island, after the saint’s dwelling.

4 Piscem non modicum, ‘no small fish’; piscem grandem in the anonymous Life, bk 2, chap. 5.

5 Instead of using a word for ‘bird’, the Life uses volucres ‘winged [creatures]’; the Vulgate specifies corvos, which can refer to either a crow or a raven, both species of the genus Corvus.

6 Chapter Eight of Book Two of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great recounts a story of a corvus who demonstrates humility before Saint Benedict.

7 Destructive waterfowl are not unknown in medieval literature; for example, the destructive birds at the beginning of the Irish tale Compert Con Culainn (‘The conception of Cú Chulainn’; Hamel 1933, 3). These én, ‘birds’, are likely to be geese or swans as elsewhere in medieval Irish literature, and not any kind of ducks. The natural behaviour of geese is to attack plants when new and green rather than the ripened grain as in Cuthbert’s Life.

8 In the painting, four additional crows on the roof watch the saint and the humble crow, perhaps an implicit reference to Chapter Nineteen (Colgrave 1938, illustrated between pages 17 and 18).

9 Wikipedia. ‘Cuthbert of Lindisfarne’. Last modified 11 August 2010. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuthbert_of_Lindisfarne. The text on Wikipedia has since changed but can be found verbatim (and uncredited) elsewhere on the Internet.

10 Many earlier natural science writers mention the episode, but always in the context of sanctuary or physical protection rather than protective legislation or conservation.

11 A further portion of Reginald’s Libellus, not discussed here, was finished in the early 1170s.

12 Reginald lists the monks present by name in Chapter Forty of his Libellus.

13 Baldwin lists several other Western manuscripts with Sasanian ducks after St Cuthbert’s time in both France and England. An example of the Sasanian duck can be found online (http://isaw.nyu.edu/news/copy_of_III8419a.jpeg), an image which has been adapted for the logo of the Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology (http://mongolschinaandthesilkroad.blogspot.ca/2014/11/journal-of-inner-asian-art-and.html).

14 It is unlikely that Bernard was still sacristan when Reginald was writing in the 1160s, half a century after 1113, and so the events are probably more precisely datable to the time of Bernard’s tenure.

15 Regarding my translation, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for his or her detailed suggestions. They have saved me from more than a few errors and infelicities.

16 I take dum as ‘when’ following Latham et al. 1986, s.v. dum.

17 Reginald’s Middle English words have been discussed elsewhere, notably by R. H. Bremmer (1990). ‘Lomes’ is the earliest attestation for the word that became both ‘loom’ in Northern English dialects and ‘loon’ in Standard English, originally referring to the species of the genus Uria such as the guillemot and murre and later attached to the diver (Gavia spp.). Nowhere in the long series of historical, regional, and comparative eider names is there anything resembling Reginald’s ‘eires’. In fact, as written, eires does not greatly resemble any words for seabirds known from any English or Low German dialect. In some ways ‘eider’ itself is closest, but a contemporary borrowing from Old Norse æðr ‘eider’ would have resulted in **eithres or similar. Bremmer attempted to derive eir(e)- from Western Germanic *hraigron-, ‘heron’, through a Middle Dutch form which had lost initial /h/ and medial /γ/, but added a plural in -(e)s formed on the basis of English or Latin rules rather than those of Dutch. Reginald is clear, however, that his birds nest on the ground, swim in the sea, and are very tame, none of which fits the heron. Bremmer’s thesis requires that Reginald cite a genuine but irregular form and yet list the wrong language and dramatically misidentify the bird; linguistically elegant but unnecessarily complicated. Another and stronger possibility is that the word was a vernacular coinage based on the ease of taking eider eggs. Bremmer takes anglis and saxonibus to refer to the people of England and the continental Saxons, as I have here, following comments by a reviewer. Given that Reginald is reproducing vernacular words in Durham, however, it is strange that he would give a local word from the north of Germany, far from the eider’s usual haunts. The two ethnonyms might be better translated as ‘Anglian’ and ‘Saxon’; that is, northern, Northumbrian English, Reginald’s local dialect, and the English spoken south of the Humber, with which he might reasonably be expected to be less familiar. His Saxon word, ‘eires’, may be based on the very same dialect distinction made famous in the fifteenth century by the publisher William Caxton in the printer’s prologue to Vergil’s Eneydos about the contrast between the northern, Norse-derived word egg and the native southern word ei (Culley and Furnivall 1890, 2–3). The famously tame eiders were not often eaten—the adult birds are reputed to have a foul taste—but their eggs certainly were. ‘The flesh of Eider Ducks, especially old males, is unusually bad … about the worst of all the ducks’ (Phillips 1986, 107). In Middle English, the plural of ei ‘egg’ is eiren or eire, and eirer is attested from the early fifteenth century as a word for a ‘pen’ (female swan; see Kurath 1998, s.v. eirer). Reginald’s Saxon word for the eider-duck might be a more general word for female waterfowl, especially of a species where eggs were eaten but the adult birds were not. Otherwise, ‘eires’ continues to resist explanation.

18 ‘Remainder’ in Old English is attested as laf; Middle English leving would derive from an unattested **læfing.

19 According to Dominic Alexander, Leving vomits up the remains of the bird, presumably his translation of indicavit, but there is no need for Leving’s confession to be so graphic (Alexander 2008, 157).

20 Beginning with the Sea Birds Protection Act of 1869 and the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1872.

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Antone Minard

Antone Minard received his PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California at Los Angeles, USA in 2002. He specializes in Celtic-language belief and narrative, and currently teaches in the Humanities Department of Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada.