KENNETH GRAHAME’S OTHER BADGER [originally posted 4 January 2015]
Although best known for The Wind in the Willows (1908), the writer Kenneth Grahame was also the creator of the short story, “The Reluctant Dragon” (1898). As a somewhat vexed romantic, and as a keen observer of both animal behaviour and human attitudes toward animals, Grahame offers another badger, this one unnamed but significant. In this contemplative fantasy, the brave knight St. George comes to a small village in the Berkshire Downs to dispatch a fearsome dragon. To his confusion and disappointment, however, he finds that the (notably unnamed) dragon in question is not the least bit disposed toward fighting; rather, the dragon is a cultivated and gentle soul, and it is the humans of the area who are bloodthirsty, as the dragon’s young human friend points out:
“Oh, you’ve been taking in all the yarns those fellows have been telling you,” said the Boy impatiently. “Why, our villagers are the biggest storytellers in all the country round. It’s a known fact. You’re a stranger in these parts, or else you’d have heard it already. All they want is a fight. They’re the most awful beggars for getting up fights–it’s meat and drink to them. Dogs, bulls, dragons–anything so long as it’s a fight. Why, they’ve got a poor innocent badger in the stable behind here, at this moment. They were going to have some fun with him to-day, but they’re saving him up now till your little affair is over.[“][i]
St. George and the dragon become friends, but to fulfill the letter (if not the spirit) of tradition–and to entertain the bored villagers–they decide to participate in a mock battle that will offer excitement without bloodshed. In the celebratory feast that follows, St. George “made a speech, in which he informed his audience” that, among other issues, “they shouldn’t be so fond of fights, because next time they might have to do the fighting themselves, which would not be the same thing at all. And there was a certain badger in the inn stables which had got to be released at once, and he’d come and see it done himself.”[ii] In this unassuming and pacifist-oriented story, both badgers and dragons are spared death for human entertainment, and the people of the community learn to appreciate their other-than-human neighbours; though unnamed and unseen, this badger is kindly remembered by a brave hero whose masculinity is not dependent upon tormenting small animals for sport.
[i] Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon (New York: Holiday House, 1938), p. 29.
[ii] Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon, p. 52.
W.B. YEATS’S TIDY BADGERS AND FOULING FOXES [originally posted 2 January 2015]
Drawing on folk comparisons between supposedly filthy foxes and fastidious badgers, the Irish poet-playwright W.B. Yeats eulogized the great artists of his time in ‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’ (1937) with the defiant line ‘And now that end has come I have not wept;/No fox can foul the lair the badger swept’, hinting that there would be no lesser poets to sully the work of the greater ones. Yeats explicitly drew the proverb from Edmund Spenser’s 1591 lament for the death of Robert Dudley, the first Earl of Leicester, in The Ruines of Time, as well as ‘the common tongue’.[i] Spencer’s earlier poem was a much more pessimistic view of noble men (badgers) displaced by far inferior ones (foxes).
[i] W.B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays, edited by Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein (New York, 2007), pp. 470-471.
PHILIP PULLMAN’S HIS DARK MATERIALS [originally posted 27 December 2014]
Though not a major presence in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, the two appearances by badgers in the trilogy’s first book, Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in North America), are nevertheless significant to the tale, as they relate to the essential bond between young Lyra Belacqua and her shapeshifting soul-dæmon, Pantalaimon. The first takes place when Lyra tries to meet with the disgraced bear king, Iorek Byrnison, to persuade him to join her in a rescue mission; though generally high-spirited and even reckless, she is too frightened of the massive beast to follow through with her plan. To urge her forward, and relying on their deep physical and spiritual bond, Pantalaimon transforms into a stout Meles:
She felt angry and miserable. His badger claws dug into the earth and he walked forward. It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your dæmon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. And she knew it was the same for him. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.
She overcomes her fear and rushes to embrace Pan, who has brought her close enough to begin the delicate negotiations with the mighty bear, but certain that ‘she knew she would rather die than let them be parted and face that sadness again; it would send her mad with grief and terror’.[i] This reflection is a prescient one, for it foreshadows the other badger appearance in the novel, when Lyra and Pan fight against a group of ‘Gobblers’ who threaten to cut Pan away from her in a horrific surgical procedure meant to strip children of the free will represented by their dæmons: ‘But they had dæmons too, of course. It wasn’t two against three, it was two against six. A badger, an owl, and a baboon were all just as intent to pin Pantalaimon down, and Lyra was crying to them: “Why? Why are you doing this? Help us! You shouldn’t be helping them!”’[ii] Here, too, badgerish determination succeeds, though in a sinister reflection of the earlier scene the badger of a full-grown man is used to subject Lyra to the fear of arbitrary power, rather than the earlier freedom she’d experienced when her own beloved Pan became a badger.
[i] Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 143-144.
[ii] Pullman, His Dark Materials, p. 205.