Three fat mice, a fine fat mole, seven fat minnows, six fat beetles (each wrapped in a dock-leaf, fastened with a pine-needle pin), wild honey and a new-laid egg.
No matter how desperate I am to go to a restaurant, I would not choose any of the above from an à la carte menu. Indeed, in Pigs Have Wings, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe (so plump they named him twice) has quite a different dinner in mind when Gloria Salt gives him the bird.
“Smoked salmon, mushroom soup, filet of sole, Hungarian goulash, mashed potatoes, buttered beets, buttered beans, asparagus with mayonnaise, ambrosia chiffon pie, cheese, fruit and petit fours.”
Nevertheless the first menu, delivered over six days, met with the approval of Old Brown owl, the seigneur of an island on a lake. The donors are squirrels seeking his permission to gather nuts. As almost everybody knows, squirrels are poor swimmers, so they made little rafts out of twigs and paddled to Mr Brown’s island using large oars and spreading their tails to act as sails.
Squirrel Nutkin, not only did not bring a present for Old Brown but taunted him every day the squirrels came to the island to gather nuts. Old Brown’s patience wore thin. He caught Master Nutkin but before he could skin him he escaped, albeit losing half his tail. What use an owl has for a squirrel skin is not clear; probably a rich source of roughage.
The squirrels in this story are entrepreneurial in their raft-building, industrious in their nut gathering and prepared to pay for their bounty. Is their payment the reward due to the island’s custodian or a sacrifice to a deity? Old Brown is an enigmatic figure and can be seen as benevolent landowner or vengeful deity. And what do you make of Nutkin? Perhaps a naughty squirrel who gets his come-uppance? I think he is more than that. He is the Fool to Old Brown’s Lear. He eschews nut gathering because in the winter the other squirrels will share their nuts with him. He is a flawed character but escapes from Old Brown’s clutches, becoming a marked squirrel different from the others; a hero who may supplant Old Brown as the object of the other squirrels’ reverence. A leader, the inspiration for Watership Down? If you are reading this you are probably human and, assuming this is the case, there’s not a lot of difference between a squirrel and a rabbit.
BB
You continue to scale new heights in your ability to dazzle us with the breadth of your erudition. Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces missed out Squirrel Nutkin. I can see a chair in social anthropology beckoning. Pity the South Bank Poly has gone. It would have been convenient for lunch in club land.
Thank you, I am working on “De-constructing Beatrix Potter; a fresh perspective”.
As you say, squirrels are poor swimmers so luckily the grey variety have never made it to the Isle of Wight. We see red squirrels in our garden on most days, rushing about on the ground and leaping from branch to branch like gymnasts in the Cirque du Soleil.