Exploring new interpretations
of past and place in archaeology,
folklore and mythology
Black Dogs
Guardians of
the corpse ways
If the
folklore
of phantom black dogs <bdogfl.htm> is
exceptionally rich then the mythology of dogs shows they
have been not only man's close companions for many millennia,
but also providing a very specific spiritual guardianship.
Guardian hounds occur widely in
shamanic Otherworldly lore. The Altaic shaman encounters a
dog that guards the underworld realm of Erlik Khan. When the
Yukaghir shaman follows the road to the kingdom of shadows,
he finds an old woman's house guarded by a barking dog. In
Koryak shamanism the entrance to the land of the dead is
guarded by dogs. A dog with bared teeth guards the entrance
to the undersea land of Takakapsaluk, Mother of the Sea
Beasts, in Eskimo shamanism [1]. The custom of burying a dog
and the skin of a favourite reindeer with a dead man was
still current among Ugrian people of Siberia earlier this
century [2].
The notion of dogs as spiritual
guardians fits the separate folklore of 'Church Grims'.
These perhaps derive from the belief that the first person
to be buried in a churchyard would have to guard any
subsequent inhumed souls. Baring-Gould put forward the
belief that it was the custom to sacrifice a dog,
specifically one without a single white hair, in the
foundations of the church - although direct evidence is
lacking. In Scandinavia a similar practice more commonly use
a lamb, but the creature was still known as the Kirkogrim
[3].
The dog is the oldest domestic
animal, traceable to the paleolithic, since when dogs have
enjoyed a peculiarly close relationship with humans, sharing
their hearths at night and guarding the home, working during
the day as sheepdogs or hunters. This close symbiotic
relationship with people is reflected in the early
literature where dogs seem to have clear connections with
the Otherworld. But this is not unique to hounds as many
species from bulls, boars, to owls and cuckoos have clear
associations with deities which lead to ritual veneration.
However, archaeological evidence and mythology brings
recurring examples of a very specific role for dogs. They
are the 'psycopomps', the guides on the paths to the
Otherworld, the guardians of the 'liminal' zone at the
boundaries of the worlds.
A clear example from British
archaeology is two dogs found with an impressive alignment
of wooden posts at the Flag Fen neolithic/bronze age complex
near Peterborough. These animals seem to have been ritually
killed to serve as spirit-guardians, at a site which was
undoubtedly a major focus for funereal rituals over many
centuries. At Caldicot in Gwent another bronze age site
provides evidence for a dog buried in a manner which
strongly suggests a role as ritual guardian
During the bronze age few of the
population were buried. We can only speculate on the
funerary rituals - did they involve funeral fires by the
side of major rivers, as with hindus today in India? Or did
they involve excarnation, such as the infamous 'Towers of
Silence' of the Parsis in India, that slowly-dying race who
hark back to before all the major religions of that
continent? If excarnation was part of the bronze age death
rites, then it may have been part of everyday life to see
dogs and other scavengers gnawing on human corpses, reducing
most of the bones to small fragments in the process. Such a
grisly sight would reinforce the dog as the species most
suited to act as psychopomp.
Bear in mind also that most
pre-technological cultures believe that the 'essence' of the
food is absorbed by the person eating it. So a dog eating a
corpse would be considered to be takingin not only the flesh
but also the 'soul'. As a slight digression, pigs and boars
are also notable consumers of carrion - could this be why
the boar is the sacred animal of Freya, who also has strong
associations with the battle-slain dead? It might also
explain the 'Tombs of the eagles' in Orkney, so-called
because the human remains were accompanied by the bones of
large raptors - especially those species most given to
scavenging. If burial in a chamber tomb was reserved for the
lite, and the common funereal customs involved excarnation,
then it would be normal belief to see the body and soul of
the dead being consumed and carried skyward by sea eagles.
In north African countries the dog
is less prevalent as scavenger than the jackal. In ancient
Egypt the dog- or jackal-headed Anubis is both psychopomp
and divine embalmer. His cult is older than that of Osiris,
and can be traced to the Sumerian goddess Bau who was also
dog-headed. Her name may well be onomatopoeic, little
removed from 'bow-wow'. Anubis himself, written in early
heiroglyphs as 'An-pu', may be a direct continuation of
Bau's father, the Sumerian god An.
In the early stages of Egyptian
religion, at least, Anubis was linked with the star Sirius,
the brightest star in the sky, known in most mythologies
throughout the world as the 'Dog Star' and the central
consideration of the Egyptian calendar - although Sirius was
later most closely linked with Isis, of course. Incidentally,
this is where our expression 'dog days' originated: the hot,
parched season that followed the heliacal rising of Sirius
coinciding with the Nile's annual inundation of the valley.
[4]
When Anubis mythology travelled to
pre-Classical Greece, where there are no jackals, the wolf
fitted the role just as well. A wolf-headed man, the
prototype of the werewolves of subsequent folk belief, was
begot. I can do no more here than draw attention to Nigel
Jackson's treatment of this theme in a recent issue of The
ley hunter [5] and to Angela Carter's treatment of this
perennial Gothik horror in her short story which was
transformed into the film Company of wolves [6].
Temples to Lycian Apollo, that is 'wolfish Apollo', were not
rare in Classical Greece. Indeed, Aristotle's famous school
was in the grounds of the Lycian Apollo's temple in Athens.
Our word 'Lyceum' has its origins, therefore, with this
lupine god. More academically, Apollo bore the epithet 'Lykegenes',
meaning 'born from the she-wolf' and it was said that his
mother Leto had been escorted from the Hyperboreans (that is,
a distinctly Otherworldy race) by wolves at the time of her
labour. It was as a wolf that Apollo abducted the maiden
Cyrene, although a further epithet was 'Lykoktones', meaning
'one who slew the wolf'. Undoubtedly, the wolf was Apollo's
special animal and a fitting sacrificial victim in his
worship [7].
Dogs were closely linked with the
Greek goddess Hecate (along with lions and horses). Indeed,
at times she was depicted as dog-headed and was certainly
linked to the Dog Star, Sirius. Her pet was the dog Cerberus
(or Kerberos) who is the watchdog at the entrance to Hades.
Usually depicted as triple-headed (a common trait to denote
especial importance) he was originally fifty-headed, a topic
which I shall return to. The Dorian Greeks explicitly
associated Cerebos with Anubis in his role as psychopomp and
Robert Graves (The Greek myths) writes that Cerebos
'. . . seems to have been originally the Death-goddess
Hecate . . .'
A dog as companion on the road to
the Otherworld occurs explicitly in one of the tales in that
vast hindu epic the Mahabharata. Yudhishthira, the
King of Pandavas, with his five brothers, their joint wife
and a dog set off on a rambling journey which took them to
the sacred 'omphalos' of the hindus, Mount Meru. The
companions die one-by-one of exhaustion but Yudhishthira
survives and 'enters heaven in his mortal body, not having
tasted death' [8]. The dog too comes with him, and is
revealed to be Dharma (the Law) in disguise.
A very similar tale survives from
Iran, although the only significant difference is that the
dog is replaced by the angel Surush. It seems clear that
both these tales hark back to a common ancestor which must
be very ancient indeed. Further parallels can be detected in
the Book of Enoch and in the New World legends of
Quetzalcoutl, which suggest an exceptionally early origin (although
it has to be said that the dog companion does not feature in
these two versions). A very degraded version of the legend
survives in an Albanian fairy tale (it would be too
long-winded to specify the just-detectable links). In it we
can recognise the Dharma Dog. A king's daughter offers to go
to war in her father's place and asks his blessing. 'The
king procured three male suits and gave her his blessing,
and this blessing changed into a little dog and went with
the princess.' [9] Going to war may not be the same as going
directly to the Otherworld, but the gender-bending surrogate
has curiously shamanic overtones.
Celtic canines
Coming closer to home, both
geographically and temporally: 'Faunal remains, iconography
(mainly of the Romano-Celtic period) and vernacular Celtic
literature all indicate that there were many different types
of Celtic dog, from the deer-hound so splendidly represented
at the Lydney sanctuary to small terriers and lapdogs. . . .
Greyhounds are specifically mentioned in the early Welsh
literature: they formed some of the many gifts presented to
Pwyll by Arawn, lord of the Otherworld, in the First Branch
of the Mabinogi. Two greyhounds accompany Culhwch,
when he sets out in all his splendour to visit his cousin
Arthur, in 'Culhwch and Olwen.' [10]
The guardianship aspect of dogs in
Celtic life is amply illustrated by one of the stories of
the early life of C Chulainn. In early Ireland the prefix 'Cu'
(Hound of) was frequently used in Celtic names of heroes, to
denote warrior status. But the most famous so named - Cu
Chulainn, the Hound of Culann - had a very special and close
relationship with dogs. As a young boy, he is called Stanta,
but he kills the huge guard dog of Culann the smith and, as
a penance, he takes the dog's place and also his name. This
affinity with dogs recurs in the adult life of Cu Chulainn:
he has a geis (a bond or taboo) on him that he must
never eat hound-flesh. But he is offered dogmeat at a feast,
and there is another geis on him never to refuse
hospitality. He breaks the first rule and eats the meat;
this act weakens the hero's supernatural strength and leads
ultimately to his death. The episode is interesting, since
it implies that dog meat was a traditional food for the
early Celts; this is borne out by the archaeology of Iron
Age Europe, where dog remains are part of food refuse on
settlement sites. But at the same time, dog ritual was very
prominent in Britain and Gaul, and there is evidence that
dogs fulfilled a special role in Celtic religion.
There is evidence that dogs were
eaten, both on habitation sites and as part of ritual
feasting, as at the sanctuary of Gournay (Oise, northern
France). Dog pelts were also frequently utilised as the
Roman writer Diodorus Siculus remarks of the Celts: 'When
dining, they sit not on chairs but on the earth, strewing
beneath them the skins of wolves or dogs'. More macabrely
still, the ninth century commentator Cormac comments on a
divination rite known as Imbas Forosnai, which involved
foretelling the future by chewing on the flesh of pigs, dogs
or cats - a custom which, presumably, dates back to well
before the Anglo-Saxon era.
In the Roman period the remains of
dogs seem to be found frequently in association with wells.
At the Romano-British town of Caerwent, the tribal capital
of the Silures, five dog skulls were placed in a well.
Numerous dogs were cast into a deep well associated with the
shrine of the first century CE at Muntham Court (Sussex).
The remains of sixteen dogs, together with a complete Samian
bowl, were placed in a second-century well at Staines near
London. 'It is very probable that dogs were linked with some
chthonic or underworld ritual.' [11]
As scavengers and carrion-eaters,
dogs came to be associated with death, in both the classical
and Celtic religious traditions. Some of the ritual
treatment of dogs in Gaul and Britain may point to this
aspect of their symbolism. The rich iconography of the
Gundestrop cauldron also shows a a dog underneath the
cauldron in which a man or child is being immersed
head-first - usually considered to be a sacrificial act.
Hunting hounds
There is a strong hint in the Irish
and Welsh vernacular literature of a close correlation
between hunter/hunted and the divine world. Dogs were used
in the hunt and this may have been the origin of their
symbolic link with death. Hunted animals were sometimes
perceived as messengers of the Otherworld powers, the means
of bringing living humans, either directly or indirectly, to
the underworld. The hunted creature itself may be enchanted
or possess magical qualities: it may be a transformed human
or a god in zoomorphic form.
In 'Pwyll',
Arawn, king of the
underworld, has a pack of shining white, red-eared dogs,
their colouring proclaiming their Otherworld origins. The
Cwn Annwn or Hounds of Annwn were death omens, described in
an early Welsh poem as small, speckled and greyish-red,
chained and led by a black-horned figure. These were ghost
dogs which appeared only at night to foretell death, sent
from Annwn to seek out corpses and human souls.
In the Welsh 'Tale of Culhwch and
Olwen', Culhwych's quest for the hand of Olwen is associated
with a number of tasks connected with supernatural dogs: one
of his 'labours' is to seek the two whelps of a great bitch
called Rhymni, who is in the shape of a she-wolf and
extraordinarily swift. (Perhaps it is worth noting that
Pliny refers to cross-breeding wolves with dogs to obtain
exceptionally fierce war dogs. Could such hybrids be
occurring in the wild and giving rise to reports of menacing,
oversize hounds?)
Near one of the forts at Cashlie in
the Highlands is a large standing stone which resembles the
head of a dog. It is known as Bhacain (Gaelic for 'dog stake')
and locals say it is the stake where Fionn MacCummail's
warriors tethered their hunting dogs when they returned from
the chase. Fionn was a hero god-king of the Dark Ages who
occurs in both Scottish and Irish lore. [12]
Finnish canines
The Finnish epics known as the
Kalevala
contain their own dog-lore. Bear in mind that the
Finno-Ugaric cultures are, originally, quite separate from
Indo-European ones (although no doubt by the medieval period
at least some intermingling of ideas had taken place in the
border areas, such as Scandinavia.
Runo XLVI (lines 81-94) of the
Kalevala
tells how Louhi, the Crone of the northern wasteland that
has more than a passing resemblance to the realm of the dead,
awakens the bear (known by such nicknames as Small-eye,
Broad-nose, Otso) from hibernation to ravage V inminen's
herds. In response, Vinminen gets his brother, the smith
Ilmarinen, to forge him a spear. He asks the goddess
Mielikki, the mistress of the forests, to bind her dogs
securely and keep her whelps in order. In the context, this
is understood to be a request for protection from the wolves.
Then Vinminen:
Heard his dog barking loudly,
And the hound was fiercely baying
Just beside the Small-eye's dwelling,
In the pathway of the Broad-nose;
And he spoke the words which follow:
'First I thought it was a cuckoo,
Thought I heard a love-bird singing;
But no cuckoo there is calling,
nd no love-bird there is singing,
But it is my dog that's baying,
Here my faithful hound awaits me,
At the door of Otso's dwelling,
At the handsome hero's homestead! [13]
One assumes it reads much less like
doggerel in the original Finnish. Vinminen then kills the
bear and sings its praises in a manner typical of
Finno-Ugarian bear rites. While this may, superficially,
seem a digression, it should be emphasised that the Great
Bear of these legends is inextricably woven into the World
Tree mythos and should be seen, among other things, as the
stellar constellation of the Bear (the Plough) circling
about the Pole Star (stellar pivot of the axis mundi).
I suspect the confusion with the cuckoo, another supremely 'Otherworldly'
creature in folklore, is intended to emphasise the mythical
importance of the events.
Furthermore, the same bear hunting
rituals link in closely with 'ritual' pathways. A Finnish
bear-hunting song goes:
Go pointing the path
and blazing the trail
marking the sides of the path
straightening planks over swamps;
carve notches along the lands
slash a trail upon the slopes
that this fool may feel the way
this utter stranger may know! [14]
The significance of this will be
brought into focus later.
Although the Kalevala derives from
traditions quite separate to Celtic Scandinavia and Europe,
it is interesting that one of the mischievous protagonists,
Kullervo, is sent to the house of Ilmarinen, the divine
smith. In one variant of the tale is is said that he was
'sent to Estonia to bark under the fence . . . three years
he barked at the smith'. This, of course, has curious
parallels with the life of C Chulainn, described above. [15]
In another episode, Kullervo
returns home after a long absence and unknowingly seduces
his sister. She drowns herself but Kullervo is persuaded to
go off to war. After much derring-do he comes back home
again but finds all his family have died. He weeps over the
grave of his mother. Her voice is heard:
And beneath the mound made answer:
'Still there lives the black dog, Musti,
Go with him into the forest,
At thy side let him attend thee
Kullervo takes the dog into the
forest but, when he comes to the place where he dishonoured
his sister, despair overcomes him and he throws himself on
his own sword. The presence of the dog in this episode seems
quite incidental - unless we look upon him as a guardian of
the road to the dead.
Friar Tuck's fifty hounds
As Alby Stone has discussed in his
article
on hellhounds <hellhnds.htm>
in this issue, in the Old English Passion of St
Christopher the saint is described thus: 'He was of the
race of mankind who are half hound'. The OE Martyrology
says he was of 'The nation where men have the head of a dog
and from the country where men devour each other'. In this
work St Christopher himself is portrayed in this way: 'He
had the head of a hound, and his locks were extremely long,
and his eyes shone as bright as the morning star, and his
teeth were as sharp as a boar's tusks.' This version of the
story is peculiarly English, needless to say.
If this sounds decidedly odd then
moving on a few centuries to the Robin Hood legend
associated with Fountain Dale, Nottinghamshire and Fountains
Abbey, Yorkshire provides an intriguing parallel. At one
point Friar Tuck agrees to carry Robin Hood across a moat to
an island (i.e. act as psychopomp to the Otherworld) on the
understanding that Robin will return the favour on the
return journey. However, Robin dumps Friar Tuck in the water
half-way back. A fight ensues, and Robin Hood starts to get
the better of his adversary who blows his horn which summons
fifty hounds. Robin Hood blows his horn, in response to
which fifty bowmen appear and shoot the dogs. In the
introduction to the tale, Friar Tuck is introduced as Master
of the Hounds.
St Christopher, of course, lived by
a ford and made a name for himself by carrying an incognito
JC across a river. The overlaps are clear, especially the
Old English variants where St Christopher is also linked to
dogs. The emphasis on crossing a watery boundary with the
Otherworld confirms the 'liminality' of the symbolism and
make the - apparently unexpected - connections with canines
seem quite predictable [16].
But why fifty hounds? Consider that
the earliest written story in the world, the Saga of
Gilgamesh, makes frequent references to the king-priest
Gilgamesh wearing armour that weights fifty minas and having
fifty companions. Slightly later Sumerian legends talk of
'fifty great gods' (and give Marduk, the greatest of their
gods, fifty different names, to emphasise his importance), a
symbolic mace with fifty heads and fifty heroes in a boat.
The early Greek legends of the Argonauts sailing off also
feature a crew of fifty [17].
In later Greek myths, the goddess
Artemis sets the hounds of hell upon Actaeon. After this
little digression on numerology, perhaps it will not
surprise you that there were fifty of these beasts. As
mentioned briefly above, Cerebos, the hellhound with
guardianship of Hades itself, started his mythical life with
fifty heads. Clearly, fifty was a 'magical' number in early
middle eastern myth, gradually losing its importance in the
Classical Greek legends. But why should this carry through
to medieval Sherwood Forest? Well, it is possible that the
tales of Artemis and Acteon were known to a medieval
storyteller and were 'borrowed'. Interesting, nevertheless,
that the psychopompic symbolism remains intact.
The hounds of northern mythology
Back to our 'local' Anglo-Saxons .
In Beowulf the monster Grendel and his mother are
variously described as werhdo, heorowearh, brimwulf
and grundwyrgenne, all of which imply a lupine
nature. Grendel is also called a scucca ('demon')
which is the source of the second part of the folklore name
for phantom black dogs, Black Shuck. The general idea is
that the Grendel family represent canine or lupine demons
who haunt fenland and marshes; but they also have a human
aspect, which connects them to the old Germanic idea of
outlawry, and to the werewolf.
Behind the northern myths of
Otherworldly dogs there are numerous mythological reference
'hellhounds' in Greek, Indic, Celtic, Germanic, Latin,
Armenian and Iranian sources. These all suggest that there
was a pair of Otherworldly dogs, 'one being the dog
of life and the other the dog of death, serving to carry off
one about to die, while the former can restore him or her to
life' [18]. In the Armenian this is most clear as one hound
is named Spitak, 'the White', and the other the hound of
death, Siaw, 'the Black'.
Hellhounds almost abound in the
northern myths - such dogs are mentioned in Baldrs
Draumar, Voluspa, Gylfaginning, Grimnismal, Skirnismal
and Fjolsvinnsmal. The last-named poem tells of
Odin's two hounds who keep ceaseless watch - one sleeps by
day and the other by night - outside the Otherworldly
fortress-hall Lyfjaberg ('mount of healing') of Mengloth,
thought by some to be another name for Freyja (although she
could be Hel herself, in a beneficent aspect, or a minor
goddess of the dead).
In Fjolsvinnsmal these
hounds are named:
Tell me Fjolsvithr
this I want to ask
and I wish to know:
how the dogs are named,
who greedily roam
before the grounds [i.e. of Mengloth's hall]
One is called Gifr,
and the other Geri,
if you want to know that;
very ancient guards
and they keep guard
until the gods are torn apart. [19]
The names of these hounds, Gifr and
Geri, are closely linked to words meaning 'greedy',
understood to mean hungry for the flesh of the dead. In
various Indo-European texts (Iliad; Vedevdat) there
are references to dogs devouring corpses (no doubt harking
to a period when excarnation was a preliminary funerary
process). There is a formulaic curse in the Old Norse sagas
which translates: 'Dogs shall gnaw you in Hel.'
In the poem
Baldrs Draumar
the god Baldr has bad dreams, so Odin rides down to Hiflhel
on old Sleipnir [20], to find out what they mean.
Up rose Odin, the ancient
gautr,
and on Sleipnir laid the saddle.
Downward he rode to Nifhel;
he met a hound that came from Hel.
It was bloody about the breast,
and at the Father of Spells
he howled long. Forward rode Odin,
the earth-way thundered,
at last he came to the house of Hel. [21]
In the tenth century Scandinavian
poems Eirksml and Hakonarmal a dead king is
described as entering the hall of Odin after his last
battle. When he arrives at Valhalla he is welcomed by
valkyries, one of whom greets the newcomer with a horn of
ale. Such scenes are depicted on several stone sculptures,
one of which from Alskog (Gotland) appears to show a
stylised hall, which bears some resemblance to a burial
mound and a dog which 'could be the dog mentioned in
mythological poems as guarding the road to the land of the
dead.' [22]
Is this the hound which is the
precursor of the phantom guardians of gates and stiles which
abound in our country's folklore?
The idea of entering into the earth
on an Otherworldly journey also occurs in British folklore
and the various tales of Piper's Holes. Here a man, usually
a piper but sometimes a fiddler, enters an underground
passage way. Those above ground follow his progress by
listening for his music but suddenly all goes quite.
Intriguingly, in the tales the man seems to invariably be
accompanied by a dog. The dog emerges from the entrance,
desperately frightened (or badly burned, in some versions)
but the man is never seen again. Although never explicitly
tied to a 'hollow hill' legend, this folk tale motif seems
to have much in common with the even-more common notions of
barrows being hollow and of underground tunnels of
improbable length.
Going walkies in the liminal lands
From the Poetic Edda we get the
impression of the Otherworld divided into separate realms,
but with plenty of opportunity to pass from one to the
other, and the world of humankind only one among nine. We
are led to think of roads, tracks and waterways occupied by
many travellers, moving in ships, on horseback, by wagons
and sledges, or on foot. Such a picture, incidentally, is
borne out by many travelling figures on foot or in vehicles
shown on a ninth century tapestry recovered from the Oseberg
ship burial in southern Norway, which appears to show
supernatural characters in the restored section [23].
This insistence on the roads and
rivers of the Otherworld might imply that it was important
for men as well as the gods to possess knowledge of entry,
and of routes to take when travelling to the land of the
dead or down into the underworld in search of wisdom.
Quite why the Norse literature
considers journeying to the underworld to be important is
never explicitly stated. It is a theme which recurs in
various sagas, as Davidson had revealed in an early work, The
road to Hel [24]. Clearly, the origins of these
supernatural tracks are linked with the interior journeys of
shaman in earlier times. '. . . in certain accounts the
emphasis on supernatural wisdom, through which the journey
may be made, and on the immaterial gifts to be gained
through it, is marked.' Furthermore, 'we are faced with a
way which is not trod by the dead alone, but which the
living also may follow. The land of the dead according to
Norse heathen thought is not a wholly undiscovered country,
and from it the traveller who has learned the old wisdom
aright may return to the world of men.' [25]
Elsewhere in
The road to Hel
we are told that dog guardians are one of several
characteristic features of the journey. Analogously, 'The
watchman on the mound, too, is a familiar figure; can it be
because the figure sitting on the howe symbolises
communication between the living and the dead . . . ?' As we
have seen, it might be better to see the dog as the better
guardian and symbol of the liminal status of the barrow.
The essence of the hellhound is his
intermediary position - at the border of this world and
next, between life and death, hope and fear, and also (given
its pairing with the dog of life) between good and evil. For
this role, the dog is perfectly suited, being the domestic
species par excellence, the tamed carnivore who stands
midway between animal and human, savagery and civilization,
nature and culture [26].
'The growl of the hellhound is yet
another expression of this liminal position, for the growl
is a halfway station between articulate speech and silence.
It is a speech filled with emotion and power, but utterly
lacking in reason. Like death itself, the hellhound speaks,
but does not listen; acts, but never reflects or
reconsiders. Driven by hunger and greed, he is insatiable
and his growl is eternal in duration. In the last analysis,
the hellhound is the moment of death, the great crossing
over, the ultimate turning point.' [27]
Which takes us straight back to the
folklore of sable curs and - as detailed in my 'Black
dogs in folklore' <bdogfl.htm> article
elsewhere in this issue - confirms their close association
with stiles and gateways such as the Rev Worthington-Smith's
perceptive remarks of 1910 state and Theo Brown's assertions
about their natural tendency to be seen on roads, plus Janet
and Colin Bord's research into phantom dogs on leys.
Few myths have such world-wide
parallels. We are left with the distinct impression that
dogs have been protecting the ways to the Otherworld back
into the origins of human beliefs.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was
inspired by Hilda Ellis Davidson's remarks on the Alskog
stone in The lost beliefs of northern Europe. The
information on Celtic dogs is based almost entirely on
Miranda Green's Animals in celtic life and myth. Both
authors provided helpful guidance to further information,
for which I am most grateful. Special thanks to Alby Stone
for drawing my attention to Lincoln's work on the
hellhounds, Eliade's work on dogs in shamanism, some of the
Kalevala canine connections, and also for reading a draft
version of this article. Jeremy Harte provided especially
useful assistance, and Frank Earp perceptively suggested the
Tomb of the Eagles parallels and imparted the Friar Tuck
legend.
References
1: Mircea Eliade, Shamanism:
archaic techniques of ecstasy, Pantheon, 1951.
2: V N Chernetsove, 'On Ugrian concepts of the soul' in Studies
in Siberian shamanism ed. H.N. Michael, University of
Toronto Press 1963.
3: Coamhin O'Dubhfaigh, 'Another shaggy dog story', Talking
stick No.11, 1993.
4: Robert K.G. Temple, The Sirius mystery, Sidgwick
and Jackson, 1976. While many of the suggestions made in
this book can be ridiculed, his wide-ranging research
provides some sound insights into related topics.
5: Nigel Jackson, 'Christmas as you never knew it', The
ley hunter No.120 1994. This is closely related to a
chapter in the same author's Call of the horned piper,
Capall Bann 1994 (see review elsewhere in this issue).
6: A. Carter, 'Company of wolves' in The bloody chamber
(Victor Gollanz 1979)
7: R.G.Wasson, S. Kramrisch, J. Ott, C.A.P. Ruck, Persephone's
quest, Yale University Press, 1986.
8: Firdausi The Shahnama of Firdausi, trans. A.G. and
E. Warner, London 1905-9 cited in Hamlet's mill G. de
Santillana and H. von Dechend, Macmillan 1970
9: J.C. von Hahn Griechische und Albanische Mrchen
(1918) cited in G. de Scintillas and H. von Decked, op.
cit.
10: Miranda Green, Animals in Celtic life and myth,
Routledge, 1992. Much of the information in this article on
the Celtic mythology of dogs is drawn from this book,
together with the same author's Symbol and image in
Celtic religious art, Routledge, 1989.
11: Green, ibid.
12: 'The hag's house', David Clarke, The ley hunter
No.120, 1994
13: Translation by Kirby.
14: Translation by Keith Bosley, The Kanteletar
Oxford 1992
15: G. de Santillana and H. von Dechend, op. cit.
16: I am particularly grateful to Frank Earp for drawing
attention to this tale, which brings the enigmatic notions
of the preceding paragraph more clearly into focus.
17: Temple, op. cit.
18: Bruce Lincoln, Death, war and sacrifice,
University of Chicago Press, 1991; citing Bernfried
Schlerath, 'Der Hund bei den Indogermanen', Paideuma,
6 (1954), p39.
19: Translation by Alby Stone especially for this article.
20: Sleipnir is Odin's eight-legged steed. But given Odin's
own role as a psycopomp, Hilda Ellis Davidson has speculated
that such a 'steed' may be a metaphorical reference to a
coffin carried by four men.
21: Translation by Alby Stone especially for this article. Gautr
is an obscure term which may mean that Odin's ancestors are
the Goths, but it is likely to have also meant a human
sacrificial victim.
22: Hilda Ellis Davidson, The lost beliefs of northern
Europe, Routledge, 1993.
23: Hilda Ellis Davidson, 'Mythical geography in the Edda
Poems', Mapping invisible worlds (Cosmos 9), ed. G.D.
Flood, Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
24: Hilda Ellis Davidson, The road to Hel, Cambridge,
1943.
25: ibid.
26: Lincoln, op. cit.
27: Lincoln, op. cit.
Originally published in Mercian
Mysteries No.20 August 1994.
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Created April 1996; updated August 2001
http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/bdogs.htm
Hi
Sorry for the delay.
Thanks too for the info about the
NDE and the images. Not too many people have tried to depict
'phantom' black dogs so I'm intrigued by your pics.
Which Web pages? Are they all
written by me? If not I will need to contact the author for
formal permission. Please email the URLs (Web site adresses)
of the relevant page(s) and I then confirm. Shouldn't be any
problem but I need to know exactly what you are interested
in.
Best wishes
Bob
Thanks to Bob Trubshaw to have let
me publish this text "Black
Dogs
Guardians of the corpse ways".
No changes have been made , the
copy is complete. You can check out the website
<http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/index.htm>
and the relevant page(s) with illustrations
at:
http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/bdogs.htm
