Episode 5: Hunting the Wren
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December 26th is known by many names—Boxing Day, St. Stephen’s Day—but one that might be less familiar is Wren Day. Wren Day is named after an ancient, pre-Christian ritual once common to Britain and France; it’s called “Hunting the Wren,” and it’s still enacted in parts of those regions today. Its roots lie in ancient sun-worship and symbolic sacrifice; the death of the old year and the birth of the new. “The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,” the chant begins; and on Wren Day that king, a tiny bird, is hunted and laid to rest, only to sing again with the rising sun. The king is dead; long live the king. Welcome to Rime, where we’re hunting tales from the history of poetry. I’m your host, MJ Millington.
On the Isle of Man, the ritual is known as “Hunt the Wren.” It’s still celebrated every December 26th, and involves participants dancing in a ring, while a child standing in the center holds the ritual’s most important artifact—the wren pole. The wren pole, made of two willow hoops set crosswise, is dressed with ivy and ribbons, with a wren dangling by its legs from the top. A replica wren is used now, but traditionally the wren would have been a real one, hunted and paraded before the dancing took place. George Waldron, author of A Description of the Isle of Man, published in 1731, described the ritual: “they go to hunt the wren, and after having found one of these poor birds, they kill her, and lay her on a bier with the utmost solemnity, bringing her to the parish church, and burying her with a whimsical kind of solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manks language, which they call her knell.” Waldron doesn’t offer any interpretation of the ritual; he only describes it with the faint (and sometimes not-so-faint) disdain with which he, an Englishman, seems to describe everything these perplexing, uncouth foreigners are doing, referring to their Christmastide customs as “infinitely more fatiguing.” Later authors are willing to offer up all manner of explanations for the origin of and meaning behind the ritual; we’ll cover some of those later on.
The ritual is also still performed in Ireland to this day, again with a replica bird nailed to the wren pole. Participants gather in the days leading up to Wren Day to make the distinctive straw suits—which look a little like a cross between a haystack and a wookie—that they’ll wear as part of a parade of mummers, musicians and other motley characters that joyously tromp through the streets of towns like Dingle, in south-western Ireland. Traditional wren days in the past didn’t end so joyously for the wrens, however. Well into the early 20th century, gangs of young boys, called “wren boys,” would have trooped out with cudgels and wattle sticks to beat the bushes in the surrounding countryside, startling wrens out of hedge and thicket, exhausting the birds through repeated flushing, until they were too tired to evade their hunters. On the 26th, St. Stephen’s day, the wren boys would parade the dead wren on its pole about the town, singing some variation of a song that begins, "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds / St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze. / Up with the kettle and down with the pan/ Give us a penny to bury the wren.” The boys would collect the pennies into a fund used for a dance known as the Wren Ball; those who gave money received a feather from the wren, which was supposed to be good luck. In the Isle of Man the feather was supposed to protect against shipwreck, and sailors would be sure to have one on their person when at sea.
This traditional version of the wren hunt is the background for “The Boys of Barr na Sraide,” a poem written by Irish poet Sigerson Clifford in the 1940s. A song based on the poem became hugely popular in Ireland in the 1950s through the radio program The Ballad Makers’ Saturday Night; it remains a standard in pubs, folk festivals and funerals. The poem is set in the beloved town of Clifford’s childhood: Cahersiveen, in County Kerry, on the south-western coast of Ireland, where the narrator remembers hunting the wren with his childhood friends. “Barr na Sraide” means “the top of the street” in Irish Gaelic, and “dreoilín” means “wren.”
The Boys of Barr na Sraide by Sigerson Clifford
O the town it climbs the mountain and looks upon the sea,
And sleeping time or waking ’tis there I’d long to be,
To walk again that kindly street, the place I grew a man
And the Boys of Barr na Sraide went hunting for the wran.* wren
With cudgels stout we roamed about to hunt the droileen
We searched for birds in every furze from Letter to Dooneen:
We sang for joy beneath the sky, life held no print nor plan
And we Boys in Barr na Sraide, hunting for the wran.
And when the hills were bleeding and the rifles were aflame,
To the rebel homes of Kerry the Saxon stranger came,
But the men who dared the Auxies and beat the Black and Tan
Were the Boys of Barr na Sraide hunting for the wran.
And here’s a toast to them tonight, the lads who laughed with me,
By the groves of Carhan river or the slope of Beenatee,
John Dawley and Batt Andy, and the Sheehans Con and Dan,
And the Boys of Barr na Sraide who hunted for the wran.
And now they toil on foreign soil, where they have gone their way
Deep in the heart of London town or over in Broadway.
And I am left to sing their deeds, and praise them while I can
Those Boys of Barr na Sraide who hunted for the wran.
And when the wheel of life runs down and peace comes over me,
O lay me down in that old town between the hills and sea,
I’ll take my sleep in those green fields the place my life began,
Where the Boys of Barr na Sraide went hunting for the wran.
Clifford saw Irish myths as living things: the people, the landscape were part of an ongoing story that began deep in ancient history, and was still playing out around him. He was their bard, “left to sing their deeds;” and so the ordinary people around him were just as important as any legendary figure from a story. In his poem “I am Kerry,” he wrote: “My grandfather tended the turf fire / And, leaning backward into legend, spoke / Of doings old before quills inked history. / I saw dark heroes fighting in the smoke….” Clifford had already moved away from the town of his youth by the time he wrote “The Boys of Barr na Sraide.” He was a playwright living in Dublin in the 1940s, looking back with longing on a place and time where stories were still alive; where he had been a part of them as a child, on the inside, without ever having known it at the time.
Clifford does not try to explain the wren hunting ritual in “The Boys of Barr na Sraide,” though he himself was a participant during perhaps the last period in history when the ritual was enacted without modern self-consciousness or self-awareness. It was still the province of country people, mostly untouched by the Celtic revival that swept through the Irish intellectual class of the late 19th-century; nor again through the student-led Celtic revival movement of the 1960s, which is the reason the replica-wren hunt has been revived in many parts of the UK and Ireland today. Clifford, like the rest of the Cahersiveen wren boys, was born into it, and lived right inside of it—and perhaps because he was inside it, it needed no explanation at all.
Others did want a meaning for the wren hunt, however. Beginning in the 18th century, after the Enlightenment began to sever people from what would have been a lifelong, community-nurtured understanding of such rituals (even if their true original meaning was shrouded in the mists of time), origin stories began to be conjured to try to explain where the ritual of hunting the wren had come from. Educated spectators tried to make sense of what they were seeing, and tied those loose ends together with snippets of Celtic mythology, Christian martyrology, and Irish history, to name a few. In 1816, nearly a hundred years after George Waldron first described the wren hunt on the Isle of Man, English historian Hannah Ann Bullock, who lived on the island for 10 years, offered a literal fairy-tale explanation for the hunt, writing “...In former times, a fairy of uncommon beauty exerted such undue influence over the male population, that she at various times seduced numbers to follow her footsteps, till, by degrees, she led them into the sea, where they perished. … A knight-errant sprung up, who discovered some means of countervailing the charms used by this syren, and even laid a plot for her destruction, which she only escaped at the moment of extreme hazard, by taking the form of a wren; but though she evaded instant annihilation, a spell was cast upon her, by which she was condemned on every succeeding New Year's Day, to reanimate the same form.” So the fairy enchantress, sometimes referred to by the name Tehi Tegi, is condemned annually to be hunted and die in the shape of a wren—one of many instances throughout early European mythology of siren-type women luring men to watery deaths, and being punished accordingly.
Christian connections were also teased out of the ritual, pinning it more firmly to December 26th, the feast of St. Stephen, then it had been in the past. In 1731 when Waldron described the wren hunt, it took place late on Christmas Eve into Christmas Day, rather than firmly on the 26th; other sources describe it as a solstice ritual, which would have taken place nearer the 21st of December, by our modern reckoning. The identification with St Stephen, then, is a relatively recent development in the long history of the wren ritual. "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds / St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze,” the wren song goes, and that modern version of the song is probably less than two hundred years old. St. Stephen is considered the first Christian martyr: he was known for his wisdom and impassioned speeches, but was accused of blasphemy, and stoned to death for heresy in AD 34. The manner of killing the wren is not fixed throughout history, but those who explain it relative to St. Stephen often state that the wren, too, is stoned to death. So there’s an interesting identification here of the wren—whose name in almost every European language translates as king, or “little king,” thus making the wren the king of birds—with the saint, whose name, Stephen, is Greek for “crown.” They are both a type of sacrificed king.
And yet the wren is just as likely, if not moreso, to be identified with those who threw the stones at Stephen, those who martyred him. In fact there’s a very fluid and flexible line of explanation that pins the wren in the role of betrayer; of treachery, of revealing that which had hoped to stay hidden, of defeat at the hands of the enemy. The players—those betrayed—change depending on who’s doing the telling, but the betrayer remains the same. So the wren, on the fateful day of Stephen’s martyrdom, is supposed to have betrayed him to the angry crowd by flapping its wings over him, thus revealing the saint’s hiding place. Different versions cast different groups from Irish history into the tale: for example the Irish are hiding from invading Vikings, and they’re about to raid the invaders, take them by surprise and finally win back their land, but at the critical moment their presence is betrayed by a wren. Or in another version set in the 17th century, Irish soldiers are hiding from Cromwell’s invading army; and they’re about to raid the invaders, take them by surprise and finally win back their land, but at the critical moment their presence is betrayed by a wren. You see how it goes. And so in this explanation for the ritual the wren must be hunted: to redress a wrong, to punish its treachery.
Talk of treachery brings us around again to Sigerson Clifford’s poem, particularly one of its most evocative stanzas. “The Boys of Barr na Sraide” on the whole embodies nostalgia for a lost world and home; but at the same moment that the boys in the poem are “[singing] for joy beneath the sky, [as] life held no print nor plan,” their world was on the verge of explosive change, far beyond that of children simply growing up or moving away. Clifford alludes to those events in the third stanza: “And when the hills were bleeding and the rifles were aflame, / To the rebel homes of Kerry the Saxon stranger came, / But the men who dared the Auxies and beat the Black and Tan / Were the Boys of Barr na Sraide hunting for the wran.” The “Saxon strangers” that Clifford mentions, the Auxies and the Black and Tans, were two groups associated with the Royal Irish Constabulary, the English-controlled police force established in Ireland in 1822. The Auxies were the paramilitary “Auxiliary Division” of the RIC, while the Black and Tans were English recruits into the regular police force, which had been majority Irish in makeup previously. Both were established in 1920 as reinforcements to aid the English against the Irish Republican Army in the Irish War for Independence; the vast majority of recruits were ex-servicemen returned home after World War I, when jobs for returning servicemen were scarce. Both groups became quickly infamous for drunkenness, unprovoked police brutality, looting, extrajudicial killings, shocking reprisals against civilians for actions taken by the IRA, and the arson and bombing of civilian centers, such as the destruction of the city of Cork. Their shameful behaviour ironically led members of the English public and upper classes to press for a peaceful resolution to the war: a peace treaty was signed, and the Republic of Ireland was established in 1922. With it came the disbanding of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the Auxies and Black and Tans were shipped back home; though their treachery cast a long shadow over the land they left behind. The spectre of the Black and Tans is still a powerful one; the name itself looming darkly despite the century that has passed since their disbanding.
Some sense of this looming spectre is present in Clifford’s poem, the sense of an evil still alive despite the passage of time. There’s a strange sense of displacement in time throughout the stanza, in fact. “... The men who dared the Auxies and beat the Black and Tan / Were the Boys of Barr na Sraide hunting for the wran.” The lines make it sound as though the boys who hunted the wren, Clifford and his friends, were the same men who fought the Black and Tans and the Auxies; but that could not have been literally true. Clifford was born in 1913, so he would have been seven years old in 1920, when the Black and Tans were recruited into the RIC; and he would have been only nine years old when they were disbanded two years later. He and his friends could not have been the ones to actually fight the “Saxon strangers” mentioned in the poem. And yet, in a sense, they were those fighters; because “the men who dared the Auxies and beat the Black and Tan,” had once themselves been the boys of their town, hunting the wren. And I think it’s fair to entertain the idea, since we are talking about a symbolic ritual—many of which, by their very repetition, have a feeling of existing outside time—that perhaps the wren boys are always the same, no matter who steps into their role from year to year. And so of course the wren boys of Barr na Sraide were the ones to fight the Black and Tans. This is something I love about poetry (and about symbolic rituals, come to think of it)—that each line or image, sometimes each word, is not merely its most obvious self, but actually made up of layers; so that a line that is not the literal truth can yet still be true at the exact same time, in a different sense. Perhaps it’s also this layering of meaning that allows the wren hunt, as portrayed in Clifford’s poem, to be a thing of joy and innocence, even though it involved the hunting and killing of a creature that was itself innocent. And yet it’s so strongly contrasted with the terrible violence the Black and Tans caused—the “bleeding hills,” as Clifford describes them, that it’s clear that, for Clifford at least, whatever violence we modern viewers might see in the wren hunt, it does not exist on the same plane as that of war.
Perhaps that’s because the wren hunt, by its nature, is not realistic but symbolic; the ritual itself exists on, or touches, a different plane. Irish poet Padraic Fallon connects the wren hunt to the ancient Mesopotamian weather god Anzu, in his poem “Yesterday’s Man.” He writes about a drawing in his notebook, “A pen drawing, very odd, the Storm God Zu / Trussed in his fowl form to a carrying pole; / (From him the wren-walk on St. Stephen’s Day);” as if there’s a direct line between the wren paraded on the wren pole, and the propitiation of some kind of elemental deity. And that may be true, for all we know; though the most likely origins of the ritual lie, as in so many of our most ancient human rituals, in recognition of the diminishing, returning sun, rather than a thunder god. There’s also a strong injunction in British and Celtic lore against harming wrens, who are held to be sacred birds. William Blake echoed this long-held belief in his poem “Auguries of Innocence,” when he wrote, “He who shall hurt the little Wren / Shall never be belov’d by Men.” Blake speaks of auguries—signs from the animal or natural world interpreted to find meaning for the human world; and that’s interesting for us, because one of the reasons that wrens were held sacred was for their use as auguries by the Druids, who had clearly delineated meanings for the wren’s variety of calls, all depending upon which direction the listener heard the call from. All this is simply to say that the greatest and most worthy sacrifice is something held sacred; and so the wren was the king of birds in more than name alone.
Animal sacrifice is a type of ritual that we don’t really understand anymore, because it requires a different way of conceiving of ourselves and nature. We are individualistic now, and live out of step with the yearly cycles of nature, and we see barbarism in the hunt; whereas the communities who practiced such rituals would have seen themselves as interconnected with everything around them. The natural world had a direct effect on the life of everything in it, animals and people included. And so the reverse was true as well: the life of people and animals could affect the natural world. By that logic the sacrifice, the offered death, of a small sacred creature in the heart of winter, like the death of plants that slumber or the sun’s metaphorical death during its shortest days, would have ensured its—and everyone else’s—rebirth, just as plants or the sun are “reborn” in the spring. And there is no more worthy sacrifice than that of a king; or a king of birds, in this case.
Rime is written, produced and hosted by me, MJ Millington. The theme song is “Wizard of the Stars,” by Phillip Traum and the Moral Sense. Thanks for listening! Make sure to visit the Rime website at rimepodcast.com, that’s R_I_M_E podcast.com, where you’ll find complete shownotes for this and every episode. You’ll also find links to my own poetry and visual art, so check it out. And if you enjoy Rime, please leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. Those ratings really help potential listeners find the great stories we’re telling here. Until next time!
Sources
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