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A Drollish Samhain

Natalie Zaman

It may be a bit odd to think of Samhain in the springtime, but every turning of the wheel encompasses bits of the sabbats that proceed and follow it. You can sense Samhain’s shadows in the corner of a sunny day, the rustle in the underbrush that is heard but not seen. And, perhaps, in a flock of flying pigs. Or dogs that play musical instruments. Or an army of angry—and armed—bunnies. If you’ve been online at all in the past year (or five), you’ve probably seen at least one of the articles that gets a resurgence in popularity when the world is ready for daffodils and colored eggs. My personal favorite is “Drolleries of the Middle Ages Included Comical Yet Sinister Killer Rabbits and Erotic Art” by Wu Mingren (Mingren 2019). It’s a brief study of rabbits (and other creatures) making mischief in the margins of medieval manuscripts. Welcome to the world of the drollery—where even if it’s spring or summer, Samhain is in the air.

Pigs with Wings and Stranger Things

I love how animals are depicted in medieval art, the “normal” and the not so normal. Drolleries are far from normal. My first encounter with them was in the Sean Connery film The Name of the Rose. Set in a fourteenth-century Benedictine monastery famed for its scriptorium, Connery’s character, Friar William, comes to attend a debate but ends up sleuthing when the monks start dying under increasingly suspect circumstances. William (who also has a thing for books) visits the scriptorium to examine a manuscript that was being worked on by one of the victims. The young monk’s unusual illustrations are fascinating: a donkey reading the scriptures to a group of bishops, the Pope as a fox, and the abbot as a monkey. Was this a statement of the state of the church at the time? Or a commentary on the small monastic community in which the artist lived—or perhaps a bit of both?

These subtle additions are typical drollery fare, providing the reader with a bit of levity in what was probably some hefty reading. Drolleries, also called grotesques (no surprise that they fall into the same category as gargoyles) are whimsical and often comic illustrations that appear in the margins (and are sometimes hidden in the details of larger illustrations and lettering) of devotional medieval books such as Psalters (books of Psalms) or books of hours—decorative samplers of church services for folks who wanted to incorporate a bit of the monastic into their lay lifestyles. These were luxury items made for the literate and the wealthy. Interestingly, books of hours were often made for women and given as wedding gifts. (To remind them of their role and duties including, via the drolleries, the naughty bits?)

As an art form, drolleries saw their heyday between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries when custom devotional books drawn by hand were popular. Bestiaries, which date back to the classical world, undoubtedly influenced drollery art; both utilize the symbolism and moral lessons associated with animals and come from a time when Pagan and Christian sensibilities were not so far removed from each other as they would become.

So, if you were a literate medieval lady of rank, what would you see in the margins of your book of hours when you cracked it open to say your morning prayers? You might, perhaps, encounter animals “playing” humans: monkeys doing household chores like sweeping or churning butter or a rabbit riding a dog and “hawking”—but with a snail on its arm. The animals might be wearing clothes or armor. You may also see humans interacting with animals. Curiouser still, you might find animal, animal-human, and even animal-human-plant combinations: the head and forehooves of a deer emerging from a snail’s shell, a rooster with a man’s head, or a lady (shockingly naked!) with a stem and leaves sprouting from her head. Erotica was not off limits in drollery art, and while rabbits played their part in this (because, rabbits), a drollery could also take the form of a full on and sometimes explicit illustration—related to the text of course and undoubtedly placed there to illustrate behaviors in which persons of quality should not be engaged—but illustrated, in case you weren’t exactly sure what that should mean.

Drolleries were comments and annotations purposefully included to illustrate the story with which they were paired while others were added later as asides and afterthoughts. Illuminators didn’t limit themselves to illustrations—they were calligraphers after all. Words and scribbles also made appearances, giving rare glimpses into the lives of these often-anonymous artists and how they were feeling:

“The parchment is hairy.” (Ew!)

“The ink is thin …”

“Oh, my hand.” (I can relate!)

You can find these and more monkish scribblings in the Spring 2012 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly (“Marginalized”).

Examples of individual drollery creatures can be seen with a quick visit to Pinterest, but you can also view entire manuscripts, some of them annotated and transcribed for easy reading. One of the most famous, The Croy Hours, has so many drolleries in it that it’s been nicknamed “The Book of Drolleries” and contains animals going about human business as well as human-animal hybrids, some of which are so cleverly illustrated that you can see the backside of the figures from the opposite page when you turn it over. The British Library has digitized whole and partial manuscripts with drolleries including The Gorleston Psalter and The Taymouth Hours. Both books contain illustrations, prayers, Bible stories, lives of the saints, and tales of chivalric romance—all material that is ripe for droll commentary.

While anthropomorphism has been around for a while, a drollery is different in that it has that topsy-turvy quality that gives one pause; it draws the viewer in to look closer and stop and think. I’ve found this spirit alive and well in the world today: in the decorative art trays by French designer ibride where animal heads are placed on classic paintings, in films like Fantastic Mr. Fox, and books like The Wind in the Willows. The word “droll” itself is telling as it denotes dry wit with a side of curiosity and strangeness. Archaically, droll refers to a buffoon or jester—in other words, the Fool. The trickster—often portrayed as an animal: the coyote. So Samhain is, perhaps, the drollest of Sabbats. It is the holy day of the trickster, for on this day more than any other, things are not as they seem.

Humans have always taken on animal guises. Even our language melds us together to describe character traits and physical features:

Porcine eyes

Chicken hearted

Fox lady

Mulish

Bearish

Boarish (and boorish!)

But when do we truly embrace our animal nature? When the shadows of October emerge from their corners to encroach upon the light, when the rustle in the undergrowth emerges from hiding, Samhain is upon us! It’s time to step out of the pages of an illuminated story … and into the monster’s ball!