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preservingshrine · 7 years

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"Bos Primigenius" in Britain: Or, Why Do Fairy Cows Have Red Ears?

I was inspired by the lovely @hyacinth-halcyon and zir wonderful Butler writeup to summarize some academic articles I’ve been sitting on for a very long time. It’s useful to me as a devotional and an academic exercise. The paper I’m summarizing for you today is "Bos Primigenius" in Britain: Or, Why Do Fairy Cows Have Red Ears?, written by Jessica Hemming, Ph.D, for Folklore, Volume 113 (2002), pages 71-82.

Many medievalists, especially scholars of Celtic literature, have observed that red-eared white animals are associated with fairies and other supernatural beings. What has not been satisfactorily answered is why this should be so. This article offers a possible explanation, suggesting that this widespread phenomenon is rooted not in fantasy but in zoology.

Cows! They’re adorable. They’re delicious. They’re important. Hit the jump for more.

As a general rule in Irish folklore, white animals with red ears that come from the Otherworld are a fairly commonplace motif. From the earliest Irish sources, we have accounts of white cattle with red ears, and dogs with the same coloring accompany Annwn, King of the Otherworld, in the Middle Welsh tale of Pwyll. We also have reports right up into this century; in a presentation given on the Isle of Man to the Folklore Society, Mrs. Moore Douglas talks about “fairy dogs, usually white with red ears and feet are frequently seen running across the fields in the evening” and Marie Trevelyan mentions that the Welsh Cwn Annwn, or Annwn’s Hounds, are “very small dogs, white as the drifted snow, with tiny ears quite rose colored inside.“ The paper focuses on cows because they’re the earliest animals of that type and to quote it, “dogs and horses seem to have only acquired this pattern by analogy (Heming, 71)”.

So where have you heard of these cows? Let’s run down the list:

In the Tain Bo Friach, the hero’s mother gives him a herd of twelve cows out of the fairy mound and they’re white with red ears.

In the Tain Bo Cuialnge, the Morrigan transforms herself into a white heifer in her attempt to destroy Cu Chulain.

In Compert Mongdin ocus Serc Duibhe-Lacha, the hero promises his wife to the king of Leinster's in exchange for his beautiful red-eared white cattle.

The twelfth-century Metrical Dinshenchas, in a place name stanza about Howth, mention "seven hundred kine, red eared, pure white." There are further references to these cattle-always noted for their beauty or purity and frequently specified as coming from the fairy mounds-in Tochmarc Etaine, Tain Bo Regamna, Caith Maighe Lena, and the lives of Saints Brigid, Ailbhe, Mo Lua, Columcille, Finian and Ciaran.

I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that all these references are literary.So why do white cattle with red ears always belong to the fairies? Well, there’s a couple of theories:

They’re fairy beasts because white and red are “magical colors”. We know that this is the case with white; gwyn in Welsh primarily means “white, bright, shining fair” and the secondary meaning is “holy/blessed”. With red, it’s not so cut and dried. In recent comparative studies of British folklore, white, red, and black are all the most symbolically significant colors and in his discussions on Anglo-Saxon magic, G. Storms claims that red was a magical color in that society. This is all well and good, but it doesn’t provide any information about the polysemy or significance of red in medieval Ireland and Wales.

They really did exist and people believed they came from the Otherworld because they were rare or of a special value.

So what historical evidence do we have? Let’s take a look.

In one of the early Irish law tracts, as a punishment for satirizing King Cernodon of Ulster, part of the penalty includes “seven white cows with red ears” (Heming, 71-72).

According to the Reverend John Storer, the entry for the year 1211 in Holinshed's chronicle reports that the wife of William de Braose (a powerful Norman baron with lands in Wales) gave to the queen of England "a gift of foure hundred kine and one bull, of coulour all white, the ears excepted, which were red" (Storer 1879, 107).

In a passage from the thirteenth-century Iorwerth Redaction of the Welsh laws, the sarhaed (or payment due for insult) of the king of Aberffraw is set at "a hundred cows for every cantred he has, with a red-eared [white] bull for every hundred cows,"(Jenkins 1990, 5). The Cyfnerth and Blegywryd redactions add the following: "The status of the lord of Dinefwr is also adorned with white cows, each with its head to the tail of the next, with a bull between every twenty of them, so as to fill the space from Argoel to the court of Dinefwr" (Jenkins 1990, 6).

Finally, a custom at Stretton-on-Dunsmore in Warwickshire required the villagers to pay "Wroth or Ward money" to the lord of the Hundred of Knightlow until the 1870s. If they defaulted, they would forfeit "twenty shillings for every penny, and a white bull with red ears and a red nose" (Storer 1879, 104). Locals claimed this tradition predated the Norman Conquest.

There is a historical record that sets a loose precedent for the existence of these cows. (In Ireland? Not really. There’s some evidence that they did have red-eared white cattle with the Moylie, a modern breed that is claimed to be ancient, but can’t really be verified. There’s no evidence of red-eared white cattle in Ireland consistently.)

However, the most compelling evidence is that white cows with red ears exist is that though the several herds on record have dwindled down, one still exists today in Northumberland, England. Meet the Chillingham Cattle.

Handsome cows! Charming cows! Cows of many talents--and they love to pose for photos! Unfortunately, any basic scientific information about them is wrapped up in a convoluted origin myth. Here’s what we know. They are white with red ears. They’re not specialized either--these cattle have not been bred for beef or dairying. Proper records only go back to 1689, in which a white calf with red ears is purchased, and another white cow with red ears is mentioned again in 1692. They were owned by the noble family in those records up until 1939, when a private association was formed to manage the herd. They are related to Wild Park cattle, another registered breed, but the Chillingham herd is very much inbred.

Here is what the association would like you to believe. The Chillingham Cattle are directly descended from the aurochs of the ancient world (Bos primigenius), more so than modern breeds. They have always been while with red ears and they have never been domesticated. Symbolically, these cattle were associated with the noble family who owned them and questioning their lineage and purity also meant questioning the legitimacy of the noble family. These assumptions are all easily refuted.

The current scientific consensus is that all humpless domestic cattle are of a single species, Bos taurus, and all of them descend from the aurouchs, Bos primigenius. A Chillingham cow is about as exotic as a Holstein or a Jersey cow. They may resemble miniature aurochs, but cattle tend to revert to their ancestral type when they are not bred for a specific purpose of beef or dairy. It has been argued that they could have descended from aurochs imported by the Romans, but there are no records of them importing cattle into Britain and genetic studies done on the cows have proven that there is no relationship between them and Roman stock. There is also nothing to suggest that they could be pre-Roman, particularly due to the fact that aurochs in Britain became extinct during the Bronze Age. (They never reached Ireland, either.)

If Europe never had any truly wild cattle besides the aurochs, then by definition, the Chillingham cattle nor any other herds can be considered wild. The line between feral and domesticated cattle in the Middle Ages is also more blurred than the modern definition because allowing your herds to forage for food in the forests was a very common practice. However, the Chillingham cattle could have become feral. It’s also possible, given the only records we have are from 1692, that the cattle could have been purchased between the thirteen and seventeenth century and put in the park then. If that was when they became feral, no one would have had any reason to try to curb those behaviors. Thus, because there were no wild cattle in Europe, the Chillingham cattle must have descended from feral or domestic stock.

Multiple sources of evidence state that the Chillingham cattle do not always breed true to type. In the 1692 account, out of the twelve cattle with colored ears mentioned, some have black ears. In another account from an engraver, Thomas Bewick, in 1790, “about twenty years since, there were a few at Chillingham with BLACK EARS [sic], but the present park-keeper destroyed them; since which period there has not been one with black ears (Bewick, 1970, 39)”. In other words, the color seems to be a result of selective breeding rather than ancient purity. It also probably points to them not being descended from the northern European strain as aurouchs because as far as we can tell from the cave paintings, the bulls tended to be black and the cows and calves were red (Clutton-Brock, 1987, 64). A zoological study has noted, though, that colored herds tend to produce white cows with colored ears, and the Chillingham cattle could have originated from white calves dropped by a domestic herd (Bilton, 1957, 147).

So what can the Chillingham cattle tell us about the fairy cows in Irish and Welsh literature? Well, for one, how special they are perceived to be. We’ve seen ample evidence of how much effort it takes to maintain the appearance of the breed. We’ve talked about how unusual their appearance is and why the colors may inspire people to see them as Otherworldly.

There’s a definite possibility that this could be an Irish construct. Red-eared white cattle could have been imported from Great Britain to Irelan during the early Medieval period. They would have still been seen as exotic (and expensive) as imports and their appearance embedded them into folk memory, particularly if they were owned privately by noble families. Alternatively, if they were already feral, they could have been granted a liminal status: not wild beasts, but not tame.(Or people may have just assumed that the fairies would have the most expensive, exotic type of cow known to mortals. Sounds legit, especially given how rare they would have been.)

Overall, we don’t really know the true story of the Chillingham cattle, even today. I do think it’s telling, though, that the association protecting them argues that they are descended from “the great bull of Caesar’s time” and the neolitich and paleolithic eras. Imagine how much more extraordinary they must have seemed to people in the early Middle Ages. It makes their story all the richer.

#gaelpol #irish polytheism #gaelic polytheism #irish history #iripol #cows #british history #my posts

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