CHAPTER XXVIII

FISHING WITH THE HAIR OF THE DEAD

This chapter owes its birth to a passage of intrinsic interest but gruesome nature.

Before quoting or dealing with it, I may be allowed a few words as to my running it to ground and the curiosity it excited among Angling scholars.

Some years ago I read in an article that “fishing with the hair of a dead person, ἔδησεν νεκρᾷ τριχὶ δέλεαρ, was practised by the Egyptians, as is shown by discoveries during the last thirty years.” No authority, no reference was given. “Thirty years” opened up a search too extensive to waste on an anonymous statement.

Even so this fishing with an unknown gut, dead men’s hair, kept worrying me. Aristotle and others had written of the use of horse-hair, but none of my friends or I had ever come across this Egyptian tackle. A great authority suggested that it was possibly taken from a body of which the hair continued to grow after death, and thus possessed much value because of length and strength.

Instantly floated before us visions of obtaining by a new _Rape of the Lock_ this most desirable gut. Two nefarious courses were discussed. First, to rifle the coffin of Edward I., which when last opened in Dean Stanley’s time revealed (_teste_ the Verger) long hair still growing. Second, to raid the tomb of the Countess of Abergavenny (_née_ Isabella Despencer) in Tewkesbury Abbey, in which (to use Canon Ernest Smith’s words) “at the restoration of the Abbey in 1875 was disclosed bright auburn hair, apparently as fresh and as plentiful, as when the body was buried four and a half centuries ago.”[878]

Do the Sagas or other ancient Scandinavian literature, in which descriptions of fishing frequently figure, allude to such use of dead men’s hair? Two of the foremost Scandinavian scholars could recall none. _The Kalevala_—the great Finnish epic—yielded no help.

Nearest comes the account of “Gunnar’s Slaying” in _Story of the Burnt Njal_.[879] After his bowstring has been cut by his foe, Gunnar said unto his wife, Hallgerda, ‘Give me two locks of thy hair, and ye two, my mother and thou, twist them together into a bowstring for me.’ ‘Does aught lie on it?’ she says. ‘My life lies on it,’ he said; ‘for they will never come to close quarters with me, if I can keep them off with my bow.’ ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Now will I call to thy mind that slap in the face thou gavest me,’ and refused him her hair.

Gunnar, just ere he falls, sings:

“Now my helpmeet, wimple hooded, Hurries all my fame to earth. Woman, fond of Frodi’s flour Wends her hand, as she is wont.”[880]

The passage containing the Greek words quoted in the article was eventually discovered on p. 82 of _Fayum Towns and their Papyri_, by Grenfell, Hunt, and Hogarth.

καὶ δὴ χθόνα δυσπράπελον φθάσας ασχήμονας ἦλθε παρ’ ἠόνας ἒνθεν δὲ πέτραν καθίσας ὅτε κάλαμον μὲν ἔδησεν νεκρᾷ τριχὶ δέλεαρ δὲ λαβὼν καὶ ψωμίσας ἂγκιστρον ἀγῆγε βύθει βυθῷ

* * * * *

ὡς δ’ οὐδὲν ὅλως τότ’ ἐλαμμένον[881]

I subjoin a translation:—

“And so hastening over the rugged ground he came unto the unsightly shores, and there seated on a rock tied the rod with dead hair, and taking bait and feeding with little morsels, drew the hook along (or up and down) in the deep pool. But as naught was caught,” and as αὕτη μὲν ἡ μηρινθός οὔδεν ἔσπασεν,[882] both in its literal and proverbial sense held true, he returned to the place whence he came, the place of corpses.

The Editors’ introduction to the Papyrus runs: “The matter of the poem is hardly less remarkable than the manner in which it was written down. The subject is the adventures of a man whose name is not given. After some talk, the hero proceeds to a place which is full of corpses being devoured by dogs. He then makes his way to the sea-coast and proceeds to sit down on a rock, and fish with Rod and Line. He did not, however, succeed in catching anything: we then revert to the corpses, the gruesome picture of which is further elaborated. The language and style of the composition, the literary qualities of which are poor enough, clearly show its late date, not posterior to the second century.”

I am indebted to Professor Grenfell for further information. “The Papyrus,” he writes me, “is certainly a poem describing the descent of some one to the under-world.” An Austrian, A. Swoboda,[883] wrote an article to show that it belonged to a Naassene[884] psalm describing the descent of Christ to Hades. The beginning of a poem on this subject, in the same metre as the Papyrus, is known from Hippolytus, _Refutatio Hereticorum_. The second column of the Papyrus seems to be an address to a Deity, and would fit in with Swoboda’s theory.

“The composition being, in any case of a mystical and imaginative character, I do not think the description of the fishing incident is to be regarded as in any way real, and, from the fisher’s point of view, it is not to be taken literally. _No parallel for the use of dead men’s hair in fishing has ever been suggested._ In none of the Papyri are there any details about the modes of Angling. Ἔδησεν, which I should translate _tied_, has been generally supposed to refer to the angler’s line, and considering the composition is poetical, this seems the natural interpretation.”

This coupled with the Introduction to the Papyrus appears to shatter the statement that fishing with the hair of a dead person was practised in ancient Egypt. But although in such a mystic adventure as a Descent to Hades all is possible and all is pardonable, the passage can hardly from its extremely abrupt and casual mention of hair be regarded as heralding in the use of this substance as a quite new adjunct to fishing. It partakes of the nature of a simile.

If it be true that an ancient simile was intended to throw light from the more familiar on the less familiar, but never to illustrate the moderately familiar by the wholly strange, one might, despite the absence of all reference to such tackle in the representations or in classical writers, possibly argue that lines made of the hair of the dead were known and were used by the Egyptians. The substitution of the hair of a dead person for the hair of a horse may be but a bold and not ineffective attempt to heighten the mysticism of the picture.

Apart from the pleasant gain which the quest and the running down of this hare in “a mare’s nest” (to mix metaphors boldly) entailed, one’s only real satisfaction is that the Egyptian angler, notwithstanding his gruesome gut and loathsome bait, caught NOTHING!

FOOTNOTES:

[878] Aristotle (_H. A._, III. 11), states that the hair does grow in dead bodies. Since his time many descriptions of remarkable growth after death have been published, and many people believe that such growth does take place. Erasmus Wilson pronounces that “the lengthening of the hairs observed in a dead person is merely the result of the contraction of the skin towards their bulb.”

[879] Blakey, _op. cit._, 207, states an engraving was found at Herculaneum “representing a little Cupid fishing with the ringlets of her (_sic_) hair for lovers.” So far I have failed to track this hermaphroditic representation, nor is Sir C. Waldstein aware of its existence.

[880] Translated by Dasent. _Frodi’s flour_ = gold.

[881] Professor Grenfell tells me that ὃτε here has no connection, unless the main verb came in line 16, where there is a lacuna, but the traces do not suggest any verb. He also approves my rendering of ψωμίσας having the sense of “baiting the swim” with bits of flesh from the corpses.

[882] Aristophanes, _Thesm._, 928. Cf. also _Wasps_, 174-6.

[883] _Wiener Studien_, XXVII. (1905), pp. 299, ff.

[884] Or early Gnostics, also called Ophites, who honoured serpents.