The Edges of the Medieval World

The Beast of Muhu: A Hybrid from the Periphery

THE BEAST OF MUHU: A HYBRID FROM THE PERIPHERY Tom Pettitt and Kadri Tüür The organizers of this workshop on the Edges of the Medieval World having opted to hold it on the edge of modern Europe, participants duly steeled themselves for the encounter with the creatures of this particular periphery, rumoured to range from wood-ticks and adders, through elk and bears, to wolves. Nothing however had prepared them for the “beast of Muhu,” lurking within the very venue of their deliberations , a disturbing hybrid of the human and the animal (indeed of more than one animal ). In what follows its characteristics, habits and environment are surveyed by a workshop participant with an interest in folk customs, and the curator of the museum which is currently the beast’s home. Among its display of farm implements and other bygones the Folklife Museum1 in the village of Koguva on the island of Muhu, off the coast of Estonia, boasts a wellpreserved “New Year's Goat” (näärisokk; fig. 1). Closely related to analogous Scandinavian traditions such as the Christmas Goat (juleged),2 and more distantly to English customary beast-figures such as the Old Tup and the Wild and Hooden Horses,3 the New Year's Goat has been recorded in hundreds of communities, particularly in the western regions of the Estonian mainland and the Baltic islands (Muhu and the larger Saaremaa).4 It is encountered more frequently in the records than analogous customs involving figures representing storks, geese, or bears. 1 The official name is Muhu Museum: it also commemorates the major Estonian author, Juhan Smuul (1922-1971), whose family previously owned the homestead, Tooma, in which the museum is housed. For more information consult its website http://www.muhumuuseum.ee. This article is illustrated by photographs taken by Anu Mänd of Tallinn University in August 2006, to whom our thanks. 2 See Nils Keyland, Julbröd, Julbockar och Staffanssång (Stockholm: Nordiska Museet, 1919); Iørn Piø, Julens Hvem Hvad Hvor (Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 1977), 77-78; Olav Bø, Vår Norske Jul (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 1970), 139-148. 3 See Percy Maylam, The Hooden Horse: An East Kent Christmas Custom (Canterbury: the author, 1909); E. C. Cawte, Ritual Animal Disguise (Cambridge: Brewer, 1978). 4 The following account of the custom in general is based on the standard account in Estonian, Mall Hiiemäe (ed.), Eesti rahvakalender VII (Tartu: Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia, Fr. R. Kreutzwaldi nim. Kirjan- THE BEAST OF MUHU 131 Fig. 1: The New Year’s Goat Within an overall cluster of winter “going a-goating” (sokku tegema) customs the closely-related tradition of the Christmas Goat mostly involves the beast wandering haphazardly around the community alone and engaging in mischief with those it encounters , while the New Year's Goat custom, with which the Koguva figure is most probably connected, is a house-visit custom involving a rather more systematic perambulation of farmhouses in the performers’ own community and immediately adjacent villages during the first days of the new year, say up to Epiphany. Sometimes led on a rope by a “goatherd” (who might wield a stick but was otherwise uncostumed), the goat dusmuuseum, 1995), 70-71 and 121-132. There is a one-volume abridgement in German, Der estnische Volkskalender (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1998), see 273-277. The areas of Estonia referred to are those least affected by (late-medieval) German and (modern) Russian cultural domination; on the other hand they were very much within the Scandinavian sphere of influence deep into the early-modern period. There is a substantial and systematic discussion of the New Year’s Goat in Ülo Tedre’s “Masks and Mumming Traditions in Estonia,” forthcoming in Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area, ed. Terry Gunnell, Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi XCVIII (Uppsala: Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur, 2007), 367-448, at 397-409. Analogous figures feature in other regional surveys of this significant new contribution to the study of folk customs. TOM PETTITT AND KADRI TÜÜR 132 (on occasion one of a group of goat-figures) would enter a farmhouse uninvited and make a nuisance of itself, prodding people (especially girls) with its horns and sprinkling them with water – for example by dipping its tail in a bucket and shaking it. As a rule no songs or other entertainment were offered, beyond the goat’s bleating as it rampaged...