Hare and Rabbit

Hare and Rabbit

What is it—a hopper of ditches, a cutter of corn, a little brown cow without
any horns? Answer: A hare.

—Irish riddle


The hare and rabbit, members of the family Leporidae, are rodents, yet
they usually have a far more benign reputation in folklore than does
their close relative the rat. While rabbits are highly social, hares often
tend to be solitary. Hares are also larger than rabbits and have smaller
litters. Nevertheless, the two are often confused in folklore, and much
the same stories are told of both. Like most other animals that are
prominent in myth and legend, leporids are dramatically distinguished
from other animals by a single feature—their long ears.
Though not terribly fast runners, they are remarkably agile, and their
ability to elude predators by changing direction instantly has doubtless
contributed to their reputation as tricksters. Even more than most
other rodents, they reproduce prolifically, a characteristic that has
made leporids, especially rabbits, symbols of fertility throughout the
world. They are endearingly timid, arousing an affection that often
makes it hard for farmers to shoot them, even when they ravish
planted fields. The most remarkable feature of their lore, however, is
the notion that a hare may be seen in the moon, a belief shared by
many cultures across the globe, including the Chinese, Hottentots,
and Maya Indians.

The widespread association of the hare with the moon cannot be
due simply to the contours of lunar landscapes, since people envisage
the hare in the moon in very divergent ways. One reason for the association
is that the act of a hare leaping suggests the rising moon.
Also, the patterns of white, gray, and brown on the bodies of hares
are suggestive of the lunar surface. But the most important reason is
probably the extreme watchfulness of hares, which at attention stand
almost completely still with their eyes wide open and their ears
raised. This suggests the moon, especially when full, which appears
to be continually watching events on earth.

The Jatakas, early Buddhist animal fables from India, tell one of
the many stories created to explain the hare-moon relationship. The
future Buddha was once a hare and lived together with three wise animals,
a monkey, a jackal, and an otter. He preached to the other creatures
of the forest, telling them to give alms. Sakra, the god of thunder,
heard him and came down to the forest in the guise of a Brahman.
The monkey offered him fruit, then the jackal offered meat, and the otter
offered fish. Finally, the Brahman came to the hare, who directed
him to gather wood and start a fire. When the fire was blazing, the
hare hopped in, for he had resolved to offer his own body as food. The
flames, however, would not burn. The Brahman revealed that he was
truly a god. Then he squeezed a mountain to make ink, and he drew
an image of the hare in the moon.

The Chinese see a hare with a mortar and pestle, grinding the
elixir of life, in the moon, an idea inspired by the reproductive powers
of the animal. This vision comes from the story of Chang-O, the
beautiful wife of the famous archer King Ho-Yi. The Queen Mother of
Heaven once gave Ho-Yi a pill containing the elixir of immortality at
a festivity. The king had drunk much wine and wished to sleep before
swallowing the pill, so he entrusted it to Chang-O. She swallowed the
pill, immediately felt very light, and soon discovered that she had the
gift of flight. On awakening, Ho-Yi asked for the pill, and Chang-O
flew away to the moon. One day she coughed up the pill, which immediately
changed into a white hare. Chang-O demanded that the
hare restore the elixir, and she gave the rabbit a mortar and pestle to
grind it. But since she was now subject to the ravages of age, Chang-
O turned into a three-legged toad as she looked on and waited for the
hare to finish.

A story in the third book of the Hindu-Persian Panchatantra may
affectionately poke fun at the association between the leporids and
the moon, though it also shows the rabbit (in some versions, a hare)
in the familiar role of trickster. Aherd of elephants discovered the paradisial
Lake of the Moon, and in their eagerness to drink, they
crushed many rabbits to death. A rabbit named Victory went the next
day to the king of the elephants, saying he was an envoy of the moon
and protected by the laws of diplomacy. He rebuked the king and his
herd for killing rabbits, who were under the protection of the moon,
and he spoke so eloquently that the monarch wished to find the moon
and beg forgiveness. Victory led the king to a place where the full
moon shone brilliantly in the water of the lake. When the elephant
tried to bow down before it, his trunk touched the water, breaking the
image into thousands of pieces. At that Victory said, “Woe, woe to
you, O King! You have doubly enraged the moon.” The elephant then
promised never to return, and the rabbits once again had the lake to
themselves (Ryder, pp. 308–315).

In the fables of Aesop, the hare is also a trickster, though, like
most other tricksters, he often becomes a victim of his own cleverness.
Perhaps the most famous fable of all is “The Tortoise and the Hare.”
The hare had mocked the slowness of a tortoise, which then chal-
lenged him to a race. The hare agreed, and as the race began, he
spurted ahead and gained a big lead. Supremely confident, the hare
dawdled, rested, and played until the slow but steady tortoise overtook
him to claim victory.

Julius Caesar stated that the hare was sacred to the early Britons.
According to the Roman historian Dio Cassius, Queen Boudicca, who
led the Britons in revolt against Roman rule, would release a hare
from the folds of her dress before each campaign. The direction in
which the hare ran would be used to predict the outcome of the battle.
The Easter Bunny, originally a hare, was probably a sacrificial animal
offered to the gods at the start of spring. Closely associated with
the Easter Bunny are colored eggs, which hark back to pre-Christian
celebrations of spring in Slavic lands. At one time eggs may have accompanied
the hare not only in games but also in festive meals.
In the European Middle Ages, hares were both familiars and the
guises under which witches ran about at night. One confessed witch,
Isobel Gowdie, told how she had taken the form of a hare when
hounds surprised her. She managed to evade them by running into a
house and hiding long enough to say the rhyme that disenchanted
her, though she still carried a mark on her back where a hound had
nipped at her. In Precious Bane (first published in 1924), a novel by
Mary Webb set in the countryside of early-nineteenth-century Shropshire,
the heroine, Prudence Sarn, had a harelip, a slit upper lip like
that of a hare. Her mother thought that the deformity had been
caused by a hare’s running across her path shortly before Prudence
was born. Fellow villagers constantly suspected the young woman of
a connection with the Devil.

All across Africa, the hare is an important trickster figure, and he
often matches his cleverness against the size and strength of a hyena
or a lion. In one Hausa story from Nigeria, the lion had so terrified the
other animals of the forest that they made a deal with him. One animal
would come to the lion and sacrifice itself every day if the king of
beasts would no longer hunt. After a gazelle, an antelope, and many
other animals had given their lives, it was the turn of the hare. The
hare told the lion that he had brought a special present of honey but
that another lion, who was even fiercer, had demanded the gift. When
the king of beasts demanded to know where his challenger was, the
hare pointed to a well. The lion looked into the well, saw his own reflection,
pounced, and drowned. All animals acclaimed the hare as the
new king of beasts.

Master Rabbit is a trickster well known to several Native American
tribes. The Ute tell how Rabbit once became angry because the
sun had burned his back. He tested his skills by killing all the people
and animals that crossed his path until he felt mighty enough to duel
the sun. When he hurled a magic ball at the sun, fire spread all over
the earth, and Rabbit was seared so badly that he began to cry. When
his tears had finally put out the flames, Rabbit realized that killing
could not solve problems. In the lore of the Lenape Indians of the
Northeast, Hare, also called Tschimammus, was one of the twins born
to the earth mother after she had fallen from the clouds. He ascended
to Heaven, and since he was expected to return to earth, Indian converts
to Christianity identified Hare with Jesus.

But perhaps the best-known, and certainly the most controversial,
leporid of modern times is Brer Rabbit, from the tales that Joel Chandler
Harris put in the mouth of an old black man named Uncle Remus
toward the end of the nineteenth century. Brer Rabbit is as ruthless as
he is clever, and he continually matches wits with larger predators such
as the fox, the wolf, and the bear. His adversaries often end up not only
defeated but cuckolded, roasted, flayed, or otherwise horribly punished.
When Brer Fox has been killed through trickery, Brer Rabbit
gives the unfortunate animal’s head to the wife of Brer Fox as a steak.
The tales are as controversial as they are popular. Perhaps the
most intense debate in the entire study of American folklore is the relative
contributions to these tales of European, African, and Native
American traditions. The aesthetic and cultural debates about the
tales are no less vehement. While some critics admire the cleverness
of Brer Rabbit, others consider him a racist caricature, portraying
blacks as shiftless and amoral. But the Brer Rabbit tales remain, in any
case, an important part of African-American folklore, and those who
find the versions by Harris inaccurate or patronizing may prefer those
of Zora Neale Hurston and others.

The most famous story told by Harris is that of Brer Rabbit and
the Tar Baby. Brer Fox had made a little figure out of tar, left it in the
bushes, and watched until Brer Rabbit came down the road. When the
Tar Baby failed to return his greeting, Brer Rabbit became angry and
struck the figure. His paw stuck to the tar, so Brer Rabbit struck again
and again, until finally all his limbs were bound together by the pitch.
Brer Fox had the culprit completely at his mercy and was trying to
choose the most dreadful punishment, when the clever rabbit begged
not to be thrown in the briar patch. Brer Fox promptly tossed the rabbit
in the brambles. “Bred and bawn in a briar patch,” shouted Brer
Rabbit as he ran away (Harris, p. 19). Very similar stories are told of
Hare by the Hausa and other tribes in Africa, as well as of Master Rabbit
by the Apache and other Native Americans.

In the nineteenth century, rabbits and hares became favorite figures
in books for children. Peter Rabbit, created by Beatrix Potter, is
perhaps the most beloved, but just about everybody is also familiar
with the White Rabbit and the March Hare from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland. Potter turns the traditional trickery of
leporids in folklore into childish misbehavior, while Carroll turns it
into the insanity, from a child’s point of view, of adults. Far less appealing
yet in some ways closer to folk traditions is Bugs Bunny, a cartoon
character created by Warner Brothers in the 1940s. An amoral
trickster, Bugs outwits the dim-witted hunter Elmer Fudd, who often
ends up falling from a cliff or being run over by a truck. In the 1970s
Richard Adams tried to give greater dignity to rabbits in Watership
Down, his novel about a group of male rabbits who set out to establish
a new warren. Although rabbits and hares are not patriarchal, virtually
all of these popular images are male.

In Playboy Magazine, young girls are referred to as “bunnies.” In
the Playboy clubs, the hostess bunnies wear skimpy costumes with
long ears and white tails, and every issue of the magazine features a
bunny of the month. These practices build on the reputation of rabbits
for being cute and cuddly. The use of fertility symbolism is paradoxical,
however, since the male clientele supposedly wish to remain unattached
and certainly do not want to have a lot of children. This suggests
that the decoupling of sex and reproduction may be far less
complete in contemporary society than people usually aknowledge.

Selected References

Bierhorst, John. Mythology of the Lenape. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1995.
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz. American Indian Trickster Tales.
New York: Penguin, 1999.
Ezpeleta, Alicia. Rabbits Everywhere. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus: His Stories and His Sayings. New
York: A. Appleton, 1928.
Hughes, D. Wyn, ed. Hares. New York: Congdon and Lattès, 1981.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: HarperPerennial,
1990.
Parrinder, Geoffrey. African Mythology. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1973.
Rowland, Beryl. Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973.
Ryder, Arthur W., ed. The Panchatantra. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1964.
Santino, Jack. All around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American
Life. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Sun, Ruth Q. The Asian Animal Zodiac. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1974.
Webb, Mary. Precious Bane. New York: The Modern Library, ca. 1960.