Flights of Fancy by Peter Tate

Author:Peter Tate
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307783974
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-16T10:00:00+00:00

The sound of a nightingale singing in the quiet of the night is unforgettable, and perhaps as a result is the subject of a great body of folklore. St Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, who had a great reputation for his affinity with animals and birds, was said to have sung duets with the nightingale. In France, there is a myth that originally the blindworm and the nightingale had one eye each. When the nightingale was invited to a wedding, it asked to borrow the blindworm’s eye for the day so that it might look its best. After the wedding, the nightingale refused to return the eye and was thereafter compelled to remain awake all night in case the worm should try to get it back again. A further story which attempted to explain the nightingale’s wakefulness was that the bird once overslept while roosting on a vine, and its feet became entangled in the growing tendrils. To prevent such a thing happening again, it sings all night to keep awake.

In Westphalia, the peasants believed that the nightingale was once a shepherdess who tantalized her lover by constantly postponing their wedding day. Eventually, he became so infuriated that he cursed her, changing her into a nightingale and condemning her to remain awake until the Day of Judgement. It was held that the bird’s cries at night are the shepherdess calling to the dog that helps her guard her sheep.

Because the song of the nightingale is both pure and mournful, it’s perhaps not surprising that various stories about it involve a forlorn hero or heroine being turned into a nightingale so that they can for ever express their grief in song. Greek mythology, for example, tells of the wicked Aedon, Queen of Thebes. She had only one child, a son called Itylus, but her sister-in-law Niobe had six sons and six daughters and she was insanely jealous of her – so jealous, in fact, that she resolved to kill some of Niobe’s children. Because Itylus generally slept on the same couch as the other children, on the night Aedon planned to carry out her evil deed she told her son to sleep somewhere else. Tragically, he forgot, and so his mother killed him by mistake. She was so distraught with grief that Zeus took pity on her and turned her into a nightingale so that her remorse could be expressed in song for ever.

Perhaps the most famous Greek myth concerning nightingales is that of Philomela. Shakespeare referred to it in his poem The Rape of Lucrece, with the lines:

Come, Philomel, that sing’st of ravishment,

Make thy sad grave in my dishevell’d hair.

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