The Hare That Watches the Moon

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — the Norfolk Brecklands, early spring

I first noticed the posture on a worn misericord in a Norfolk church: a hare carved with its body twisted back on itself, forepaws tucked, head craned upward as though listening to something the rest of the congregation could not hear. The guidebook called it 'moon-gazing' and left it there, but the phrase followed me around East Anglia for the rest of that spring, turning up on an inn sign, on a rusted weathervane outside Swaffham, pencilled in the margin of an old hare-coursing manual.

The posture is not an invention of carvers and painters. Anyone who has walked the Brecks at dusk in March will have seen a hare stop mid-run, sit up on its haunches with ears flattened along its back, and simply look — not at the ground, not at a dog, but up. Naturalists distinguish this watching stance from the famous boxing bouts of does fending off does in the mating season, but it takes little imagination to see why earlier observers read the sky into it, and decided the hare was not listening for danger but keeping some appointment with the moon.

The association is old enough to have reached the historical record. Cassius Dio, writing of the British rising against Rome, describes the Icenian queen Boudicca releasing a hare from beneath her cloak before battle and reading the line of its flight as an omen of victory. It is the earliest written link we have, in Britain, between the hare and prophecy — though the source says nothing of moons, and I would not claim more for it than it gives.

The hare's other reputation, as a creature that could be a woman wearing fur, runs stronger through the later record. Trial testimony from Scotland and Ireland tells of women who confessed, or were accused, of taking hare-shape to steal milk from a neighbour's cow before first light, and of hunters who wounded a hare only to find, on visiting a certain cottage, an old woman nursing an injury in the same place. Whether these tales are older than the trials that preserve them, or grew up around them, I could not say with confidence; the versions disagree, as they usually do once the law gets involved in a story.

The tidier version, that the hare belongs to a goddess named Eostre and so to Easter, is more fragile than the greetings-card image suggests. It rests almost entirely on a single line of speculation from the nineteenth-century scholar Jacob Grimm, working from a passing mention in Bede, and no earlier source names an Anglo-Saxon hare-goddess outright. I set it down because it is widely told, not because I can youch for it.

What I can vouch for is the animal itself, and the dark marks on the moon's face that a fair portion of the world, not only Britain, has looked up and read as a crouching hare rather than a man. Standing at the edge of a stubble field with the moon coming up orange over the Brecks, ears of barley still catching the last light, it is not difficult to understand why. The hare sits up, goes still, and looks at the one light in the sky that never quite explains itself. People have been reading meaning into that stillness for a very long time, and I doubt they have finished yet.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.