Giraldian Beavers and Their Contexts
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Gerald of
Wales’s preoccupation with the beaver stands as a major touchstone of his early
writings on Ireland and Wales. His first
description of the habits and characteristics of beavers appears as a deliberate
and almost audaciously digressive chapter in the original version (ca. 1187) of
the Topographia Hibernica, Gerald’s
account of a country in which, among other things, there are in fact no
beavers. Gerald’s fascination with
beavers—and also perhaps his self-satisfaction in his own description of the
creatures—provided him with sufficient motivation both to include an expanded
version of the account in the first version (1191) of his Itinerarium Kambriae and
also to expand it again in the second version (ca. 1194) of the Itinerarium, which he then copied
wholesale yet again into the first version (ca. 1194) of his Descriptio Kambriae.
In this paper I will attempt to make sense of Gerald’s idiosyncratic interest in beavers. Thinking through and, to some extent, pushing against Gransden’s and Bartlett’s discussions of Giraldian naturalism, I examine the ways in which the beaver passages function in the various texts. I will then make two main assertions about Gerald’s use of the beavers as a literary touchstone. First, I suggest how the beaver passages provide a useful diagnostic for gauging Gerald’s evolving understanding of his status as a man of letters. Second, I focus on the particularly rich way in which Gerald utilizes his beaver passage in the Itinerarium as a paradigm of his polysemic literary technique at its best, adducing analogous examples from some of his later works such as the Gemma Ecclesiastica and the De Instructione Principis, and suggesting a parallel in the work of his colleague Walter Map. It is my contention that, in the end, the passages about beavers are in fact not about beavers at all, and that Gerald always already knew it.
In this paper I will attempt to make sense of Gerald’s idiosyncratic interest in beavers. Thinking through and, to some extent, pushing against Gransden’s and Bartlett’s discussions of Giraldian naturalism, I examine the ways in which the beaver passages function in the various texts. I will then make two main assertions about Gerald’s use of the beavers as a literary touchstone. First, I suggest how the beaver passages provide a useful diagnostic for gauging Gerald’s evolving understanding of his status as a man of letters. Second, I focus on the particularly rich way in which Gerald utilizes his beaver passage in the Itinerarium as a paradigm of his polysemic literary technique at its best, adducing analogous examples from some of his later works such as the Gemma Ecclesiastica and the De Instructione Principis, and suggesting a parallel in the work of his colleague Walter Map. It is my contention that, in the end, the passages about beavers are in fact not about beavers at all, and that Gerald always already knew it.