Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
This, in case you don’t recognize it, is the famous beginning of Dante’s Inferno, written in 1308, in which the poet is guided by Virgil into the underworld and devotes a couple thousand cantos to describe for the rest of us what kind of fate awaits our sins. The entire trilogy is called the Divine Comedy, not because its funny, but because it goes from despair to heaven, which is the old sense of the word where ‘tragedy’ begins in happiness and ends in ruin, and ‘comedy’ ends in triumph.
Though no theologian, I can announce with certitude that Dante was wrong about at least three things. Socrates, sodomites, and beavers. Given the topic of this website I’ll confine myself to the latter for the time being.
If your archaic Italian is a little rusty, allow me to translate. Dante is using a reference to the beaver sitting on his tail at the edge of the water as a way to describe how a monster is waiting at the edge of the void to carry them to the next level. ‘Lo bevero‘ is our friend, and he’s sitting there to ‘wage war’. Wage war? Who does a beaver wage war against? Not city council members or trappers or piles of willow leaves, according to Dante something very unsuspected. I’ll let the Scottish journal I was pointed to yesterday written for Lord Bute (who apparently had his own Scottish Beaver trial in 1878) describe it.
Isn’t that beautiful? This was the best Thanksgiving present ever and you might want to check it out yourself here. So thank you to Peter Smith (CEO of the WIldwood Trust in Scotland) who put me on to it and thank you to Lord Bute for inspiring this excellent excellent dressing down of Dante. A great bit of beaver lore and further proof that folks have been lying about beavers for 700 years!
Oh, and Happy Evacuation Day!
