Hobby horse
The hobby horse is on the one hand a children's toy , which consists of a stick (handle) and a horse's head, a wooden frame covered with a blanket in the shape of a horse or of some other construction. On the other hand, hobby horses are part of cult processions and ceremonial dances in many regions. In ancient times they are mentioned as toys, and in the European Middle Ages the Christian Church tried to ban the hobby horses used in pagan customs.
In a figurative sense, the word hobby horse means something like hobby. In English it is referred to as hobby horse or hobby for short , from where the German “ hobby ” in the corresponding meaning is derived. Hobby goes back to the Middle English word hobi and referred to a small horse (pony) since its first known mention in 1298. Hobi is a diminutive of Robin or Hobbe, which was possibly the name of a horse. In literature and the fine arts, the hobby horse symbolizes a wide range of meanings: childhood, a stupid or silly person, savagery, peasantry and it is used to caricature chivalry.
to form
For Don Quixote , his skinny nag Rosinante gave the illusion of a proud horse. In children's imitation games, a stick of wood between the legs can become a horse in its simplest form. In the Kuku language of the Thadou, a small ethnic group in the northeast Indian state of Assam , this stick is called sakol-chunga-tou (“horse to sit on”).
The main ceremonial hobbyhorse shapes in Europe are the wooden stick with a wooden or soft material shaped horse head at the tip, which is held between the legs with both hands pointing upwards. At the Mari Lwyd Welsh New Year celebration , the stick and person are wrapped in a white cloth with a (real or occasionally recreated) horse skull protruding from it. In the second traditional form of “sticking with a sieve”, the rod is held in the same position, with the circular wooden frame of a sieve attached to its lower end. The third variant is a wooden frame with a blanket that is tied to the hip and gives off the front part of a horse. It can be extended to include a corresponding horse's hindquarters. In Great Britain, the simple rod type is most common, while in New Mexico only the frame type occurs.
The ceremonial hobby horse in the southern French region of Languedoc consists of a light construction of wooden sticks in a naturalistic horse shape, into which the wearer climbs from above so that it surrounds his hips. The horse's cloth cloak hangs down over the knees and still offers enough legroom to dance with. Men with bells on their feet accompany the horse dancer. This form is shown in Nuremberg Schembart books from the 15th century and occurs in Carnival parades in Germany.
History and dissemination
Europe
Hobby horses were used for fun leisure entertainment in ancient Greece . Some famous men are reported to have hopped on wooden sticks for their own pleasure and that of their children. According to Persian ambassadors, General Agesilaos of Sparta rode in the 4th century BC. Chr. With his children on hobby horses; the statesman Alkibiades tells the same about his teacher Socrates and his son Lamprokles in the second half of the 5th century BC. The ancient hobby horse was obviously a toy with no religious meaning, while at the same time the horse was assigned a magical meaning. Tacitus reports on the use of the horse in prophecies, and the wooden Trojan horse had more of a magical than strategic importance in the conquest of the city of Troy . The fertility aspect of the horse can be traced back to the Greek mother goddess Demeter , who ensures the fertility of the grain fields and is represented by a black horse's head.
The hobby horse, which plays a role in this ritual, is used as evidence of the old age and the magical origin of the European mummery . Augustine of Hippo in AD 395 and the Bishop Caesarius of Arles around 500 were opposed to the event of the mummery . In the middle of the 8th century, St. Pirminius issued a decree that forbade the procession with hobby horses. Nevertheless, the hobbyhorse continued to be used in pagan customs that the people did not want to do without. In the European Middle Ages, the hobby horse was part of masquerades and ecstatic dances. Curt Sachs puts ecstatic dances with hobby horses, which survived in Mallorca , the Basque Country , Romania and Bulgaria , in a broad context with the equestrian dances of ancient China. Less old traditions such as the Kraków Lajkonik refer to a striking historical event.
The Cornish town of Padstow in south-western Great Britain is known for its spring festival with hobby horses on May 1st, which is called 'Obby' Oss festival in the local dialect . Men in black robes and fearfully masked ride through the streets with hobby horses throughout the day, driven with clubs by teasers , until they arrive at the central square with the maypole in the evening . Then they return to where they came from. They are symbolically buried until they are resurrected a year later. The headdress over the black mask is reminiscent of a grenadier of the 17th / 18th centuries. Century. Because Padstow is on the coast, some residents believe that the festival might refer to the attempted landing of a French ship in Napoleonic times. Hobby horses, which also appear elsewhere in England, suggest that the tradition is much older. Other processions with hobby horses take place across Cornwall at the Golowan Festival in June and at the Montol Festival on December 21 in Penzance . The oldest description of Fest in Minehead dates back to 1830.
The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in the village of the same name in the central English county of Staffordshire includes twelve dancers, six of whom wear reindeer horns, one rides a hobby horse and one plays the fool. The oldest written evidence of this festival is from 1686. A document from Abbots Bromley from the time of Henry VIII , which mentions hobby horses, is dated to 1532. The oldest written sources in Great Britain indicating hobby horses come from London (1460 and 1529), Wales (14th and 15th centuries) and Cornwall (early 16th century). The English spring festivals are part of the traditional setting of the late medieval Moriskan dances , which were widespread in Western Europe and are still performed today under various names.
In the French civil society of the 15th and 16th centuries, sottie , games of fools with rough jokes, were performed. The male members of fun associations ( sociétés joyeuses ) held dances with hobby horses in a splendid setting during the carnival season, during which literary texts were also presented. The fact that men who had just grown up at these get-togethers used children's toys is related to the reversal of social structures at the carnival. For a certain time the world was and is symbolically in disarray and is upside down during Carnival. Accordingly, the young, unmarried men parodied in an anarchic way a social role behavior into which they were about to integrate. Some Hobby Horse dancers wore oversized horns on their heads, which is interpreted as a phallic symbol, i.e. a demonstration of masculinity. The performances were satirical and political, some elements had an obscene character. At the end of the 16th century, the French authorities banned the performances.
America
With the Spanish colonization in the 16th century, the hobby horse came from Europe to New Mexico, where it was taken over by the pueblos . In the 1970s, seven pueblo groups were practicing ceremonies with hobby horses. These consist of a wooden frame that is attached to the wearer's waist and covered with a blanket. The frame ends at the front with a horse's head and at the back with a tail. The Jemez Pueblo group holds a ceremony on August 1st and 2nd every year in which they continue the tradition of the abandoned pecos pueblo and carry around the figure of an ox. The procession includes a hobby horse or two accompanied by two clowns. On the evening of the first day, the procession reached the north end of the pueblos . From here on, ox figures and hobby horses go from house to house and receive bread (a symbol of fertility), which helps households to receive divine blessings. Religious leaders bless the animal dummies on the way to the central village square. At the service in the Catholic Church the next morning, like the day before, hobby horses, masked actors and drummers are present. The big show with several dancing hobby horses, the ox and a large audience begins at the central square around noon. These and similar ceremonies elsewhere very likely came with Spanish Franciscans , the first of whom reached New Mexico in the 1530s. They introduced religious dance dramas as a method of proselytizing. The ceremonies are a combination of Indian-animistic customs, Christian elements and certain defensive measures to protect them from further external influences.
Under the influence of Spanish culture, dance dramas with hobby horses came to America, especially with the cult of St. Santiago . He is the patron saint of Spain and is venerated on July 25th. In ceremonies on this day, hobby horses appear with his name. The Santiago dancers from Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico are led in the processions by a Santiago de Caballero on a hobby horse and accompanied by fiddle and guitar music. Dances with Santiago as the leading clown on a hobbyhorse are popular across Mexico. In the Mexican folk dances, certain influences generally come from the British Isles, in addition to hobby horses, among other things, the maypole and the figure of the booby.
Orient, South and Central Asia
The hobbyhorse appears in early Islamic literature (7th / 8th century) with the name chayāl , which generally meant “figure” at this time and later “play” and “shadow”, in particular the Arabic shadow play . The horse has had a magical meaning in Asia since ancient times. Among other things, it is associated with shamanic practices in Central Asia and with religious possession rituals in India. The shaman of the Siberian Buryats uses a hobby horse as a symbolic transmission of the wind horse that appears in trance . The shaman's drum, which is played to accompany, is often covered with horse skin. Arab nomads used to ride on real horses around the tent in which a child had just been born, stretching their weapons to protect the newborn from the influence of evil spirits in this particularly endangered phase. In this overall context, the ethnologist Verrier Elwin puts a ritual observed around 1940 in the central Indian Gond , in which a man in a trance rides a hobby horse in order to find out the cause of an evil.
The symbolism of using a hobby horse in a state of trance is not necessary for riding a horse. The hobby horse can just as easily be carried on the shoulder. Then - conversely - the load of the horse presses on the body. This means that a deity rides the possessed, which amounts to an identity of horse and rider as felt in the trance.
In 1937, Arnold Baké observed dances and slapstick with hobby horses on several occasions in southern India. In Madurai it was a village comedy with dumb guys showing jokes and a poor plot, a man disguised as a woman and a hobby horse rider moving around the group. At one performance, the hobby horse's appearance was reminiscent of a bullfight, another appearance had a religious background.
Humor and satire in Turkish folk tales ( masalları ), as in the corresponding Arab genres, are often directed against the religious and secular authorities. Because Hārūn ar-Raschīd (caliph from 786 to 809) went down in history as a particularly important ruler, the vernacular said he had a brother or half-brother named Behlül Dane (Turkish "crazy prankster"). The contrast between the two couldn't be greater. Instead of marrying one of the beautiful women of the palace, Behlül Dane preferred, according to one of the stories, to live in a hut on the outskirts of the city and ride a hobby horse with the street children.
South East Asia
Ritual dances performed in trance with hobby horses occur on various occasions on the Malay Islands . A dance form that is cultivated in Java , Bali and Malaysia is called kuda lumping ( Indonesian “made of leather, ie flat horse”) in Indonesia and kuda kepang (“[made of bamboo] braided horse”) in Malaysia. The generic term for these dance games accompanied by music is jatilan . Horse dancing came to Malaysia with immigrants from Java and Banjarmasin in the 1920s. The horse dummies consist of a flat bamboo mesh that is covered with fabric or animal skin and brightly painted, depending on the region. Sometimes the figures are assembled from tin cans without a frame and hammered into shape. In Java trance states are part of the dances, then the adjective betul (“real”, “truthful”) is placed in front of the name; the dances without trance from Banjarmasin are "just fun" ( main-main saja ). The captain who is responsible for accompanying the participants who have fallen into a trance is called pawang . Its function is synonymous with that of the traditional healer ( dukun ) and the game leader ( dalang ) in the shadow play wayang kulit , to which there are also relationships. The musicians accompanying the at least a dozen dancers play angklung (struck bamboo tubes of different pitches), gendang (large double-headed barrel drum), terbang ( frame drum ) and a bronze gong . In most dance formations, two groups compete with each other. In a state of trance, when a horse spirit ( hantu ) has taken possession of the actor, he gets out of control and leaves his prescribed dance floor. As equine beings, dancers cannot use their hands, but tend to kick their feet, bite onlookers and tear off flowers with their mouths. Kuda lumping is performed at public and private parties.
Even if a state of obsession is not achieved, it is still about an intense relationship between humans and horses. In his imagination, a person is not a rider, but becomes a horse. According to popular belief, most of the dances with hobby horses can be interpreted as a fertility ritual. There is obviously a connection that cultures that otherwise have little contact with horses, such as the inhabitants of the Malay Islands, tend to organize dances with hobby horses and other cultures in which the horse plays an important role in everyday life, do without hobby horses. This applies, for example, to the North American Indians who used to roam nomadically with horses and who never had hobby horses, while hobby horses became indigenous to the culture of the pueblos, whose handling of horses is limited.
Children's toys and entertainment
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Johann Georg Krünitz writes in his 242-volume encyclopedia (1773-1858) on the use of the hobby horse:
"Children's toys, a stick or stick with a horse's head made of wood in front, on which small children tend to ride by taking the stick between their thighs, grasping the bridle by the head, and so with their own feet, in the imagination, sitting on a horse, galloping around with a stick or horses. "
The hobby horse was already in use as a children's toy in the Middle Ages: The oldest plastic hobby horse in the St. Anne's Museum in Lübeck is in a children's group on the altar of the Gertrudenbrettererschaft der porters, made around 1509 in the vicinity of the carver Henning von der Heyde . A little later, around 1521, a carved child with a hobby horse is dated on the high altar of St. Petri Church in Dortmund .
In Osnabrück , hobby horse riding for children has been held every year on October 25th since 1953 . The festival commemorates the Peace of Westphalia concluded in Osnabrück and Münster in 1648 to end the Thirty Years' War . The hobby horse riding was organized for the first time in Osnabrück in 1948.
At the Neuburg Castle Festival in Neuburg an der Donau , hobby horses are used in the so-called Steckenreitertanz, a play commemorating the wedding of Count Palatine Ottheinrich and Princess Susanna of Bavaria on October 16, 1529. Two Steckenreiters children can be seen on the city arms of Neuburg: the two princes and later princes Ottheinrich and Philipp .
Hobby horse polo was introduced as a fun sport in 1998 in Heidelberg and 2002 in Mannheim . The Indologist Hugh van Skyhawk saw some boys playing polo with hobby horses in the village of Hispar in the northern Pakistani mountain region of Gilgit-Baltistan .
Music, literature and visual arts
The composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856) composed a piano piece that he called "Knight of the Hobby Horse". It belongs to his cycle Kinderszenen op. 15 (1838), about whose work he jokingly wrote to his fiancée Clara Wieck “[...] I felt as if I were in a grand piano dress”. Like the entire cycle, the piano miniature is not composed for children. She onomatopoeically imitates the child's hopping with the stick (horse) - a paradox - in that the 3/4 time is consistently emphasized by the right hand on the third beat , ie runs “against the grain”. Instead of the normal focus on one , it has an eighth rest with an attached, consistently dotted three-tone rhythm, while the left hand plays with natural waltz emphasis until the end. The two-part piece, with its repetition signs that characterize the dance, increases at the end in long leaps of the left hand to fortissimo. Schumann wrote “With humor” as the title of the lecture.
In the novel Life and Views of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne , published between 1759 and 1767 , the hobbyhorse is an aid to sexual satisfaction and otherwise a toy for adults and a constant exercise in concentration for infantile Uncle Toby, who became impotent due to a war injury for the mind. The hobbyhorse acts as a tool to keep the rambling mind connected to the weak, limited body. The term Hobby Horse for favorite pastime came from the translation of the novel into German. In colloquial English, hobby horse has the connotation "lover" or "prostitute", probably also going back to Sternes novel. A derogatory, often insulting aftertaste of hobby horse has been known in literary terms since the end of the 16th century and has been prominently passed down through the Shakespeare comedy Much Ado About Nothing , published in 1600 .
In the drawing “Triumph of Death” by the Florentine painter Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627), the focus is on death, which appears with outstretched, ossified wings and which brings down its victims in a violent attack. On the left are two naked children, tied to death with a rope around their stomachs. While the girl tilts her head to one side, the boy looks ahead. With one hand he holds a hobby horse in front of him and with the other a wind turbine on a pole. These two attributes are since iconographic dictionary Iconologia (1593) of Cesare Ripa the allegory for stupidity. The child's toy creates a contrast to the somewhat more mature boy and, as a sign of childlike innocence, increases the horror of the cruel incursion of death. In Ripa's Iconologia , the woodcut of a grown man with a long coat and the Italian title Pazzia (“madness”) is depicted, who is carrying these children's toys in his hands. Hans Holbein the Younger (1497 / 98–1543) uses the same attributes of a hobby horse and a windmill in his illustration for Psalm 52, which shows an idiot running along in torn rags. The psalm begins with the Latin words: Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus (“The fool speaks in his heart: There is no God”). At the time, stupidity and childliness were related characteristics.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hobby horses: In: Rodney P. Carlisle (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society. Sage Publishing, New York 2009, p. 299
- ↑ Katja Gvozdeva: Hobbyhorse Performances: A Ritual Attribute of Carnivalesque Traditions and its Literary Appropriations in Sottie Theater. In: Eyolf Østrem, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Nils Holger Petersen, Jens Fischer (Eds.): Genre and Ritual: The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals. Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen 2005, pp. 65–86, here p. 65
- ^ Hans Eberhard Kauffmann: The games of the Thadou-Kuki in Assam. In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie , Volume 73, Issue 1/3, 1941, pp. 40–71, here p. 54
- ^ Violet Alford: Ceremonial Animals of Languedoc and the Sinibelet. In: Folklore, Vol. 59, No. 4, December 1948, pp. 184-187, here p. 184
- ^ Edward Marwick Plummer: Athletics and games of the ancient Greeks. Lombard & Caustic, Cambridge (Mass.) 1898, p. 52
- ^ Brian W. Rose: A Note on the Hobby-Horse. In: Folklore, Vol. 66, No. 3, September 1955, p. 363
- ^ Curt Sachs: World History of the Dance. Norton, New York 1937, p. 338
- ^ M. Macleod Banks: The Padstow May Festival. In: Folklore, Vol. 49, No. 4, December 1938, pp. 391-394
- ^ The Minehead Hobby Horse. An old tradition of Minehead. minehead-online.co.uk
- ^ Michael Heaney: New Evidence for the Abbots Bromley Hobby-Horse. In: Folk Music Journal, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1987, pp. 359f
- ↑ Katja Gvozdeva: Hobbyhorse Performances: A Ritual Attribute of Carnivalesque Traditions and its Literary Appropriations in Sottie Theater, 2005, pp. 70–75
- ^ Luke Lyon: Hobby Horse Ceremonies in New Mexico and Great Britain. In: Folk Music Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1981, pp. 117-145
- ^ Luke Lyon: Hobby-Horse Ceremonies in New Mexico and Great Britain, 1981, p. 141
- ^ Gertrude Prokosch Kurath: Mexican Moriscas: A Problem in Dance Acculturation. In: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 62, No. 244, April – June 1949, pp. 87–106, here p. 88
- ^ Max Harris: Moctezuma's Daughter: The Role of La Malinche in Mesoamerican Dance. In: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 109, No. 432, Spring 1996, pp. 149–177, here p. 172
- ↑ Pamela Loos: Greek Drama. (Bloom's Period Studies) Chelsea House Publications, New York 2004, p. 194
- ^ Verrier Elwin: The Hobby Horse and the Ecstatic Dance. In: Folklore, Vol. 53, No. 4, December 1942, pp. 209-213, here p. 212
- ^ Ernest Theodore Kirby: The Origin of the Mummers' Play. In: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 84, No. 333, July – September 1971, pp. 275–288, here p. 282
- ^ Arnold Baké: Some Hobby Horses in South India. In: Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 2, 1950, pp. 43-45
- ↑ Ahmet E. Uysal, Warren S. Walker: Saintly Fools and the Moslem Establishment. In: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 87, No. 346, October-December 1974, pp. 357-361, here p. 359
- ^ Jaap Art : Music in Java. Its History, its Theory and its Technique. (2nd edition 1949) 3rd edition edited by Ernst L. Heins. Volume 1. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1973, p. 284
- ^ Kathy Foley: The Dancer and the Danced: Trance Dance and Theatrical Performance in West Java. In: Asian Theater Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1985, pp. 28-49, here p. 29
- ↑ KOL Burridge: Kuda Kepang in Batu Pahat, Johore. In: Man, Vol. 61, February 1961, pp. 33-36, here p. 35
- ^ Johann Georg Krünitz : Economic Encyclopedia or general system of the state, city, house and agriculture. 1773–1858, keyword: Hobby horse
- ↑ The sport interview: What is the attraction of hobby-horse polo? In: The Rhine Palatinate . July 25, 2008, accessed October 15, 2014 .
- ↑ Trend sport hobby horse polo: I think my horse is cutting. In: Der Spiegel . September 2014, accessed October 15, 2014 .
- ^ Hugh van Skyhawk: Burushaski texts from Hispar: Materials for understanding an archaic mountain culture in northern Pakistan. (Contributions to Indology, No. 38) Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2003, p. 196, ISBN 978-3-447-04645-9
- ↑ Schumann Children's Scenes Op. 15 . Wiener Urtext Edition, Schott / Universal Edition, 1996, ISMN M-50057-140-7, foreword p. 5 and p. 29, no. 9.
- ↑ William C. slogan reading: Tristram Cyborg and Toby Toolmaker: Body, tools and Hobby Horse in "Tristram Shandy." In: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Restoration and Eighteenth Century) Summer 2007, pp. 679–701, here p. 681
- ↑ Lubomir Konecny: Jacopo Ligozzi, Dante and Petrarch. In: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Volume 50, Issue 3, 2006, pp. 401–407
- ^ Yona Pinson: Folly and Childishness go hand in hand: Hans Holbein's "Dixit Insipiens". In: Notes in the History of Art , Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring 2003, pp. 1–7, here p. 1
