If you drive from Ruby Valley to Elko Nevada, and you take the long way round if I remember correctly, you will get to the town of Jiggs, Nevada, which has (I believe) one house, a school, and a bar…the smallest town in Nevada. The first time I set foot in the bar, I was about 15, and I don’t believe that was quite old enough, because the bar in Jiggs, Nevada is one of the most scary things in my memory. Although the people in Jiggs (all 8 of them) are very nice, on the walls of the bar hang creatures of horror for a 15 year-old, but of humor for adults. There you can find the one and only two-headed calf as well as many other montages of mammals, including quite a few Jackalopes.
Don’t know what a Jackalope is? Basically it’s a rabbit or hare with horns or antlers, looks like this:
Here’s the funny thing…from Jiggs, Nevada to Mittenwald, Bavaria, not much has changed in the mythology! (Although they are 5,564 miles/8,954 km apart as the crow flies.) In this little corner of Bavaria, up in the Alps, the people of Mittenwald believe in the ferocious Wolpertinger, not quite unlike the Jackalope, however, with wings and fangs:
Here comes the best part! When I wanted to find out more about these small and strange beasts, I discovered something quite amusing for Art Historians!
(All pictures are clickable for a larger version.)
The first of these rabbits is actually a famous work from the German artist Albrecht Dürer from 1502. Apparently over time people have independently taken Dürer’s work and re-interpreted it for their own cultural mythology! Talk about comparative visual culture! *giggle*
On another tangent…
Oddly enough, it seems as though Jiggs, Nevada has more than one connection to Germany. At one point there was a commercial filmed there for the VW, in which “the entire population of Jiggs can fit into a Volkswagen Bus”! After much time spent googling, I found the following photo:
That concludes my random blog post! And all because my uncle asked me for a schnitzel recipe…
Our old friend Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) created his own taxidermic expressions:
According to Liane Bonin:
“Seuss is Seuss through and through.”
Even when it comes to, of all things, taxidermy. During the 1930s, Geisel’s zookeeper father began sending his son the castoff horns, beaks and antlers of his animal charges, inspiring the young artist to use them in sculptures of mystical creatures sprung from his own imagination. “He was creating what he thought these animals would want to be reincarnated as,” Dreyer says.
The results, mostly round-eyed and grinning creatures like the Semi-Normal Green-Lidded Fawn, are too cute to be off-putting, but Depression-era art enthusiasts apparently didn’t see their charm. “Seuss tried to do a mail-order sculpture project trying to sell these things, but it wasn’t successful,” Dreyer says.”
So…jackalopes and wolpertingers and 16th century works by Albrecht Dürer…independent inventions, perchance?
Ha,
looks like somebody else is seeing the connection too 🙂
The latest release of ubuntu linux is code named “the jaunty jackalope” and since English is not my first language, I did not know the word “jackalope”. So I started googling and would you know it, the first picture I came across looked suspiciously like a wolpertinger. Ubuntu has its root in South Africa I believe. So I’m wondering where else this mythical creature has been spotted?