The hare and the transformed witch in the folklore of the British Isles

Fast, unpredictable and active at dusk, the hare has for centuries been an animal laden with meaning. In the British Isles in particular, the belief that witches could take its shape was among the most widespread and enduring, so much so that it survived in country tales into the twentieth century. But before becoming the witch's favourite form, the hare had a sacred and divinatory history, already attested by ancient authors.

An animal respected by the ancient Britons

Julius Caesar, in the fifth book of his Gallic War, observes that the Britons considered it unlawful to eat the hare, the hen and the goose, although they kept them for pleasure. The note is brief, but it suggests that these animals were the object of a religious prohibition. The historian Cassius Dio also relates that Queen Boudica, before the revolt against Rome in AD 60 or 61, released a hare from the folds of her garment as an omen.

According to his account, the hare ran in a direction considered favourable and the crowd greeted the sign with enthusiasm. We do not know how faithful the episode is to the facts, but it shows that for Greek and Roman authors the hare could have a divinatory function among the Celtic peoples. Pliny the Elder, for his part, reports the belief that hares were hermaphrodites, a sign of the curiosity the animal aroused.

Gerald of Wales and the old women who steal milk

In the twelfth century Gerald of Wales, in his Topographia Hibernica, records a complaint he describes as both old and current: certain old women in Wales, Ireland and Scotland were said to turn into hares in order to suck the milk of other people's cows in secret. It is one of the earliest written records of the motif, tied to a rural economy in which milk was a precious resource.

From this belief a very widespread type of tale arose. A hunter wounds a hare that flees towards an isolated cottage; on entering, he finds an old woman with a wound in the same place on her body. The story, collected in countless variants in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, closely recalls Petronius's werewolf, where the wound reveals the secret identity.

Isobel Gowdie and the confessions of 1662

The most famous case is that of Isobel Gowdie, a woman from Auldearn in Scotland who in 1662 made a series of remarkably detailed confessions. Among many claims, she said she could turn into a hare and had been chased by dogs in that shape, escaping with difficulty. Her statements, rich in poetic imagery, have long been studied by historians.

We do not know for certain what became of Isobel Gowdie, nor the exact conditions in which she spoke. Her confessions mix popular beliefs about fairies, the demonological ideas of the judges and personal elements that are hard to decipher. For this very reason they remain a valuable source for understanding how the figure of the hare-woman lived in the imagination of seventeenth-century Scotland.

The hare never entirely lost its sacred aura. In the modern age it became, in Germany, the bearer of Easter eggs, a tradition documented as early as 1682 by Georg Franck von Franckenau, while in the British countryside it continued to evoke witches and spells. An animal of spring and of night, of fertility and of suspicion, the hare reflects the ambivalence with which rural communities looked at the nature around them.