The Creatures of Farne

The most beloved of all the Cuthbert stories are the nature wonders: the two otters that came up from the sea to warm and dry the saint’s feet with their breath and fur after he had spent the night praying in the cold water, and the eider ducks — “St Cuthbert’s birds” — that nested fearlessly about his cell and which he is said to have protected by a rule, the earliest bird-protection law in Britain. This file gathers the creature-miracles of Farne as the Lives attest them, pinned to their texts under METHODOLOGY §3.5, and reads them not as whimsy but as theology: the obedience of the creation to the saint as the sign of Eden restored.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic-Roman; wonderworker of Northumbria)

How These Stories Are to Be Read

The animal stories of Cuthbert are the part of his legend best known to the world, and they are easily sentimentalized into a kind of Franciscan charm. They are reported here as what they are: the testimony of the Lives, recounted by the anonymous Lindisfarne monk and by Bede as wonders worked through the saint, not as adjudicated natural history (METHODOLOGY §3.5). But it is important to see that, for the hagiographers, these were not charming trifles. They belong to a serious theology: the tameness of the wild creatures around the holy man is the sign that in him the harmony of paradise, broken by Adam’s fall, is being restored — that the saint, reconciled to God, is reconciled also to the creation, which obeys him as it obeyed unfallen man (Ward 1990; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989). The same theology runs through the desert tradition, where lions serve the hermits and the beasts grow gentle before the saints; Cuthbert’s otters and ducks are the northern form of it (see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers).

The Otters

The most famous of the stories is, in fact, set not on Farne but earlier, during Cuthbert’s days at Coldingham, the double monastery on the coast where he stayed for a time; but it belongs with the Farne material as the type of all his creature-wonders. The anonymous Life tells it first, and Bede retells it. A monk of Coldingham, suspicious of where Cuthbert went on his nightly absences, secretly followed him one night and saw him go down to the sea and wade out into the waves up to his neck, where he stood through the dark hours singing the praises of God. At dawn, coming up onto the sand, he knelt to pray; and there came up out of the sea two little sea-creatures — otters, in the usual rendering — which prostrated themselves before him, warmed his feet with their breath, and dried them with their fur, and then, having received his blessing, slipped back into the water. The watching monk was stricken with fear and remorse, and the next day confessed and was forgiven (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert II.3; Bede, Prose Life 10; trans. Colgrave 1940).

The story is told, in both Lives, with great restraint and seriousness. Its point is not the charm of the otters but the secrecy of Cuthbert’s ascetic prayer — the night vigils in the cold sea, hidden from men — and the way the creation itself ministers to the holy man whose discipline the world does not see. The animals honour what the monk had spied on with suspicion; the wild sea-beasts know the saint better than his own brother-monk. It is, at bottom, a story about hidden holiness and its vindication.

The Birds of Farne: “St Cuthbert’s Birds”

The Inner Farne is to this day a great seabird colony, and the eider duck — a heavy, tame, ground-nesting sea-duck — breeds there in numbers. The association of the eider with Cuthbert is ancient and has given the bird its enduring northern name: in Northumberland and the Borders the eider is still called the cuddy duck or St Cuthbert’s duck/bird (cuddy being a local form of “Cuthbert”). The Lives and the later tradition present Cuthbert as the friend and protector of the birds of his island. Bede tells how the ravens of Farne, which had been pulling thatch from the guest-house, were rebuked by Cuthbert and, repenting, brought him a lump of lard with which the brethren greased their boots — a story of the obedient and even penitent creation (Bede, Prose Life 20; trans. Colgrave 1940).

The protection of the eider ducks themselves is firmly attached to Cuthbert in the cult and the tradition, and the eiders’ fearlessness of human beings on Farne has been associated with his patronage from early times; he is on this account often called the patron saint of the seabirds, and the protection of the eiders on Farne — sometimes described as the earliest bird-protection measure in the British Isles — is referred to his rule for the island. [Disputed: the eider ducks' association with Cuthbert as "St Cuthbert's birds" and his protection of them is firmly rooted in the cult and the Farne tradition (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989); the often-repeated claim that Cuthbert issued a formal law protecting the eiders — "the first bird-protection law" — is a traditional and devotional formulation rather than a measure documented in the early *Lives*, which record his care for the creatures of Farne and the ravens but do not preserve such an enactment as a legal text (cf. Colgrave 1940 on the contents of the *Lives*)]. The historical kernel is Cuthbert’s documented protectiveness toward the wildlife of his island and the long folk-tradition that grew from it; the “law” is the tradition’s way of crystallizing that protectiveness.

The Ravens and the Other Wonders

Besides the otters and the eiders, the Lives record a cluster of further creature-stories that fill out the picture of the saint at peace with the wild. The ravens that stole the thatch and were banished, then returned in penitence — head bowed, wings drooping — to beg pardon and offer the lard, are Bede’s most developed animal-fable, and he draws from it an explicit moral about humility and the obedience even of irrational creatures to the will of God (Bede, Prose Life 20; trans. Colgrave 1940). There is the eagle that, at Cuthbert’s word, provided a fish for him and his boy companion on a journey, and which Cuthbert insisted be given its due share, rebuking the boy for taking the whole (Bede, Prose Life 12; trans. Colgrave 1940). There is the horse that, nuzzling the thatch of a shelter where Cuthbert and his servant sheltered hungry, dislodged a hidden bundle of bread and meat — provision sent, the Life says, by God for His servant (Bede, Prose Life 5; trans. Colgrave 1940). Each of these is reported as the testimony of the Lives; each turns on the same theme of the creation’s ministry to the holy man and of God’s provision through it.

The Theology of the Tame Creation

What unites these stories, and what lifts them above the level of folklore, is their place in the theology of holiness the Lives are working out. In the biblical and patristic understanding, Adam in paradise lived in harmony with the animals, who were subject to him and unafraid; the fall broke that harmony, and the wild creatures became strange and hostile to man. The saint, restored by grace toward the condition of Adam, recovers something of that lost lordship — not by mastery but by holiness — and the creation answers him. The otters minister to Cuthbert; the ravens repent before him; the eiders nest fearlessly at his feet; the eagle and the horse serve him. This is, for the hagiographers, evidence of the same order as the healings and prophecies: the visible sign of an invisible sanctity, the radiance of a man in whom the image of God is being renewed (Ward 1990; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989). The desert fathers’ lions and the Farne otters belong to one tradition, and Cuthbert is the northern heir of it (see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers).

For the Orthodox reader, then, “St Cuthbert’s birds” are not a charming footnote but an image of redemption: the holy man at peace with the wild creation, the first-fruits of the world’s healing in the saints. That the eider ducks of Farne still bear his name, and still nest unafraid where his cell once stood, is the living continuation of a story the Lives told as theology.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Anonymous Life II.3 and Bede, Prose Life 10: the night prayer in the sea and the otters at Coldingham; Bede, Prose Life 20: the penitent ravens of Farne; Prose Life 12: the eagle and the fish; Prose Life 5: the horse and the hidden bread; on the contents of the Lives generally and the limits of what they record.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (IV.27–28: Cuthbert’s life on Farne.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (The nature wonders as the sign of paradise restored; the desert background.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (The eider ducks and the Farne tradition; the cult of Cuthbert as protector of the island’s creatures.)