Hyenas and Bears in Snarkland

[GoetzKluge]

045    He would joke with hyenas, returning their stare
046        With an impudent wag of the head:
047    And he once went a walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,
048        "Just to keep up its spirits," he said.

[justin]

Your point being?

[GoetzKluge]

The four lines in the stanza show that the Baker seemingly must have gotten along pretty well with animals to which less gifted people usually prefer to keep a good safety distance: Not only could the Baker tame hyenas just by joking with them, he also was a bear whisperer. Quite a few years before the Baker hunted Snark, not one but two saints (one of them having been the Bishop of the Bavarian Freising district, where I am living today) were required for these two demanding jobs. Here we have, as for the nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll, a nice coincidential link between the stanza and those tales about St. Macarius and St. Corbinian. We'll never know, whether the Reverend Dodgson noticed that coincidence after reading Carroll's poem in 1876.

Have a nice day
Goetz