Somehow I never connected the words hermit and hermitage until yesterday, when I read an article in the New York Times about a new book by Gordon Campbell entitled The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (Oxford University Press), which traces “the origins of Snow White’s cuddly dwarf friends and their suburban-lawn counterparts to the 18th-century outbuildings where real people lived merely to provide ambiance.” The article leads off with a photograph of an eighteenth-century Scottish hermitage (one of only perhaps 200 such structures that survive in Europe) that made the metaphorical light bulb turn on in my head. It also included a charming story taken from the book, about an English nobleman who hired a hermit to live in the quaint hermitage in his garden, for a period of seven years. Apparently the solitude was oppressive, and “subsequent versions of the story have the hermit being caught in the local tavern after three weeks and dismissed, and more recent elaborations include improper relations with a dairymaid” according to Mr. Campbell.
The Surviving Scottish Hermitage/ Photograph by Gordon Campbell, New York Times.
These stories also caught by attention, as they reminded me of the wayward hermit in a magnificent (and amusing) medieval manuscript commonly known as the “Smithfield Decretals”, produced in southern France around 1300 with additional illuminations added in London later on. Its formal title is the Decretals of [Pope] Gregory IX, British Library Royal MS 10 E.iv and it fills 310 folios of text and accompanying gloss–you can read a great post about it here. The images are varied and whimsical: there are anthropomorphic animals, grotesques, crimes and misdemeanors, amorous encounters, and a very bad hermit, who, enticed by the devil, leaves his hermitage for the tavern, and becomes (in succession) a drunkard, fornicator, murderer, and wild man (surely an occupational hazard for any hermit), before he is ultimately redeemed in the end.
The Hermit and the Devil, followed by the Hermit drinking outside a tavern, in delicto flagrante, clubbing a miller to death, as a wild man with only animals for company, and confessing his many sins, British Library MS Royal 10 E. iv, early 14th century.
June 1st, 2013 at 7:34 am
Reblogged this on lauraleighlinker and commented:
Really interesting post.
June 1st, 2013 at 8:25 am
Hermits are not dead, but alive in Maine! One man lived, undetected, for 27 years near North Pond and was caught this year while attempting to break into one of the local camps he’d been victimizing for so long for food, clothing and supplies. Unlike the hermits you described, his digs was a tent covered with a tarp and the only thing he claims that he owns….his glasses. Without outside contact for so long, one wonders how he was still able to see with them without an eye test and upgraded glasses? lol
June 1st, 2013 at 8:28 am
Thanks, Paula–I’m sure there are more out there—
June 1st, 2013 at 8:48 am
Very interesting post!
June 1st, 2013 at 9:17 am
Great entry. Sometime I feel as though I’m living the hermit’s life!
June 1st, 2013 at 9:32 am
Your posts continue to dazzle! This is so interesting, and yes, I, too, was reminded of the recent kerfuffle about the hermit in Maine.
June 1st, 2013 at 6:41 pm
A Hermit Disclosed by Raleigh Trevelyan is a little classic and looks at Jimmy Mason, the Hermit of Great Canfield in the early twentieth century.
June 11th, 2013 at 4:51 am
Reblogged this on shabir hussain and commented:
we don’t trust 3 in 3…… it is philosophy u shldnt ask y?