Серебряные зайцы водят хоровод!

September 29, 2022 6:50 AM

Near the end of the Gogol Bordello song Through the Roof And Undergound there's a single phrase that's not in English. Google translate of online lyrics says it's Russian, translated as "Silver hares lead a dance!". Is there some specific Russian/Ukranian - GB frontman Eugene Hütz is Ukrainian - context to the dancing silver hares or did they just like the image?
posted by each day we work to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

Dancing hares have long been a subject of folklore in many cultures. This site, while not authoritative, fairly summarizes the lore. In Anglophone cultures, there's something known as a "hare's parliament," hares supposedly gathered in a circle. Because of their "dancing," in the Celtic lands of the British Isles and throughout much of northern Europe, hares were suspected of being witches in animal form, perhaps so they could milk cattle on the sly —though prior to the arrival of Christianity hares were considered lucky, sacred, and associated with spring and renewal (and thus their syncretization with Easter — it was originally an Easter hare, not an Easter rabbit). These were-hares could be killed with silver bullets, a crooked silver sixpence, a silver button, or by putting rowan or vervain (a kind of verbena) behind the gun stock before shooting. Various bits of lore tell of a hunter wounding a hare only to find an old crone turn up in the village with a bandage on a severe wound. Another story tells of a hare being shot with silver, and a local woman at the same instance throwing up her arms and shouting, "They have killed my familiar spirit!" Anyway! That's more than about dancing hares but you get the point — they are the subject of folklore across European cultures.
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:31 AM on September 29, 2022

Good stuff Mo Nickels. More: the symbol of three hares or rabbits running in a circle is widespread in the world's iconography but not uniformly distributed. There is a peculiar cluster of them, carved out of wood and embedded in the roofs of churches in and around Dartmoor in SW England, where they are known as Tinners' Rabbits although most of the examples are more clearly hares Lepus europaeus than rabbits Oryctolagus cuniculus. Both species are members of the mammalian order Lagomorpha, along with a couple of dozen other species, some more prolific (breeding like rabbits etc.) than others. Tinners were the workers of the mineral cassiterite which was particularly abundant in SW England since ancient times and immensely desirable as a component of bronze.

One of the peculiarities of the three carved lagomorphs is that they usually save on ears and are show a sort of optical illusion with each animal having two ears shared with two others. This emphasises that one of the mythological attributes of hares is resurrection and cycles perhaps because its gestation period is the same (28 days) as the cycle of the moon. The Easter Bunny has clearly come down to us from this source. It's not clear why the Tinners should have adopted the ever-running hares as their badge but there is a suggestion that the symbol travelled from the Buddhist Orient along the Silk Road during medieval times and came to rest in Devon. Along the way, it infected all three great monotheistic religions and you are as likely to find the three hares in a synagogue as in a church.

MeFi's own Paul Slade has a long interesting essay about the silver hare in Kit Williams' Masquerade.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:15 PM on September 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

No, there is not -- but just FYI, it's not just hares leading a dance, it's hares leading khorovod -- a classic folk round dance.
posted by virve at 6:00 PM on September 30, 2022