In August I had a small birthday party gathering in my garden - it was lovely to sit and chat with so many friends around a fire.
At the party I was given a book that I have only just got around to reading. The chance to read was a trip up to visit my biological mother (please see previous post on Substack) for her birthday - and also to offer support as her husband, Edward, suffers from the ravages of vascular dementia, compounded by a broken femur and C. diff infection.
The evenings are quiet - after I have cooked for and fed my mother, and we have finished the crossword (easy one in the i paper) we turn to our books. Previous visits I have been working through the 900 paged Books of Jacob by the amazing Olga Tokarczuk … it is brilliant, but I needed something lighter. So - out came Your Inner Hedgehog by Alexander McCall Smith.
When given it I was shocked that I had never even heard of this book - I am obviously aware of the author from his Number One Lady’s Detective Agency stories - but this had passed me by entirely. I dived in hoping for some hedgehog related wisdom ….
Ok - if you have not read it, there is a plot spoiler coming.
It is NOT about hedgehogs!! It is about a German academic called Professor Dr Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld. And those of you with any German will know that igel is the word for hedgehog - and this pompous Prof has the surname of hedgehog-field!!
And that is as far as we get with hedgehogs … but there was a bit that really caught my eye.
“Most people who today are dukes or earls are there because of descent from markedly successful psychopaths. Their ancestors were simply higher achievers than other people’s when it came to deceit, expropriation, selfishness and murder. That not of these attributes tends to be recorded in family coats of arms is testimony to the ability of people to brush over or even completely ignore the saliences of the inconvenient past. Coats of arms of armigerous families therefore tend to embody devices that bear no relation to the means by which those families’ prominence was achieved. There are no bloody knives in heraldry, no hidden trapdoors, no evicted widows, impoverished orphans or betray allies.”
Oh - I am being ungenerous, McCall Smith does go on to say …
“The hedgehog is not a common heraldic device; indeed it is thought to occur in no other coat of arms, German or otherwise. It is not generally considered a noble creature. Lions and unicorns abound in heraldry because they evoke, respectively, courage and charm; the modest hedgehog, by contrast, bears few associations. It scurries about the undergrowth on business of its own devising. It threatens nobody other than the small grubs and insects, for whom there is anyway generally little sympathy.”
When I was tasked to write a book on the iconography of the hedgehog this lack of ‘specialness’ was initially, I thought, going to present a problem. But what I did find was that the animal is deeply embedded in our hearts - not just in Britain, but all across the range of the 19 (or so) species … we love hedgehogs! We just tend not to make a song and dance about them. In fact I think one of the reasons we like them is their essentially modest nature.
Lets leave the lions and unicorns to the earls and dukes - and let us common folk adopt the hedgehog as our emblem … I think we would be hard pressed to do better!
If you would like to learn more about hedgehogs, here are two other books I have written … for Penguin and Graffeg
Obviously if you can get these in your local bookshop everyone benefits, but I also appreciate that a lot of people struggle to get out and find one ….
Oh - and to wrap up this ‘review’ of Your Inner Hedgehog … sorry, got distracted … it was such an easy read and made me realise I have tended to either read books related to my work, or things a little denser!!! I will find more light reads … in fact … if you could recommend any that would be great!
The author is not entirely correct. My family's coat of arms (Gwinnett) has a spear held by a horses mouth that is dripping blood
Have you read 'The Elegance of The Hedgehog' by Muriel Barbery, trans. by Alison Anderson?.