Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. It is, of course Saturday, so we
Speaker 1: have a vault episode for you. This is going to
Speaker 1: be one of our holiday episodes from last year, titled
Speaker 1: The Rat King, originally published twelve twelve, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is.
Speaker 3: Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And on today's
Speaker 3: episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind, we are going
Speaker 3: to be talking about the wonderful, the Glorious Rat King, which,
Speaker 3: believe it or not, this is a Christmas episode, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Rob? That's right? This is one of a pair of
Speaker 1: Christmas Core episodes we're busting out this week. You can
Speaker 1: probably guess what the next one's going to be. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, the Holidays bring on an abundance of traditions, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, we have the Christian Nativity, we have Santa Claus,
Speaker 1: we have other things like Crampus, we have Marley's Ghost,
Speaker 1: we have the nineteen ninety sci fi action film I
Speaker 1: Come in Peace, and of course we have The Nutcracker.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, here's the tie in.
Speaker 1: So most of you are probably familiar with Tchaikovsky's ballet
Speaker 1: The Nutcracker. If you haven't seen it, if you haven't
Speaker 1: seen it many many times, this basically this is how
Speaker 1: it plays out. The first half is a rather imaginative
Speaker 1: tale of a nutcracker prince coming to life and with
Speaker 1: the help of a little girl, waging a battle against
Speaker 1: an evil mouse king, culminating in a cool sword fight.
Speaker 1: And then the rest of the ballet, which feels about
Speaker 1: usually about like three or four hours long. It is
Speaker 1: just a victory lap of dancing, just one dance after
Speaker 1: the other, no more stay, no more conflict, just dancing.
Speaker 3: What do I remember about the Nutcracker. I remember like
Speaker 3: a grandfather clock and like a sort of creepy, mysterious
Speaker 3: grandfather figure. I remember a lady with a giant dress
Speaker 3: that a bunch of children come out of. And I remember, yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess the rat king.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, or I guess it's specifically it's a mouse king,
Speaker 1: but it's very closely tied no pun intended with the
Speaker 1: concept of the rat king. Now. The ballet was based
Speaker 1: upon German romantic author Eta Hoffman's eighteen sixteen short story
Speaker 1: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, in which the titular
Speaker 1: mouse king is described as follows. This is the This
Speaker 1: is from the LRC translation. Marie was not afraid of mice,
Speaker 1: and she could not help being amused by this sight.
Speaker 1: She stood watching the mice come from all directions, when
Speaker 1: suddenly there came a sharp and terrible piping noise, and
Speaker 1: seven mouse heads with seven shining crowns upon them, rose
Speaker 1: through the floor. And behind them wriggled a mouse's body,
Speaker 1: on which the seven heads had all grown. Then the
Speaker 1: whole army of my shouted in full chorus, and went trot,
Speaker 1: trot right up to the cupboard. In fact, to Marie,
Speaker 1: who was standing beside it.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, I don't remember that this is a
Speaker 3: single mouse's body, but it's got seven mouse heads.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is commonly not depicted in performances of the ballet,
Speaker 1: though sometimes it is. Sometimes ballets will decide to get creative,
Speaker 1: get a little dark, and dive back into these roots.
Speaker 1: But I have more passages to read here. There's more
Speaker 1: of this. It's great, okay. Later on in the text,
Speaker 1: Hoffman writes, but that moment two enemy marksmen took hold
Speaker 1: of nutcrackers wooden cloak and held him fast. Squeaking in
Speaker 1: triumph from seven throats, the mouse King sprang forward to
Speaker 1: take his kill.
Speaker 3: Whoa, oh, and.
Speaker 1: Get this one, This one may be the best. She
Speaker 1: could only watch as the mouse King squeezed himself out
Speaker 1: through a hole in the wall. His fourteen eyes and
Speaker 1: seven crowns glistened as he bounded through the room and
Speaker 1: made a huge leap up to the top of Marie's nightstand.
Speaker 3: Yikes, I'm getting flashes of Stephen King's cat's eye.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean this is a creature of horror.
Speaker 3: Yeah, less cute than I recall from the ballet. So
Speaker 3: this is a monster creature that is a mouse with
Speaker 3: seven heads on a single body.
Speaker 1: That's right, And there are other descriptions in the text
Speaker 1: that emphasize the horror of multiplicity into a mouse. Cumig
Speaker 1: Now Hoffman, who of seventeen seventy six through eighteen twenty two,
Speaker 1: was a dark romantic. One of his early novels, eighteen
Speaker 1: fifteen's The Devil's Elixirs, concerns a doppelganger. He didn't originate
Speaker 1: the term or the concept but his work may have
Speaker 1: helped popularize the concept. He is also well known for
Speaker 1: his eighteen seventeen story The Sandman, which references a folkloric
Speaker 1: entity and kind of a horror spin, and it also
Speaker 1: features a female automaton. He's apparently noted for often employing
Speaker 1: optical motifs, which include not only the doubling of one's
Speaker 1: identity as with the Doppelganger, but also the multitude of
Speaker 1: heads on The Mouse King. And I think he makes
Speaker 1: use of other more direct uses of optical technology in
Speaker 1: places as well, like telescopes and so forth.
Speaker 3: You're saying optical motifs because like the doubling might be
Speaker 3: like a kind of multiplicity of images you would see
Speaker 3: through like a prism or some kind of thing a
Speaker 3: lens or thing like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Like, for instance, in these passages from the
Speaker 1: Nutcracker in the Mouse King, you get a sense of
Speaker 1: like almost like that of a kaleidoscope. You know, there's
Speaker 1: something just optically out of line with this thing that
Speaker 1: is moving towards you the reader, or towards Marie, the character.
Speaker 3: I understand now.
Speaker 1: Of course, Hoffman would have been acquainted with folklore, which
Speaker 1: we also see in his referencing of the sandman. The sandman,
Speaker 1: of course, typically sprinkles sand or dust upon a sleeper's eyes.
Speaker 1: I think we all know that basic idea. But in
Speaker 1: Hoffman's work, the sandman is said to steal the eyes
Speaker 1: of children who refuse to go to bed. The sand
Speaker 1: he puts on their eyes causes their eyeballs to fall out,
Speaker 1: and then he collects set eyeballs and takes them to
Speaker 1: the moon to feed his children.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And of course Hoffman would have definitely been familiar
Speaker 1: with the concept of the rat king, which seemingly plays
Speaker 1: into his invention here as well. Now, I was looking
Speaker 1: at a couple of sources, both by an author by
Speaker 1: the name of David Blameyer's. One of them is Telling
Speaker 1: Tales the Impact of Germany on English Children's Books, seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty through nineteen eighteen. This is a two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine publication, and he points out that Hoffman's description of
Speaker 1: the mouse king references both folkloric tales of multi headed
Speaker 1: dragons as well as the dragon from the Book of Revelation.
Speaker 1: Be clear, the author doesn't make any mention of rat kings,
Speaker 1: as we'll be discussing them later As an inspiration here.
Speaker 3: Right, Okay, but you can clearly see how knowledge of
Speaker 3: the biological or alleged biological entity the rat king would
Speaker 3: have would have or could have inspired the idea of
Speaker 3: a mouse with seven heads.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Now there's another example. This is sort of
Speaker 1: folk little bit more, I guess specifically literature. There's another
Speaker 1: work by the same author, the Folklore Tradition in Germany,
Speaker 1: where he mentions a rat king by the name of
Speaker 1: Berlibby that pops up in what Longreads author Adrian Dobb
Speaker 1: describes as a kunsmachen quote, an art fairy tale, a
Speaker 1: narrative that a writer fashions to resemble something you might
Speaker 1: hear from a farm hand at your father's estate. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: according to Dobb, here again this excellent piece on Longreads.
Speaker 1: I recommend it if you want some more rat king action.
Speaker 1: Here he points out that the rat king in this
Speaker 1: work is described as a king of all rodents. He's
Speaker 1: like a literal ruler of the rodent world, but is
Speaker 1: singular in body and in head, though it is implied
Speaker 1: that his tale is nodded with that of his wife,
Speaker 1: the rat Queen. Aw that's sweet, I guess, kind of sweet.
Speaker 1: It was this particular work. In this particular creation, Berlibby
Speaker 1: was the creation of Ernst mountst Arndt, who lives seventeen
Speaker 1: sixty nine through eighteen sixty a German nationalist, historian, writer
Speaker 1: and poet who in this tale seems to have been
Speaker 1: largely commenting on the rise of Napoleon, critiquing the idea
Speaker 1: that some might want to rise above their station within
Speaker 1: their own nation via the interference of a foreign power.
Speaker 1: And this, according to Dobb, was two years after Hoffman's tale.
Speaker 1: I don't know that there's any indication that like Hoffman's
Speaker 1: tale inspired this one. I think it's more probably the
Speaker 1: idea that like the rat King, was like a general
Speaker 1: concept already that was established. And we see two different
Speaker 1: authors exploring things with the idea, but for different purposes.
Speaker 3: Ah okay. So even in these slightly altered or just
Speaker 3: different forms, we see that the idea of the rat
Speaker 3: king is often used to symbolize something. It means something
Speaker 3: about religious life, or political life, or morality.
Speaker 1: That's right. Doab, writing about the example in Arnt's work, writes, quote,
Speaker 1: the rat King appears like an almost perfect parody of
Speaker 1: the community building ambitions that dominated German public life during
Speaker 1: and following the Napoleonic Wars. So he says, you know,
Speaker 1: the community building we're talking about here. This would have
Speaker 1: been things like community singing, community storytelling, various community minded
Speaker 1: efforts that were present in the culture of the time period.
Speaker 1: And the mouse king is presented perhaps as the unpleasant
Speaker 1: under belly of social cohesion. Quote the rat represented the
Speaker 1: dark side of community, the dark side of dependency, the
Speaker 1: dark side of proximity, tied.
Speaker 3: So closely to one another that you, in the end,
Speaker 3: are all doomed, doomed to a common fate.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, And so all of this would have been
Speaker 1: during a century in which Germany was transitioning from a
Speaker 1: largely rural society to a largely urban one. But of
Speaker 1: course these literary treatments did not invent the concept. Rather,
Speaker 1: again they find imaginative and or metaphorical uses of something
Speaker 1: that was already present in the public mindset. So what
Speaker 1: could that be? What could they have possibly been commenting
Speaker 1: on what had been seen, what had been witnessed, what
Speaker 1: was alive and the zeitgeist of the time.
Speaker 3: Right, So I guess this brings us to the question
Speaker 3: many listeners probably already know the basic idea. But what
Speaker 3: is a rat king In the common modern understanding, it
Speaker 3: is a group of rats who are joined at the tail,
Speaker 3: usually described or represented with the tails entangled in a
Speaker 3: huge not ball, and going all the way back to
Speaker 3: the sixteenth century, there have been dozens of documented accounts
Speaker 3: of rats discovered in this state, multiple rats three or
Speaker 3: more joined by the tail, sometimes hiding underneath floorboards, inside walls,
Speaker 3: protruding from earthen burrows, often with the rats still alive,
Speaker 3: arranged like the spokes of a wheel. And there are
Speaker 3: also physical specimens of alleged rat kings preserved and photographed
Speaker 3: with their tails entwined in this way, though of course
Speaker 3: in these cases the rats are generally already dead, so
Speaker 3: it can be hard to rule out hoaxes in the
Speaker 3: case of like a rat king that's actually kept in
Speaker 3: a museum somewhere that we'll have some educated commentary on
Speaker 3: the plausibility of hoaxes versus natural origin later on.
Speaker 1: I will say that you can certainly do some image
Speaker 1: searches and see some rat kings are like rat kings,
Speaker 1: but these are not pleasant images to look at, like
Speaker 1: a lot of like monstrous curiosities or alleged curiosities of
Speaker 1: the natural world or even the unnatural world, are interesting
Speaker 1: to look at or cool looking. The rat king not
Speaker 1: so much. I feel like it kind of seems to
Speaker 1: catch on as an idea more so than it is
Speaker 1: an actual symbol. Like, I don't know there are a
Speaker 1: lot of say, bands that use the rat king as
Speaker 1: their logo or anything of that nature.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't even consider that, but I bet there
Speaker 3: are some.
Speaker 1: I bet there are some, but they're probably kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, going for something outrageous and gross.
Speaker 3: So we wanted to look at the question what are
Speaker 3: these masses of mutually doomed rodents? Are they something that
Speaker 3: actually forms in nature or merely a legendary cryptid that
Speaker 3: inspired some taxidermy hoaxes, And if they do occur in nature,
Speaker 3: why and how so? First of all, I want to
Speaker 3: mention a major source that I'm going to be using
Speaker 3: in this exploration, one of the best things I came across,
Speaker 3: which is a book called Rats by an author named
Speaker 3: Martin Hart, published by Alison and Busby, Originally published in
Speaker 3: Dutch in nineteen seventy three, but with an English translation
Speaker 3: by Arnold Palmeranz in nineteen eighty two, and this book
Speaker 3: has an entire chapter devoted to ratkings and is just
Speaker 3: generally an excellent resource on this topic. So to get
Speaker 3: a flavor of what an encounter in the wild with
Speaker 3: a ratking looks like, I'm going to share an account
Speaker 3: from the beginning of Hart's chapter. So the setting is
Speaker 3: a cold day in February nineteen sixty three, and this
Speaker 3: is actually the most recent discovery of a rat king
Speaker 3: that Hart recounts in his book, though there have been
Speaker 3: other ones since then. This took place at a farm
Speaker 3: in the Dutch town of Rukfenn. A farmer named Peeve
Speaker 3: van Ninatten was out in his yard and he noticed
Speaker 3: a squealing sound coming from the direction of the barn.
Speaker 3: The farmer followed the squealing to its source, and when
Speaker 3: he got to it, he noticed a black rat peering
Speaker 3: out from under a heap of bean poles. The farmer
Speaker 3: killed the rat, but then when he tried to pull
Speaker 3: it out from under the poles, it wouldn't budge. It
Speaker 3: was stuck to something, and further uncovering revealed that the
Speaker 3: rat he had killed was somehow tied by the tail
Speaker 3: to six other rats. He killed the other rats as well,
Speaker 3: and then was left with this wheel of rats, consisting
Speaker 3: of seven apparently well fed adults, two males, and five females.
Speaker 3: They were of the species Rattus ratus, the black rat.
Speaker 3: They were not brown rats or the species Ratus norwegicus,
Speaker 3: which was a bit strange because they were found in
Speaker 3: the barn and chicken coop area of the farm, which,
Speaker 3: according to the farmer, was normally inhabited by brown rats
Speaker 3: and not black rats, though the farmer knew that he
Speaker 3: had black rats living in the loft of his house
Speaker 3: some distance away. On closer examination of the tail knot,
Speaker 3: most of the rats were tied only by the tips
Speaker 3: of their tails, though one rat had basically its entire
Speaker 3: tail tangled up. The knot also contained external material, like
Speaker 3: some straw. The flesh of the tails appeared compressed where
Speaker 3: it had been tied against the others, and an X
Speaker 3: ray revealed that there were some bone fractures in the
Speaker 3: tails and in the rats of their vertebrae. Examination indicated
Speaker 3: that the tails appear to have been joined like this
Speaker 3: for a while, which is a little perplexing because the
Speaker 3: rats did appear to have eaten well like they didn't
Speaker 3: appear emaciated and rob I've attached some pictures for you
Speaker 3: to look at of the rat King of Rukfinn. Here's
Speaker 3: the whole rat king with the seven individuals, and then
Speaker 3: there's a close up of the tail knot. It does
Speaker 3: look very grizzly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Worth noting, of course that rats tails are
Speaker 1: I belief, semi prehensile. But you can imagine in a
Speaker 1: situation that's if they were to come intertwined and certainly broken,
Speaker 1: there'd be very little that rats could do to free themselves.
Speaker 3: That's right. There are some accounts of people witnessing or
Speaker 3: claiming to witness a rat here or there breaking out
Speaker 3: of the tangle, like actually getting out, either by detaching
Speaker 3: like part of its tail coming off, injuring itself to escape,
Speaker 3: or managing to untangle and get out, but this seems rare.
Speaker 3: Mostly the rats appear stuck this way, and to summarize
Speaker 3: a large later section of Heart's chapter, a lot of
Speaker 3: the accounts of rat king discoveries from history take basically
Speaker 3: the same form as the story I just told. Someone
Speaker 3: is attracted to the sound of squealing, and then they
Speaker 3: discover behind or underneath something a single rat and then
Speaker 3: they attack it and then later discover that it is
Speaker 3: joined to at least two others in extreme instances dozens
Speaker 3: of others.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And in a lot of time, I've seen
Speaker 1: multiple accounts where it's something you know, it's taking place at,
Speaker 1: say a barn or perhaps an urban environment. I guess
Speaker 1: you could point out that these would be you know,
Speaker 1: human spaces, human places. Rats, of course, their populations growing
Speaker 1: in the very places where human populations grow and living
Speaker 1: alongside us in the shadows.
Speaker 3: I think that is significant. And let's come back to
Speaker 3: that when we talk about the conclusions of a paper
Speaker 3: I'm going to get to later. So another section of
Speaker 3: Heart's chapter here is an interesting diversion on the origin
Speaker 3: of the name rat king. It is a kind of
Speaker 3: weird thing to call a collection of rats tied together
Speaker 3: by the tail, Like, what is especially kingly about this?
Speaker 1: Right? Right? I mean, a king, by its very nature
Speaker 1: is an individual room over the mini. We tend not
Speaker 1: to think of a king as being a composite.
Speaker 3: Of multiples exactly, But the way Heart lays it out,
Speaker 3: I think you can kind of see the way the
Speaker 3: the meaning applied to this term has has sort of
Speaker 3: crept and morphed over time. So, according to Hart, the
Speaker 3: term rat king is a direct translation of the medieval
Speaker 3: German ratten koenig, though in this usage it originally had
Speaker 3: nothing to do with tailknots. It meant quote, one who
Speaker 3: lives well on the backs of others, So you can
Speaker 3: think of a sort of opulent parasite, or in a
Speaker 3: way one might argue any king somebody who you know,
Speaker 3: lives off the labor of others. They live well, they're
Speaker 3: you know, they're they're well fed, they get all the
Speaker 3: luxury they desire with other people doing the work. And
Speaker 3: that sort of social human association with the term rat
Speaker 3: king is explained somewhat by its usage in the sixteenth
Speaker 3: century text by an author named Conrad Gesner called Historia Animalium.
Speaker 3: From what I can tell, this scene to be a
Speaker 3: kind of a kind of great source document of like cryptozoologists.
Speaker 3: They'll love looking back to Conrad Gessner's entries in this
Speaker 3: But the point Gessner makes in this book, as summarized
Speaker 3: by Heart, is quote, some would have it that the
Speaker 3: rat wax is mighty in its old age and is
Speaker 3: fed by its young. This is what's called the rat king. Okay,
Speaker 3: So the idea is that like, some rats get like
Speaker 3: old and venerable as rats go, and then the other
Speaker 3: rats will start to serve it as a king. They'll
Speaker 3: bring it food, they'll bring it little baubles and like
Speaker 3: pieces of velvet or luxury items. You know, they're coming
Speaker 3: to serve their rat king. So that rat king is
Speaker 3: living well by doing nothing off of the labor of
Speaker 3: the other rats in its nest.
Speaker 1: Of course, you could easily tell the same fancy old
Speaker 1: story and point out that, hey, rats look after their elders,
Speaker 1: how honorable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you could exactly say that. Though to be clear, I,
Speaker 3: in featuring this story, I do not mean to endorse
Speaker 3: the idea that there's biological evidence for this. This seems
Speaker 3: to be more like a you know, an early modern
Speaker 3: story about how rats work, not anything that's backed up
Speaker 3: by research. Another early usage of the term rat king,
Speaker 3: though apparently having nothing to do with the the you know,
Speaker 3: the the wheel of rats tied together by the tail,
Speaker 3: is a quote from the founder of the Protestant Reformation,
Speaker 3: Martin Luther, in a passage attacking the Catholic Church. Luther says, quote,
Speaker 3: the archbishops have a primate above them the primate's a patriarch,
Speaker 3: and finally there is the pope, the king of the
Speaker 3: rats right at the top.
Speaker 1: Kind of kind of complicated here we have primates and rats.
Speaker 3: Well, the primate's that's like a position in the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, sorry, I'm just picturing an actual primate. So
Speaker 1: he's like Martin Luther is talking about apes, he's talking
Speaker 1: about rats. He might be if flinging something at a devil.
Speaker 1: He's just sees his.
Speaker 3: That usage of primate can be confusing and has confused
Speaker 3: me in the past. Yeah, but no, he's just talking
Speaker 3: about like the positions and like, yeah, the worst one
Speaker 3: who's like sort of the the evil king at the
Speaker 3: top of this institution that Luther hated, that's the rat
Speaker 3: king the pope, And that Luther quote would have been
Speaker 3: sixteenth century as well. Heart writes that after this the
Speaker 3: term ratt and Koenig came to refer to a king
Speaker 3: rat who sat on a throne made of knotted tails.
Speaker 3: So this seems like there's some morphing now where you're
Speaker 3: getting halfway to the rat king idea we have today.
Speaker 3: And I guess in this formulation, if I'm picturing picturing
Speaker 3: it right. It's not just that there are multiple rats
Speaker 3: with their tails nodded, but there's a king rat riding
Speaker 3: that knot of tails, like a palanquin or a litter.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like sitting upon the throne of tails.
Speaker 1: I'm a little hazy on where I saw this, but
Speaker 1: there was an old bit. I think Robert Snegel had
Speaker 1: something to do with this, the comedian behind Triumph the
Speaker 1: insult comic dog. But oh ok, the sketch. Perhaps listeners
Speaker 1: can write in about where I'm remembering this from, but
Speaker 1: the sketch was always the same. Here's a snake and
Speaker 1: it has a sizeable lump in its body. It's like
Speaker 1: an anaconda or something. And you have to guess what
Speaker 1: the lump is based on the shape of it, And
Speaker 1: so looking at the snake, the lump appears to be
Speaker 1: an old woman in a rocking chair. And then they reveal,
Speaker 1: after everyone's had a chance to guess, they reveal what
Speaker 1: the contents of the rat stomach happens to be, and
Speaker 1: it is a pile of dead rats in the shape
Speaker 1: of a woman in a rocking chair.
Speaker 3: That's good, But to come back to this image, it
Speaker 3: is a striking image, though Heart says it is not
Speaker 3: known where this idea first came from. But okay, so
Speaker 3: that's like a rat king on a throne of knotted tails.
Speaker 3: You take away the king and then what you've got
Speaker 3: left is just rats with knotted tails. And according to Heart,
Speaker 3: the first source to visually depict a rat king in
Speaker 3: any form and this is I think, in the form
Speaker 3: that we now understand it as just a group of
Speaker 3: rats with noted tails. The first publication to contain this
Speaker 3: was an edition of a sixteenth century book called the
Speaker 3: Emblemata by a Hungarian author named Johannes Sambucus or I
Speaker 3: think in his original language, janosh Zamboki. And this was
Speaker 3: an emblem book, which was a genre of literature that
Speaker 3: used to be quite popular, which would be essentially a
Speaker 3: catalog of allegorical illustrations or images. So in one common format,
Speaker 3: each page of this book would have a picture like
Speaker 3: a drawing that has some weird stuff going on in it,
Speaker 3: and then a Latin motto, and then some text, often poetry,
Speaker 3: explaining or interpreting the image. So for a modern example
Speaker 3: that people can understand, I'm just making this up, imagine
Speaker 3: a book that's got a page that has an illustration
Speaker 3: of Lady Justice blindfold blindfolded holding a sword in scales
Speaker 3: and a Latin motto that means to give everyone their due.
Speaker 3: Then there would be some texts describing what the image means,
Speaker 3: and that the scales mean the weighing of the evidence,
Speaker 3: and the blindfold means impartiality, and so forth. In the
Speaker 3: case of the Rat King in the Emblemata by Johanna Sambucus,
Speaker 3: the book depicts a scene with seven rats in a street,
Speaker 3: tied together by the tail, though none of them appears
Speaker 3: to be particularly elevated or king like. It just looks
Speaker 3: like seven common rats tied together. And in fact, they
Speaker 3: don't even look like rats. They look more like a
Speaker 3: cross between ferrets and wiener dogs. And there is a
Speaker 3: man looming over all of them, raising a baton, presumably
Speaker 3: to beat them to death.
Speaker 1: But then there's another man raising a baton or something
Speaker 1: that's facing away from them, like, yeah, I guess almost
Speaker 1: like he's leading them, or maybe he's saying, hey, come
Speaker 1: beat these rats.
Speaker 3: I don't know that's a good point. I don't understand
Speaker 3: what the other guy's doing. Yeah, his backs to them.
Speaker 3: He almost looks like they're both raising the sticks, and
Speaker 3: this other guy looks like he's going to like whack
Speaker 3: a big flower bush with it. I don't know. I've
Speaker 3: got more on this page in a second, but I
Speaker 3: just briefly did want to say that in early symbolic usage,
Speaker 3: the idea of rats tied together by the tails seems
Speaker 3: to be symbolically loaded significant to people. The image meant
Speaker 3: something about the structures or causes that bound people inextricably
Speaker 3: to one another. Now in the Emblemata, Johanna Simbucus explains
Speaker 3: that there's like a poem underneath the illustration, saying that
Speaker 3: there was once a man who was plagued by rats
Speaker 3: for many years, and then one day a servant came
Speaker 3: across a group of seven rats stuck together by the tail. Now,
Speaker 3: at this point Hart didn't say anything else about the emblemata,
Speaker 3: but I got really interested. I wanted to know what
Speaker 3: the book said about this illustration, so I did some
Speaker 3: real digging. I found on a full scan and transcription
Speaker 3: of the Latin text of the Emblemata. I have no
Speaker 3: idea what most of the text in this book is about,
Speaker 3: but searching through the pages, I found some really good
Speaker 3: pictures I just wanted to share with you. Rob One
Speaker 3: is like a guy who's going out to I think,
Speaker 3: pick some berries off of a bush, but he looks
Speaker 3: like Exeter from this island Earth, and there's some storm
Speaker 3: clouds in the background. Another one is I don't even
Speaker 3: know how to describe this. There's like a giant baby
Speaker 3: holding up these horns underneath his arms, but they're also
Speaker 3: kind of snakes and they've got fruit coming out of them,
Speaker 3: and he has a giant, I don't know, thread spool
Speaker 3: on his head, and then there's some other guys looking
Speaker 3: at him, like get a load of this guy. A
Speaker 3: lot of the images in this book have the energy
Speaker 3: of like my bird is better than your bird, or
Speaker 3: this guy with a dog head is bothering my dog.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Like there's something going on, there's some sort
Speaker 1: of drama or or interaction, but it's all trapped in
Speaker 1: some sort of cryptic imagery.
Speaker 3: There's one I really like of a guy who's got
Speaker 3: like a fishing net and he's kneeling beside the water's
Speaker 3: edge and he's like, yes, I'm going to touch this squid.
Speaker 3: There's like a dead looking squid in the water.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And the sheep are watching on kind of I
Speaker 1: guess with disapproval or approval. It depends if he's about
Speaker 1: to grab that squid or if he's letting the squid go.
Speaker 1: It does remind me of something that came up in
Speaker 1: a past episode, like different ideas about whether it is
Speaker 1: right to eat squid or if they should not be eaten.
Speaker 1: So maybe this concerns that, but it could concern various things.
Speaker 3: I guess that may well be the subject matter. Another
Speaker 3: one I liked is there's a dude in a very
Speaker 3: wide brimmed hat approaching a man who appears to be sick,
Speaker 3: laying on like a cot on the floor, and he's
Speaker 3: coming at him with severed heads in each hand. Is like,
Speaker 3: which of these heads is yours?
Speaker 1: Oh? This one is frightening.
Speaker 3: But anyway, coming back to the Ratking, Okay, I found
Speaker 3: the page that it's on, and God help me, I
Speaker 3: tried to manually translate this passage from the Latin via
Speaker 3: Google Translate, at extremely rough results somewhat funny. I'm sure
Speaker 3: I'm doing a horrible job getting the meaning here, but
Speaker 3: here's the best I could come up with. So the
Speaker 3: motto at the top of this image says capput seditionies tolendum,
Speaker 3: which means to remove the head of the rebellion. And
Speaker 3: here's the translation that I was able to come up with.
Speaker 3: It is not a fictional story that the shrew mice
Speaker 3: harassed the patrons and dug up the house too much,
Speaker 3: don't a safe battle? That many had hid for years
Speaker 3: being treated badly by the enemy. While the servant beholds
Speaker 3: the seven hidden, their tails firmly tied. The lord tried
Speaker 3: to torture all these with poison, but the labor was
Speaker 3: long in vain. While the plan was slaughtering something behind
Speaker 3: the treachery, not a single one appeared from it. In
Speaker 3: this way, also the connections of the wild animals, these
Speaker 3: traps must first be removed, for peace is a result
Speaker 3: of the gods. When the author of the evil is slain,
Speaker 3: so the good flows now. Notice it's interesting that this
Speaker 3: is the first visual depiction of a rat king in
Speaker 3: the way we understand it. But it doesn't use the
Speaker 3: term rat king or any equivalent term. It just says,
Speaker 3: you know, the rats, and then shows them tied together
Speaker 3: this way and explains that they're tied by the tail.
Speaker 3: As far as interpreting this text, I'm fumbling in the
Speaker 3: dark because you know, bad translation. But the moral allegory
Speaker 3: might be something about how the conjoined rats cannot be
Speaker 3: defeated until like the author of the evil is undone
Speaker 3: or the thing from which the evil flows is undone,
Speaker 3: which maybe means, I guess, could refer to a so
Speaker 3: called king of these rats, though there doesn't appear to
Speaker 3: be one pictured, Or maybe it means just by maybe
Speaker 3: it means like the nodding of the tale is the
Speaker 3: author of the evil here, though in that case it
Speaker 3: would seem kind of counterproductive to untie their tails if
Speaker 3: you wanted to fight the rats. But honestly, I do
Speaker 3: not know. I admit failure in discovering the meaning of this, because.
Speaker 1: One of the things about alleged real life encounters with
Speaker 1: ratkings is that their tangled tales make them significantly easier
Speaker 1: to kill. Yeah, because that is almost always what happens next,
Speaker 1: or has happened to some degree as they are discovered.
Speaker 3: That's yeah, exactly right. So there is an interesting thing
Speaker 3: I uncovered by this translate exercise, which is the line
Speaker 3: about how this is not a fictional story. That's the
Speaker 3: first thing it says, and I guess this means that
Speaker 3: it is supposed to refer to a specific sighting of
Speaker 3: a real rat king known to the author, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't specify who, where or when.
Speaker 1: Hmm. You know. This also touches on something that I'll
Speaker 1: mention in tomorrow's Monster Fact episode. The tying of a
Speaker 1: knot has been a part of human magic since prehistoric times.
Speaker 1: We see it in some of the most ancient records rituals.
Speaker 1: We see it in the magics of the ancient Egyptians,
Speaker 1: for instance. It seems to be pretty common to tie
Speaker 1: a knot is to bind something, and in the case
Speaker 1: of the rat king, perhaps to transform something. There seems
Speaker 1: to be something inherently magical about knots.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I agree. And that so maybe the knot
Speaker 3: in the tails is the thing from which the evil
Speaker 3: flows in this poem, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Or it's the person who tied the knot, or
Speaker 1: or you know, there's so many ways to interpret it,
Speaker 1: you know, certainly when you get into these other treatments
Speaker 1: as well. If the not something that just occurs via proximity,
Speaker 1: via overcrowding, via the complexities of urban living, or whatever
Speaker 1: the you know, however one ends up interpreting it. I
Speaker 1: also like how the image, the specific image, kind of
Speaker 1: implies that the rats, all of them are running away
Speaker 1: from each other, like all of them have a totally
Speaker 1: different idea about which direction they should go. Almost kind
Speaker 1: of a cartoonish situation where they all are trying to
Speaker 1: solve the problem but cannot because they're not actually addressing
Speaker 1: the problem at the root, their tails being tied to
Speaker 1: get interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, though, on the other hand, from what I
Speaker 3: can tell, sources from this period do not really display
Speaker 3: any propensity for understanding the plight of a rat from
Speaker 3: the rats perspective. They pretty much all view rats as
Speaker 3: just like a disgusting evil that must be destroyed.
Speaker 1: It's understandable, I mean, that is essentially the case, and
Speaker 1: the tail of the rat is the most disgusting part.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know we probably have some rat fans
Speaker 1: out there. We're not talking about your pet rats. We're
Speaker 1: talking about rats encountered in the wilds of human habitats
Speaker 1: and agriculture and cities and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, these were people who part of their
Speaker 3: daily life was battling rat infestation. Coming back to Heart's
Speaker 3: history here, so he describes a few other things in
Speaker 3: the development of this idea of the rat king. The
Speaker 3: term rat king in its modern usage, referring to rats
Speaker 3: joined together by a knot of the tales, appeared more
Speaker 3: and more in print after this. Hart mentions a seventeen
Speaker 3: fifty seven dictionary by nol Gommel that included the term ratking,
Speaker 3: defining it as a number of rats joined together by
Speaker 3: their tails. There are also equivalent terms in French which
Speaker 3: are usually thought to be related to the German rat
Speaker 3: and koenig, though some have offered competing etymologies there. But
Speaker 3: beyond the evidence of people using the term and evincing
Speaker 3: knowledge of the concept going back to the sixteenth century,
Speaker 3: there are also allegedly factual accounts of rat king finds,
Speaker 3: so not just people saying, hey, here's what a rat
Speaker 3: king is, but actual like I saw ratking. There was
Speaker 3: one here at this time. So Hart says that from
Speaker 3: fifteen sixty four to nineteen sixty three he was able
Speaker 3: to turn up a total of fifty seven accounts of
Speaker 3: distinct rat kings, though he says that some of these
Speaker 3: cases are clearly deliberate forgeries or otherwise less than fully authentic.
Speaker 3: So This certainly doesn't mean fifty seven instances where yes,
Speaker 3: there was a real rat king the fifty seven claims,
Speaker 3: with some subset of those being seemingly credible. The majority
Speaker 3: of the accounts come from Germany. To name a few
Speaker 3: early ones, there was a rat king of Donzig allegedly
Speaker 3: made of nine rats found alive in sixteen twelve in
Speaker 3: the loft of a house, mentioned in a letter from
Speaker 3: a professor to a colleague. There was a rat king
Speaker 3: of Strasbourg consisting of six live rats, which was reported
Speaker 3: and depicted in illustration in the French gazette Mercury Galant
Speaker 3: in sixteen eighty three. Apparently some of these reports came
Speaker 3: with helpful explanations, for example, the knowledge that God sends
Speaker 3: rat kings to me mankind to remind us of our wickedness,
Speaker 3: and then like listing out the sins that the rat
Speaker 3: king might be useful in calling to your attention, Like
Speaker 3: remember when you did this, Yeah, here's a rat king
Speaker 3: to remind you. And so heart goes on to chronicle
Speaker 3: a bunch more of these fifty something odd accounts of
Speaker 3: people stumbling upon ratkings. I'm not gonna go into all
Speaker 3: these stories here because most of them have details that
Speaker 3: are or at least in most cases where details of
Speaker 3: the discovery are available, the details are pretty similar to
Speaker 3: anecdotes we've already discussed, though often with additional just sad
Speaker 3: grizzly details about the ways the rats were killed, often
Speaker 3: involving boiling water. People just like pour boiling water into
Speaker 3: a hole that they thought rats were in, and then
Speaker 3: also religious explication of the various finds relating to sin
Speaker 3: or deliverance from evil. Some of these rat kings were preserved,
Speaker 3: often pickled in alcohol, and a few can actually still
Speaker 3: be seen in museum collections today.
Speaker 1: And we're still finding rat kings apparently or allegedly. There
Speaker 1: was one as recently as twenty twenty one in Estonia,
Speaker 1: as reported by the rat King Desk at the Daily Mail,
Speaker 1: of course, allegedly found in a chicken coop. There was
Speaker 1: a I've got a paper about that one late, you've
Speaker 1: got a story, okay, good about this one. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: they are still allegedly occurring, and the details of their
Speaker 1: discovery are still basically the same as they've always been.
Speaker 3: Now this brings us back to the question of where
Speaker 3: do these things come from? Are these really things that
Speaker 3: occur in nature. Does this just happen to rats sometimes?
Speaker 3: Or are these hoaxes? Are these like the Ginny hannovers
Speaker 3: that people would make out of the remains of like
Speaker 3: rays and sea animals? Is this like the Fiji mermaid?
Speaker 3: Some investigators have claimed that all rat kings are artificial,
Speaker 3: practical jokes. They're all just like people taking dead rats
Speaker 3: and tying the tails together. Heart However, after his instigation
Speaker 3: does not agree with this. He does think that rat
Speaker 3: kings occur naturally and are not all hoaxes. Though obviously
Speaker 3: some of the ones that have been attested are hoaxes,
Speaker 3: and we'll come back to arguments for that. But one
Speaker 3: argument in favor of this is something that really is
Speaker 3: kind of sad to relate but does inform our knowledge
Speaker 3: on this, which is experimental rat kings. Hart said he
Speaker 3: would not reproduce these experiments because he considers them cruel
Speaker 3: and unethical, but he recounts attempts by a couple of
Speaker 3: other researchers to create rat kings in the lab. And
Speaker 3: I'm not going to describe the experiments in detail, but
Speaker 3: the gist of the findings is that, first of all,
Speaker 3: if you tie up the tales of already dead rats,
Speaker 3: they do not look like the tail knots of allegedly
Speaker 3: natural rat kings. So you just compare the rat kings
Speaker 3: that are preserved or people have taken pictures of with
Speaker 3: like you take dead rats and tie their tails together,
Speaker 3: it doesn't look the same. They need to be alive
Speaker 3: when their tails are joined together in order to create
Speaker 3: the rat king knot ball. However, these rat king experiments
Speaker 3: did find that if you anesthetize rats, put them to sleep,
Speaker 3: and then glue their tail tips together, then you allow
Speaker 3: them to wake up and run around and do their
Speaker 3: thing for a period of time, their tails end up
Speaker 3: tangled in a ball that does pretty much exactly resemble
Speaker 3: the tails of ratkings.
Speaker 1: So kind of the difference to some extent between being
Speaker 1: given the assignment of hey, go get your computer cable,
Speaker 1: go get your mouse cable, and just go ahead and
Speaker 1: tangle all that up, versus just leave it alone in
Speaker 1: your backpack for a while, see what happens, you know,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe just tug at it loosely. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like you're going to have a different sort of
Speaker 1: not than the one that you might intentionally.
Speaker 3: Tie that's right. And in these these experiments, once the
Speaker 3: glue was removed, after the rat king table not had
Speaker 3: been created by live rats, mostly the tails stayed stuck together.
Speaker 3: They had become tangled enough that they could not get
Speaker 3: free even though the glue was dissolved.
Speaker 1: Again, horrifying that this was someone's choice in experimentation. There's like, well,
Speaker 1: we've got to We've got to create these rat kings
Speaker 1: in order to fully test this. Like, it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like this was necessary. It's nice to have this information,
Speaker 1: I guess, but it was certainly not ethically created.
Speaker 3: Yeah, our heart discusses these experiments with what feels like
Speaker 3: some degree of scorn, and again he says he won't
Speaker 3: reproduce them to check the results for himself. But if
Speaker 3: these results are in fact accurate, this does give us
Speaker 3: some information that we can use. It does make it
Speaker 3: seem like ratkings could be created in nature if rats
Speaker 3: tails were somehow initially stuck together while the rats were
Speaker 3: still alive. And Heart goes on to offer another argument
Speaker 3: and in favor of the idea of ratkings being a
Speaker 3: real natural phenomenon, which is that with one exception, all
Speaker 3: discovered rat kings are of one species, the black rat
Speaker 3: Ratus ratus, in places where rats of other species exist,
Speaker 3: So you might have brown rats and black rats occupying
Speaker 3: the same farm, but if you find a rat king,
Speaker 3: it's always the black rat. So if they were all hoaxes,
Speaker 3: why wouldn't people be equally making them out of brown rats.
Speaker 1: That's a good point.
Speaker 3: And the black rat, of course has a longer and
Speaker 3: more flexible tail than the brown rat, which seems again
Speaker 3: like it would make a lot of sense that it
Speaker 3: could become more likely entangled under the right or wrong circumstances. Also,
Speaker 3: there are examples of so called kings being observed in
Speaker 3: other animals, for example, squirrel kings that have been reported.
Speaker 3: One example of this was in a zoo in South
Speaker 3: Carolina in nineteen fifty one. Now, there have been a
Speaker 3: number of hypotheses offered throughout history to explain rat kings
Speaker 3: if they are natural phenomena. One idea is that they're
Speaker 3: simply born that way. Heart does not think that's very likely,
Speaker 3: because they're born with shorter tails, the tails grow longer
Speaker 3: over the course of the lifespan, and also it's hard
Speaker 3: to imagine how the rats would survive and do so
Speaker 3: well until they get older. With their tails all tied
Speaker 3: together in that way. Another idea is that the tails
Speaker 3: might entwine as part of a fear response. As rats
Speaker 3: huddle together, maybe when they're terrified by something, they have
Speaker 3: a reaction that causes their tails to entwine, and then
Speaker 3: they get tangled and stuck together. Another example. Another hypothesis
Speaker 3: is the idea of rats huddling for warmth and somehow
Speaker 3: allowing their tail tips to become frozen or stuck together
Speaker 3: by a substance, perhaps frozen urine or some other kind
Speaker 3: of liquid that freezes the tales together, or a sticky
Speaker 3: substance that sticks the tales together, and then being initially
Speaker 3: stuck together by that external adhesive material or frozen material,
Speaker 3: they could entwine them crawling around, as we saw in
Speaker 3: one of those experiments, crawling around and creating a natural
Speaker 3: not just with their own activity and movement. But I
Speaker 3: mentioned I was going to get to an actual scientific
Speaker 3: paper about rat kings, and I want to talk about
Speaker 3: that now. So this one was published in the Proceedings
Speaker 3: of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Biology and Ecology in
Speaker 3: two thousand and seven by Andre Miluton, called rat kings
Speaker 3: in Estonia. I looked up the author of this paper
Speaker 3: and he's a zoologist and curator at the University of
Speaker 3: Tartu National History Museum in Estonia. So the author begins
Speaker 3: this paper by looking at the literary record of evidence
Speaker 3: for the rat king and he cites Hart actually is
Speaker 3: a major resource and notes that at the time of
Speaker 3: this paper in two thousand and seven, there was still
Speaker 3: significant question over whether rat kings are ever created naturally,
Speaker 3: or they are they all hoaxes, and if they are
Speaker 3: created naturally, what the cause is. By Miluton's count as
Speaker 3: of the year two thousand and five, there were fifty
Speaker 3: eight reliable accounts of rat kings, six of which were
Speaker 3: physically preserved in some way, and across these accounts, the
Speaker 3: number of animals joined within a rat king varies from
Speaker 3: three to thirty two. The greatest number of rat king
Speaker 3: claims come from Germany, followed by France, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Speaker 3: and then finally one account from Indonesia, and with one exception,
Speaker 3: all of the rat kings the author was able to study.
Speaker 3: Rat king accounts the author was able to study consisted
Speaker 3: of a single species, again, Ratus ratus the black rat.
Speaker 3: The one rat species exception is the report from Indonesia,
Speaker 3: which was allegedly made of the species Radus argentivanter, which
Speaker 3: is commonly known as the rice field rat. Miliwton also acknowledges,
Speaker 3: as Heart did, that outside of rats, there are a
Speaker 3: few claimed observations of similar quote kings made of animals
Speaker 3: like mice and squirrels, but the vast majority of alleged
Speaker 3: rodent kings are agglomerations, specifically of Rattus ratus, the black rat.
Speaker 3: But the recent discovery of a rat king at Saaru,
Speaker 3: which is a small village in Estonia, in January two
Speaker 3: thousand and five, seems to have prompted this new investigation,
Speaker 3: and the author believes this rat king may shed some
Speaker 3: light on how these masses of creatures are formed. Warning,
Speaker 3: of course, about this story there will be some moderately
Speaker 3: gruesome details about rat corpses and rat injuries to read
Speaker 3: from the author's report about this Estonian incident quote. On
Speaker 3: sixteen January two thousand and five, farmer Ray and Kuieve
Speaker 3: discovered a huddle of squeaking rats on the sandy floor
Speaker 3: of his shed in Saaru village, mon East Parish Voru County, Estonia.
Speaker 3: The animals were unable to escape, and the farmer's son
Speaker 3: killed them with a stick. After that, a cluster of
Speaker 3: sixteen rats were excavated from the frozen sand. Their tails
Speaker 3: were tangled in a knot that contained frozen sand. At
Speaker 3: the time of discovery, only about nine of the rats
Speaker 3: were alive. Obviously, the animals tried to dig themselves out
Speaker 3: of the narrow tunnel, and the first rats buried the
Speaker 3: last ones under the sand. The crater in the sandy
Speaker 3: floor could still be seen even two months later.
Speaker 1: I do want to note that the article that I
Speaker 1: referred to earlier about an Estonian rat king is actually
Speaker 1: from years later.
Speaker 3: Oh, but the.
Speaker 1: Same individual is commenting on it. This is so it's
Speaker 1: no uton in both cases.
Speaker 3: Okay, so there was another Estonian rat king after this,
Speaker 3: I see. Yeah, So to pick up on this story,
Speaker 3: So the farmer had no idea what he was looking
Speaker 3: at here, didn't know anything about ratking legends, or so
Speaker 3: he says, but no reason to doubt him, really, but
Speaker 3: he thought it was weird. So he put this tangle
Speaker 3: of rats out on a pile of planks so the
Speaker 3: neighbors could come by and gawk at it, and then
Speaker 3: about two months later a relative of the farmer's wife,
Speaker 3: who was a journalist, was like, hey, what's up with this?
Speaker 3: You know, maybe you should contact some experts. So this
Speaker 3: relative guid in contact with some zoologists to see if
Speaker 3: the find was significant, and this led to a bunch
Speaker 3: of reports in local media and investigation in Estonian academic journals.
Speaker 3: On March tenth of that year, the rat King was
Speaker 3: taken to the Natural History Museum at the University of Tartu,
Speaker 3: where it was submerged in alcohol for preservation and put
Speaker 3: on display. And it consisted of thirteen adult black rats,
Speaker 3: seven males and six females. There were originally sixteen, but
Speaker 3: one was removed and discarded by the farmer, and then
Speaker 3: two more were removed by a scavenger. The paper says
Speaker 3: probably a pole cat, this, I guess. Seemingly while the
Speaker 3: rat king was, you know, on neighborhood display on the
Speaker 3: pile of planks.
Speaker 1: It is kind of humorous that his first inclination was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I better put this out on the plank for the
Speaker 1: neighbors to see. When, of course, we have these other
Speaker 1: traditions and interpretations of the rat king as like a
Speaker 1: dire omen or as a punishment from God. But you know,
Speaker 1: as he said, he wasn't really familiar with any of
Speaker 1: these traditions. He's just like, it's kind of neat. I
Speaker 1: guess I'll put it out on the plank.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a low key spirit of curiosity. I appreciate it. So,
Speaker 3: of the two rats that were scavenged taken away by
Speaker 3: some kind of predator or animal, one of the tails
Speaker 3: remained attached to the not so I guess by the
Speaker 3: time the museum got the rat king there were thirteen rats,
Speaker 3: but fourteen tails left. The remaining thirteen bodies have undergone
Speaker 3: various types of damage and decay. Two of the rats
Speaker 3: had their brains eaten by what no speculation here in
Speaker 3: the paper, and it just says brains eaten. Another one
Speaker 3: seems to have had its hind legs nod on, and
Speaker 3: as the rat king dried out, the knot appears to
Speaker 3: have loosened. So at the museum during examination, some of
Speaker 3: the rats separated from the rest. But if you look
Speaker 3: at the flesh in the parts of the tail that
Speaker 3: were trapped in the knot, that flesh is highly compressed.
Speaker 3: So the author concludes that the tail knot was originally
Speaker 3: very tight when the animals were alive and the flesh
Speaker 3: was higher pressure in it, I guess the rat was
Speaker 3: more hydrated. The author compares this to two other rat
Speaker 3: king reports from Estonia, both of which lack physical evidence.
Speaker 3: One the so called rat King of Tartu, which allegedly
Speaker 3: consisted of three rats and was found sometime around nineteen
Speaker 3: fifteen to nineteen twenty. The other was found in a
Speaker 3: place called Roika in the early seventies in the winter time,
Speaker 3: made of eighteen black rats. So coming to the conclusions
Speaker 3: the author draws from this examination and after reviewing the
Speaker 3: literature and the others from history, including hearts observations, he's
Speaker 3: raising the question how are these things made? A few options.
Speaker 3: Number one, it's a hoax. These are artificially manufactured by people.
Speaker 3: Number two, the knot is created naturally by chance due
Speaker 3: to tail movements. Sometimes maybe you know, the rats are
Speaker 3: wiggling around each other, so they end up with their
Speaker 3: tails nodded. This could be related to the idea that
Speaker 3: rats become frightened, you know, like heart rays, they become
Speaker 3: frightened in their tails. In twine and then the third
Speaker 3: option is the knot is created naturally when tails are
Speaker 3: stuck together by some external binding process, such as by
Speaker 3: gluing or freezing, and after examining the Saru Village rat king,
Speaker 3: the author suggests that this probably is a natural phenomenon,
Speaker 3: giving several reasons for doubting it was created artificially. First
Speaker 3: of all, by all accounts, none of the family of
Speaker 3: farmers who found it had ever heard of rat kings,
Speaker 3: and they received no tangible benefits for their find except
Speaker 3: I guess maybe the attention of neighbors who came by
Speaker 3: to see the thing. And this doesn't rule it out,
Speaker 3: but it does make it seem less likely. The next
Speaker 3: one is a good point, as was raised by Heart.
Speaker 3: It's impossible to tie the tails of living rats in
Speaker 3: a knot without anesthesia, and it is not plausible that
Speaker 3: this kind of rat anesthetic surgical procedure was carried out
Speaker 3: on a rural farm. It's also not plausible that anesthesia
Speaker 3: was used to create so many of these attested rat
Speaker 3: kings from long ago. Also, remember about how the rats
Speaker 3: they dried out and the tail knot became loose. The
Speaker 3: author points out that the finder made no attempt to
Speaker 3: tighten the knot of the dried tales, which you might
Speaker 3: imagine someone would do if they were trying to carry
Speaker 3: out a hoax. You know, they might try to tighten
Speaker 3: it make it look better.
Speaker 1: Because they would have initially tightened the tails of perhaps
Speaker 1: dead rats, and would have needed to do so again
Speaker 1: to make sure that they're fined was still presentable.
Speaker 3: Right, so, the author does not think it's very likely
Speaker 3: these rats were tied together artificially. Now, coming to that
Speaker 3: second hypothesis, did the rats simply get their tails wrapped
Speaker 3: around one another until an formed? Under this hypothesis, rats
Speaker 3: that are nervous will attempt to wrap their tails around
Speaker 3: one another, and maybe this happens until then forms. The
Speaker 3: rat king at Tsaru, though, was discovered partially in its burrow,
Speaker 3: where there's no reason to think the rats would be
Speaker 3: especially nervous, and the story of the rat king at
Speaker 3: Roika was found inside a wall, also a sheltered place,
Speaker 3: And then the author in fact it doubts this could
Speaker 3: even happen in principle, He writes, quote, I've kept wild
Speaker 3: black rats in captivity for about eight years. Over this period,
Speaker 3: hundreds of animals were disturbed by people every day during
Speaker 3: the cleaning of cages, feeding, catching, or observing the animals.
Speaker 3: But an entangling of tails has never been observed, So
Speaker 3: Milutin is saying, I don't even think this happens. Much
Speaker 3: less would be the explanation of how the tails end
Speaker 3: up knotted in a ball. But then, coming to the
Speaker 3: last hypothesis about the external binding process, Milutant writes, quote,
Speaker 3: according to the third hypothesis for the formation of a
Speaker 3: rat king, rats should first huddle together, as they usually
Speaker 3: do when sleeping in the nest chamber, especially when it
Speaker 3: is cold. If their tails become glued or frozen together,
Speaker 3: animals try to free themselves by moving in different directions.
Speaker 3: These chaotic movements may result in their tails becoming entangled
Speaker 3: in a tight knot. Even after removal of the initial cause,
Speaker 3: sticky substance or ice, they are no longer able to
Speaker 3: escape from the knot. The sticky substance may be blood,
Speaker 3: food items, nesting material, et cetera. And I would add
Speaker 3: to that that Heart mentioned the possibility of just frozen urine.
Speaker 1: It's about to say, must we add to this list,
Speaker 1: but I guess we should for science now.
Speaker 3: Miliuton argues that this last hypothesis about the freezing or
Speaker 3: sticking together and then that leading to the knot is
Speaker 3: the best explanation for the rat kings found in Estonia.
Speaker 3: Reasons for this argument. First of all, ratkings in question
Speaker 3: appear to have formed within the shelter, not outside of it,
Speaker 3: so you know places where they would huddle together for warmth.
Speaker 3: In stories of rat kings in which details about the
Speaker 3: weather are known, it tended to be frosty weather. In fact,
Speaker 3: the rat king of Soru was found right after the
Speaker 3: village had experienced sub zero temperatures. Adding to this, apart
Speaker 3: from the story attributed to Indonesia, basically all the stories
Speaker 3: of rat king sightings are traceable to colder climates, especially
Speaker 3: in Central and Eastern Europe, where there are two things,
Speaker 3: cold winters and Rattus ratus. Ratus ratus is more common
Speaker 3: in southern Europe where the winters are more temperate, and
Speaker 3: in Northern Europe. In Canada, where the winters are colder,
Speaker 3: the brown rat ratus or vegicus is the more common species.
Speaker 3: So rat kings have and again to emphasize what I
Speaker 3: said earlier, rat kings have really not been reported in
Speaker 3: the brown rat. They have shorter, thicker, and less flexible tails.
Speaker 3: So the author argues that rat kings are in fact
Speaker 3: to genuine natural phenomena, though of course sometimes they may
Speaker 3: be created by people, especially out of already dead rats.
Speaker 3: They occur within the nest of the black rat during
Speaker 3: cold weather via the gluing freezing process described earlier, and
Speaker 3: finally says, most of the time we will never find
Speaker 3: out about them.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 3: Not all rat kings that arise are found by people,
Speaker 3: and not all finds are reflected in the press, much
Speaker 3: less in scientific papers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is an idea that I saw discussed in
Speaker 1: some other works as well, Like, not every rat king
Speaker 1: that could assuming that rat kings do occur naturally, not
Speaker 1: everyone that occurs naturally is going to turn up. Because
Speaker 1: even though there are accounts of them seeming to be
Speaker 1: well fed, and these tend to be, you know, the
Speaker 1: ones that have been found, and they've been found in
Speaker 1: say agricultural or urban environments where there's perhaps an abundance
Speaker 1: of food, for the most part, they're doomed. They're going
Speaker 1: to die, and in many cases they would die without
Speaker 1: humans ever laying eyes on them. And then you may
Speaker 1: have other cases where they're not reported. You know, perhaps
Speaker 1: they it is seen as a dire omen and they're like,
Speaker 1: better cover this up. I'm not going to put this
Speaker 1: on a plank for the neighbors to see. But I
Speaker 1: kept coming back, and I guess we've partially answered this.
Speaker 1: But I was thinking, well, Okay, if all we need
Speaker 1: are black rats, cold weather, and the presence of human
Speaker 1: agriculture and or urbanization, then why do we not have
Speaker 1: accounts of them from before around fifteen seventy six, Like,
Speaker 1: certainly observations of a rat king would be novel, and
Speaker 1: it makes sense that you would maybe hear about them,
Speaker 1: say during the Roman period. But maybe indeed it does
Speaker 1: have to do with it just not being like the
Speaker 1: perfect combination of all these forces like again, cold weather,
Speaker 1: black rats, human agriculture, urbanization, Like you have to have
Speaker 1: everything clicking along just right, and then there's still going
Speaker 1: to be a rare occurrence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that all sounds right to me, though, I think
Speaker 3: it is actually a good question you raise. Yeah, why
Speaker 3: do these accounts first pop up in the sixteenth century,
Speaker 3: especially when the term rat king with a different meaning
Speaker 3: was already in common parlance.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Interesting, And again, knots have always been of interest
Speaker 1: to human beings, and rats have been with us a
Speaker 1: long time as well, you know, often seen in a
Speaker 1: more ominous light, but also sometimes celebrated for various aspects
Speaker 1: of the organism. So it again, it's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that, if observed, would surely be novel enough to
Speaker 1: bear repetition in the written record, which of course is
Speaker 1: inherently incomplete. We have to acknowledge that as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I would say where I sit with this
Speaker 3: is I think Heart and Milluton make good arguments, and
Speaker 3: I would say, if I had to guess one way
Speaker 3: or another, I would agree with them that rat kings
Speaker 3: probably are naturally created, probably along the methods that the
Speaker 3: Milluton highlights. But on the other hand, I would admit
Speaker 3: that questions still remain and there are some reasons to
Speaker 3: be skeptical.
Speaker 1: Now, I want to come back briefly to rat kings
Speaker 1: and pop culture, sort of get some of the realistic
Speaker 1: horror perhaps off the palette. Here we've touched on a
Speaker 1: couple of the major examples of rat kings and pop culture,
Speaker 1: at least the major one as far as the modern
Speaker 1: audiences are concerned, but a couple of other ones that
Speaker 1: I thought are worth mentioning the idea of a rat king,
Speaker 1: particularly as possessing a collective intelligence, is one that has
Speaker 1: fascinated me for a while. This idea originates, as far
Speaker 1: as I'm aware, in the pages of the Bridge Is
Speaker 1: comic two thousand and a d, specifically in the Adventures
Speaker 1: of Halo Jones. These were written by the legendary comics
Speaker 1: author Alan Moore and illustrated by the legendary comics artist
Speaker 1: Ian Gibson, who sadly passed away earlier this week. One
Speaker 1: of the greats. But in Halo Jones, the rat king
Speaker 1: is displayed as using its advanced intelligence to control all
Speaker 1: the rats in the world and then take over the
Speaker 1: world in the process. I included an illustration from the
Speaker 1: comic book here for you, Joe in black and white.
Speaker 3: Is it typing on a computer?
Speaker 1: I believe so. Yeah. These are mass communicating rat kings
Speaker 1: right here.
Speaker 3: You never know when you're talking to somebody on the internet.
Speaker 3: They could be a rat king.
Speaker 1: It could have no way. It absolutely could be. Now
Speaker 1: related but separate concept is that of the cranium rats
Speaker 1: and dungeons and dragons. These are psionically enhanced rats. So
Speaker 1: these are rats that the e lithids or the mind
Speaker 1: flares have toyed with and they've changed their brains in
Speaker 1: order to use them as spies to go out and
Speaker 1: especially into like the human world and see what's up.
Speaker 1: But the thing I always liked about cranium rats is
Speaker 1: the idea that one of these is essentially just a rat.
Speaker 1: If you encounter one cranium rat, you're just encountering a rat.
Speaker 1: But if you have two cranium rats, well, they have
Speaker 1: the collective intelligence, the psionically connected brain of two rats together,
Speaker 1: and it builds from there. So in great numbers, cranium
Speaker 1: rats have a vast collective intelligence. And in the world
Speaker 1: of dungeons and Dragons, they have enhanced psionic abilities, so
Speaker 1: they'd be able to like basically like lash out at
Speaker 1: you with scanner powers.
Speaker 3: WHOA, So you really don't want to let them get
Speaker 3: on the computer less like Cameron Vail, they hack into
Speaker 3: your mainframe mainframe via scanner powers through the phone lines.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Another frequently cited use of of of rat kings
Speaker 1: in pop culture. I believe Liz Lemon's old boyfriend Dennis
Speaker 1: Duffy on Thirty Rock claims in one episode to have
Speaker 1: seen a rat king perhaps in the sub or what
Speaker 1: have you. That one definitely stuck in my mind, But
Speaker 1: I'd forgotten about this one. It's been a long time
Speaker 1: since I've read Stephen King's nineteen eighty six novel It,
Speaker 1: but there is mention of a rat king, and it's
Speaker 1: vast pages. I had to look it up to see
Speaker 1: exactly what is said. But on page eight hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy two of the kindle edition, you have the kids
Speaker 1: exploring the Nyebolt House. This is the you know, the
Speaker 1: Haunted House. If you've seen the movie, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about, the dark, decayed house that they go
Speaker 1: to and Ritchie opens up a cupboard, looks inside, and
Speaker 1: then reports what he has seen. He says, quote, there's
Speaker 1: hundreds of them in there, their tails, they were all
Speaker 1: tangled up, bill nodded together like snakes.
Speaker 3: Creepy. So page eight seventy two is that near the
Speaker 3: end of chapter one.
Speaker 1: Yes, I have a physical copy around here somewhere, but
Speaker 1: there's no way I was going to like scan through
Speaker 1: it and find one mention of a rat king. So
Speaker 1: I had to pony up by the can edition, do
Speaker 1: a word search and find out exactly where King mentions
Speaker 1: rat Kings because there's a lot of horror, plenty of
Speaker 1: horror in that book to go around.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so.
Speaker 1: That's just a taste of some uses of the rat
Speaker 1: king and pop culture. But there are others. So if
Speaker 1: there are any that are near and dear to your
Speaker 1: heart do you think are particularly insightful, write in. We
Speaker 1: would love to hear from you. Do not send us
Speaker 1: your ratkings, though. If you find a rat king, please
Speaker 1: find an acceptable local authority to report this. All right,
Speaker 1: we're going to go ahead and close this episode out again,
Speaker 1: look to the Monster Fact tomorrow from a little more
Speaker 1: from me regarding rat king esque matters. But then we'll
Speaker 1: be back on Thursday with an episode on you Guessed
Speaker 1: It The Nutcracker.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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