Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And on today's episode
Speaker 3: of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we are going to
Speaker 3: be talking about the Wonderful, the Glorious rat King, which,
Speaker 3: believe it or not, this is a Christmas episode, isn't it, Rob?
Speaker 2: That's right? This is one of a pair of Christmas
Speaker 2: Core episodes we're busting out this week. You can probably
Speaker 2: guess what the next one's going to be. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, the Holidays bring on an abundance of traditions, right,
Speaker 2: I mean we have the Christian Nativity, we have Santa Claus,
Speaker 2: we have other things like Crampus, we have Marley's Ghost,
Speaker 2: we have the nineteen ninety sci fi action film I
Speaker 2: Come in Peace, and of course we have The Nutcracker.
Speaker 3: Ah Okay, here's the tie in.
Speaker 2: So most of you are probably familiar with Tchaikovsky's ballet
Speaker 2: The Nutcracker. If you haven't seen it, if you haven't
Speaker 2: seen it many many times, This basically this is how
Speaker 2: it plays out. The first half is a rather imaginative
Speaker 2: tale of a Nutcracker prints coming to life and with
Speaker 2: the help of a little girl, waging a battle against
Speaker 2: an evil mouse king, culminating in a cool sword fight.
Speaker 2: And then the rest of the ballet, which feels about
Speaker 2: usually about like three or four hours long. It is
Speaker 2: just a victory lap of dancing, just one dance after
Speaker 2: the other, no more steaks, 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 2: Yeah, yeah, or I guess it's specifically it's a mouse king,
Speaker 2: but it's very closely tied. No pun intended with the
Speaker 2: concept of the rat king now. The ballet was based
Speaker 2: upon German romantic author Eta Hoffmann's eighteen sixteen short story
Speaker 2: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, in which the titular
Speaker 2: mouse king is described as follows is. This is from
Speaker 2: the LRC translation. Marie was not afraid of mice, and
Speaker 2: she could not help being amused by this sight. She
Speaker 2: stood watching the mice come from all directions. When suddenly
Speaker 2: there came a sharp and terrible piping noise, and seven
Speaker 2: mouseheads with seven shining crowns upon them, rose through the floor,
Speaker 2: and behind them wriggled a mouse's body, on which the
Speaker 2: seven heads had all grown. Then the whole army of
Speaker 2: mice shouted in full chorus and went trot, trot, right
Speaker 2: up to the cupboard. In fact, to Marie, who was
Speaker 2: standing beside.
Speaker 3: It, wait a minute, I don't remember that this is
Speaker 3: a single old mouse's body, but it's got seven mouse heads.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is commonly not depicted in performances of the ballet, okay,
Speaker 2: though though sometimes it is. Sometimes ballets will decide to
Speaker 2: get creative, get a little dark, and dive back into
Speaker 2: these roots. But I have more passages to read here.
Speaker 2: There's more of this. It's great, okay. Later on in
Speaker 2: the text, Hoffman writes, But that moment two enemy marksmen
Speaker 2: took hold of nutcrackers wooden cloak and held him fast,
Speaker 2: squeaking in triumph from seven throats, the mouse king sprang
Speaker 2: forward to take his kill. Whoa, oh, and get this one,
Speaker 2: this one may be the best. She could only watch
Speaker 2: as the mouse king squeezed himself out through a hole
Speaker 2: in the wall. His fourteen eyes and seven crowns glistened
Speaker 2: as he bounded through the room and made a huge
Speaker 2: leap up to the top of Marie's nightstand.
Speaker 3: Yikes, I'm getting flashes of Stephen King's cat's eye.
Speaker 2: 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 2: That's right. And there are other descriptions in the text
Speaker 2: that emphasize the horror of multiplicity into a mouse. Cumig
Speaker 2: Now Hoffman, who of seventeen seventy six through eighteen twenty two,
Speaker 2: was a dark romantic. One of his early novels, eighteen
Speaker 2: fifteen's The Devil's Elixirs, concerns a doppelganger. He didn't originate
Speaker 2: the term or the concept, but his work may have
Speaker 2: helped popularize the concept. He is also well known for
Speaker 2: his eighteen seventeen story The Sandman, which references a folkloric
Speaker 2: entity and kind of a horror spin, and it also
Speaker 2: features a female automaton. He's apparently noted for often employing
Speaker 2: optical motifs, which include not only the doubling of one's
Speaker 2: identity as with the Doppelganger, but also the multitude of
Speaker 2: heads on the Mouse King. And I think he makes
Speaker 2: use of other, like more uses of optical technology in
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah. Yeah, Like, for instance, in these passages from the
Speaker 2: Nutcracker in the Mouse King, you get a sense of
Speaker 2: like almost like that of a kaleidoscope. You know, there's
Speaker 2: something just optically out of line with this thing that
Speaker 2: is moving towards you the reader, or towards Marie, the
Speaker 2: character I understand now. Of course, Hoffman would have been
Speaker 2: acquainted with folklore, which we also see in is referencing
Speaker 2: of the sandman. The sandman, of course, typically sprinkle sand
Speaker 2: or dust upon a sleeper's eyes. I think we all
Speaker 2: know that basic idea, but in Hoffman's work, the sandman
Speaker 2: is said to steal the eyes of children who refuse
Speaker 2: to go to bed. The sand he puts on their eyes,
Speaker 2: causes their eyeballs to fall out, and then he collects
Speaker 2: set eyeballs and takes them to the moon to feed
Speaker 2: his children.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And of course Hoffman would have definitely been familiar
Speaker 2: with the concept of the rat king, which seemingly plays
Speaker 2: into his invention here as well. Now, I was looking
Speaker 2: at a couple of sources, both by an author by
Speaker 2: the name of David Blameyer's. One of them is Telling
Speaker 2: Tales the Impact of Germany on English Children's Books seventeen
Speaker 2: eighty through nineteen eighteen. This is a two thousand and
Speaker 2: nine publication, and he points out that Hoffman's description of
Speaker 2: the mouse king references both folkloric tales of multi headed
Speaker 2: dragons as well as the dragon from the Book of Revelation.
Speaker 2: Though to be clear, the author doesn't make any mention
Speaker 2: of rat kings, as we'll be discussing them later as
Speaker 2: 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: would have or could have inspired the idea of a
Speaker 3: mouse with seven heads.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Now there's another example. This is sort of
Speaker 2: folk little bit more, I guess specifically literature. There's another
Speaker 2: work by the same author, the Folklore Tradition in Germany,
Speaker 2: where he mentions a rat king by the name of
Speaker 2: Berlibby that pops up in what long Reads author Adrian
Speaker 2: Dobb describes as a kunsmachen quote an art fairy tale,
Speaker 2: a narrative that a writer fashions to resemble something you
Speaker 2: might hear from a farm hand at your father's estate. Okay, so,
Speaker 2: according to Dobb, here again this excellent piece on Longreads,
Speaker 2: I recommend it if you want some more rat king action.
Speaker 2: Here he points out that the rat king in this
Speaker 2: work is described as as a king of all rodents.
Speaker 2: He's like a literal ruler of the rodent world, but
Speaker 2: is singular in body and in head, though it is
Speaker 2: implied that his tale is nodded with that of his wife,
Speaker 2: the rat queen. Aw that's sweet, I guess kind of sweet.
Speaker 2: It was this particular work. In this particular creation, Berlibby
Speaker 2: was the creation of Ernst mounts Aren't, who lives seventeen
Speaker 2: sixty nine through eighteen sixty a German nationalist, historian, writer
Speaker 2: and poet who, in this tale seems to have been
Speaker 2: largely commenting on the Rise of Napoleon, critiquing the idea
Speaker 2: that some might want to rise above their station within
Speaker 2: their own nation via the interference of a foreign power.
Speaker 2: And this, according to dob was two years after Hoffman's tale.
Speaker 2: I don't know that there's any indication that like Hoffman's
Speaker 2: tale inspired this one. I think it's more probably the
Speaker 2: idea that the rat king was like a general concept
Speaker 2: already that was established. And we see two different authors
Speaker 2: exploring things with the idea, but for different purposes.
Speaker 3: Oh 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 politic life, for morality.
Speaker 2: That's right. Doab, writing about the example in Arnt's work, writes, quote,
Speaker 2: the rat king appears like an almost perfect parody of
Speaker 2: the community building ambitions that dominated German public life during
Speaker 2: and following the Napoleonic Wars. So he says, you know,
Speaker 2: the community building we're talking about here, This would have
Speaker 2: been things like community singing, community storytelling, various community minded
Speaker 2: efforts that were present in the culture of the time period.
Speaker 2: And the mouse king is presented perhaps as the unpleasant
Speaker 2: underbelly of social cohesion. Quote, the rat represented the dark
Speaker 2: side of community, the dark side of dependency, the dark
Speaker 2: side of proximity.
Speaker 3: Tied so closely to one another that you, in the end,
Speaker 3: are all doomed, doomed to a common fate.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, and so all of this would have been
Speaker 2: during a century in which Germany was transitioning from a
Speaker 2: largely rural society to a largely urban one. But of
Speaker 2: course these literary treatments did not invent the concept. Rather, again,
Speaker 2: they find imaginative and or metaphorical uses of something that
Speaker 2: was already present in the public mindset. So what could
Speaker 2: that be? What could they have possibly been commenting on
Speaker 2: what had been seen, what had been witnessed, what was alive,
Speaker 2: 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 earth and 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 2: I will say that you can certainly do some image
Speaker 2: searches and see some rat kings or alleged rat kings,
Speaker 2: but these are not pleasant images to look at. Like
Speaker 2: a lot of like monstrous curiosities or alleged curiosities of
Speaker 2: the natural world or even the unnatural world, are interesting
Speaker 2: to look at or cool looking. The rat king not
Speaker 2: so much. I feel like it kind of seems to
Speaker 2: catch on as an idea more so than it is
Speaker 2: an actual symbol. Like I don't know, there are a
Speaker 2: lot of say, bands that use the rat king as
Speaker 2: 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 2: I bet there are some, but they're probably kind of
Speaker 2: 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 Pomeranz 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 rat king looks like, I'm going to share an
Speaker 3: account from the beginning of Heart's chapter. So the setting
Speaker 3: is a cold day in February nineteen sixty three, and
Speaker 3: this is actually the most recent discovery of a rat
Speaker 3: king that Hart recounts in his book, though there have
Speaker 3: been other ones since then. This took place at a
Speaker 3: farm in the Dutch town of Rukfenn. A farmer named
Speaker 3: Peeve van Ninatten was out in his yard and he
Speaker 3: noticed a squealing sound coming from the direction of the barn.
Speaker 3: So the farmer followed the squealing to its source, and
Speaker 3: when he got to it, he noticed a black rat
Speaker 3: peering out from under a heap of bean poles. The
Speaker 3: farmer killed the rat, but then when he tried to
Speaker 3: pull it out from under the poles, it wouldn't budge.
Speaker 3: It was stuck to something, and further uncovering revealed that
Speaker 3: the rat he had killed was somehow tied by the
Speaker 3: tail to six other 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 not. It does
Speaker 3: look very grizzly.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. Worth noting, of course that rats tails are
Speaker 2: I belief, semi prehensile. But you can imagine in a
Speaker 2: situation like this, if they were to come intertwined and
Speaker 2: certainly broken, there'd be very little that rats could do
Speaker 2: 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 Hearts 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 2: Yeah. Yeah, And in a lot of time, I've seen
Speaker 2: multiple accounts where it's something you know it's taking place at,
Speaker 2: say a barn or perhaps an urban environment. I guess
Speaker 2: you could you could point out that these would be
Speaker 2: you know, human spaces, human places. Rats, of course, their
Speaker 2: populations growing in the very places where human populations grow
Speaker 2: and living 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 2: Right? Right? I mean, a king, by its very nature,
Speaker 2: is an individual ruling over the mini We tend not
Speaker 2: to think of a king as being a composite of
Speaker 2: multiples exactly.
Speaker 3: But the way Heart lays it out, I think you
Speaker 3: can kind of see the way the meaning applied to
Speaker 3: this term has sort of crept and morphed over time.
Speaker 3: So according to Heart, the term rat king is a
Speaker 3: direct translation of the medieval German ratten konig, though in
Speaker 3: this usage it originally had nothing to do with tail notts.
Speaker 3: It meant quote one who lives well on the backs
Speaker 3: of others. So you can think of a sort of
Speaker 3: opulent parasite, or in a way one might argue any king,
Speaker 3: somebody who you know, lives off the labor of others.
Speaker 3: They live well, they're you know, they're they're well fed.
Speaker 3: They get all the luxury they desire with other people
Speaker 3: doing the work. And that sort of social human association
Speaker 3: with the term rat king is explained somewhat by its
Speaker 3: usage in the sixteenth century text by an author named
Speaker 3: Conrad Gessner called Historia Animalium. From what I can tell,
Speaker 3: this seems to be a kind of a kind of
Speaker 3: great source document of like cryptozoologists, they love looking back
Speaker 3: to Conrad Gessner's entries in this But the point Gessner
Speaker 3: makes in this book, as summarized by Heart, is quote,
Speaker 3: some would have it that the rat wax is mighty
Speaker 3: in its old age and is fed by its young.
Speaker 3: This is what's called the rat king. Okay. So the
Speaker 3: idea is that like some rats get like old and
Speaker 3: venerable as rats go, and then the other rats will
Speaker 3: start to serve it as a king. They'll bring it food,
Speaker 3: they'll bring it little baubles and like pieces of velvet
Speaker 3: or luxury items. You know, they're coming to serve their
Speaker 3: rat king. So that rat king is living well by
Speaker 3: doing nothing off of the labor of the other rats
Speaker 3: in its nest.
Speaker 2: Of course, you could easily tell the same fanciful story
Speaker 2: and point out that, hey, rats look after their elders,
Speaker 2: how honorable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you could exactly say that. Though to be clear,
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 protest 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 rats,
Speaker 3: right at the top.
Speaker 2: 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 2: Oh okay, sorry, I'm just picturing an actual primate. So
Speaker 2: he's like Martin Luther is talking about apes, he's talking
Speaker 2: about rats. He might be if flinging something at a devil.
Speaker 2: He's just sesus going wild.
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 ratten Koenig came to refer to a king rat
Speaker 3: who sat on a throne made of knotted tails. So
Speaker 3: this seems like there's some morphing now where you're getting
Speaker 3: halfway to the rat king idea we have today. And
Speaker 3: I guess in this formulation, if I'm picturing it 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 2: I'm a little hazy on where I saw this, but
Speaker 2: there was an old bit. I think Robert Sniegel had
Speaker 2: something to do with this, the comedian behind Triumph the
Speaker 2: insult comic dog. But oh ok, there was the sketch.
Speaker 2: Perhaps listeners can can write in about where I'm remembering
Speaker 2: this from, But the sketch was always the same. Here's
Speaker 2: a snake and it has a sizeable lump in its body.
Speaker 2: It's like an anaconda or something, and you have to
Speaker 2: guess what the lump is based on the shape of it,
Speaker 2: and so looking at the snake, the lump appears to
Speaker 2: be an old woman in a rocking chair. And then
Speaker 2: they reveal, after everyone's had a chance to guess, they
Speaker 2: reveal what the contents of the rat stomach happens to be,
Speaker 2: and it is a pile of dead rats in the
Speaker 2: shape of a woman in a rocking share. That's good.
Speaker 3: But to come back to this image, it is a
Speaker 3: striking image, though Hart says it is not known where
Speaker 3: this idea first came from. But okay, so that's like
Speaker 3: a rat king on a throne of knotted tales. You
Speaker 3: take away the king and then what you've got left
Speaker 3: is just rats with nodded tales. And according to Hart,
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 nodded tales. The first publication to contain this
Speaker 3: was an addition 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 Samboki. 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 blindfolding 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 text describing what the image
Speaker 3: means 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 Raking in the Emblemata by Johanna Sambucus,
Speaker 3: the book picks 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 2: But then there's another man raising a baton or something
Speaker 2: that's facing away from them, Like, yeah, I guess it
Speaker 2: almost like he's leading them, or maybe he's saying, hey,
Speaker 2: come 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 gonna like whack a
Speaker 3: big flower bush with it. I don't know. M 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 a full scan and transcription of
Speaker 3: the Latin text of the Emblemata. I have no idea
Speaker 3: 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 2: Yeah. Yeah, Like there's something going on, there's some sort
Speaker 2: of drama or interaction, but it's all trapped in some
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, and the sheep are watching on kind of I
Speaker 2: guess with disapproval or approval. It depends if he's about
Speaker 2: to grab that squid or if he's letting the squid go.
Speaker 2: It does remind me of something that came up in
Speaker 2: a past episode, like different ideas about whether it is
Speaker 2: right to eat squid or if they should not be eaten.
Speaker 2: 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 2: Oh? This one is frightening.
Speaker 3: But anyway, coming back to the rat king, Okay, I
Speaker 3: found the page that it's on, and God helped me.
Speaker 3: I tried to manually translate this passage from the Latin
Speaker 3: via Google Translate, 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 catput seditionis 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 ratking or any equivalent term. It just says, you know,
Speaker 3: the rats and then shows them tied together this way
Speaker 3: and explains that they're tied by the tail. As far
Speaker 3: as interpreting this text, I'm fumbling in the dark because
Speaker 3: you know, bad translation. But the moral allegory might be
Speaker 3: something about how the conjoined rats cannot be defeated until
Speaker 3: like the author of the evil is undone or the
Speaker 3: thing from which the evil flows is undone, which maybe means,
Speaker 3: I guess, could refer to a so called king of
Speaker 3: these rats, though there doesn't appear to be one pictured,
Speaker 3: or maybe it means just by Maybe it means like
Speaker 3: the nodding of the tail is the author of the
Speaker 3: evil here, though in that case it would seem kind
Speaker 3: of counterproductive to untie their tails if you wanted to
Speaker 3: fight the rats. But honestly, I do not know. I
Speaker 3: admit failure in discovering the meaning of this, because.
Speaker 2: One of the things about alleged real life encounters with
Speaker 2: rat kings is that their tangled tales make them significantly
Speaker 2: easier to kill. Yeah, because that is almost always what
Speaker 2: happens next, or has happened to some degree as they
Speaker 2: 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 2: Hmm. You know. This also touches on something that I'll
Speaker 2: mention in Tomorrow's Monster Fact episode. The tying of a
Speaker 2: knot has been a part of human magic since prehistoric times.
Speaker 2: We see it in some of the most ancient recorded rituals.
Speaker 2: We see it in the magics of the ancient Egyptians,
Speaker 2: for instance. It seems to be pretty common to tie
Speaker 2: a knot is to bind something, and in the case
Speaker 2: of the rat King, perhaps to transform something. There seems
Speaker 2: to be something inherently magical about not.
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 2: Yeah, Or it's the person who tied the knot, or
Speaker 2: or you know, there's so many ways to interpret it.
Speaker 2: You know, certainly when you get into these other treatments
Speaker 2: as well, it's the not something that just occurs via proximity,
Speaker 2: via overcrowding, via the complexities of urban living, or whatever
Speaker 2: the you know, however one ends up interpreting it. I
Speaker 2: also like how the image, the specific image kind of
Speaker 2: implies that the rats, all of them, are running away
Speaker 2: from each other, like all of them have a totally
Speaker 2: different idea about which direction they should go, almost kind
Speaker 2: of a cartoonish situation. Where they all are trying to
Speaker 2: solve the problem but cannot because they're not actually addressing
Speaker 2: the problem at the root, their tails being tied.
Speaker 3: To get interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Though, on the other hand,
Speaker 3: from what I can tell, sources from this period do
Speaker 3: not really display any propensity for understanding the plight of
Speaker 3: a rat from the rats perspective. They pretty much all
Speaker 3: view rats as just like a disgusting evil that must
Speaker 3: be destroyed to understand.
Speaker 2: I mean, that is essentially the case, and the tale
Speaker 2: of the rat is the most disgusting part. I mean,
Speaker 2: I know we probably have some rat fans out there.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about your pet rats. We're talking about
Speaker 2: rats encountered in the wilds of human habitats and agriculture
Speaker 2: 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. But coming back to
Speaker 3: Heart's history here, so he describes a few other things
Speaker 3: in the development of this idea of the rat king.
Speaker 3: The term rat king in its modern usage, referring to
Speaker 3: rats joined together by a knot of the tales, appeared
Speaker 3: more and more in print after this. Hart mentions a
Speaker 3: seventeen to fifty seven dictionary by Nol Gomel that included
Speaker 3: the term rat king, defining it as a number of
Speaker 3: rats joined together by their tails. There are also equivalent
Speaker 3: terms in French which are usually thought to be related
Speaker 3: to the German rat and koenig, though some have offered
Speaker 3: competing etymologies there. But beyond the evidence of people using
Speaker 3: the term and evincing knowledge of the concept going back
Speaker 3: to the sixteenth century, there are also allegedly factual accounts
Speaker 3: of rat king finds, so not just people saying, hey,
Speaker 3: here's what a rat king is, but actual, like I
Speaker 3: saw ratking there was one here at this time. So
Speaker 3: Hart says that from fifteen sixty four to nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: three he was able to turn up a total of
Speaker 3: fifty seven accounts of distinct rat kings, though he says
Speaker 3: that some of these cases are clearly deliberate forgeries or
Speaker 3: otherwise less than fully authentic, so this certainly doesn't mean
Speaker 3: fifty seven instances where yes, there was a real rat
Speaker 3: king the fifty seven claims, with some subset of those
Speaker 3: being seemingly credible. The majority of the accounts come from Germany.
Speaker 3: To name a few early ones, there was a rat
Speaker 3: king of Donzig allegedly made of nine rats found alive
Speaker 3: in sixteen twelve in the loft of a house. Mentioned
Speaker 3: in a letter from a professor to a colleague, there
Speaker 3: was a rat king of Strasbourg consisting of six live rats,
Speaker 3: which was reported and depicted in illustration in the French
Speaker 3: gazette mercur Galant in sixteen eighty three. Apparently some of
Speaker 3: these reports came with helpful explanations, for example, the knowledge
Speaker 3: that God sends ratkings to mankind to remind us of
Speaker 3: our wickedness, and then like listing out the sins that
Speaker 3: the rat king might be useful in calling to your attention,
Speaker 3: Like remember when you did this? Yeah, here's a rat
Speaker 3: king to remind you. And so heart goes on to
Speaker 3: chronicle a bunch more of these fifty something odd accounts
Speaker 3: of people stumbling upon ratkings. I'm not gonna go into
Speaker 3: all these stories here because most of them have details
Speaker 3: that are or at least in most cases where details
Speaker 3: of the discovery are available, the details are pretty similar
Speaker 3: to anecdotes we've already discussed, though often with additional just
Speaker 3: sad grizzly details about the ways the rats were killed.
Speaker 3: Often involving boiling water people just like pour boiling water
Speaker 3: into a hole that they thought rats were in, and
Speaker 3: then also religious explication of the various finds relating to
Speaker 3: sin or deliverance from evil. Some of these rat kings
Speaker 3: were preserved, often pickled in alcohol, and a few can
Speaker 3: actually still be seen in museum collections today.
Speaker 2: And we're still finding rat kings apparently or allegedly. There
Speaker 2: was one as recently as twenty twenty one in Estonia,
Speaker 2: as reported by the rat King Desk at the Daily Mail,
Speaker 2: of course, allegedly found in a chicken coop. There was
Speaker 2: a I've got a paper about that one late, you've
Speaker 2: got a story, okay, good pocus one. Yeah. So they
Speaker 2: are still allegedly occurring, and the details of their discs
Speaker 2: 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 Jenny Hannovers
Speaker 3: that people would make out of the remains of rays
Speaker 3: and sea animals? Is this like the Fiji Mermaid? Some
Speaker 3: investigators have claimed that all rat kings are artificial, practical jokes.
Speaker 3: They're all just like people taking dead rats and tying
Speaker 3: the tails together. Heart However, after his investigation does not
Speaker 3: agree with this, he does think that rat kings occur
Speaker 3: naturally and are not all hoaxes, though obviously some of
Speaker 3: the ones that have been attested are hoaxes, and we'll
Speaker 3: come back to arguments for that. But one argument in
Speaker 3: favor of this is something that really is kind of
Speaker 3: sad to relate but does inform our knowledge on this,
Speaker 3: which is experimental rat kings. Hart said he would not
Speaker 3: reproduce these experiments because he considers them cruel and unethical,
Speaker 3: but he recounts attempts by a couple of other researchers
Speaker 3: to create rat kings in the lab. And I'm not
Speaker 3: going to describe the experiments in detail, but the gist
Speaker 3: of the findings is that, first of all, if you
Speaker 3: tie up the tails of already dead rats, they do
Speaker 3: not look like the tail knots of allegedly natural rat kings.
Speaker 3: So you just compare the rat kings that are preserved
Speaker 3: or people have taken pictures of with like you take
Speaker 3: dead rats and tie their tails together. It doesn't look
Speaker 3: the same. Apparently, they need to be alive when their
Speaker 3: tails are joined together in order to create the rat
Speaker 3: king knot ball. However, these rat king experiments did find
Speaker 3: that if you anesthetize rats, put them to sleep, and
Speaker 3: then glue their tail tips together, then you allow them
Speaker 3: to wake up and run around and do their thing
Speaker 3: for a period of time, their tails end up tang
Speaker 3: in a ball that does pretty much exactly resemble the
Speaker 3: tails of ratkings.
Speaker 2: So kind of the difference to some extent between being
Speaker 2: given the assignment of hey, go get your computer cable,
Speaker 2: go get your mouse cable, and just go ahead and
Speaker 2: tangle all that up, versus just leave it alone in
Speaker 2: your backpack for a while. See what happens, you know,
Speaker 2: and you know, maybe just tug at it loosely. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like you're going to have a different sort of
Speaker 2: not than the one that you might intentionally tie.
Speaker 3: That's right. And in these these experiments, once the glue
Speaker 3: was removed after the rat king tail knot had been
Speaker 3: 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 again.
Speaker 2: Horrifying that this was someone's choice in experimentation. There's like, well,
Speaker 2: we've got to We've got to create these rat kings
Speaker 2: in order to fully test this. Like, it doesn't seem
Speaker 2: like this was necessary. It's nice to have this information,
Speaker 2: 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: tales were somehow initially stuck together while the rats were
Speaker 3: still alive. And Heart goes on to offer another argument
Speaker 3: in favor of the idea of rat kings 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 ratus ratus,
Speaker 3: in places where rats of other species exist, So you
Speaker 3: might have brown rats and black rats occupying the same farm,
Speaker 3: but if you find a rat king, it's all ways
Speaker 3: the black rat. So if they were all hoaxes, why
Speaker 3: wouldn't people be equally making them out of brown rats.
Speaker 2: 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 you know, the rats would survive
Speaker 3: and so well until they get older with their tails
Speaker 3: all tied together in that way. Another idea is that
Speaker 3: the tails might entwine as part of a fear response
Speaker 3: as rats huddle together, maybe when they're terrified by something,
Speaker 3: they have a reaction that causes their tails to entwine
Speaker 3: and then they get tangled and stuck together. Another example.
Speaker 3: Another hypothesis is the idea of rats huddling for warmth
Speaker 3: and somehow allowing their tail tips to become frozen or
Speaker 3: stuck together by a substance, perhaps frozen urine or some
Speaker 3: other kind of liquid that freezes the tails together, or
Speaker 3: a sticky substance that sticks the tails together, and then
Speaker 3: being initially stuck together by that external adhesive material or
Speaker 3: frozen material, they could entwine them crawling around, as we
Speaker 3: saw in one of those experiments, crawling around and creating
Speaker 3: a natural knot just with their own activity and movement.
Speaker 3: But I mentioned I was going to get to an
Speaker 3: actual scientific paper about rat kings, and I want to
Speaker 3: talk about that now. So this one was published in
Speaker 3: the Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Biology and
Speaker 3: Ecology in two thousand and seven by Andre Miluton, called
Speaker 3: rat Kings in Estonia. I looked up the author of
Speaker 3: this paper and he's a zoologist and curator at the
Speaker 3: University of Tartu National History Museum in Estonia. So the
Speaker 3: author begins this paper by looking at the literary record
Speaker 3: of evidence for the rat king and he cites Heart
Speaker 3: actually is a major resource, and notes that at the
Speaker 3: time of this paper in two thousand and seven, there
Speaker 3: was still significant question over whether rat kings are ever
Speaker 3: created naturally, or they are they all hoaxes, and if
Speaker 3: they are created naturally, what the cause is. By Miluton's count,
Speaker 3: as of the year two thousand and five, there were
Speaker 3: fifty eight reliable accounts of rat kings, six of which
Speaker 3: were physically preserved in some way, and across these accounts,
Speaker 3: the number of animals joined within a ratki 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
Speaker 3: study rat king accounts the author was able to study
Speaker 3: consisted 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 Ratus argent tivanter,
Speaker 3: which is commonly known as the rice Field rat mill
Speaker 3: Youuton also acknowledges, as Heart did, that outside of rats,
Speaker 3: there are a few claimed observations of similar quote kings
Speaker 3: made of animals like mice and squirrels, but the vast
Speaker 3: majority of alleged rodent kings are agglomerations, specifically of Ratus ratus,
Speaker 3: the black rat. But the recent discovery of a rat
Speaker 3: king at Saaru, which is a small village in Estonia
Speaker 3: in Ja Nanuary two thousand and five, seems to have
Speaker 3: prompted this new investigation, and the author believes this rat
Speaker 3: king may shed some light on how these masses of
Speaker 3: creatures are formed. Warning, of course, about this story there
Speaker 3: will be some moderately gruesome details about rat corpses and
Speaker 3: rat injuries to read from the author's report about this
Speaker 3: Estonian incident.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: On sixteen January two thousand and five, farmer Ray and
Speaker 3: Kuieve discovered a huddle of squeaking rats on the sandy
Speaker 3: floor of his shed in Saru Village, mon East Parish,
Speaker 3: Voru County, Estonia. The animals were unable to escape and
Speaker 3: the farmer's son killed them with a stick. After that,
Speaker 3: a cluster of sixteen rats were excavated from the frozen sand.
Speaker 3: Their tails were tangled in a knot that contained frozen sand.
Speaker 3: At the time of discovery, only about nine of the
Speaker 3: rats were alive. Obviously, the animals tried to dig themselves
Speaker 3: out of the narrow tunnel, and the first rats buried
Speaker 3: the last ones under the sand. The crater in the
Speaker 3: sandy floor could still be seen even two months later.
Speaker 2: I do want to note that the article that I
Speaker 2: referred to earlier about an Estonian rat king is actually
Speaker 2: from years later. Oh, but the same individual is commenting
Speaker 2: on it. This is so it's no uton in both cases.
Speaker 3: Okay, so there was another Estonian rat king after this,
Speaker 3: I see. Yeah, well, 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 rat king legends or
Speaker 3: so he says, but no reason to doubt him really,
Speaker 3: but he thought it was weird. So he put this
Speaker 3: tangle of rats out on a pile of planks so
Speaker 3: the neighbors could come by and gawk at it. And
Speaker 3: then 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 god 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 2: It is kind of humorous that his first inclination was like, Wow,
Speaker 2: I better put this out on the plank for the
Speaker 2: neighbors to see, when, of course, we have these other
Speaker 2: traditions and interpretations of the rat king as like a
Speaker 2: dire omen or as a punishment from God. But you know,
Speaker 2: as he said, he wasn't really familiar with any of
Speaker 2: these traditions. He's just like, it's kind of neat. I
Speaker 2: 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 knot. 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. It just says brains eaten. Another one seems
Speaker 3: to have had its hind legs nod on, and as
Speaker 3: the rat king dried out, the knot appears to have loosened.
Speaker 3: So at the museum during examination, some of the rats
Speaker 3: separated from the rest. But if you look at the
Speaker 3: flesh in the parts of the tail that were trapped
Speaker 3: in the knot, that flesh is highly compressed. So the
Speaker 3: author concludes that the tail knot was originally very tight
Speaker 3: when the animals were alive, and the flesh was higher
Speaker 3: pressure in it. I guess the rat was more hydrated.
Speaker 3: The author compares this to two other rat king reports
Speaker 3: from Estonia, both of which lack physical evidence. One the
Speaker 3: so called rat King of Tartu, which allegedly consisted of
Speaker 3: three rats and was found sometime around nineteen fifteen to
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty. The other was found in a place called
Speaker 3: Roika in the early seventies in the winter time, made
Speaker 3: of eighteen black rats. So coming to the conclusions the
Speaker 3: author draws from this examination and after reviewing the literature
Speaker 3: and the others from history, including hearts observations, he's raising
Speaker 3: 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: around each other, so they end up with their tails nodded.
Speaker 3: This could be related to the idea that rats become frightened,
Speaker 3: you know, like heart rays. They become frightened in their
Speaker 3: tails in twine. And then the third option is the
Speaker 3: knot is created naturally when tails are stuck together by
Speaker 3: some external binding process, such as by gluing or freezing.
Speaker 3: And after examining the Saru Village rat king, the author
Speaker 3: suggests that this probably is a natural phenomenon, giving several
Speaker 3: reasons for doubting it. Was created artificially. First of all,
Speaker 3: by all accounts, none of the family of farmers who
Speaker 3: found it had ever heard of rat kings, and they
Speaker 3: receive no tangible benefits for their find except I guess
Speaker 3: maybe the attention of neighbors who came by to see
Speaker 3: the thing. And this doesn't rule it out, but it
Speaker 3: does make it seem less likely. The next one is
Speaker 3: a good point, as was raised by Heart. It's impossible
Speaker 3: to tie the tails of living rats in a knot
Speaker 3: without anesthesia, and it is not plausible that this kind
Speaker 3: of rat anesthetic surgical procedure was carried out on a
Speaker 3: rural farm. It's also not plausible that anesthesia was used
Speaker 3: to create so many of these attested rat kings from
Speaker 3: long ago. Also, remember about how the rats they dried
Speaker 3: out and the tail knot became loose. The author points
Speaker 3: out that the finder made no attempt to tighten the
Speaker 3: knot of the dried tails, which you might imagine someone
Speaker 3: would do if they were trying to carry out a hoax.
Speaker 3: You know, they might try to tighten it make it
Speaker 3: look better.
Speaker 2: Because they would have initially tightened the tails of perhaps
Speaker 2: dead rats, and then would have needed to do so
Speaker 2: again 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 a knot formed? Under this hypothesis,
Speaker 3: rats that are nervous will attempt to wrap their tails
Speaker 3: around one another, and maybe this happens in hillaot forms.
Speaker 3: The rat king at Tsaru, though, was discovered partially in
Speaker 3: its burrow, where there's no reason to think the rats
Speaker 3: would be especially nervous. And the story of the rat
Speaker 3: king at Roika was found inside a wall, also a
Speaker 3: sheltered place. And then the author in fact it doubts
Speaker 3: this could even happen in principle. He writes, quote, I've
Speaker 3: kept wild black rats in captivity for about eight years.
Speaker 3: Over this period, hundreds of animals were disturbed by people
Speaker 3: every day during the cleaning of cages, feeding, catching, or
Speaker 3: observing the animals. But an entangling of tails has never
Speaker 3: been observed. So Miluton is saying, I don't even think
Speaker 3: this happens. Much less would be the explanation of how
Speaker 3: the tails end up knotted in a ball. But then
Speaker 3: coming to the last hypothesis about the external binding process,
Speaker 3: Miliuton writes, quote, according to the third hypothesis for the
Speaker 3: formation of a rat king, rats should first huddle together,
Speaker 3: as they usually do when sleeping in the nest chain,
Speaker 3: especially when it is cold. If their tails become glued
Speaker 3: or frozen together, animals try to free themselves by moving
Speaker 3: in different directions. These chaotic movements may result in their
Speaker 3: tails becoming entangled in a tight knot. Even after removal
Speaker 3: of the initial cause sticky substance or ice, they are
Speaker 3: no longer able to escape from the knot. The sticky
Speaker 3: substance may be blood, food items, nesting material, et cetera.
Speaker 3: And I would add to that that Heart mentioned the
Speaker 3: possibility of just frozen urine.
Speaker 2: It's about to say, must we add to this list,
Speaker 2: but I guess we should for science now.
Speaker 3: Milywton 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, rat kings in
Speaker 3: question appear to have formed within the shelter, not outside
Speaker 3: of it. So you know places where they would huddle
Speaker 3: together for warmth. In stories of rat kings in which
Speaker 3: details about the weather are known, it tended to be
Speaker 3: frosty weather. In fact, the rat king of Saru was
Speaker 3: found right after the village had experienced sub zero temperatures.
Speaker 3: Adding to this, apart from the story attributed to Indonesia,
Speaker 3: basically all the stories of rat king sightings are traceable
Speaker 3: to colder climates, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, where
Speaker 3: there are two things, cold winters and Rattus ratus. Ratus
Speaker 3: ratus is more common in southern Europe, where the winters
Speaker 3: are more temperate, and in northern Europe. In Canada, where
Speaker 3: the winters are colder, the brown rat Ratus norvegicus is
Speaker 3: the more common species. So rat kings have and again
Speaker 3: to emphasize what I said earlier, rat kings have really
Speaker 3: not been reported In the brown rat. They have shorter,
Speaker 3: thicker and less flexible tails. So the author argues that
Speaker 3: rat kings are in fact to genuine natural phenomena, though
Speaker 3: of course sometimes they may be created by people, especially
Speaker 3: out of already dead rats. They occur within the nest
Speaker 3: of the black rat during cold weather via the gluing
Speaker 3: freezing process described earlier, and finally says, most of the
Speaker 3: time we will never find out about them.
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, this is an idea that I saw discussed in
Speaker 2: some other works as well, like, not every rat king
Speaker 2: that could assuming that rat kings do occur naturally, not
Speaker 2: everyone that occurs naturally is going to turn up because
Speaker 2: there are even though there are accounts of them seeming
Speaker 2: to be well fed, and these tend to be you know,
Speaker 2: the ones that have been found, and they've been found
Speaker 2: in say agricultural or urban environments where there's perhaps an
Speaker 2: abundance of food. For the most part, they're doomed. They're
Speaker 2: going to die, and in many cases they would die
Speaker 2: without humans ever laying eyes on them. And then you
Speaker 2: may have other cases where they're not reported. You know,
Speaker 2: perhaps they it is seen as a dire omen you
Speaker 2: better cover this up. I'm not going to put this
Speaker 2: on a plank for the neighbors to see. But I
Speaker 2: kept coming back, and I guess we've partially answered this,
Speaker 2: But I was thinking, well, okay, if all we need
Speaker 2: are black rats, cold weather, and the presence of human
Speaker 2: agriculture and or urbanization. Then why do we not have
Speaker 2: accounts of them from before around fifteen seventy six, Like,
Speaker 2: certainly observations of a rat king would be novel, and
Speaker 2: it makes sense that you would maybe hear about them,
Speaker 2: say during the Roman period. But maybe indeed it does
Speaker 2: have to do with it just not being like the
Speaker 2: perfect combination of all these forces like again, cold weather,
Speaker 2: black rats, human agriculture, urbanization, Like you have to have
Speaker 2: everything clicking along just right, and then there's still going
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah. Interesting, And again, knots have always been of interest
Speaker 2: to human beings, and rats have been with us a
Speaker 2: long time as well, you know, often seen in a
Speaker 2: more ominous light, but also sometimes celebrated for various aspects
Speaker 2: of the organism. So it again, it's the kind of
Speaker 2: thing that, if observed, would surely be novel enough to
Speaker 2: bear repetition in the written record, which of course is
Speaker 2: inherently incomplete, so 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 Miluton make good arguments, and
Speaker 3: I would say, if I if I had to guess
Speaker 3: one way or another, I would agree with them that
Speaker 3: rat kings probably are naturally created, probably along the methods
Speaker 3: that the Miluton highlights. But on the other hand, I
Speaker 3: would admit that questions still remain and there are some
Speaker 3: reasons to be skeptical.
Speaker 2: Now, I want to come back briefly to rat kings
Speaker 2: and pop culture, sort of get some of the realistic
Speaker 2: horror perhaps off the palette. Here we've touched on a
Speaker 2: couple of the major examples of rat kings and pop culture,
Speaker 2: at least the major one as far as the modern
Speaker 2: audiences are concerned, but a couple of other ones that
Speaker 2: I thought are worth mentioning. The idea of a rat king,
Speaker 2: particularly as possessing a collective intelligence, is one that has
Speaker 2: fascinated me for a while. This idea originates, as far
Speaker 2: as I'm aware, in the pages of the British comic
Speaker 2: two thousand and a d specifically in the Adventures of
Speaker 2: Halo Jones. These were written by the legendary comics author
Speaker 2: Alan Moore and illustrated by the legendary comics artist Ian Gibson,
Speaker 2: who sadly passed away earlier this week. One of the greats.
Speaker 2: But in Halo Jones, the rat King is displayed as
Speaker 2: using its advanced intelligence to control all the rats the
Speaker 2: world and then take over the world in the process.
Speaker 2: I included an illustration from the comic book Here for
Speaker 2: You Joe in black and white.
Speaker 3: Is it typing on a computer?
Speaker 2: I believe so. Yeah, these are mass communicating rat kings
Speaker 2: right here.
Speaker 3: You never know when you're talking to somebody on the internet.
Speaker 3: They could be a rat king. It could have no way,
Speaker 3: It absolutely could be. Now related, but separate concept is
Speaker 3: that of the cranium rats and dungeons and dragons. These
Speaker 3: are psionically enhanced rats. So these are rats that the
Speaker 3: e Lithids or the mind flares have toyed with and
Speaker 3: they've changed their brains in order to use them as
Speaker 3: spies to go out and especially into like the human
Speaker 3: world and see what's up. But the thing I always
Speaker 3: liked about cranium rats is the idea that one of
Speaker 3: these is essentially just a rat. You encounter one cranium rat,
Speaker 3: you're just encountering a rat. But if you have two
Speaker 3: cranium rats, well they have the collective intelligence, the psionically
Speaker 3: connected brain of two rats together, and it builds from there.
Speaker 3: So in great number, cranium rats have a vast collective intelligence.
Speaker 3: And in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, they have
Speaker 3: enhanced psionic abilities, so they'd be able to like basically
Speaker 3: like lash out at you with scanner powers. WHOA, So
Speaker 3: you really don't want to let them get on the
Speaker 3: computer less Like Cameron Vail, they hack into your main
Speaker 3: mainframe via scanner powers through the phone lines.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another frequently cited use of rat kings in pop culture.
Speaker 2: I believe Liz Lemon's old boyfriend Dennis Duffy on Thirty
Speaker 2: Rock claims in one episode to have seen a rat king,
Speaker 2: perhaps in the subway or what have you. That one
Speaker 2: definitely stuck in my mind. But I'd forgotten about this one.
Speaker 2: It's been a long time since I've read Stephen King's
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty six novel It, but there is mention of
Speaker 2: a rat king and its vast pages. I had to
Speaker 2: look it up to see exactly what is said. But
Speaker 2: on page eight hundred and seventy two of the kindle edition,
Speaker 2: you have the kids boring the Nyebolt House. This is
Speaker 2: the the Haunted House. If you've seen the movie, you
Speaker 2: know what I'm talking about, the dark, decayed house that
Speaker 2: they go to, and Richie opens up a cupboard, looks inside,
Speaker 2: and then reports what he has seen. He says, quote,
Speaker 2: there's hundreds of them in there. Their tails, they were
Speaker 2: all tangled up, bill knotted together like snakes.
Speaker 3: Creepy. So page eight seventy two is that near the
Speaker 3: end of chapter one.
Speaker 2: Yes, I have a physical copy around here somewhere, but
Speaker 2: there's no way I was going to like scan through
Speaker 2: it and find one mention of a rat king. So
Speaker 2: I had to pony up by the kindle edition do
Speaker 2: a word search and find out exactly where King mentions
Speaker 2: rat kings because there's a lot of horror, plenty of
Speaker 2: horror in that book to go around. Oh yeah, so
Speaker 2: that's just a taste of some uses of the rat
Speaker 2: king in pop culture. But there are others. So if
Speaker 2: there are any that are near and dear to your heart,
Speaker 2: do you think are particularly insightful write in we would
Speaker 2: love to hear from you. Do not send us your
Speaker 2: rat kings, though. If you find a rat king, please
Speaker 2: find an acceptable authority to report this. All right, we're
Speaker 2: going to go ahead and close this episode out again
Speaker 2: look to the Monster Fact tomorrow from a little more
Speaker 2: from me regarding rat king esque matters. But then we'll
Speaker 2: be back on Thursday with an episode on you Guessed
Speaker 2: 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. That's Stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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