Caesar's Kneeless Elk

... is the name of my new band.

In Book 6 of his Gallic War, Julius Caesar describes some of the flora and fauna of the ‘Hyrcanian Forest’, a region he locates as occupying central Europe. There’s a unicorn-horned bovine (‘an ox of the shape of a stag, between whose ears a horn rises from the middle of the forehead, higher and straighter than those horns which are known to us’) and aurochs, which Caesar calls uri. Then there is the German elk:

Sunt item, quae appellantur alces. Harum est consimilis capris figura et varietas pellium, sed magnitudine paulo antecedunt mutilaeque sunt cornibus et crura sine nodis articulisque habent neque quietis causa procumbunt neque, si quo adflictae casu conciderunt, erigere sese aut sublevare possunt. His sunt arbores pro cubilibus: ad eas se applicant atque ita paulum modo reclinatae quietem capiunt.

There are also [animals] which are called elks. The shape of these, and the varied color of their skins, is much like roes, but in size they surpass them a little and are destitute of horns, and have legs without joints and ligatures; nor do they lie down for the purpose of rest, nor, if they have been thrown down by any accident, can they raise or lift themselves up. Trees serve as beds to them; they lean themselves against them, and thus reclining only slightly, they take their rest. [Caesar, Gallic Wars 6:27]

Caesar goes on that the Germans hunt this knee-less creature by chopping a little way into the trees they use as beds, such when they lean against them their support gives way, the giant elk falls over, and the hunters can pounce: ‘they undermine all the trees at the roots, or cut into them so far that the upper part of the trees may appear to be left standing. When they have leant upon them, according to their habit, they knock down by their weight the unsupported trees, and fall down themselves along with them.’

We know Shakespeare studied Caesar’s book at school—generations of schoolchildren suffered the same fate—because he makes specific reference, not just to the Hyrcanian forest (in Hamlet and Macbeth) but to this peculiar mode of hunting, and we also know that he wasn’t altogether paying attention (like generations of schoolchildren) because he confuses the unicorn-ox with the kneeless-elk. In Julius Caesar, speaking of Caesar himself, Decius Brutus says:

Decius. Never feare that: If he be so resolv’d,
I can o’er-sway him: For he loves to heare,
That Unicornes may be betray'd with Trees ... [Julius Caesar, 2.1.203]

But what is going on with Caesar’s weird animals? He can’t seriously believe that elks lack knees, can’t lie down, and must sleep leaning on trees? Can he? Why does he think elks lack antlers? One thing anyone who has actually seen an elk would agree on is: they have big-ass antlers. On their heads, of course. Not their asses. The Latin alces, from the Greek ἄλκη, does mean ‘elk’; but the beast Caesar describes is very unelky.

So: something odd, here, and scholars have fretted over it. It is assumed that the convincing and detailed account of his own military expeditions and victories that constiutute the bulk of the Bellum Gallicum bespeak an author scupulous about correctness and eye-witness exactitude, but Kneeless Elk rather speaks against that. ‘It has often caused astonishment that so sober a historian as Julius Caesar, the “prince of authors,” as Tacitus calls him, should have been credulous enough to tell the fables about the one-horned deer, jointless elk, and huge ure-ox in these chapters’ says Walter Woodburn Hyde. Hyde thinks the whole bestiary section an interpolation by ‘a lesser author’. Emily Allen-Hornblower thinks the passages are by Caesar, but that he is engaging in a rhetorical trick. Jools said he would cross the Rhine and conquer Germany; then he back-tracked, and didn’t (and the Germans remained unconquered, and indeed a thorn in the side of the Roman empire, for centuries). Allen-Hornblower thinks this section is Caesar in effect saying: ‘yes, I conquered Gaul, but that’s a fertile, attractive land and worth possessing: Germany though? That’s all impenetrable forests, bestial barbarians tribes and fantastical monsters of the kind you’ve never come across before. Not worth conquering’. It’s true he describes the land on the far side of the river as a forest so gigantic than you could trek for nine days and not reach the far side, that even the natives have never crossed it; and he goes on to list these bizarre beasts. It’s possible it’s all a rhetorical ruse. Then again, Allen-Hornblower quotes an earlier scholar, one ‘H. Aili’, who believes that Caesar did see actual elks, but in less-than-ideal conditions for accurate visibility, and at a distance:

Aili (a scholar who has participated in Swedish elk hunts) makes an ingenious attempt to rehabilitate Caesar's unlikely account of the Hercynian forest's fauna by suggesting that particular weather conditions and low visibility may have warped his perception [H. Aili, ‘Caesar's elks and other mythical creatures of the Hercynian forest’, in M. Asztalos and C. Gejrot [eds.], Symbolae Septentrionales: Latin Studies Presented to Jan Oberg [Stockholm, 1995], 15-37)]

I have been an academic for over three decades, and I can only sigh disappointedly that at no point has anyone been able to say of me: ‘Adam Roberts (a scholar who has participated in Swedish elk hunts) …’

What’s going on? Well, the first thing to say is that whatever alces means or meant in Latin, Caesar cannot be talking of the animal we think of today as ‘elk’. Certainly not as North Americans understand the term: for that creature has never lived in Europe. The European elk is called, in North America, the moose: and it is the largest species of deer, has enormous antlers, and can indeed bend its entirely existent knees. Here’s an Iron Age saddle showing a moose, or European elk, being hunted by a Siberian tiger which shows, if nothing else, that the artist was entirely aware of the knee-ish-ness of the creature concerned.

Let’s say there is some arborial ruminent that lies behind Caesar’s description—which is to say, some either still existent deer, or something like the auroch, alive in Julius’s time but now extinct. It would, obviously, have had knees: but it’s possible that an observer might not realise this fact. The other animal often described as kneeless is the elephant which, although the claim is erroneous (elephants do have knees) is sort-of understandable: if you’d never seen a pachyderm before, but came across one—perhaps as Hannibal marched a cavalry over them over the alps at your homeland—you might think: (a) wow, those are scary! (b) I’m not getting any closer than I need to, believe me; (c) wow, their legs are weirdly short and stumpy compared to their bodies (d) I wonder if they even have knees? This seems like a plausible trajectory that goes, without having to invent from whole cloth an animal concerning which you had no idea, from observation to conclusion.

The point, it seems to me, is to contrast bulk with flexibility: ‘they’ (the enemy, the otherm, the barbarians) are big but clumsy, stilted, monstrous: ‘we’ (the civilised) may be small in comparison, but we are flexible, manoeuvrable, bendable, and so will prevail. Stories of these beasts circulate. Caesar picks up on it: barbarian monsters? They’re not like our decent Roman animals. They don’t even have knees!

An alternative is the ‘stupid thick-browed Neanderthal’ theory—that is, the belief that Neamderthals were heavy-skulled, beetle-browed numbheads, slow and muttering and idiotic, was derived from one Neanderthal skull of an individual who, unfortunately for him, happened to have crippling and disfiguring osteoarthritus. Initially people extrapolated his disfigurement to the whole people, and believed all Neanderthals looked that way. Now we know better. It’s possible that Caesar, or the individual who reported to Caesar what he had seen, had encountered an elk with knee-joints fused by some arthritic or cancerous pathology, and that he, or they, described all elks in such terms. By a similar logic, the hornlessness of these elks might reflect an unusual specimen. Walter Woodburn Hyde again: ‘Caesar's elks were mutilae cornibus—a term which has been translated “bereft of horns,” and led investigators, like Buffon, to believe that Caesar was describing the females only … However, the word mutilus means simply “mutilated” or “maimed” (like truncus, mancus, curtus), and is used of horned animals which have lost their horns. Thus the elk which forms the basis of Caesar's account may have been injured, or the word may be exactly descriptive of the appearance of the antlers which look scraggy and as though they had been injured.’ Could be! Or maybe, for whatever reason, Caesar just let his imagination run riot in this section.