Preface: The following story came about from a email in the summer of 2007. A film production company, Les Films Camera Obscura, from Montreal, needed some footage of white deer for their feature film and found our website. Over the course of several months, we finally gained access to the Depot. On a cold in early December 2007, we traveled back and forth in the Depot and finally captured the moments they so needed for their film. I must say, what a terrific group of people they are – extremely professional and passionate about their craft. Here then is the story behind the movie as written by Francine Brunel-Reeves, the singing star of the movie and also a scholar in ethnomusicology. Enjoy.
Dennis Money
La Blanche Biche / The White Doe (also called The White Hind)
My main subject of research is a traditional song, a beautiful though quite shocking old ballad, La Blanche Biche, entitled The White Hind by anglophone scholars. Scandinavian scholars entitle it Jungfrun I Hindhamn (= The young maiden turned into a hind).
I have gathered 79 variants of this ballad, and 43 melodies (either written or recorded), but I have not collected myself any unknown version. While most of its melodies have the character of religious hymns, a few of them could be hunting horn tunes.
This research, which I started out of sheer curiosity for a single narrative element in the ballad, has unexpectedly led me to probe into several different fields such as mythology, history of religions, linguistics, ethnology, musicology, biology (genetics), theater, and now cinema… When I started, in 1986, I knew no more than most other people about these disciplines (for which a whole life's work is necessary to become a specialist in only one of them), so since that year [1986] I have turned into a perpetual student.
The White Hind:
This ballad tells a tale of a young maiden, Marguerite, with a malediction attached to her of being a girl during the day and a white doe (hind seems to be an older word for the females of the deer, and of some other animals also) during the night. In fourteen canadian versions, fairies are responsible for this malediction because they became angry and cast a spell on her on the day of her birth when her mother, after washing her newborn baby in a golden basin, threw the soiled water in their garden. We have to suppose the spell becomes active when she turns fifteen., the usual marrying age for a young girl.
So while she is a white doe she runs around in the forest. Princes and lords pursue her every night with their hunting dogs, her brother Renaud among them with his own dogs, and he is the worst of the hunters, a hundred times worse. She cries and complains to her mother, asking her to stop him. The mother then calls after her son, telling him that the doe he pursues is his sister, but he refuses to believe her and, despite her warning, sounds his horn three times after his dogs, and on the third or fourth horn call the white doe is captured and killed. The dogs fetch her and bring her back to him, and he takes her to the cook in his castle, telling him to have her well cooked and to prepare a banquet where the doe will be served. At this point, either he or another person proceeds to skin the doe. This person remarks with surprise, while doing this, that the doe has hair as blond as wax, a neck like a demoiselle, a ring on her finger like a newlywed young lady. Still the cook proceeds with his cooking, everybody comes to the table, the princes and the lords are invited, and somebody —usually the brother— wonders why Marguerite is not there.
At this moment the doe, although dead, cooked (or rather, roasted) and cut into pieces in a large silver plate on the table, speaks up and tells the company to go on and eat, that she is the first guest at the table ; she goes on describing piece by piece her broken up body to the horrified guests… Hearing this, the brother either kills himself or declares that for such a terrible tragedy he will do penance and « sleep for seven years under the white thorn (= « hawthorn »). These endings are probably very archaïc, and the second one could have something to do with pre-christian funerary rituals. There are other less important endings to the song, some of them having evidently been added later on by a moralizing religious hand…
Remark : This tale, which is evidently a brother-sister incest story with a strong mythological connotation, must have been traveling a long time on Indo-European territory before it became a song in the Middle Ages. The oldest traces it presents are etymological, with much insistance on the white color of the doe (in the 79 variants I have gathered, except for the five Scandinavian versions and two French ones, « the girl-hind » is always white), but some shamanistic elements may also have been preserved.
In the course of its travels and along the transmission chain the tale and then the song evidently picked up other elements from different cultures, for example ancient incestuous marriage customs in germanic countries, or a hunt with staghounds followed by a banquet : this motive of the hunting hounds is important, because it was probably added to this very antique tale in the Middle Ages, changing its setting to a noble and rich french feodal world of castles, kings, princes and lords, all hunting with hounds and banqueting, whereas in the most ancient written version, a swedish one collected in 1570, the young man hunts alone with his bow and arrow, accompanied by only one dog, and there is no mention of a banquet. What's more, that swedish version has a most surprising ending, considering the tragic and fatal drama that just took place, with two verses wishing the best of luck to the young man who leaves to go hunting. The latest elements picked up by the song, probably in the last 350 years, are strongly religious and moralizing.
That happy hunter might be a mythological vestige of The Great Celestial Hunter hunting with « an arrow that never fails »… The mythologies of a great number of amerindian as well as euroasiatic populations say that this great hunter is Orion, the beautiful constellation of Orion… If you search on the web for the Orion constellation, you will find a great deal of information on this great mythological hunter… And there is even a father-daughter incest story imbedded in the middle of that constellation !