This could have gone to Favorite Phrases as it is from an interesting author, but the subject of it makes it fit in better into this Bear world.
This is one for Mabbogtebby, to upgrade his lightly handicapped bit of self esteem: a little bit of bear lore. Hope he likes it.
And then there was Snuffles .
Snuffles was a bear - possibly - and of sorts. The bear is himself a caricature of animalkind, somehow a giant dog, somehow a shaggy man, an ogre, and also a toy. And Snuffles was a caricature of a bear. Billy Cross tried to explain to them about bears. Billy was an old bear man.
" It is the only animal that children dream of without having seen or been told about. Moncrief by his recall methods had studied thousands of early childhood dreams. Children universally dream of bears, Thahithian children subject to no ursine influence in themselves or their ancestry, Australian
children, town tikes before they ever saw a bear toy. They dream of bears. The bear is the boogerman. Bears live in attics of old childhood houses. Their existance there is not of adult suggestion, but of innate Childhood knowledge.
But here is duality about this boogerman. He is friendly and fascinating as well as frightening. The boogerman is not a story that adults tell to children.
It is the only story that children tell to adults who have forgotten it.
Now the boogerman is also philologically interesting, being actually one of the less than a hundred Indo-European root words. Though Bog has come to mean
God in the Slavic, yet the booger was earlier an animal-man demiurge, and the Sanscrit bhaga is not without this meaning. In the sense of a breaker, a smasher,
it is in the Old Irish bong , and in Lithuanian banga . In the sense of a devourer in the Greek phag , and as one who puts to flight it is in Latin fug.
We have, of course, the Welsh bwg , a ghost, and bogey has been used in the meaning of the devil. And we have bugbear , which rounds out the circuit.
"In many mythologies it was the bear who made the world. After that he did nothing distinguished. It was felt by his devotees that he had done enough."
From : R.A Laffery- "Snuffles" fragment. 1960, from Galaxy. dec. 1960
Last edited by BranShea; 03/05/07 09:55 PM.
