WILLIAM WOOLFITT

U Is for Ungulate

Julius Caesar said that in size, the wild ur-oxen, or aurochsen, rank only a little below elephants, but in shape, color, and general appearance they are like bulls. The Germans are keen to capture them in pits and kill them. The aurochsen spare no person they see. The aurochs was already extinct in Britain by the time the Anglo-Saxons settled there; it lingered on in the Anglo-Saxon imagination and also in their alphabet, in the rune ūr (ᚢ). The shape of this rune may bring to mind the horns of an ox; it was derived from a Germanic rune that meant aurochs. In feasting halls, rich men drank mead and ale from silver-mounted aurochs horns that could measure as much as six feet long. The author of the Old English “Rune Poem” describes the aurochs as oferhyrned and frēcne, over-horned and fierce, a beast that fought with its horns; the rune ūr must have suggested the monstrous, the magical, the pagan. 

Later, missionaries took the aurochs out of the alphabet—took some of the marvel out of it—when they replaced the rune ūr with the Roman u we use today, which was derived from the Phoenician consonant waw, meaning hook, or nail, or tent peg. Later, the kings of Poland were still giving aurochs meat as gifts; hunters saved their heart-bones and forelocks. The last herd of aurochsen lived in a swampy, dense, inaccessible part of the Jaktorów Forest in eastern Poland; the last cow ate leaves and acorns, and the hay that gamekeepers brought her; she was alone for seven years, and was killed by poachers in 1627.   

Today, we know the aurochs mostly by its bones, which have been found in peat bogs, lake bottoms, chalk springs.

And by what Charles Hamilton Smith bought in the early 1800s: the only known painting of the aurochs, a square panel in the hands of a dealer at Augsburg. Smith copied the painting, published his sketch and his description of a bull without mane, rather rugged, large head, thick neck, small dewlap, sooty black, the chin alone white, the horns turning forward, then upward. As for the painting, it was sold after Smith died, and has since disappeared; only Smith’s copy survives—and the painting was old when he touched it, examined it—not pristine, evidently faded, or even damaged; what image of the aurochs we have from Smith must be guess, surmise, a scrambling-after, trying to shape something solid from a handful of air, ersatz hope.

William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer University Press, 2020). His fiction chapbook The Boy with Fire in His Mouth (2014) won the Epiphany Editions contest judged by Darin Strauss.