Content area
Full text
Redbreast: The Robin in Life and Literature. By ANDREW LACK. Arundel, West Sussex: SMH Books. 2008. x + 294 pp. £19.95.
Even the most cursory glance at the Christmas cards around my house as I write this serves to reinforce the theme of Andrew Lack's charming book: the central place of the robin in British culture, history, literature and tradition. No other Christmas motif seems as popular this year - not even the Holy Family.
And if the book itself is aptly described as the author's own labour of love - a tributary update to the original work of his father, David, first published in 1950 - then the overwhelming sense that it projects, is the quite astonishing relationship between this diminutive member of the thrush family and the British people. The wealth of evidence presented makes it no surprise at all that the robin was voted our national bird in 1960. It features in almost every aspect of our lives and many key moments of our history. It is there in rural folklore/ features in chapter and verse throughout literature and fittingly even plays its part in the great struggles for national identity -nesting both in a hole in the mast of HMS Victory (albeit after it has been removed from the ship following the Battle of Trafalgar) and calmly in the engine of a Spitfire during World War Two.
Andrew Lack's book is a very fitting celebration of the robin. It is well researched, truly comprehensive and beautifully produced. Individual chapters cover such as aspects as the robin's song; the robin and Christmas; and Children; in Myth and Folklore,- and home-life, and there are separate chapters on the most enduring of robin legends - 'The Saga of Cock Robin' and its central role in 'Babes in the Wood', where the robin covers the bodies with moss, thus cementing its strong association down the years with death. It is, however, very much an update of David Lack's original, so this is not quite a new book in itself, with many pages of the original untouched - though more modern poems have been added.
What makes our relationship with the robin so special is that it is unique to Great Britain. Unlike other national figures,...