Beards

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Orson Welles                                                                            

Beards divide opinion: do they indicate virility, strength and wisdom, or do they show a lack of commitment to shaving and personal hygiene? Luminaries such as Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and Father Christmas would look naked without their beards, but the unprepossessing face furniture predominating among real ale enthusiasts, trainspotters and other devotees of spectacularly mundane hobbies would suggest that the ‘weirdy beardy’ stereotype may not be without foundation. Social attitudes towards beards are heavily influenced by prevailing cultural norms and fashion trends, but also religious traditions. For example, Sikhism, Rastafarianism and most sects of Islam require men to wear a beard. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin speculated that the process of sexual selection led to the evolution of beards and that men with beards were more attractive to women than men without beards. (In later life, Darwin sported a series of truly magnificent beards, which may not be entirely coincidental given his belief in this hypothesis!)

The English word beard is inherited from a Proto-Germanic root *bard-, daughters of which include German bart, Dutch baard and West Frisian burd. This Proto-Germanic root is descended from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *bhardhā, which is also the source of Proto-Slavic bardā – ancestor of Russian борода (boroda), Polish broda and Bulgarian брада (brada), all of which mean ‘beard’ and ‘chin’, as well as Latin barba, the source of Romance words for ‘beard’, including Portuguese, Spanish and Italian barba ‘beard’,  Romanian barbă and French barbe. The French word for ‘candy floss’ barbe à papa is literally ‘Daddy’s beard’, though even the most avant-garde Frenchmen are unlikely to have garish pink beards with the stickiness of tree sap and the texture of sandpaper. Barbe à papa was transformed to Barbapapa, the eponymous hero of a 1970s series of children’s books and television cartoons, which are still very popular around the world. Barbapapa is a pear-shaped pink blob, but can shapeshift at will, like his wife Barbamama and their seven children. Incongruously, only one of the Barbapapa family is remotely beardy. This honour goes to the temperamental artist Barbabeau, who is black, hairy and slightly louche.

The pirate, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, has perhaps the most celebrated beard in history. His bushy, black beard reached down as far as his waist and was an integral part of his carefully crafted image. He also lit slow fuses in his long hair to make it smoke under his hat, giving him a disturbing and somewhat crazed appearance. This was supplemented by the flags his ships flew, often blood-coloured or featuring a skull on a black background. (The popular notion that his flag depicted a horned skeleton stabbing a heart with a spear with one hand and raising a glass to toast the devil with the other is probably apocryphal, however.) The fearsome reputation that Blackbeard garnered on the strength of these props enabled him to maintain order on his ships and to terrify the crews of the ships that he attacked in his career of plunder and piracy in the West Indies and along the east coast of North America in the early 1700s.

Other famous historical figures have been named after their distinctive facial hair. Sweyn Forkbeard rebelled against his equally evocatively named father, Harald Bluetooth, to seize the Danish throne in 986, and later became king of Norway and briefly king of England before he was succeeded on his death in 1014 by Cnut. Frederick I, the charismatic Holy Roman Emperor from 1155 to 1190, had a striking, red beard, which inspired the northern Italian cities he attempted to subdue to give him the sobriquet of Barbarossa. Even in his German homeland, he was known as Kaiser Rotbart ‘Emperor Redbeard’, and his hirsute accoutrement made him easily recognisable on the battlefield. According to legend, Frederick is not really dead, but lies asleep inside a cave in the Kyffhäuser mountains of central Germany, his red beard having grown through the table at which he sits. The myth states that when ravens stop flying around the mountain he will wake up and reestablish Germany’s ancient greatness. This idea of restoring German prestige and power was referenced by Hitler when he named his invasion of the Soviet Union Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Fortunately for the world, Hitler lacked the military pragmatism, sagacity and sanity of Frederick and eventually Operation Barbarossa foundered, and momentum in the Second World War shifted decisively to the Allies.

Many nations and peoples also took their names (or had names foisted upon them) from their impressive beards. The Lombards are named after their long beards, Lombard being a compound of the Proto-Germanic words *langaz ‘long’ and *bardaz ‘beard’. This Germanic tribe was based in northern Germany, near the River Elbe, until around two thousand years ago, but they gradually migrated southwards and invaded Italy in the mid-6th century CE. In less than a hundred years, the Lombards were able to conquer most of the Italian peninsula, and their name endures in the region of Lombardia (Lombardy) in the north of Italy. In 1167, it was beards versus beard, as Italian cities united in the Lombard League to resist Frederick Barbarossa as he tried to assert his power over the Kingdom of Italy. The coral island of Barbuda – the smaller half of the nation of Antigua and Barbuda – may also be named after the beards of the Carib peoples who lived there when Columbus encountered the islands in 1493 – barbuda means ‘bearded’ in Spanish. However, it is also possible that the island was named after the bearded fig, ficus citrifolia, which is endemic to the island and has long aerial roots resembling a splendidly bushy beard. If so, Barbuda shares an etymology with its fellow Caribbean island Barbados, which was given its current name by Portuguese explorer Pedro Campos in 1536. Campos named the island after the bearded fig trees – os barbados ‘the bearded ones’. More on the mysteries of figs next post!

In works of fiction, too, the bearded have often taken centre stage. The protagonist of Barbe bleue (Bluebeard), a French folktale first written down and published by Charles Perrault, has a blue beard so repulsive that it scares away all the women and girls of the neighbourhood. Apparently unaware of the widespread availability of razors, Bluebeard has to work hard to overcome the local maidens’ aversion to his horrendous facial impediment. Fortunately, his great wealth and skill at wooing means he succeeds in marrying a succession of beautiful brides, though nobody is aware, or apparently even curious, about their later whereabouts. In fact, Bluebeard murders them all and keeps the bodies in a locked closet in his house. A month after his final marriage, Bluebeard goes away on ‘affairs of very great consequence’ and gives his wife a huge bunch of keys to rooms which house his best furniture and cupboards containing his money and jewels, as well as a key to the closet, which he says she must not enter. Naturally, as soon as Bluebeard is out of sight, she unlocks the forbidden closet and finds the gruesome remains of his previous wives inside. After Bluebeard returns, he notices blood on the closet key and is about to chop off his wife’s head with a sabre when her brothers arrive in the nick of time and save the day. For Perrault, the moral of the story is that curiosity is short-lived and always leads to deep regret – though being dutifully obedient to a serial killer who keeps his wives’ decapitated torsos in a cupboard doesn’t strike me as being a massively better option.

Of course, careful beard cultivation requires the service of professional beard-trimmers. The Ancient Egyptians are the first culture known to have barbers < French barbour ‘hairdresser, surgeon’, whose tools of the trade were made of sharpened flints and oyster shells. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder is very exact in his assertion that the first barbers were brought to Rome from Sicily under the leadership of Publius Ticinius Mena 454 years after the founding of the city, that is, in 299 BCE, in which case the barbers were likely to have been Greeks. (However, Pliny also claimed that bear cubs were born as shapeless masses of white flesh which needed to be licked into shape by their mothers, that there was a valley in the Himalayas where people had backward-facing feet but could run with astonishing speed and that the mineral cinnabar was the result of the blood spilt in a battle between an elephant and a dragon, so he’s not always the most reliable source.) By the Middle Ages, barbers were also performing surgical operations. In addition to cutting hair, these barber-surgeons would pull out rotten teeth, bleed patients with leeches, drain boils, lance cysts, perform enemas and amputate limbs, amongst other delights. The striped barber’s pole alludes to the activities of the barber-surgeons. These poles are either striped red and white, or red, white and blue. The red signified that the barber would let blood, white that the barber would set bones or pull teeth, and blue, if present, was the more mundane promise that the barber would give customers a shave. On that note, enjoy your next beard trim, and if you don’t have a beard, enjoy your next haircut!