St. John’s Mummer’s Festival hits 10-year mark
Any murderous Mummers ‘llowed in?
The 10th annual Mummer’s Festival is underway in St. John’s, offering a multitude of diverse mummering-related events until Dec. 13.
Leading up to the main event, the Mummers Parade, the festival offers paint nights, workshops on building hobby horses, ugly sticks, box and bucket masks, short film screenings, and educational lectures on the colourful history of the festival’s namesake colourful characters.
The dark, cold night on Wednesday perfectly matched some of the topics to be discussed in the evening’s presentation, titled “Frightening Fools: Exploring Mummering’s Dark Side.”
The Rooms’ theatre was warm and inviting, like Mummers Festival co-ordinator Ryan Davis, who began the evening with a presentation on “a pretty creepy tradition,” the hobby horse.
“A peculiar breed” and a “rare sight,” the hobby horse has nails for teeth, and a hinged jaw to create a menacing “snocking” jaw. A unique disguise, the hodge-podge hobby horse was known to be extra mischievous, with early accounts telling spooky tales of people being bitten and chased by the strange creature.
Davis recounted a court record from 1862, in which a Harbour Grace man claimed to have been attacked by a hobby horse. He then discussed a 1967 provincewide survey on Christmas traditions, which amassed mummering and hobby horse stories from nearly 350 communities.
Hobby horse pastimes ranged from playful and innocent, to devious and mischievous, on through to intimidating and violent, like their mummer/janney counterparts.
Having spent over 10 years studying mummering, Joy Fraser is an expert on the topic.
Fraser earned a PHD in folklore at Memorial University, and has been researching the connections between mummering, violence and the law in 19th-century Newfoundland.
Using court records, press coverage, legal proceedings and more, Fraser has been piecing together the details of a nearly 160-year-old murder, perpetrated by six mummers in Bay Roberts.
Six men were indicted for the offence, but none were convicted, due to insufficient evidence.
This was the most serious of the many violent mummering-related events of late 19th century, which would eventually lead to the issuing of mummering “licences” in 1861, followed by an all-out ban in 1862. The ban remained in place for more than a century.
Throughout her informative, interesting and shocking presentation, Fraser recalled historical details and amusing anecdotes related to the annual practice.
The custom has not always been as cute as Simani’s “The Mummer’s Song” music video would lead you to believe.
At its best, mummering strengthened community bonds, while simultaneously providing citizens with a temporary escape from their own reality. At worst, mummering was “traditional violence,” or “culturally sanctioned deviousness,” inspiring terror, tears and, sometimes, bloodshed.
With a vast and deep scope of knowledge, Fraser’s presentation could have easily continued for another hour – it seemed as though she only skimmed the surface of this intriguing, entertaining and jaw-dropping cultural phenomenon.
Mummering will be celebrated in full regalia around the winding city streets of St. John’s on Dec. 8.
After learning about the dark side of mummering, I’ll be ignoring the noise out by the porch door, and I won’t be allowing any mummers in, never mind 20 or more.