Okay, here’s part 2 of my Hannibal-as-fairy-tales series, which I am now calling “Hanny Tales” because I am horrible. (They’ll all be tagged “hanny tales,” fyi, so you can just track that tag if you want to.) I wanted to talk about Hannibal as the…
The stag! Will as Tam Lin is brilliant, and the stag totally works with it!
Okay, warnings for some Hannibal grossness on this one, my peeps. If the ick squicks, you can press J on your keyboard to skip right on past to the next post on your dashboard.
Stags are classic fairy animals; they symbolize swiftness, cleverness, and the crossing between life and death (as a prey animal, they die so that others can live). They’re messengers from the otherworld, guides and lures—hunters follow them through the woods, only to find themselves stumbling into Faerie, where they either find what they need or find themselves trapped.
As a border animal, they’re shapeshifters—often it’s a form assumed by the fairies themselves, to take on the stag’s traits, but equally often the shapeshifting is done to someone involuntarily—men (and sometimes even women) are made into stags as a way of being taken captive by the fairies. Sometimes they are then hunted, and in a couple of the darkest fairy tales they’re even eaten. I remember one where someone was turned into a stag, only to be unwittingly hunted, killed and served by their own father at a feast.
(Incidentally, that doe that Garret and Abigail killed together? We always see that scene as a flashback playing in Abigail’s mind. Are we REALLY SURE that was ACTUALLY a deer?)
Will’s stag, now, is clearly a symbol of the Ripper for him; when it shows up, he (and the viewer) knows he’s bumping up against the patterns that represent the Ripper’s involvement. And though he doesn’t realize it yet, he also equates it (ultimately not coincidentally, of course) with Hannibal. Note that the stag started showing up not immediately after the first killing, but shortly after that, after the first time Will stopped to stare at Hannibal’s little bronze elk statue (the same one Hannibal later brained Tobias with).
So we’ve seen the stag act as a warning or herald of the Ripper’s presence. We’ve seen it lead Will to discoveries. Is it a guide or a trap, though? Calling it a sort of spirit guide would be obvious, but spirit guides are generally supposed to be on your side—whereas there’s always been, for me, a sense that the stag can’t be trusted. There’s a heavy menace around it that implies it’s not SAFE for him when it shows up, even though it’s in his mind. In the most recent episode, in particular, it’s hard to say whether it was leading him where Will wanted to go or leading him where the Ripper wanted him to go.
He’s so screwed, seriously; the encephalitis is one thing, but if the ‘Ripper’ corner of his brain is actually working for the Ripper, then Will really does have every problem he’s worried he might have. It means he’s got a serial killer nesting in his brain, and he cannot trust himself.
And if that’s true, then the stag serves as Hannibal’s animal totem (which is already implied by Hannibal’s fondness for them) and, in a sense, when Hannibal crosses the borders into the fairyland of Will’s mind he shapeshifts into the stag. And in more than one sense, Hannibal is turning Will into the stag. It’s a figment of Will’s own imagination, for one; and it’s him again because the stag is the Ripper and Will becomes the killer when he works. And if that stag really did lead Will where Hannibal wanted him to go, then it’s Will AGAIN—and totally in the shapeshifter/captivity/Tam Lin sense—as a corner of Will’s mind that Hannibal’s convinced to do his work for him and thus turned into that stag.
OKAY ILU FOR THIS THIS IS GR8, AND ALSO: SOME THINGS:
All this border animal stuff totally ties into part 1 and if I had not been mysteriously ignorant of all this stag stuff I would TOTALLY HAVE TALKED ABOUT IT, SO THANK YOU.
SECONDLY: I did find some stuff about stags, but at the time I was intending to write a different (still unwritten) part of the meta and failed to remember I’d seen it when I was writing the Tam Lin part. They are all, it turns out, relevant, though not necessarily to Tam Lin.
The following two things are drawn from The Mists of Avalon. I am 100% fine with considering this relatively recent text a source, because if we can draw on Keats we can totally draw on Marion Zimmer Bradley. They were both working from the real shit. (Loads of credit to this paper for pointing out the following excerpts.)
So in TMoA, there are legends about Fairy Queens using stags as a kind of yearly sacrifice (not unlike a seven-year tithe to Hell), and the fairy host coming to a kind of bargain with the deer. The whole ritual is described by Viviane, Morgane Le Fay’s aunt (and we should note that Morgane is totally a fairy queen figure, if a more unseelie than seelie one):
And since [the fairies] lived by hunting, their queen and priestess learned to call the deer to her, and ask of their spirits that they sacrifice themselves and die for the life of the Tribe. But sacrifice must be given for sacrifice–the deer died for the Tribe, and one of the Tribe must in turn die for the life of the deer, or at least take the chance that the deer could, if they chose, take his life in exchange for their own. […] So the Mother of the Tribe chose, every year, her consort. […] [W]hen the year was past–every year in those times–he would put on the antlers of the deer, and wear a robe of untanned deerskin so that the deer would think him one of their own, and he would run with the herd as the Mother Huntress put the spell upon them to run. But by this time the herd had chosen their King Stag, and sometimes the King Stag would smell a stranger, and turn on him. And then the Horned One would die. […]
So this gets really complicated because of the collapsing of identities and binaries that Will’s stag represents. The layers are as such:
- Hannibal is the Fairy Queen, and Will is the deer for sacrifice. The elk, in a weird way, is Hannibal’s consort, the predator in disguise running with Will; and, when Will inevitably turns on Hannibal, he will be the King Stag turning on the impostor—making a sacrifice (his wounding) but taking one in return (Hannibal’s imprisonment).
- Hannibal is the Fairy Queen and Will is his horned consort—in order for Hannibal to get the sustenance he needs (the stimulation Will offers him, as well as the literal sustenance of his cover as good guy Hannibal, not killer Lecter), he needs Will as an agent in the wider world, a bringer of sacrifices (think of the various kills Hannibal has made as a result of Will’s actions, the killers Will has literally brought to his door in the persons of Tobias and Gideon). The elk represents the bond of sacrifice and sustenance that exists between them; and remember, it led him directly to Gideon in order for him to bring the good doctor to Hannibal.
- There’s a strong undertone of the running of the herd as a form of sport for the host; Tam Lin’s existence among the fairies isn’t described much, but he, Thomas, and La Belle Dame’s knight all seem to have been some form of entertainment for the Queen. Abducted mortals usually are; they’re that, and they’re some kind of food (not necessarily in the literal sense). Will is unquestionably a kind of entertainment for Hannibal.
Secondly, we need to talk about the Fisher King archetype. (That link talks mostly about Arthurian legend, but the roots go back way, way farther; if you really want to get into it, just give in and read The Golden Bough. The Waste Land does a good job with it too.) For anyone who doesn’t know, a Fisher King is a king whose health and well-being are tied to the land; as he sickens, the land sickens. There is a kind of symbolic marriage between him and his kingdom. The kingship turns over not by inheritance, but by victory; the new king must kill the old in order to assume his bond with the land and renew himself. In TMoA, there’s a whole lot of stag imagery associated with this: the phrase “What of the King Stag when the young stag is grown?” pops up repeatedly, and after Mordred defeats Arthur, we are told, “[it is] the end of an age. […] [T]he King Stag had killed the young stag, and there would be none after him….”
So if we look at it this way, Hannibal is the King Stag, the old king, the one in control; the elk is his avatar, as you said. Will is the young stag, who will eventually dethrone him and free the land from sickness.
Finally, I want to tag onto your general point about stags being a liminal animal. Fairy boundaries, as I said in part 1, can be physical, they can be temporal, or they can be existential, borders between states of being. When Hannibal delivers the killing blow to Tobias, he does it with the stag statue. He delivers him from one state to another literally by means of a portal animal.
The beautiful thing about the stag is that it’s contradictory on nearly every level. When Will hallucinates being trapped in a forest of antlers, he’s trapped among weapons that are also symbols of renewal (shedding and regrowing antlers every year; the fisher king; sacrifice for sacrifice to turn over the new year.) The antlers are a weapon coated with healing velvet; the stag is a prey animal stalking a predator animal. The stag is Will and Hannibal and neither and both; the stag is renewal and death; the stag is a portal; the stag is a predator and the stag is prey; the stag is a guide and the stag is a trick.
Yes! And to dig into the roots from which MZB draws, the thing about the Faery Queens using the stag as a sacrifice comes from the story of the Earth Goddess and the Hunter God. Fundamentally, the Hunter is the Earth’s consort. They get busy, and the Earth gets pregnant (summer). The Hunter—he is both hunter and food, the Horned One who is Lord of the Hunt, the stag both as leader of the herd and as prey—provides for his family, but ultimately food grows sparse and all he can do is offer up his own life for nourishment (fall). In her grief, the Earth travels to the underworld, intent on bringing back his soul (winter), and returns victorious to give birth in the spring (when livestock and hibernating animals often give birth)—to the re-incarnation of her beloved consort. Wash, rinse, repeat.
So! Where MZB turns it into a bait-and-switch, that’s really just a symbolic replay of the original. TL; DR: the stag’s liminality comes from its symbolism as the dying, resurrecting God.
So I mean. All you said holds true, but going back to the source material kicks it all up a notch. (Because Hannibal is all about Go Big or Go Home.) The Young Stag is the same reborn person as the King Stag—by which we mean, you know, the God.
And the ‘Mother of the Tribe’ is the Fairy Queen is the Goddess.
The other form of the Lord of the Hunt might come into play here…oh, shit, Will’s pack of dogs. Okay, ‘cause check it. The Lord of the Hunt runs with a pack of hounds, and when the Hunt chooses you as its prey, there’s no escaping it (though also theoretically if you can escape it for three days then you’re home free—but you know, nobody ever actually manages that).
(Entertainingly and perhaps fittingly, there’s a Bacchus/Dionysus parallel to all this, featuring more cannibalism and food-oriented sensualism. Dionysus had some death/rebirth stuff going on too, and also had the Maenads, his priestesses who would feast and get drunk until they spun themselves up into a frenzy and ran down unsuspecting men to rend them limb from limb.)
EXCEPT of course that all this is how Hannibal might like it to play out—Will as consort, sacrifice, nourishment, and himself as the ever-living, food-producing (here’s that food thing again) God(dess)/Ruler figure.
But for Will, that stag isn’t any kind of damn consort or noble sacrifice. That stag represents his enemy. That stag represents one or more of three things:
1: It’s a guide leading him to unearthing his enemy
2: It’s a trap, leading him where his enemy wants him to go
3: It’s his own mind, trapped and shapeshifted into a form that suits his enemy
But then, of COURSE the stag means different things for Will vs. Hannibal. Everything in this series has at least two different interpretations. You can’t trust what anything ‘means’ or that it’s even real till the camera’s fact-checked it for you through at least two different POVs. And if nobody else sees it, then you can tell Hannibal about it and he’ll tell you what it should mean to you.