QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Frithiof’s Saga (1825) became an international hit. Until then the word ‘Viking’ was virtually unknown in English (‘Dane’ or ‘Norseman’ were the usual terms), so the saga literally made the Vikings’ name – and their supposed horned helmets created a powerful visual image of them that has lasted to this day.

  On the other hand, the tradition of adorning the head with horns for religious purposes seems to have been widespread across the Celtic world. There are several depictions of the god Cernunnos sporting enormous antlers and, in the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described the Gauls as having helmets with horns, antlers or even whole animals attached. No one knows exactly what Celtic religious rituals involved, but it is likely that the ceremonial antlers were a symbol of fertility and rebirth, because they are shed and regrown each year.

  The cern element in Cernunnos means ‘horn’ in Old Irish and is derived from an Indo-European root that also gives us unicorn, keratin (the substance horn is made from) and corn (a patch of hard, hoof-like skin).

  Can you name an animal with horns?

  Strictly speaking, not all the pointed projections that stick out of an animal’s head are horns.

  True horns have a permanent bone core surrounded by compacted strands of a protein called keratin – the same stuff that human hair and nails are made from. Animals that have them include cattle, buffalo, sheep, antelopes and horned lizards.

  Animals with pointed projections that aren’t horns include rhinos (their ‘horns’ are made of keratin but have no bone core); deer (they have antlers which are made of bone, but covered in velvety skin not keratin, and they drop off and are regrown each year); giraffes (they have ossicones – literally ‘big bones’ – covered with furry skin but not keratin); and elephants, pigs, walruses and narwhals (they all have tusks, which are overgrown teeth, made of ivory).

  Keratin is a remarkable substance. In its softer alpha form, it is what ensures our skin is flexible and waterproof and, as well as producing horn, forms the hair, fur, claws, hooves and nails of mammals. In its harder beta form, it makes the shells and scales of reptiles and the feathers and beaks of birds.

  Horns, tusks and antlers have a variety of functions – they can be used as tools, or weapons, or to attract a mate – but only true horns are used to cool down. The blood vessels surrounding the bone core turn the whole horn into a device similar to a car radiator, cooling the liquid by spreading its exposure to the air, in much the same way an elephant uses its large ears. Watusi cattle, a longhorn variety native to central Africa, have enormous horns for this reason. The largest true horns ever recorded belong to a Watusi bull called Lurch: they measured 92.5 centimetres (3 feet) long and weighed 45 kilograms (7 stones) each.

  When the keratinous part of a true horn is slid off its bone core, it becomes a useful hollow object. Since prehistory, humans used these for drinking vessels and musical instruments and, later, to carry gunpowder in. The substance known as ‘horn’ was carved into buttons, handles and combs, made into book bindings or windows (it is translucent if shaved thinly) and boiled down for glue.

  There are various accounts of humans growing ‘horns’ of the non-bony type. One of the strangest concerns Anna Schimper, ‘the horned nun of Filzen’. In 1795 her nunnery in the Rhineland was occupied by French troops and the nuns evicted. The shock sent Anna mad and she was committed to an asylum. After years spent banging her head against a table, a horn started to grow from the bump on her forehead. The more it grew, the less deranged she became until she was soon sane enough to return to the nunnery, where she became abbess.

  By 1834 her horn had grown to such a length that it was hard to conceal under her wimple, so she decided to have it removed. Although she was eighty-seven and the operation was both bloody and painful, she survived and lived for two more years. By the time she died her mysterious therapeutic horn had started to grow again.

  How do you milk a yak?

  You don’t – any more than you would milk a bull.

  Yaks are the males of the species Bos grunniens (Latin for ‘grunting ox’), and they live in Tibet and Nepal. Westerners who speak of milking yaks are a staple butt of Tibetan jokes.

  The female of the species is called a ‘dri’ or ‘nak’. Their milk contains twice as much fat as that of lowland cows. Contrary to some web sources, it is not pink: on the rare occasions it is drunk, blood is sometimes added for flavour. It is golden-coloured and mainly made into yoghurt, cheese and butter. Tibetans put butter in their tea, use it for face lotion and lamp fuel and make it into ritual sculptures.

  In Lhasa, fresh yak meat is for sale, draped in slabs over the branches of trees, or stacked in wheelbarrows direct from the slaughterhouse. Butchery is a hereditary trade and all butchers are Muslims. Rancid butter is piled directly on to the paving stones. The whole of Tibet smells of dri butter.

  Wild yaks can be 1.95 metres (6 feet 5 inches) at the shoulder; domestic yaks are usually half that height. To operate effectively in the thin air at heights of 5,500 metres (18,000 feet) and temperatures of –40°C (or –40°F – they are the same at that value), yak blood cells are half the size and three times as numerous as those of ordinary cattle.

  Yak bones are used to make jewellery and tent fastenings. The horns are carved into knife handles and musical instruments. The tails are exported to India where they are used as fly whisks. The dung is collected and burnt as fuel.

  Yaks have the longest hair of any animal. It can grow to be 60 centimetres (2 feet) long on the torso and is used to make rope, clothing, bags, sacks, shoes, tents and coracles. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the most sought-after material (after human hair) for making gentlemen’s wigs.

  The fashion for wearing wigs began with Louis XIII (1601–43) – who went prematurely bald in 1624 – and ended with the French Revolution. Wigs were often as expensive as the rest of a man’s clothing put together. Today, the BBC can call upon yak-hair wigs from the 10,000 false hair items available to it, and fancy-dress shops offer Santa Claus beards in 100 per cent yak hair.

  Dob-dobs were monks from the Se-ra monastery in Tibet who specialised in the collection of yak dung. By the late nineteenth century they’d evolved into a combination of monastic police force and predatory gay mafia. They would occasionally venture down to the nearby city of Lhasa to pick fights and kidnap young boys. They were easily recognised because they kept the skirts of their habits kilted up higher than regular Buddhist monks. This gave them a bulky look round the thighs, which they exaggerated by swinging their buttocks as they walked.

  STEPHEN Whose job is it in Tibet to milk the yaks?

  ROGER McGOUGH I know who cleans the hooves.

  STEPHEN Who’s that?

  ROGER Yaksmiths.

  What do you say to get a husky to move?

  Just about anything except ‘Mush!’ You can call ‘Hike!’, ‘Hike on!’, ‘Ready!’, ‘Let’s go!’, or simply ‘OK!’ – but a sled driver will only shout ‘Mush!’ when he doesn’t want to disappoint the tourists.

  ‘Mush’, far from being an authentic Inuit word, is a Hollywood mishearing of the command given by French Canadian sled drivers: Marche! It’s most unlikely that any reallife husky handler ever said ‘Mush!’, but it’s certainly not favoured today. It’s too soft a sound for the dogs to hear clearly.

  Stopping sled dogs is the problem, not starting them. They are born to run. If they ever get free, they’ll just head for the horizon until exhaustion overtakes them and you’ll never see them again. While they’re in harness, though, yelling ‘Whoa!’ and standing on the sled’s brake pad should be enough to hold them. To get them to turn right, use ‘Gee!’ and for left ‘Haw!’ (no, they’re not Inuit words either). Only the lead dog needs to understand your commands; the rest just follow the leader.

  Huskies, the best known of the many kinds of dog that have been used to pull sleds, were originally bred for winter transport by the Chukchi people of Siberia. In the summe
r, the dogs ran free, fending for themselves. This combination of tameness and independence made them perfect working dogs.

  They’re surprisingly small – weighing between 15 and 25 kilograms (35–55 pounds) – but those who race huskies for sport prefer dogs with outsize appetites. After marathon runs, covering as much as 160 kilometres (100 miles) in twenty-four hours, they will need to eat and drink enthusiastically to replace lost calories and prevent dehydration.

  If you’re thinking of getting a husky as a pet, you might want to take some advice from the Siberian Husky Club of Great Britain concerning the breed’s ‘bad points’. Siberian huskies have no guarding instinct: they will greet a burglar with the same sloppy kiss they give their master. They howl like wolves when happy. They’re notorious killers of pets and livestock: if you take them for walks, they have to be kept on a lead. They must have company: they’ll wreck your home if you leave them alone. They’ll wreck your garden, in any case – and you’ll need a 1.8-metre (6-foot) fence to keep them in it. Also, they moult massively – twice a year. In conclusion, the Club says, the Siberian husky isn’t suitable for anyone looking for a ‘civilised’ dog.

  The Swiss polar explorer Xavier Mertz (1883–1913) is remembered today as the first person to die of vitamin A poisoning. He was on a three-man mapping mission to the interior of Antarctica when one of the team, most of the sleds and half the dogs fell into a crevasse. On the 480 kilometre (300-mile) trek home, the two survivors were forced to eat the remaining dogs – a necessity which caused Mertz (who was a vegetarian) great anguish. Both men became ill, but Mertz died.

  The polar food chain is based on marine algae that are rich in vitamin A. The further up the chain you go, the more it concentrates. Huskies – like seals and polar bears – have evolved to cope with it. Humans haven’t. There is enough Vitamin A in just 100g (3½ ounces) of husky liver to kill a grown man.

  On which day should you open the first door on an Advent calendar?

  Advent usually starts in November, not on 1 December.

  In the Western Christian tradition, Advent begins on Advent Sunday, the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which also begins the Church’s year. This can occur on any day between 27 November and 3 December, so there’s only a one-in-seven chance of it falling on 1 December. As a result, Advent varies in length from twenty-two to twenty-eight days. The next time Advent Sunday falls on 1 December will be in 2013. For five of the next seven years, Advent will begin in November.

  Not that anyone seems to care. Despite their name, ‘Advent’ calendars are now firmly established as a secular custom and the first door is opened (or the first chocolate consumed) on 1 December, a date whose main function is to remind us that there are only twenty-four shopping days to Christmas. In the UK and USA, a quarter of all personal spending for the year takes place in December.

  Counting down the days to Christmas grew up among German Lutherans in the early nineteenth century. At first, they would either light a candle every day or cross off each day on a blackboard. Then, in the 1850s, German children started to draw their own home-made Advent calendars. It wasn’t until 1908 that Gerhard Lang (1881–1974), of the Bavarian publishers Reichhold & Lang, devised a commercial version. It was a piece of card accompanied by a packet of twenty-four small illustrations that could be glued on for each day of the season.

  Because it wasn’t practical to manufacture a different number of stickers each year, this was the moment that Advent became a standard twenty-four days long and the tradition of starting the calendar on 1 December began. By 1920 Lang had introduced doors that opened, and his invention was spreading across Europe. It was known as the ‘Munich Christmas Calendar’.

  Lang’s business failed in the 1930s – Hitler’s close association with Munich can’t have helped – but after the war, in 1946, another German publisher, Richard Sellmer from Stuttgart, revived the idea. He focused his efforts on the US market, setting up a charity endorsed by President Eisenhower and his family. In 1953 he acquired the US patent, and the calendar became an immediate success, with Sellmer earning the title of ‘the General Secretary of Father Christmas’. His company still produces more than a million calendars a year in twenty-five countries. The first Advent calendars containing chocolate were produced by Cadbury in 1958.

  Advent comes from the Latin adventus, meaning ‘arrival’, and it was meant to be a season of fasting and contemplation, in preparation for the feast of Christmas.

  Despite this, it often started with the raucous celebration of St Andrew’s Day on 30 November. ‘Tandrew’ customs included schoolchildren locking their teachers out of the classroom, organised squirrel hunts and cross-dressing. An 1851 account describes how ‘women might be seen walking about in male attire, while men and boys clothed in female dress visited each other’s cottages, drinking hot “eldern wine”, the staple beverage of the season’.

  How many days are there in Lent?

  Forty-six. Or forty-four if you’re a Catholic.

  Lent runs from midday on Ash Wednesday to midnight on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday. For Catholics it ends two days earlier, at midnight on Maundy Thursday. The ‘forty days’ of Lent commemorate the forty days that Jesus (and before him, Moses) spent fasting and praying in the wilderness, but the Sundays don’t count because you aren’t supposed to fast on them.

  The technical term for the period is quadragesima, Latin for ‘fortieth’. In the late Middle Ages, when preachers in Britain began using English instead of Latin, they cast around for a simple but appropriate word to replace it, and fastened on ‘Lent’ – which then just meant ‘Spring’ and was related to the days ‘lengthening’.

  The reason why penance and fasting are suspended for the six Sundays that fall during Lent is that they are considered celebratory tasters for Easter Day, the most important feast of the Christian year.

  Some may consider this weak-willed or against the spirit of the thing, but the terms of the Lenten fast have always been treated as negotiable. Even in the sixth century, when Pope Gregory the Great first came up with the idea of giving up meat, milk, cheese, butter and eggs for forty days, it was loosely interpreted. The Celtic church advised fasting during the day but having a hearty supper of bread, eggs and milk in the evening. In tenth-century England, Archbishop Aelfric went the other way and took a hard-line approach – banning sex, fighting and fish as well.

  In general, though, fish have always been the saving grace of Lent. Henry VIII encouraged Lent to support the nation’s fishing industry. As hungry Christians carried the Good News to distant climes, the definition of ‘fish’ became quite flexible. At various times, muskrat, beaver and barnacle geese have all been officially counted as ‘fish’ – as has the capybara, a kind of giant South American guinea pig that can stay underwater for five minutes. In Venezuela today it forms a magnificent centrepiece for Lenten feasts: it’s the world’s largest rodent. Perhaps because of all these shenanigans, or perhaps because fasting implies the value of its opposite (feasting), the Puritans abolished Lent completely in 1645.

  Easter is a ‘moveable feast’, calculated according to a complex formula that the Church took centuries to agree. It moves about because it has to fall on a Sunday but must never coincide with the Jewish Passover, which was dishonoured when the Crucifixion was held on the same day. There are thirty-five possible dates for Easter. The earliest in the year, 22 March, last fell in 1818 and won’t happen again until 2285. The latest is 25 April, which last happened in 1943 and is next due in 2038. The whole sequence repeats itself once every 5.7 million years.

  You might think a fixed date would be simpler. The confectionery industry certainly does – 10 per cent of the UK’s annual chocolate sales take place in the run-up to Easter. As long ago as the 1920s, they successfully lobbied Parliament to fix it as the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. The Easter Act (1928) was even passed but, despite having the support of both main churches, it was never implemented as law. No one knows
why.

  How did the Church of England react to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution?

  Rather positively, on the whole.

  In 1860, the year after the publication of On the Origin of Species, there was a debate at Oxford University between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of London, and one of the theory’s fiercest supporters, T. H. Huxley (known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’). At one point the Bishop sarcastically asked Huxley whether he was descended from a monkey on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side. But this wasn’t typical of the Church of England’s reaction in general.

  Much mainstream biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century viewed the Bible as a historical document backed up by archaeological evidence, rather than as the actual word of God. As a result, many senior Victorian Anglicans already thought of the Bible in the same way moderate contemporary Christians do: as a series of metaphors rather than a literal account.

  In the same year as the Oxford debate, Frederick Temple, headmaster of Rugby School and later Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a sermon praising Darwin. He said that scientists could have all the laws in the universe they liked, but that ‘the finger of God’ would be in all of them. The influential author Rev. Charles Kingsley also congratulated Darwin. ‘Even better than making the world,’ Kingsley wrote to him, ‘God makes the world make itself!’

  By the time Darwin himself addressed the debate about human origins directly – in The Descent of Man (1871) – there were at least as many leading churchmen who had accepted his theory on similar grounds as those (like Wilberforce) who still opposed it. At the same time, many scientists (Huxley included) continued to support compulsory Bible study in schools.