Hunting the Wren (1)

Ok... one of my assignments that I have nearly completed is called Hunting the Wren.  I have thought a lot about it and I think I have taken it about as far as I can.

It all began in my first day at college when we were asked to construct our own 'effigy' out of sticks, twine and wire!  I had never done anything like this before and was also dubious about creating something that I thought was a bit sinister.  So I had in mind to create some sort of twig lady with a big skirt... well!  I couldn't control the way the sticks went together and they formed in their own little way!

Knowing I was going to have to draw this thing later, I tried to give it some interesting lines.  After tying all the sticks together with string and ripped fabric, I then painted it with bitumen and shellac.  I rather liked the bright yellow effect of the shellac on the white cotton fabric.

As I spent time with my 'effigy', I was reminded of a passage I once read in a book....  

'It was a procession of boys, in clothes of some time long past, tunics and rough leggings: they had hair to their shoulders and bag-like caps of a shape he had never seen before.  They were older than he:  about fifteen, he guessed.  They had the half-solemn expressions of players in a game of charades, mingling earnest purpose with a bubblling sense of fun.  At the front came boys with sticks and bundles of birch twigs; at the back were the players of pipe and drum.  Between these, six boys carried a kind of platform made of reeds and branches woven together, with a bunch of holly at each corner.   It was like a stretcher, Will thought, except that they were holding it at shoulder height.  He thought at first that it was no more that that, and empty; then he saw that it supported something.  Something very small.  On a cushion of ivy leaves in the centre of the woven bier lay the body of a minute bird: a dusty-brown bird, neat-billed.  It was a wren.

Merriman's voice said softly over his head, out of the darkness:  'It is the Hunting of the Wren, performed every year since men can remember, at the solstice.'  

(The Dark Is Rising, Cooper S., First published by Chatto & Windus 1973, then Penguin Books 1983) 

That poignant little scene stuck in my mind and I decided to find out what it meant this... hunting of the wren.