Other rodents share the relatively small size and basic form of rats and mice but are usually distinguished by a few dramatic features. There are many varieties throughout the world, many of them picturesque and exotic, including flying squirrels, naked mole rats, kangaroo rats, marmosets, and capybaras.
Among the rodents of greatest folkloric importance is the beaver, which is distinguished by its large flat tail, its huge teeth that can gnaw down trees, and above all, its amazing ability to build. In the ancient world, the most widespread legend about beavers was that they possessed in their testicles a powerful medicine known as castoreum (it is actually in another organ). When a hunter chased a beaver, the beaver would bite off its testicles, giving the pursuer what he probably wanted and thus escaping alive. This was reported by Pliny, Aelian, Horapollo, Cicero, Juvenal, and many others. Priests of Cybele and also a few early Christians practiced self-castration. In Freudian terms, this act might have represented the instinctual renunciations that the founder of psychoanalysis believed were necessary for civilization. Beavers have often been regarded as the most civilized of creatures. At any rate, the legend was often repeated in medieval bestiaries and other manuscripts, where it was interpreted as an allegory of the soul that, pursued by the Devil, must give up all lewdness. The beaver was a popular totem and often a bearer of culture for Native American tribes.
According to the Algonquin, Lenape, Huron, and many other Indians, the beaver first created land, often helped by the muskrat or otter, by dredging up earth from the bottom of the sea. The Blackfoot Indians tell of a man named Apikunni, who had been temporarily banished from his tribe and took refuge during the winter in the beaver house. When he left in the spring, the patriarch of the beaver family gave him a pointed piece of aspen. Using the stick as a weapon, he became the first man ever to kill in war, and so he was welcomed back by his people and made their chief. The Osage tribe traced its origin to a chief named Wasbashas, who was taught to build by beavers after he had married the daughter of their king. Early explorers were amazed by the size of beaver lodges in the New World. Influenced by the tales of Native Americans, they brought back to Europe fantastic stories of a highly sophisticated beaver society.
Beavers were said to build with mortar, use their tails as trowels, and have a system of parliamentary law. By the seventeenth century, the beaver was regularly mentioned, along with the elephant, ape, dog, and dolphin, as perhaps the most intelligent animal after man. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, a preeminent naturalist of his day, argued that the beaver did not possess extraordinary native intelligence but merely showed what all animals might be capable of were their social cohesion not disrupted by human beings. Oliver Goldsmith, in his enormously popular History of Animated Nature (first published in 1774), wrote of America,“The beavers in those distant solitudes are known to build like architects and rule like citizens.” He added that the homes of the beavers “exceed the houses of the human inhabitants of the same country both in neatness and in convenience” (vol. 1, p. 176). At about the same time that many Europeans were idealizing the American beaver, colonial trappers were finding it a lucrative source of fur. Greed prevailed over sentiment, as the British, French, and Dutch engaged in the Beaver War, an intense competition for furs that often escalated into armed conflict and drove the beavers in North America close to extinction. Today, beaver is often a slang word for the male sex organ, used most frequently in raunchy magazines for men. Larry Flynt, the owner of Hustler, has sometimes had himself depicted as a beaver in cartoons in ads for his magazine.
One obvious reason for this usage is the size of the beaver's tail. If, however, the usage ultimately goes back to the legends of self-castration, it suggests ambivalences that the pornographers prefer not to acknowledge.
Often associated with the beaver in both Europe and America is the porcupine, a rodent known primarily for the spikes covering its back. The most widely spread legend about the porcupine, found in the work of Pliny and many other authors of the ancient world, is that it can shoot its spines when attacked. Aelian added that the porcupine can aim its quills at an attacker with considerable accuracy and that the quills “leap forth as though sped from a bowspring” (vol. 1, book 1, chap. 31). The fiction is still widespread today. In Native American mythology, the porcupine frequently accompanies the beaver, usually as a companion but occasionally as an adversary. The Haida of the Northwest coast told a story of the war between the clans of Beaver and Porcupine. After Porcupine had stolen Beaver's food, the clan of Beaver placed Porcupine on an island to starve, but the clan of Porcupine rescued their leader when the water froze and they could walk across the ice. The clan of Porcupine then captured Beaver and placed him high in a tree. Beaver could not climb, but he chewed his way down the tree, and the two clans finally made peace.
