Hedgehogs in culture

Hedgehogs have appeared widely in popular and folk culture, particularly in Europe, one of their native continents. Though not native to Oceania, hedgehogs have been introduced to New Zealand, leading to their appearance in New Zealand's culture. With many prominent roles in folktales, hedgehogs are also common in modern culture and media, with appearances in books, video games, television shows, and films.

Europe

As animals native to Europe and Africa, hedgehogs hold a place in European folklore.^[1][2]

In most European countries, hedgehogs are believed to be a hard-working no-nonsense animal^{[citation needed]}. This partially results from the folk belief that hedgehogs collect apples and mushrooms and carry them to their secret storage.

It is unclear exactly how old this belief is, though the

Hedgehogs are often pictured as fond of milk; as late as the 19th century, some English villagers even believed that these creatures would suck milk out of cows' udders.^[3] In reality, however, hedgehogs are lactose-intolerant.

Hedgehogs are also often seen in pictures with an autumn-themed background since the animal

In a Veps legend, the (female) hedgehog appears in a creation myth. According to it, early on, there was no dry land; the entire world was just a big lake. It was a giant hedgehog that brought soil and sand with its needles, creating dry land.^[1]

A hedgehog plays a role in a Lithuanian and Latvian creation story as well: when God made heaven and earth, he did not take good measurements, so the earth was made larger than the heaven; on the hedgehog's wise suggestion, God squeezed the earth, so that it would fit into the heaven. (In some versions of the legend, the process of "shrinking" the earth resulted in the creation of mountain ranges). To reward the clever hedgehog, God equipped him with a suite of needles.^[1] A similar legend is attested among the Banat Bulgarians and Romanians as well.^[2][4]

The wisdom of the hedgehog is presented in other folk legends in the Balkans as well. In a Bulgarian legend, the Sun decided to marry the Moon and invited all the animals to the wedding. The hedgehog was the only one who failed to appear. The Sun went to look for the hedgehog and found him gnawing on a stone. When the Sun inquired what he was doing, the hedgehog explained: "I am learning to eat stones. Once you marry, you'll have many Sun children born to you, and when they all shine in the sky, everything will burn, and there will be nothing to eat". The Sun then decided to call off the wedding, and the world's inhabitants were saved from starvation.^[2][5]

In the

In many Balkan (Bulgarian,[7] Macedonian,^[8][9] Greek^[10]) folk songs the (male) hedgehog often appears romantically interested in a (female) tortoise. His advances are usually unwelcome, and the tortoises often resort to legal means to deal with the harasser.^[7][11]

United States

Hedgehogs remain largely unseen in modern-day American culture. On several occasions, British educational programmes have been revised to refer to hedgehogs as porcupines (at least one such example being Bob the Builder and Littlest Pet Shop). The Wacky Wheels video game makes humorous use of hedgehogs as projectiles, and they are also seen reading the newspaper while sitting on the toilet in the middle of the race course.

One notable exception is

May has been designated Hedgehog Month by the International Hedgehog Association. ^{[citation needed]}

Oceania

New Zealand's McGillicuddy Serious Party were unsuccessful in their attempt to get a hedgehog elected to Parliament.

Also in New Zealand, hedgehogs feature in the Bogor cartoon by Burton Silver, via which they also appeared on a postage stamp.

Technology

A hedgehog transformer is an early type of electrical transformer designed to work at audio frequencies (AF). They resemble hedgehogs in size, colour and shape and were used in the first part of the 20th century.^[12]

Cuisine

In some supermarkets in the UK, a type of speciality loaf named Hedgehog Bread can be found for sale. The loaf has a hard top crust shaped before baking into a series of small spikes, resembling a hedgehog.

A "hedgehog cake" recipe appears in English cookbooks as early as the 18th century.^[13]

"Hedgehogs" may also be created by moulding ground meat in a teardrop shape, embedding pastry slivers or slivered almonds in the surface to resemble quills, and adding eyes and ears of peppercorns, olives, or whole almonds. The technique dates back to at least 1390^[14] and was referenced in an episode of Two Fat Ladies.

Hedgehogs in popular culture

In books

• In Good to Great by James C. Collins, he describes a fundamental attribute of successful businesses as their "Hedgehog Concept".
• Hans My Hedgehog is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. A wealthy but childless merchant wishes he had a child, even a hedgehog, and comes home to find that his wife has given birth to a baby boy who is a hedgehog from the waist up. After many trials Hans My Hedgehog marries a princess and becomes a handsome young man. An even more popular tale in this collection, The Hare and the Hedgehog, is about the race between a hare, who is proud of his swift legs, and a hedgehog. The hedgehog teams up with his wife who hides on the other side of the field across which the hare and the hedgehog are to race. The hedgehog does not race all the way but simply cowers in his furrow after a few steps. When the hare has crossed the field, Mrs. Hedgehog raises her head on the other side and announces "I am here already." They repeat the race until finally, the hare dies of exhaustion. The story illustrates the dangers of pride on the side of the hare who cannot overcome the common hedgehog's cunning.
• The French author the
  Comtesse de Ségur devotes a chapter in the children's classic Les petites filles modèles (in French)
  to a story featuring hedgehogs. A mother hedgehog and her three offspring are killed by a caretaker because, as he explains it, they destroy little rabbits and partridges, to the great consternation of the children in the story.
• In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts uses hedgehogs and flamingoes to play croquet.
• Beatrix Potter's Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle stars a hedgehog.
• Two hedgehogs of the school-child age feature in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.
• In the 1927 British detective novel
  John Rhode
  , in the chapter entitled "The Green Hedgehog," Doctor Lancelot Priestly, the investigator who solves the case, is nearly murdered by a hedgehog dyed green whose spines have been impregnated with a virulent poison.
• British author Terry Pratchett incorporates hedgehogs into several of his Discworld novels, and one of the characters is known for singing a lewd song called "The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered at All".
• Jan Brett has featured a hedgehog as the main character in many of her books, including The Mitten and Hedgie's Surprise.
• Hedgehogs are common characters in Brian Jacques's book series, Redwall.
• Dick King-Smith has written a story for younger children about a family of hedgehogs threatened by traffic, The Hodgeheg.
• In
  The Animals of Farthing Wood by British author Colin Dann, several hedgehogs were part of the group of animals that travelled from Farthing Wood to the nature reserve White Deer Park. The oldest two hedgehogs were run over on a motorway near the end of the journey.^[15] The rest of the hedgehogs safely made it to White Deer Park and appeared sporadically in the remainder of the series. In the television adaptation, only two hedgehogs were part of the group. As in the novel, both were killed on the motorway.^[16]
• Isaiah Berlin, in The Hedgehog and the Fox, takes the hedgehog as the type of person who knows "one big thing", as opposed to the fox, who knows many things. This was taken from a poem by Archilochus.
• Similarly, Stephen Jay Gould refers to a persistent sticking to one strategy, "hedgehog-like" behaviour in his discourse on the humanities versus science in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox.
• In Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, a Hedgehog named Stickly-Prickly is one of the main protagonists in the story "The Beginning of the Armadillos".
• One of the most popular book-length children's poems in Serbian is Branko Ćopić's Ježeva kućica, (The Hedgehog's Little House)
• Fuzzypeg, a friend of Little Grey Rabbit.
• Yona, the Hedgehog, is a mythical character in Richard Adams' Watership Down.
• Shakespeare referenced hedgehogs in The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream. He referred to them as "hedgepigs" and "urchins."^[17]
• Kiroileva siili (Finnish for "The swearing hedgehog") is a comic strip written and drawn by Finnish artist Milla Paloniemi.

In other media

• Uncle Chuck
  .
• In the Nintendo game Animal Crossing, the Able Sisters are 2 female hedgehogs that own a tailor shop for the player to purchase some clothing. In Animal Crossing: City Folk, a third Able sister was introduced named Labelle (also known in later instalments as Label).
• The Mysteries of Alfred Hedgehog stars an anthropomorphised hedgehog.
• Mr. Pricklepants is an animated, stuffed toy hedgehog from the 2010 Disney/Pixar film Toy Story 3, who likes to act in stage plays. He is voiced by actor Timothy Dalton.
• Lindsfarne Dewclaw, from the online comic strip Kevin and Kell, is a hedgehog. She is highly intelligent and is studying to be a scientist, fascinated with genetics, astronomy and spaceflight. She has recently graduated from university with her bachelor's degree and married her high school sweetheart Fenton Fuscus, a bat.
• Jeż Jerzy (George the Hedgehog in English) is a Polish comic book title written by Rafał Skarżycki [pl] and drawn by Tomasz Lew Leśniak [pl].
• Igel Ärgern is a popular
  Ursuppe
  ). The title roughly translates as "Hedgehog Irking," but the game is usually called "Hedgehogs in a Hurry" in English. In the game, each player races a team of four hedgehogs across a track, avoiding mud pits and occasionally piling atop one another.
• In a 1970 episode of
  nuclear bomb
  . During the closing credits of the show, Spiny Norman is seen stalking London and shouting "Dinsdale!"
• In 1981 an Album called "Hedgehog Sandwich" was released by BBC Records, featuring comedy sketches from the Not the Nine O'Clock News television series.
• In the Israeli version of
  Rechov Sumsum Shara'a Simsim
• In the Spanish version of Sesame Street, one of the main characters was a pink human-sized hedgehog called "Espinete" (Little spine).
• In the anime Saint Tail, the main character Haneoka Meimi acquires a pet brown hedgehog named Ruby while in her titular alter ego of the superthief Saint Tail. Ruby helps Saint Tail out on one caper, is the inspiration for one of the latter's magic tricks, and acts as a mascot.
• In the UK, the magazine Old Glory (which covers the vintage vehicle preservation movement) had a cartoon strip called "Hedgehogs Revenge". It featured hedgehogs destroying steamrollers in various creative ways, including driving one off a cliff. The strip was part of the Young Restorers page ran in the 1990's, and was drawn by someone known only as "AJ".

• Yuriy Norshteyn
  about a hedgehog who travels through a very foggy wood to visit his friend, a bear.
• Harry Hedgehog is an enemy on
  Yoshi's Island
  . He is an enemy that runs around and extends his quills when Yoshi gets near.
• Mega Man II
  on the Game Boy, this enemy returns along with Needleman, and in the "list of enemies" at the end is referred to as "Hari Harry" (note that in Japanese a hedgehog is a "harinezumi" or a "needle mouse"). It attacks by firing its spines, and can also roll, during which it is invulnerable.
• In the "Timeless Time" episode of the BBC television show One Foot in the Grave, Victor, on his way back into the house in the early morning hours after returning from turning off his faulty car alarm, accidentally steps into a rotting hedgehog and walks it into the house, like a slipper.
• A series of animated road safety advertisements featuring a family of hedgehogs aired between 1997 and the mid-2000s on various British television channels, as part of the Think! road safety campaign of the British government. The ads (e.g. King of the Road, Stayin' Alive, Glow in the Dark, Green Man, etc.) were aimed primarily at a child audience, teaching them about the basics of road safety through songs and the younger hedgehogs' humorous misadventures. A promotional website supplemented the television advertisements. It was relaunched in 2003, along with the redesigned version of the ads, but discontinued in 2008. An officially archived version survives.^[18][19][20]
• In
  tonfas
  .
• In the final episode of the second series of Bottom Richie mistakingly believes that Red Indians eat hedgehogs and Eddie Hitler mistakes a hedgehog for a womble.
• The
  Incredible String Band
  has a song called "The Hedgehog's Song" in their album The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion. It was written by Mike Heron.
• In Littlest Pet Shop, Russell Ferguson (voiced by Samuel Vincent), is a male orange hedgehog and the organizer of the group. Usually, he keeps everyone in the Littlest Pet Shop on track, making sure the others won't wreck it in the process. He is often mistaken for a porcupine.
• In the 2012 film "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey", the wizard Radagast has a pet hedgehog named Sebastian.
• A hedgehog named Russell is one of the major characters in the film
  Once Upon A Forest
  .

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Civjan, Tatjana; Razauskas, Dainius (2004), "Еж в космогонических преданиях (Балто-балканский ареал) / Hedgehog in Cosmogonic and Etiological Legends of the Balto-Balcanic Area", Folklore Studies, XXI: 79–91. English abstract also available separately.
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Gura, A.V. (А.В. Гура) (1999), "Еж [Hedgehog]", in Tolstoy, Nikita (Никита Толстой) (ed.), Славянские древности: этнолингвистический словарь в пяти томах [Slavic Antiquities: Ethnolinguistic Dictionary in Five Volumes] (in Russian), vol. 2, Международные отношения, pp. 181–182,
   ISBN 5713309827
3. ISBN 019210019X
4. ^
   ISBN 8674940250, quoted in: Tales From The Past – Folklore, Fairy Tales, Mythology and Magic Archived 19 June 2015 at the Wayback Machine
5. Marko Cepenkov in the 19th century, in what is today North Macedonia
   ; in it, the hedgehog (who rides a donkey) offers stones to his donkey to eat. In another version of the story, it is a tortoise rather than a hedgehog who warns the sun about the consequences of the wedding; in yet another version, it is an old man who offers a piece of quartz to his donkey. These other two versions can be found e.g. in Predanija i Legendi, ed. Kiril Penuševski, Skopje, 1969.
6. ^ "Raskovnik" (Расковник) in: Агапкина, Т. А (2009), Славянские древности: этнолингвистический словарь в пяти томах [Slavic Antiquities: Ethnolinguistic Dictionary in Five Volumes] (in Russian), vol. 4, Международные отношения, p. 396,
   ISBN 978-5713307035
7. ^ ^{a b} Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, ed. (1896), "Желва и еж (Tortoise and Hedgehog)", Sbornik za narodni umotvorenii͡a︡ i narodopis ... (in Bulgarian), vol. 13, Bŭlgarskata akademii͡a︡ na naukite., pp. 38–39
8. ^ Stefanovski, Božo (БОЖО СТЕФАНОВСКИ), ed. (1995), "Кинисала мома желка (The Girl Turtle went out)", Цут цутила черешвица. Македонски народни песни од Мариово [A Cherry Tree Was Blooming. Macedonian folk songs from Mariovo] (in Macedonian), Skopje{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
9. ^ Song no. 28 ("Свадба отъ ракови-те' [Lobsers' Wedding]) in the Bulgarian Folk Songs. Edited by the Miladinov brothers. Zagreb, 1861. (in Bulgarian)
10. ^ Stuart Glennie, John S., ed. (1885), "Nursery Rhyme No. VI", Greek folk-songs from the Turkish provinces of Greece, 'Η δουλη 'Ελλασ: Albania, Thessaly (not yet wholly free), and Macedonia: literal and metrical translations by Lucy M. J. Garnett, classified, revised, and edited with an historical introduction on the survival of Paganism, by John S. Stuart Glennie, p. 173, based on Song no. 195 from Panagiotis Aravantinos' "Συλλογή δημωδών ασμάτων της Ηπείρου" (Athens, 1880)
11. ^ Shapkarev, Kuzman (1891), "No. 1236, Ежовите и жельките (The hedgehogs and the tortoises)", Sbornik ot bŭlgarski narodni umotvorenii͡a, Volume 3, Issues 1–2 (in Bulgarian), Pechatnitsa na "Liberalniĭ klub,", p. 137
12. ^ Havyatt, Rick. "ATCS Newsletter: Hedgehog Transformers". TelephoneCollecting.org. Archived from the original on 8 September 2006.
13. ISBN 978-0199640249
14. ^ "The Forme of Cury, A Roll of Ancient English Cookery, Compiled, about A.D. 1390, by the Master-Cooks of King Richard II, Presented afterwards to Queen Elizabeth, by Edward Lord Stafford", contains a recipe for sausages "made after an urchoun [i.e., hedgehog] withoute legges" with "smale prikkes of gode past [pastry]". http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Forme-of-Cury2.html
15. ^ Dann, Colin (1979). "Chapter 26: The Motorway". The Animals of Farthing Wood (2006 ed.). London: William Heinemann Ltd. p. 239.
16. ^ "Between Two Evils". The Animals of Farthing Wood. Series One. Episode Ten. 10 March 1993. 19:32 minutes in. BBC.
17. ^ "22 things you didn't know about hedgehogs". MNN - Mother Nature Network. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
18. ^ "Helping hedgehogs to cross the road – games in the UK Government Web Archive". blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk. The National Archives. Retrieved 28 January 2017.
19. ^ "Hedgehogs to deliver road safety message". The Guardian. 28 August 2003. Retrieved 28 January 2017.
20. ^ "Stop Look Listen Live". hedgehogs.gov.uk (via The National Archives). Department of Transport / The National Archives. 7 November 2008. Archived from the original on 7 November 2008. Retrieved 30 January 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)