One more bird-story is connected with Christianity in general—that alluded to in _Hamlet_, where Ophelia says: “Well, God ’ield you! They say the owl was a baker’s daughter!” This enigmatical remark probably had reference to the story formerly, and perhaps still, common among the peasantry in the English Midlands, of a baker’s daughter that was transformed into an owl by Jesus as a punishment for reducing to a very small size the large piece of dough which her mother had agreed to bake for him. The dough, however, swelled in the oven to enormous proportions, to the girl’s great astonishment, and she gasped out “Heu, heu, heu!” This owl-like noise suggested her transformation into that bird. The story is told to children as a warning lesson against illiberal treatment of the poor. It is evidently alluded to, also, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play _The Nice Valour_, where the Passionate Lord says, after speaking of a nest of owls, “Happy is he whose window opens to a brown baker’s chimney! he shall be sure there to hear the bird sometimes after twilight.” In northern Germany they say a baker’s man was the offender; and that he was changed by Jesus into a cuckoo, the white spots in whose wings show where the flour was sprinkled on the man’s dun coat. The Norse people apply the same moral by means of their common woodpecker, whose pattern of dress is indicated in the legend known to Norse children as the Gertrud story, which is prettily related by Miss Walker.[39] Brewer’s _Handbook_ notes that a maid-servant of the Virgin Mary, who had purloined one of her mistress’s dresses, was converted into a lapwing and condemned forever to cry “Tyvit, tyvit!” (I stole it). The source of the anecdote is not given, nor the language of the one who interprets it, but it reminds one of Tennyson’s.
With a lengthened loud halloo, Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o.
The Greeks, according to Andrew Lang, had a similar legend of feminine impiety, by which they mystically explained the origin of owls and bats.
The prevalence of a belief in such transformations as these by Jesus is very widespread; the traditions vary somewhat, as we have seen, in different countries, but it is evident that the root is in the primitive notion that such miracles were not only possible, but natural. Rather more remote and obscure is the connection of birds with certain other religious feasts, such as the substitution of turkey for boar’s-head as the central dish for the Christmas dinner among the English Dissenters, attributed to the fact that turkeys became common about the time of the Reformation, and acquired a meritorious character on that account among those who wanted to continue the Christmas feast without the taint of a dish partaking of the customs of the hated Papists. Is our New England custom of a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day traceable to this, remembering that the Puritans paid little or no heed to Christmas?