From the Vault: The Rat King
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Alright, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the partition. Partition? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

So how about a Closmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita? I'm thirsty. Watch. I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength, and... Wow. It's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already. If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off. Tis the season to be jollier. ♪

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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. It is, of course, Saturday, so we have a vault episode for you. This is going to be one of our holiday episodes from last year, titled The Rat King, originally published 12-12-2023. Ooh, let's dive right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪♪

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And on today's episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we are going to be talking about the wonderful, the glorious Rat King, which, believe it or not, this is a Christmas episode, isn't it, Rob? That's right.

That's right. This is one of a pair of Christmas core episodes we're busting out this week. You can probably guess what the next one's going to be. But yeah, I mean, the holidays bring on an abundance of traditions, right? I mean, we have the Christian nativity. We have Santa Claus. We have other things like Krampus. We have Marley's Ghost. We have the 1990 sci-fi action film, I Come in Peace. And of course, we have the Nutcracker. Ah, okay. Here's the tie-in.

So most of you are probably familiar with Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Nutcracker. If you haven't seen it, if you haven't seen it many, many times, basically this is how it plays out. The first half is,

is a rather imaginative tale of a nutcracker prince coming to life and, with the help of a little girl, waging a battle against an evil mouse king, culminating in a cool sword fight. And then the rest of the ballet, which feels usually about three or four hours long, is just a victory lap of dancing. Just one dance after the other. No more stakes, no more conflict, just dancing.

What do I remember about the Nutcracker? I remember like a grandfather clock and like a sort of creepy, mysterious grandfather figure. I remember a lady with a giant dress that a bunch of children come out of. And I remember, yeah, I guess a rat king. Yeah, yeah. Or I guess specifically it's a mouse king, but it's very closely tied, no pun intended, with the concept of the rat king.

Now, the ballet was was based upon German romantic author E.T.A. Hoffman's 1816 short story, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, in which the titular Mouse King is described as follows. This is the this is from the LRC translation.

Marie was not afraid of mice, and she could not help being amused by this sight. She stood watching the mice come from all directions, when suddenly there came a sharp and terrible piping noise, and seven mouse heads, with seven shining crowns upon them, rose through the floor, and behind them wriggled a mouse's body on which the seven heads had all grown. Then the whole army of mice shouted in full chorus and went trot, trot,

trot right up to the cupboard, in fact, to Marie, who was standing beside it. Wait a minute. I don't remember that this is a single mouse's body, but it's got seven mouse heads. Yes, this is commonly not depicted in performances of the ballet, though sometimes it is. Sometimes ballets will decide to get creative, get a little dark and dive back into these roots. But I have more passages to read here. There's more of this. It's great.

Okay. Later on in the text, Hoffman writes, Whoa. Oh, and get this one. This one may be the best.

She could only watch as the Mouse King squeezed himself out through a hole in the wall. His 14 eyes and seven crowns glistened as he bounded through the room and made a huge leap up to the top of Marie's nightstand. Yikes, I'm getting flashes of Stephen King's cat's eye. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is a creature of horror. Yeah, less cute than I recall from the ballet. So this is a monster creature that is a mouse with seven heads on a single body. That's right. And there are other descriptions in the text that emphasize the horror of multiplicity into a mouse cloning.

Now, Hoffman, who lived 1776 through 1822, was a dark romantic. One of his early novels, 1815's The Devil's Elixirs, concerns a doppelganger. He didn't originate the term or the concept, but his work may have helped popularize the concept. He is also well known for his 1817 story, The Sandman, which references a folkloric entity and gives it kind of a horror spin. And it also features a female automaton.

He's apparently noted for often employing optical motifs, which include not only the doubling of one's identity, as with the doppelganger, but also the multitude of heads on the Mouse King. And I think he makes use of other, like, more direct uses of optical technology in places as well, like telescopes and so forth.

You're saying optical motifs because like the doubling might be like a kind of multiplicity of images you would see through like a prism or some kind of thing, lens or thing like that. Yeah, yeah. Like, for instance, in these passages from the Nutcracker and the Mouse King, you get a sense of like almost like that of a kaleidoscope.

You know, there's something just optically out of line with this thing that is moving towards you, the reader, or towards Marie, the character. I understand. Now, of course, Hoffman would have been acquainted with folklore, which we also see in his referencing of the Sandman. The Sandman, of course, typically sprinkles sand or dust upon a sleeper's eyes. I think we all know that basic idea. But in Hoffman's work, the Sandman is said to steal the eyes of children who refuse to go to bed. The sand he...

puts on their eyes, causes their eyeballs to fall out, and then he collects said eyeballs and takes them to the moon to feed his children. Wow. Yeah. And of course, Hoffman would have definitely been familiar with the concept of the Rat King, which seemingly plays into his invention here as well.

Now, I was looking at a couple of sources, both by an author by the name of David Blamires. One of them is Telling Tales, The Impact of Germany on English Children's Books, 1780 through 1918. This is a 2009 publication. And he points out that Hoffman's description of the Mouse King references both folkloric tales of multi-headed dragons as well as the story of the mouse king.

as well as the dragon from the book of Revelation. Though to be clear, the author doesn't make any mention of rat kings, as we'll be discussing them later, as an inspiration here. Right, okay. But you can clearly see how

knowledge of the biological or alleged biological entity, the rat king, would have or could have inspired the idea of a mouse with seven heads. Yeah, yeah. Now, there's another example. This is sort of folklore, but more, I guess, specifically literature. There's another work by the same author, The Folklore Tradition in Germany, which

where he mentions a rat king by the name of Berlibby that pops up in what Longreads author Adrian Dobb describes as a kunstmachan, quote, an art fairy tale, a narrative that a writer fashions to resemble something you might hear from a farmhand at your father's estate. Okay. So according to Dobb here in this, again, this excellent piece on Longreads, I recommend it if you want some more rat king action here.

It points out that the rat king in this work is described as a king of all rodents. He's like a literal ruler of the rodent world, but is singular in body and in head, though it is implied that his tail is knotted with that of his wife, the rat queen. Oh, that's sweet. I guess it's kind of sweet. It was this particular work in this collection.

particular creation, Berliby, was the creation of Ernst Moritz Arndt, who lived 1769 through 1860, a German nationalist, historian, writer, and poet, who in this tale seems to have been largely commenting on the rise of Napoleon, critiquing the idea that, you know, some might want to rise above their station within their own nation via the interference of a foreign power.

And this, according to Dobb, was two years after Hoffman's tale. I don't know that there's any indication that like Hoffman's tale inspired this one. I think it's more probably the idea that the Rat King was like a general concept already that was established. And we see two different authors exploring things with the idea, but for different purposes. Oh, OK. So even in these slightly altered or just different forms, right.

We see that the idea of the Rat King is often used to symbolize something. It means something about religious life or political life or morality. That's right. Dobb, writing about the example in Arndt's work, writes, quote, "...the Rat King appears like an almost perfect parody of the community-building ambitions that dominated German public life during and following the Napoleonic Wars."

So he says, you know, the community building we're talking about here, this would have been things like community singing, community storytelling, various community minded efforts that were present in the culture of the time period. And the mouse king is presented perhaps as the unpleasant underbelly of social cohesion. Quote, the rat represented the dark side of community, the dark side of dependency, the dark side of proximity.

Tied so closely to one another that you in the end are all doomed, doomed to a common fate. Yes. Yeah. And so all of this would have been during a century of,

in which Germany was transitioning from a largely rural society to a largely urban one. But, of course, these literary treatments did not invent the concept. Rather, again, they find imaginative and or metaphorical uses of something that was already present in the public mindset. So what could that be? What could they have possibly been commenting on? What had been seen? What had been witnessed? What was alive in the zeitgeist of the time?

Right. So I guess this brings us to the question many listeners probably already know the basic idea. But what is a rat king in the common modern understanding? It is a group of rats who are joined at the tail, usually described or represented with the tails entangled in a huge knot ball. And going all the way back to the 16th century, there have been dozens of documented accounts of

of rats discovered in this state. Multiple rats, three or more, joined by the tail, sometimes hiding underneath floorboards, inside walls, protruding from earthen burrows, often with the rats still alive, arranged like the spokes of a wheel.

And there are also physical specimens of alleged rat kings preserved and photographed with their tails entwined in this way. Though, of course, in these cases, the rats are generally already dead. So it can be hard to rule out hoaxes in the case of like a rat king that's actually kept in a museum somewhere. Though we'll have some educated commentary on the plausibility of hoaxes versus natural origin later on.

I will say that you can certainly do some image searches and see some rat kings or alleged rat kings, but these are not pleasant images to look at. Like a lot of like monstrous curiosities or alleged curiosities of the natural world or even the unnatural world are interesting to look at or cool looking images.

The Rat King, not so much. I feel like it kind of seems to catch on as an idea more so than it is an actual symbol. Like, I don't know. There are a lot of, say, bands that use the Rat King as their logo or anything of that nature. Oh, I didn't even consider that. But I bet there are some. I bet there are some. But they're probably kind of going for something outrageous and gross. Yeah.

So we wanted to look at the question, what are these masses of mutually doomed rodents? Are they something that actually forms in nature or merely a legendary cryptid that inspired some taxidermy hoaxes? And if they do occur in nature, why and how?

So first of all, I want to mention a major source that I'm going to be using in this exploration. One of the best things I came across, which is a book called Rats by an author named Martin Hart, published by Allison and Busby, originally published in Dutch in 1973, but with an English translation by Arnold Pomeranz in 1982. And this book has an entire chapter devoted to rat kings and is just generally an excellent resource on this topic.

So to get a flavor of what an encounter in the wild with a rat king looks like, I'm going to share an account from the beginning of Hart's chapter. So the setting is a cold day in February 1963. And this is actually the most recent discovery of a rat king that Hart recounts in his book, though there have been other ones since then.

This took place at a farm in the Dutch town of Rookveen. A farmer named P. van Nijnatten was out in his yard, and he noticed a squealing sound coming from the direction of the barn.

So the farmer followed the squealing to its source, and when he got to it, he noticed a black rat peering out from under a heap of bean poles. The farmer killed the rat, but then when he tried to pull it out from under the poles, it wouldn't budge. It was stuck to something. And further uncovering revealed that the rat he had killed was somehow tied by the tail to six other rats.

He killed the other rats as well, and then was left with this wheel of rats consisting of seven apparently well-fed adults, two males and five females, and

They were of the species Rattus rattus, the black rat. They were not brown rats or the species Rattus norwegicus, which was a bit strange because they were found in the barn and chicken coop area of the farm, which, according to the farmer, was normally inhabited by brown rats and not black rats, though the farmer knew that he had black rats living in the loft of his house some distance away.

On closer examination of the tail knot, most of the rats were tied only by the tips of their tails, though one rat had basically its entire tail tangled up. The knot also contained external material, like some straw. The flesh of the tails appeared compressed where it had been tied against the others, and an X-ray revealed that there were some bone fractures in the tails and in the rats' other vertebrae.

Examination indicated that the tails appear to have been joined like this for a while, which is a little perplexing because the rats did appear to have eaten well, like they didn't appear emaciated. And Rob, I've attached some pictures for you to look at of the rat king of Rukfin. Here's the whole rat king with the seven individuals. And then there's a close up of the tail knot. It does look very grisly.

Yeah, yeah. Worth noting, of course, that rats' tails are, I believe, semi-prehensile. But you can imagine in a situation like this, if they were to become intertwined and certainly broken, there'd be very little that rats could do to free themselves. That's right. There are some accounts of people witnessing or claiming to witness a rat here or there breaking out of the tangle, like actually getting out either by

detaching like part of its tail coming off injuring itself to escape or managing to untangle and get out but this seems rare mostly the rats appear stuck this way and to summarize a large later section of hart's chapter a lot of the accounts of rat king discoveries from history take basically the same form as the story i just told someone is attracted to the sound of squealing

And then they discover behind or underneath something, a single rat, and then they attack it and then later discover that it is joined to at least two others. In extreme instances, dozens of others.

Yeah, yeah. And in a lot of time, I've seen multiple accounts where it's something, you know, it's taking place at, say, a barn or perhaps an urban environment. I guess you could point out that these would be, you know, human spaces, human places, rats, of course, their populations growing in the very places where human populations grow and living alongside us in the shadows. Mm-hmm.

I think that is significant. And let's come back to that when we talk about the conclusions of a paper I'm going to get to later. All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the partition. Partition? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

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So another section of Hart's chapter here is an interesting diversion on the origin of the name Rat King. It is a kind of weird thing to call a collection of rats tied together by the tail. Like, what is especially kingly about this?

Right, right. I mean, a king by its very nature is an individual ruling over the many. We tend not to think of a king as being a composite of multiples. Exactly. But the way Hart lays it out, I think you can kind of see the way the meaning applied to this term has sort of crept and morphed over time. So according to Hart, the term Rat King is a direct translation of the medieval German Rattenkönig,

Though in this usage, it originally had nothing to do with tail knots. It meant, quote, one who lives well on the backs of others. So you can think of a sort of opulent parasite or in a way, one might argue any king, somebody who, you know, lives off the labor of others. They live well. They're, you know, they're well fed. They get all the luxury they desire with other people doing the work. Yeah.

And that sort of social human association with the term rat king is explained somewhat by its usage in the 16th century text by an author named Conrad Gessner called Historia Animalium. From what I can tell, this seems to be a kind of a kind of great source document of like cryptozoologists. I love looking back to Conrad Gessner's entries in this book.

But the point Gessner makes in this book, as summarized by Hart, is, quote, some would have it that the rat waxes mighty in its old age and is fed by its young. This is what's called the rat king.

OK, so the idea is that like some rats get like old and venerable as as rats go and then the other rats will start to serve it as a king. They'll bring it food. They'll bring it little baubles and like pieces of velvet or luxury items. You know, they're coming to serve their rat king. So that rat king is living well by doing nothing off of the labor of the other rats in its nest. Right.

Though, of course, you could easily tell the same fanciful story and point out that, hey, rats look after their elders. How honorable. Yeah, you could exactly say that. Though, to be clear, in featuring this story, I do not mean to endorse the idea that there's biological evidence for this. This seems to be more like a...

you know, an early modern story about how rats work, not anything that's backed up by research. Another early usage of the term rat king, though apparently having nothing to do with the, you know, the wheel of rats tied together by the tail, is a quote from the founder of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, in a passage attacking the Catholic Church

Luther says, quote, the archbishops have a primate above them. The primate's a patriarch. And finally, there is the pope, the king of the rats, right at the top. Kind of complicated here. We have primates and rats. Well, the primate, that's like a position in the Catholic Church. Oh, okay. Sorry, I'm just picturing an actual primate. So he's like, Martin Luther is talking about apes. He's talking about rats. He might be...

If flinging something at a devil, he's just going wild. That usage of primate can be confusing and has confused me in the past. Yeah. But no, he's just talking about like the positions and like, yeah, the worst one who's like sort of the evil king at the top of this institution that Luther hated. That's the rat king, the pope. And that Luther quote would have been 16th century as well.

Hart writes that after this, the term rat and Koenig came to refer to a king rat who sat on a throne made of knotted tails. So this seems like there's some morphing now where you're getting halfway to the rat king idea we have today. Yeah.

And I guess in this formulation, if I'm picturing it right, it's not just that there are multiple rats with their tails knotted, but there's a king rat riding that knot of tails like a palanquin or a litter, you know, it's like sitting upon the throne of tails.

I'm a little hazy on where I saw this, but there was an old bit. I think Robert Smeagol had something to do with this, the comedian behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. But there was the sketch. Perhaps listeners can write in about where I'm remembering this from. But the sketch was always the same. Here's a here's a snake and it has a sizable lump in its body. It's like an anaconda or something. And you have to guess what the lump is based on the shape of it. And so looking at the snake, the lump appears to be an old woman in a rocking chair.

And then they reveal, after everyone's had a chance to guess, they reveal what the contents of the rat's stomach happens to be. And it is a pile of dead rats in the shape of a woman in a rocking chair.

That's good. But to come back to this image, it is a striking image, though Hart says it is not known where this idea first came from. But OK, so that's like a rat king on a throne of knotted tails. You take away the king and then what you've got left is just rats with knotted tails. Right.

And according to Hart, the first source to visually depict a rat king in any form, and this is, I think, in the form that we now understand it as just a group of rats with knotted tails, was

The first publication to contain this was an edition of a 16th century book called The Emblemata by a Hungarian author named Johannes Zamboukas, or I think in his original language, Janos Zambouki. And this was an emblem book, which was a genre of literature that used to be quite popular, which would be essentially a catalog of allegorical illustrations or images that

So in one common format, each page of this book would have a picture like a drawing that has some weird stuff going on in it and then a Latin motto and then some text, often poetry, explaining or interpreting the image. So for a modern example, a

people can understand. I'm just making this up. Imagine a book that's got a page that has an illustration of lady justice, blindfolded, holding a sword and scales, and a Latin motto that means to give everyone their due. Then there would be some text describing what the image means and that the scales mean the weighing of the evidence and the blindfold means impartiality and so forth.

In the case of The Rat King in The Emblemata by Johannes Samboukas, the book depicts a scene with seven rats in a street tied together by the tail, though none of them appears to be particularly elevated or king-like. It just looks like seven common rats tied together. And in fact, they don't even look like rats. They look more like a cross between ferrets and wiener dogs. And there is a man looming over all of them, raising a baton, presumably to beat them to death.

But then there's another man raising a baton or something that's facing away from them. Like, yeah, I guess almost like he's leading them or or maybe he's saying, hey, come beat these rats. I don't know. That's a good point. I don't understand what the other guy is doing. Yeah. His backs to them. He almost looks like they're both raising the sticks. And this other guy looks like he's going to, like, whack a big flower bush with it. I don't know. Hmm.

I've got more on this page in a second, but I just briefly did want to say that in early symbolic usage, the idea of rats tied together by the tails seems to be symbolically loaded, significant to people. The image meant something about the structures or causes that bound people inextricably to one another.

Now, in the emblemata, Johannes Simbukas explains there's like a poem underneath the illustration saying that there was once a man who was plagued by rats for many years. And then one day a servant came across a group of seven rats stuck together by the tail.

Now at this point, Hart didn't say anything else about the emblemata, but I got really interested. I wanted to know like what the book said about this illustration. So I did some real digging. I found a full scan and transcription of the Latin text of the emblemata, uh,

I have no idea what most of the text in this book is about, but searching through the pages, I found some really good pictures I just wanted to share with you, Rob. One is like a guy who's going out to, I think, pick some berries off of a bush, but he looks like Exeter from This Island Earth.

And there's some storm clouds in the background. Another one is, I don't even know how to describe this. There's like a giant baby holding up these horns underneath his arms, but they're also kind of snakes and they've got fruit coming out of them. And he has a giant, I don't know, thread spool on his head.

And then there's some other guys looking at him like, get a load of this guy. A lot of the images in this book have the energy of like, my bird is better than your bird. Or this guy with a dog head is bothering my dog. Yeah, yeah. Like there's something going on. There's some sort of drama or...

um, or interaction, but it's, it's all trapped in some sort of cryptic imagery. There's one I really like of a guy who's got like a fishing net and he's kneeling beside the water's edge. And he's like, yes, I'm going to touch this squid. There's like a dead looking squid in the water. Yeah. And then the sheep are watching on, uh,

Kind of, I guess, with disapproval or approval. It depends if he's about to grab that squid or if he's letting the squid go. It does remind me of something that came up in a past episode, like different ideas about whether it is right to eat squid.

or if they should not be eaten. So maybe this concerns that. But it could concern various things, I guess. That may well be the subject matter. Another one I liked is there's a dude in a very wide-brimmed hat approaching a man who appears to be sick, laying on like a cot on the floor. And he's coming at him with severed heads in each hand. It's like, which of these heads is yours? Well, this one is frightening.

But anyway, coming back to the Rat King. Okay, I found the page that it's on. And God help me, I tried to manually translate this passage from the Latin via Google Translate. Extremely rough results. Somewhat funny. I'm sure I'm doing a horrible job getting the meaning here, but here's the best I could come up with. So the motto at the top of this image says, Caput Seditionis Tolendum, which means to remove the head of the rebellion. Hmm.

And here's the translation that I was able to come up with.

It is not a fictional story that the shrew mice harassed the patrons and dug up the house too much. Don't. A safe battle that many had hid for years, being treated badly by the enemy. While the servant beholds the seven hidden, their tails firmly tied. The Lord tried to torture all these with poison, but the labor was long in vain. While the plan was slaughtering something behind the treachery, not a single one appeared from it.

Now notice, it's interesting that this is the first visual depiction of a rat king in the way we understand it, but it doesn't use the term rat king or any equivalent term. It just says, you know, the rats and then shows them tied together this way and explains that they're tied by the tail.

As far as interpreting this text, I'm fumbling in the dark because, you know, bad translation. But the moral allegory might be something about how the conjoined rats cannot be defeated until like the author of the evil is undone or the thing from which the evil flows is undone, which maybe means death.

I guess could refer to a so-called king of these rats, though there doesn't appear to be one pictured. Or maybe it means just by maybe it means like the nodding of the tail is the author of the evil here, though in that case, it would seem kind of counterproductive to untie their tails if you wanted to fight the rats. But honestly, I do not know.

I admit failure in discovering the meaning of this. Because one of the things about alleged real life encounters with rat kings is that their tangled tails make them significantly easier to kill. Yeah. Because that is that is almost always what happens next or has happened to some degree as they are discovered.

That's yeah, exactly right. But so there is an interesting thing I uncovered by this this translate exercise, which is the line about how this is not a fictional story. That's the first thing it says. And I guess this means that it is supposed to refer to a specific sighting of a real rat king known to the author, but it doesn't specify who, where or when. You know, this also touches on something that I'll mention in tomorrow's Monster Fact episode, which

The tying of a knot has been a part of human magic since prehistoric times. We see it in some of the most ancient recorded rituals. We see it in the magics of the ancient Egyptians, for instance. It seems to be pretty common to tie a knot.

is to bind something. And in the case of the Rat King, perhaps to transform something. There seems to be something inherently magical about knots. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And that so maybe the knot in the tales is the the thing from which the evil flows. And in this poem, I'm not sure.

Yeah. Or it's the person who tied the knot or, you know, there's so many ways to interpret it. You know, certainly when you get into these other treatments as well, it's the knot something that just occurs via proximity, via overcrowding, via the complexities of urban living or whatever the, you know, however one ends up interpreting it. I also like how the image, the specific image kind of implies that the rats, all of them are running away from each other. Like all of them have a totally different idea about which direction they should go. Almost kind of a cartoonish idea.

situation where they all are trying to solve the problem but cannot because they're not actually addressing the problem at the root. They're tails being tied together. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Though on the other hand, from what I can tell, sources from this period do not really display any propensity for understanding the plight of a rat from the rat's perspective. They pretty much all view rats as just like a disgusting evil that must be destroyed. Right.

That's understandable. I mean, that is essentially the case. And the tale of the rat is the most disgusting part. I mean, I know we probably have some rat fans out there. We're not talking about your pet rats. We're talking about rats encountered in the wilds of human habitats and agriculture and cities and so forth. Yeah, I mean, these were people who part of their daily life was battling rat infestation. Mm-hmm.

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But coming back to Hart's history here, so he describes a few other things in the development of this idea of the Rat King. The term Rat King in its modern usage, referring to rats joined together by a knot of the tails, appeared more and more in print after this. Hart mentions a 1757 dictionary by Noel Gomel that included the term Rat King, defining it as a number of rats joined together by their tails.

There are also equivalent terms in French, which are usually thought to be related to the German rat and koenig, though some have offered competing etymologies there. But beyond the evidence of people using the term and evincing knowledge of the concept going back to the 16th century, there are also allegedly factual accounts of rat king finds. So not just people saying, hey, here's what a rat king is.

But actual, like, I saw a rat king. There was one here at this time. So Hart says that from 1564 to 1963, he was able to turn up a total of 57 accounts of distinct rat kings, though he says that some of these cases are clearly deliberate forgeries or otherwise less than fully authentic. So this certainly doesn't mean 57 instances where, yes, there was a real rat king. The 57 claims...

with some subset of those being seemingly credible. The majority of the accounts come from Germany. To name a few early ones, there was a Rat King of Donzig, allegedly made of nine rats found alive in 1612 in the loft of a house.

Mentioned in a letter from a professor to a colleague, there was a rat king of Strasbourg consisting of six live rats, which was reported and depicted in illustration in the French Gazette Mercure-Galant in 1683. Apparently, some of these reports came with helpful explanations. For example, the knowledge that God sends rat kings to mankind to remind us of our wickedness.

and then listing out the sins that the Rat King might be useful in calling to your attention. Like, remember when you did this? Yeah, here's a Rat King to remind you. Yeah.

And so Hart goes on to chronicle a bunch more of these 50-something-odd accounts of people stumbling upon Rat Kings. I'm not going to go into all these stories here because most of them have details that are—or at least in most cases where details of the discovery are available, the details are pretty similar to anecdotes we've already discussed—

Though often with additional just sad, grisly details about the ways the rats were killed, often involving boiling water. People just like pour boiling water into a hole that they thought rats were in. And then also religious explication of the various finds relating to sin or deliverance from evil. Some of these rat kings were preserved, often pickled in alcohol, and a few can actually still be seen in museum collections today.

And we're still finding rat Kings apparently or allegedly, um, there was one as recently as 2021 in Estonia as reported by the rat King desk at the daily mail, of course, um, allegedly found in a chicken coop, um,

I've got a paper about that one later. You've got a story? Okay, good about this one, yeah. So they are still allegedly occurring, and the details of their discovery are still basically the same as they've always been. Now, this brings us back to the question of where do these things come from? Are these really things that occur in nature? Does this just happen to rats sometimes? No.

Or are these hoaxes? Are these like the Ginny Hanivers that people would make out of the remains of like rays and sea animals? Is this like the Fiji mermaid? Some investigators have claimed that all rat kings are artificial practical jokes. They're all just like people taking dead rats and tying the tails together.

Hart, however, after his investigation, does not agree with this. He does think that rat kings occur naturally and are not all hoaxes, though obviously some of the ones that have been attested are hoaxes. And we'll come back to arguments for that. But one argument in favor of this is something that really is kind of sad to relate but does inform our knowledge on this, which is experimental rat kings.

Hart said he would not reproduce these experiments because he considers them cruel and unethical, but he recounts attempts by a couple of other researchers to create rat kings in the lab. And I'm not going to describe the experiments in detail, but the gist of the findings is that

First of all, if you tie up the tails of already dead rats, they do not look like the tail knots of allegedly natural rat kings. So you just compare the rat kings that are preserved or people have taken pictures of with like you take dead rats and tie their tails together. It doesn't look the same. Apparently, they need to be alive when their tails are joined together in order to create the rat king knot ball.

However, these rat king experiments did find that if you anesthetize rats, put them to sleep, and then glue their tail tips together, then you allow them to wake up and run around and do their thing for a period of time. Their tails end up tangled in a ball that does pretty much exactly resemble the tails of rat kings.

So kind of the difference to some extent between being given the assignment of, hey, go get your computer cable, go get your mouse cable, and just go ahead and tangle all that up.

versus just leave it alone in your backpack for a while. See what happens, you know, and maybe just tug at it loosely. You know, it's like you're going to have a different sort of knot than the one that you might intentionally tie. That's right. And in these experiments, once the glue was removed after the Rat King tail knot had been created by live rats,

mostly the tails stayed stuck together. They had become tangled enough that they could not get free, even though the glue was dissolved. Again, horrifying that this was someone's choice in experimentation. There's like, well, we've got to create these rat kings in order to fully test this. It doesn't seem like this was necessary. It's nice to have this information, I guess, but

It was certainly not ethically created. Yeah, Hart discusses these experiments with what feels like some degree of scorn. And again, he says he won't reproduce them to check the results for himself.

But if these results are in fact accurate, this does give us some information that we can use. It does make it seem like rat kings could be created in nature if rats' tails were somehow initially stuck together while the rats were still alive. And Hart goes on to offer another argument in favor of the idea of rat kings being a real natural phenomenon.

Which is that with one exception, all discovered rat kings are of one species, the black rat, Rattus rattus. In places where rats of other species exist. So you might have brown rats and black rats occupying the same farm. But if you find a rat king, it's always the black rat. So if they were all hoaxes, why wouldn't people be equally making them out of brown rats? That's a good point.

And the black rat, of course, has a longer and more flexible tail than the brown rat, which seems, again, like it would make a lot of sense that it could become more likely entangled under the right or wrong circumstances.

Also, there are examples of so-called kings being observed in other animals, for example, squirrel kings that have been reported. One example of this was in a zoo in South Carolina in 1951. Now, there have been a number of hypotheses offered throughout history to explain rat kings, if they are natural phenomena, but

One idea is that they're simply born that way. Hart does not think that's very likely because they're born with shorter tails. The tails grow longer over the course of the lifespan. And also, it's hard to imagine how the rats would survive and do so well until they get older with their tails all tied together in that way.

Another idea is that the tails might entwine as part of a fear response as rats huddle together. Maybe when they're terrified by something, they have a reaction that causes their tails to entwine and then they get tangled and stuck together. Another hypothesis is the idea of rats huddling for warmth.

and somehow allowing their tail tips to become frozen or stuck together by a substance, perhaps frozen urine or some other kind of liquid that freezes the tails together or a sticky substance that sticks the tails together, and then being initially stuck together again.

By that external adhesive material or frozen material, they could entwine them crawling around, as we saw in one of those experiments, crawling around and creating a natural knot just with their own activity and movement.

But I mentioned I was going to get to an actual scientific paper about rat kings, and I want to talk about that now. So this one was published in the Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Biology and Ecology in 2007 by Andrei Milyutin called Rat Kings in Estonia. I looked up the author of this paper, and he's a zoologist and curator at the University of Tartu National History Museum in Estonia.

So the author begins this paper by looking at the literary record of evidence for the rat king, and he cites Hart actually as a major resource and notes that at the time of this paper in 2007, there was still significant question over whether rat kings are ever created naturally or are they all hoaxes.

and if they are created naturally, what the cause is. By Milyutin's count as of the year 2005, there were 58 reliable accounts of rat kings, six of which were physically preserved in some way. And across these accounts, the number of animals joined within a rat king varies from 3 to 32. The

The greatest number of Rat King claims come from Germany, followed by France, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and then finally one account from Indonesia.

And with one exception, all of the rat kings the author was able to study, rat king accounts the author was able to study, consisted of a single species. Again, Rattus rattus, the black rat. The one rat species exception is the report from Indonesia, which was allegedly made of the species Rattus argontivinter, which is commonly known as the rice field rat. Yeah.

Milyutin also acknowledges, as Hart did, that outside of rats, there are a few claimed observations of similar, quote, kings made of animals like mice and squirrels. But the vast majority of alleged rodent kings are agglomerations specifically of Rattus rattus, the black rat.

But the recent discovery of a rat king at Saru, which is a small village in Estonia, in January 2005 seems to have prompted this new investigation. And the author believes this rat king may shed some light on how these masses of creatures are formed. Warning, of course, about this story, there will be some moderately gruesome details about rat corpses and rat injuries.

To read from the author's report about this Estonian incident, quote, On 16 January 2005, farmer Rayen Kuev discovered a huddle of squeaking rats on the sandy floor of his shed in Saru village, Monist Parish, Voru County, Estonia. The animals were unable to escape and the farmer's son killed them with a stick. After that, a cluster of 16 rats were excavated from the frozen sand.

Their tails were tangled in a knot that contained frozen sand. At the time of discovery, only about nine of the rats were alive. Obviously, the animals tried to dig themselves out of the narrow tunnel, and the first rats buried the last ones under the sand. The crater in the sandy floor could still be seen even two months later. I do want to note that the article that I referred to earlier about an Estonian rat king,

is actually from years later. Oh. But the same individual is commenting on it. So it's Milutin in both cases. Oh, okay. So there was another Estonian rat king after this. I see. Yeah.

So to pick up on this story, so the farmer had no idea what he was looking at here. Didn't know anything about rat king legends or so he says, but no reason to doubt him really. But he thought it was weird. So he put this tangle of rats out on a pile of planks so the neighbors could come by and gawk at it. And then about two months later, a relative of the farmer's wife, who was a journalist, said,

was like, hey, what's up with this? Maybe you should contact some experts. So this relative got in contact with some zoologists to see if the find was significant. And this led to a bunch of reports in local media and investigation in Estonian academic journals. On March 10th of that year, the Rat King was taken to the Natural History Museum at the University of Tartu, where it was submerged in alcohol for preservation and put on display.

And it consisted of 13 adult black rats, seven males and six females. There were originally 16, but one was removed and discarded by the farmer. And then two more were removed by a scavenger. The paper says probably a polecat, uh,

I guess, seemingly while the Rat King was, you know, on neighborhood display on the pile of planks. It is kind of humorous that his first inclination was like, well, better put this out on the plank for the neighbors to see. When, of course, we have these other traditions and interpretations of the Rat King as like a dire omen or as a punishment from God. But, you know, as he said, he wasn't really familiar with any of these traditions. He's just like, oh, it's kind of neat, I guess. I'll put it out on the plank.

Yeah, it's a low key spirit of curiosity. I appreciate it. So of the of the two rats that were scavenged, taken away by some kind of predator animal, one of the one of the tails remained attached to the knot. So I guess by the time the museum got the rat king, there were 13 rats, but 14 tails left.

The remaining 13 bodies have undergone various types of damage and decay. Two of the rats had their brains eaten by what? No speculation here in the paper. It just says brains eaten. Another one seems to have had its hind legs gnawed on.

And as the rat king dried out, the knot appears to have loosened. So at the museum during examination, some of the rats separated from the rest. But if you look at the flesh in the parts of the tail that were trapped in the knot, that flesh is highly compressed. So the author concludes that the tail knot was originally very tight when the animals were alive and the flesh was, you know, higher pressure and I guess the rat was more hydrated.

The author compares this to two other rat king reports from Estonia, both of which lack physical evidence. One, the so-called Rat King of Tartu, which allegedly consisted of three rats and was found sometime around 1915 to 1920. The other was found in a place called Roika in the early 70s in the wintertime, made of 18 black rats.

So coming to the conclusions, the author draws from this examination and after reviewing the literature and the others from history, including Hart's observations, he's raising the question, how are these things made? A few options. Number one, it's a hoax. These are artificially manufactured by people.

Number two, the knot is created naturally by chance due to tail movements. Sometimes maybe the rats are wiggling around each other so they end up with their tails knotted. This could be related to the idea that rats become frightened, like heart rays. They become frightened and their tails entwine. And then the third option is the knot is created naturally when tails are stuck together by some external binding process, such as by gluing or freezing.

And after examining the Saru village rat king, the author suggests that this probably is a natural phenomenon, giving several reasons for doubting it was created artificially. First of all, by all accounts, none of the family of farmers who found it had ever heard of rat kings, and they received no tangible benefits for their find, except, I guess, maybe the attention of neighbors who came by to see the thing.

And this doesn't rule it out, but it does make it seem less likely. The next one is a good point. As was raised by Hart, it's impossible to tie the tails of living rats in a knot without anesthesia.

And it is not plausible that this kind of rat anesthetic surgical procedure was carried out on a rural farm. It's also not plausible that anesthesia was used to create so many of these attested rat kings from long ago.

Also, remember about how the rats, they dried out and the tail knot became loose. The author points out that the finder made no attempt to tighten the knot of the dried tails, which you might imagine someone would do if they were trying to carry out a hoax. You know, they might try to tighten it and make it look better. Because they would have initially tightened the tails of perhaps dead rats and then would have needed to do so again to make sure that their find was still presentable. Right.

Right. So the author does not think it's very likely these rats were tied together artificially. Now, coming to that second hypothesis, did the rats simply get their tails wrapped around one another until a knot formed? Under this hypothesis, rats that are nervous will attempt to wrap their tails around one another, and maybe this happens until a knot forms. The rat king at Saru, though, was discovered partially in its burrow, where there's no reason to think the rats would be especially nervous. And so,

And the story of the rat king at Royca was found inside a wall, also a sheltered place. And then the author, in fact, doubts this could even happen in principle. He writes, quote, I've kept wild black rats in captivity for about eight years. Over this period, hundreds of animals were disturbed by people every day during the cleaning of cages, feeding, catching or observing the animals. But an entangling of tails has never been observed. Yeah.

So Milyutin is saying, I don't even think this happens, much less would be the explanation of how the tails end up knotted in a ball. But then coming to the last hypothesis about the external binding process, Milyutin writes, quote, According to the third hypothesis, for the formation of a rat king, rats should first huddle together as they usually do when sleeping in the nest chamber, especially when it is cold.

if their tails become glued or frozen together animals try to free themselves by moving in different directions these chaotic movements may result in their tails becoming entangled in a tight knot

Even after removal of the initial cause, sticky substance or ice, they are no longer able to escape from the knot. The sticky substance may be blood, food items, nesting material, etc. And I would add to that that Hart mentioned the possibility of just frozen urine. I was about to say, must we add to this list? But I guess we should for science.

Now, Milyutin argues that this last hypothesis about the freezing or sticking together and then that leading to the knot is the best explanation for the rat kings found in Estonia. Reasons for this argument. First of all, rat kings in question appear to have formed within the shelter, not outside of it. So, you know, places where they would huddle together for warmth.

In stories of Rat Kings in which details about the weather are known, it tended to be frosty weather. In fact, the Rat King of Saru was found right after the village had experienced sub-zero temperatures.

Adding to this, apart from the story attributed to Indonesia, basically all the stories of rat king sightings are traceable to colder climates, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, where there are two things, cold winters and Rattus rattus. Rattus rattus is more common in Southern Europe, where the winters are more temperate. And in Northern Europe and Canada, where the winters are colder, the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, is the more common species.

So rat kings have, and again, to emphasize what I said earlier, rat kings have really not been reported in the brown rat. They have shorter, thicker, and less flexible tails. So the author argues that rat kings are, in fact, a genuine natural phenomena, though, of course, sometimes they may be created by people, especially out of already dead rats. They occur within the nest of the black rat during cold weather via the gluing freezing process described earlier.

And finally, he says, most of the time, we will never find out about them. Quote, not all rat kings that arise are found by people, and not all finds are reflected in the press, much less in scientific papers. Yeah, this is an idea that I saw discussed in some other works as well. Like, not every rat king that

Assuming that rat kings do occur naturally, not everyone that occurs naturally is going to turn up because even though there are accounts of them seeming to be well-fed, and these tend to be the ones that have been found, and they've been found in, say, agricultural or urban environments where there's perhaps an abundance of food, for the most part, they're doomed. They're going to die, and in many cases, they would die without humans ever laying eyes on them.

And then you may have other cases where they're not reported. You know, perhaps it is seen as a dire omen and they're like, better cover this up. I mean, I'm not going to put this on a plank for the neighbors to see. But yeah.

But I kept coming back, and I guess we've partially answered this, but I was thinking, well, okay, if all we need are black rats, cold weather, and the presence of human agriculture and or urbanization, then why do we not have accounts of them from before around 1576? Like, certainly observations of a rat king would be novel and

And it makes sense that you would maybe hear about them, say, during the Roman period. But maybe indeed it does have to do with it just not being like the perfect combination of all these forces. Like, again, cold weather, black rats, human agriculture, urbanization, like you have to have everything combined.

clicking along just right, and then there's still going to be a rare occurrence. Yeah, that all sounds right to me, though I think it is actually a good question you raise. Yeah, why do these accounts first pop up in the 16th century, especially when the term rat king with a different meaning was already in common parlance? Yeah.

And again, knots have always been of interest to human beings. And rats have been with us a long time as well. You know, often seen in a more ominous light, but also sometimes celebrated for various aspects of the organism. So, again, it's the kind of thing that, if observed, would surely be novel enough to bear repetition in the written record. Mm-hmm.

which of course is inherently incomplete. So we have to acknowledge that as well. Yeah. So I would say where I sit with this is I think Hart and Milyutin make good arguments. And I would say if I had to guess one way or another, I would agree with them that rat kings probably are naturally created, probably along the methods that Milyutin highlights. But on the other hand, I would admit that questions still remain and there are some reasons to be skeptical.

Now, I want to come back briefly to Rat Kings and pop culture, sort of get some of the realistic horror perhaps off the palette here. We've touched on a couple of the major examples of Rat Kings and pop culture, at least the major one as far as the modern audiences are concerned. But a couple of other ones that I thought were worth mentioning. The idea of a Rat King

particularly as possessing a collective intelligence is one that has fascinated me for a while. This idea originates, as far as I'm aware, in the pages of the British comic 2000 A.D., specifically in the Adventures of Halo Jones. These were written by the legendary comics author Alan Moore and illustrated by the legendary comics artist Ian Gibson, who sadly passed away earlier this week, one of the greats.

But in Halo Jones, the Rat King is displayed as using its advanced intelligence to control all the rats in the world and then take over the world in the process. I included an illustration from the comic book here for you, Joe, in black and white. Is it typing on a computer? I believe so, yeah. These are mass communicating Rat Kings right here. You never, when you're talking to somebody on the internet, they could be a Rat King. It could be, it absolutely could be.

Now a related but separate concept is that of the cranium rats in Dungeons and Dragons. These are psionically enhanced rats. So these are rats that the illithids or the mind flayers have toyed with and they've changed their brains in order to use them as spies to go out and, you know, especially into like the human world and see what's up. But the thing I always liked about cranium rats is the idea that one of these is essentially just a rat. You encounter one cranium rat, you're just encountering a rat.

But if you have two cranium rats, well, they have the collective intelligence, the psionically connected brain of two rats together. And it builds from there. So in great numbers, cranium rats have a vast collective intelligence. And in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, they have enhanced psionic abilities. So they'd be able to like

basically like lash out at you with scanner powers. Whoa. So you really don't want to let them get on the computer or less like Cameron Vale. They hack into your mainframe, mainframe via scanner powers through the phone lines. Yeah.

Another frequently cited use of Rat Kings in pop culture, I believe Liz Lemon's old boyfriend Dennis Duffy on 30 Rock claims in one episode to have seen a Rat King, perhaps in the subway or what have you. That one definitely stuck in my mind, but I'd forgotten about this one. It's been a long time since I've read Stephen King's 1986 novel, It.

But there is mention of a rat king in its vast pages. I had to look it up to see exactly what is said, but on page 872 of the Kindle edition...

You have the kids exploring the Nybolt house. This is the haunted house. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. The dark, decayed house that they go to. And Richie opens up a cupboard, looks inside, and then reports what he has seen. He says, quote, there's hundreds of them in there. Their tails, they were all tangled up, Bill, knotted together like snakes. Creepy.

Creepy. So page 872, is that near the end of chapter one? Yes. I have a physical copy around here somewhere, but there was no way I was going to scan through it and find one mention of a rat king. So I had to pony up, buy the Kindle edition, do a word search, and find out exactly where king mentions rat kings. Because there's a lot of horror.

Plenty of horror in that book to go around. Oh, yeah. So that's just a taste of some uses of the Rat King in pop culture. But there are others. So if there are any that are near and dear to your heart or you think are particularly insightful, write in. We would love to hear from you. Do not send us your Rat Kings, though. If you find a Rat King, please find an acceptable local authority to report this to you.

All right, we're going to go ahead and close this episode out. Again, look to the monster fact tomorrow for a little more from me regarding Rat King-esque matters. But then we'll be back on Thursday with an episode on, you guessed it, the Nutcracker.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Thank you.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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