Folklore Friday: liminal moon hare
psst, it's about resisting conformity
Hi, friends. It was fun asking you to vote for this month’s Folklore Friday theme! Thank you to everyone who participated. As you can see, hares won the vote.
Would you like to pick next month’s theme from two or three choices?
Rabbits and hares are sometimes confused, but there are distinct differences. Rabbits are what most folks picture when they think of cute, fluffy bunnies, the kind you would bring home as a pet. Hares, on the other hand, have never been domesticated.
Then there are the physical differences. While many rabbits are plumper and some varieties are small, hares are rangey, wilder-looking. They certainly have longer ears and legs than their counterparts. And then there’s the eyes. See above.
Unsettling, I think. I like that.
I don’t know if their appearance had any influence on early beliefs about hares, but their movements seemed to have played a role in shaping the hare’s place in folklore all over the world.
The fact that hares were most often seen at twilight, an already liminal time of day, placed them in the realm of the uncanny. It seems their speed did, too.
Picture living hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago, ages before things like cars and special effects in movies, and you’re outside at dusk. It’s quiet, maybe even peaceful. Seemingly out of nowhere, this small yet impossibly fast creature appears and disappears, so quickly you don’t have time to recover from being startled. Where did it come from? What errand could warrant such speed?
It’s easy to see how an encounter with a hare might impart a sense of the uncanny.
Hares can be found in folklore all over the world. One of my favorites features these long-eared creatures as lantern-bearers for Frau Holle (similar to Frau Perchta or one of her other iterations, depending on the region). Imagine that. They would be frightening indeed, in procession with the Wild Hunt.
Other bits of my favorite hare lore:
-associated with the moon
-associated with femininity and androgyny
-messengers of the otherworld
-often the form witches take
You can find more about all of these in the links below.
All in all, I adore the hare. They are amazing symbols of wildness. I’m not familiar with the impact they have on agriculture, and no doubt they are a menace to many a gardener. But in folklore the hare shows us what it means to resist control. To slip in-between and defy conformity. And that’s a kind of magic we need very much.
Liminal moon hare
If you ask a hare
for otherworld directions,
she’ll lead you away.
If you ask a hare
to stay behind lines,
they’ll simply laugh.
Is the March hare mad
or simply untamed?
If you ask a hare
to keep still and calm,
she’ll don her other form.
Full moon dancing,
dark moon shifting,
half moon crossing,
transformational
transitional
liminal
hare.
©2025 Stephanie Ascough.
Sources:
P.S. My first book baby, A Land of Light and Shadow, is on sale for 99 cents for the rest of the month. I hope to have a short story about Ardin, Nonnie, a stubborn cow, and more next week in honor of its 5th birthday! It will wrap up some pretty big loose ends from the novel, so I recommend reading that first.
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Thanks for reading, friends.
Meet you over the orchard wall.*
*One of my wonderful early readers for my book started signing her emails like this. I like it.
Thanks for being here. My AuDHD brain is a bit scattered and prone to change things last minute, but here in The Purple Vale you can count on reflections on folklore, fairy tales, and the seasons from my little corner of East Tennessee–which is unceded Cherokee and Muscogee land.
I absolutely loved this!
Interesting read, and a fabulous poem! I learned recently that rabbits, too, were once considered go-betweens for the underworld and overground. Then we visited ancient barrows and stone circles in Orkney and saw that they swarmed with rabbits! -- disappearing down to communicate with the dead, then popping up again to pass on the messages!