And at rest ...
With other variants such as flickermouse and flinder-mouse, this rather charming Tudor-period English noun is a rather evocative and onomatopoeically descriptive one for that quietly sonic-guided night creature – the bat. While the idea of a flying mouse is appealing, and they are also mammals, bats are not at all related to them or in the Rodentia family, but are from the Chiroptera order, which is more closely connected in an evolutionary sense, to primates and humans.
The German language equivalent is Die Fledermaus, the title an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II to a German libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée, which premiered in 1874, also known, of course as The Bat or The Revenge of the Bat, a tale of love, disguises and masked balls:
And in Walter De La Mare’s poem, Haunted, there’s mention of one:
From out the wood I watched them shine, -
The windows of the haunted house,
Now ruddy as enchanted wine,
Now dim as flittermouse.
There went a thin voice piping airs
Along the grey and crooked walks, -
A garden of thistledown and tares,
Bright leaves, and giant stalks.
But what of other music? The word flittermouse is certainly elusive in song lyrics, but here’s small fluttering of songs about bats …
And inevitably …
Want to have a flutter with further insights on the flittermouse or variants? Feel free to share anything more in relation to anything whether in music or wider culture, such as from film, art, or other contexts, in comments below.
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