It is a sobering thought for anyone: that reading just the right book might stop us taking things quite so seriously, getting quite so worked up at house cats, flinging ourselves off the precipice quite so often. If only they would read the book they would learn that they are not driven unstoppably towards death. In the children’s tale, Read the Book, Lemmings, the lemmings keep jumping into the sea because they think it’s what they are meant to do. The lemmings didn’t jump – they were pushed. As someone off-screen tips several imported lemmings off a riverbank in Canada, the bloodthirsty voiceover narrates: “Tiny avalanches of soil and rocks – and seemingly indestructible lemmings.” The collective suicide myth persists because Disney staged one in the 1958 documentary White Wilderness. They are good swimmers but sometimes misjudge the breadth of the cold water and drown. Where are they marching? Towards the sea in search of the lost city of Atlantis, their drowned home? Every few years, their population grows by so much ( 1,000 fold) that a group of them – one can imagine the chosen ones spitting with fury under their breath that they have to be the lemmings to do it – separates from the rest of the group and migrates. “Even domestic animals such as cattle, goats and reindeer join in the destruction, stamping them to the ground with their feet.” Little that is edible stands in the lemmings’ way, and “In their turn they are pursued and harassed by crowds of beasts and birds of prey, bears, wolves, foxes, dogs, wild cats, stoats, weasels, eagles, hawks, and owls,” according to the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica. “What were these mice that we could not conquer them?” asked the poet Oscar Brynes in 1934. When the snow melts in summer, it floods their burrows and they emerge all at once – the inspiration for another myth, that they plop down miraculously from the sky – blink their eyes at the blurry Nordic sun, and begin to move, like several Roombas over which someone has thrown a grisly fur coat, hoovering up every sedge, grass and moss frond in sight. They are good swimmers but sometimes misjudge the breadth of the cold water and drown Their young are bred in a layer of air formed by warm ground melting the snow just above it, called the “subnivean space”.
Lemmings live in tunnels under the snow, sleeping in cosy nests of grass, feathers and musk ox wool. When asked to join the death cult, they squeak-bark, “No!” They refuse the poisoned Kool-Aid.
Lemmings do not practise mass suicide by jumping into the sea. Aren’t lemmings so meek and stupid that they march en masse to their deaths, throwing themselves off cliffs without a thought?Īs it turns out, no: lemmings “acting like lemmings” is a myth, as Sonia Shah explains in her book, The Next Great Migration. “They have been known,” we are told as the screen shows a lemming, surrounded by plum-coloured leaves, baring its rodent teeth and squeak-barking at the camera, “to kill weasels and fight off skua.” (Skua are aggressive, seagull-like birds.)
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