The Curious Symbolism of Tigers in Literature and Myth

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What connects the tiger with Voldemort and with lead, that chief alchemical metal? Was Winnie the Pooh friends with a tiger or not? Let’s throw ourselves head-first into the tiger’s mouth – and into the fascinating and rich history of tigerish symbolism, covering poetry, mythology, and much else.

It was Alexander the Great who introduced many Europeans to the tiger, following his campaign in India. The word ‘tiger’ may be Greek (tigris), but it is related to an Iranian word, thigra, meaning ‘sharp’ or ‘pointed’, presumably after the animal’s sharp teeth.

The tiger was thus incorporated into Dionysus’ menagerie, and along with the panther and the lynx formed a pantheon of divine big cats. During the Roman empire, the Roman emperor Augustus was memorably gifted a tiger from an Indian delegation, in AD 19.

The tiger in Chinese culture

In Chinese lore, the tiger was set against the dragon: as the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols observes, in alchemy the tiger was associated with energy and with lead (as in the soft metal), as opposed to the dragon, which was associated with mercury (the liquid metal).

What’s more, five tigers marked the four cardinal points (north, south, east, and west) and the centre: the Wu ho (literally ‘Five Tigers’) was a name given to a legendary group of valiant warriors who defended the four corners of the empire, as well as being an important force at the heart of empire. The tiger was also the third sign in the Chinese zodiac (it’s often, somewhat loosely, equated with Gemini in the Western astrological calendar).

Because the tiger was revered in Chinese folklore and culture, they generally avoided speaking aloud the word for the tiger, hu. As Hans Biedermann notes in his endlessly informative Wordsworth Dictionary of Symbolism, the Chinese word for tiger was usually substituted by phrases like ‘the king of the mountains’ or even, more oddly, ‘the giant reptile’. This makes the tiger a loose cousin of Macbeth (‘the Scottish play’) or even, perhaps, J. K. Rowling’s Voldemort (‘he who must not be named’).

Oddly, whilst the tiger was associated with the yang force in Chinese culture, because of its fearsome energy and vitality, Biedermann observes that the white tiger was linked with the corresponding yin energy. Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker-prize-winning novel The White Tiger plays on this association: the book’s title refers to the novel’s protagonist, Balram Halwai, who is marked out as different from his environment and whose ‘rags to riches’ journey takes him from a village boy (and son of a rickshaw-puller) to a successful businessman.

Blake’s Tyger

What’s the most famous tiger in all of English literature? One could name several candidates: Shere Khan, the fearsome antagonist from Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 children’s classic The Jungle Book may be top of many readers’ lists. And speaking of children’s literature, what of Tigger, A. A. Milne’s famous creation?

Two things are surprising about Tigger, though. First, although many readers associate him with Winnie-the-Pooh, he didn’t make his appearance until the second of the two novels featuring Milne’s ursine honey-lover of little brain; he only arrives in the Hundred-Acre Wood in The House at Pooh Corner (1928), the sequel to the original bestseller Winnie-the-Pooh from two years earlier.

Second, although he is often assumed to be a tiger, Tigger himself maintains that he’s ‘a Tigger’, and the only Tigger in the world. So is a ‘Tigger’ the same as a tiger?

But perhaps both of these candidates for ‘most famous tiger in English literature’ have to settle for being behind the leading contender for supremacy: William Blake’s ‘Tyger’ from his 1794 poem with its memorable opening line, ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’.

The poem, part of Blake’s Songs of Experience, is notable for its series of questions about the large and fearsome creature, the tiger. That opening reference to the creature ‘burning bright’ immediately establishes the tiger as a dangerous, energetic animal full of life but also deadly potential, much as the flames of an unpredictable fire carry the potential to harm those who get too close. So, Blake’s vision of the tiger isn’t too far removed from the older Chinese connotations of the creature.

But Blake’s poem also links the existence of the tiger to the question of Creation. What kind of God made the fearsome, dangerous tiger with its terrible power? Did the same Creator who made the gentle, meek, innocent lamb really also fashion the tiger in some divine furnace?

T. S. Eliot’s tigers

The Anglo-American modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was reportedly terrified of big cats. He liked the smaller, domestic variety, and had a number of pet cats; he even wrote a whole book of children’s poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), in honour of them. This book was famously the source material for the hugely popular musical Cats.

But big cats? Eliot’s fear of them is well-documented, but it’s a phobia that seems to have gone beyond the rational wariness one might have for the tiger, jaguar, or lion. And tigers and other big cats appear in a number of Eliot’s poems, and perhaps nowhere are they more laden with symbolism than in his 1919 poem ‘Gerontion’.

Eliot’s poem identifies the tiger explicitly with Jesus Christ, describing the animal as ‘springing’ in the ‘new year’ before ‘devouring’ humankind (the speaker of the poem, the old man identified as ‘Gerontion’, uses the pronoun ‘Us’, implying that the tiger consumes all of humanity). Here, then, Jesus is not the gentle lamb of much Christian iconography but a fearsome beast capable of devouring humankind.