a chance of rain, a high probability of animal weddings

what is it called, where you live, when the sun shines while it’s raining?

no matter how much one anglicises, certain words or sayings from your mother tongue just never leave you.

for me, one such is the Afrikaans idiom, jakkals trou met wolf se vrou (direct translation: jackal marries wolf’s wife), referring to the meteorological phenomenon of a sunshower, which is what it’s called when it rains while the sun is shining.

in a fascinating entanglement of European folklore imported by early Dutch settlers and local South African storytelling, the Jakkals and Wolf stories have roots in Khoi oral storytelling^{1 Afrikaans stories of Jackal and Hyena: Oral and written traditions} , alongside parallels with the medieval European Reynard the Fox tradition^{2 the Reynard tradition includes the medieval French Roman de Renart, on which Willem die Madoc maecte drew for the Middle Dutch poem Van den vos Reynaerde, written around 1250. later versions include William Caxton’s The Historie of Reynart the Foxe (1481), translated from a Dutch prose version, and Goethe’s Reinecke Fuchs (1794)} , which features a clever fox named Reynard, and his uncle, a dim-witted wolf called Isengrim. in the Khoi tales, the clever jackal repeatedly outwits the gullible hyena—called ‘Wolf’ in Afrikaans.

Info

as an aside: the brown hyena is also known as a strandwolf (aka beach wolf, referring to its coastal scavenging).

meet Strandwolf, a member of the rarest hyena species on Earth, as he carves out a life for himself along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, where the Namib—considered the world’s oldest desert—meets the Atlantic.

▶play YouTube video

a rhyming version of the idiom goes:

“Jakkals trou met wolf se vrou, as dit reën en die son skyn flou.” (Jackal marries Wolf’s wife when it rains and the sun shines faintly.)

according to the fable I was raised on, Wolf was on the verge of getting married, which made his neighbour, Jackal, terribly jealous. the conniving kind that he was, he tied Wolf to a tree so he could steal his identity and hijack Wolf’s grand wedding ceremony by inserting himself as the groom instead.

but the Sun and the Rain—who didn’t take kindly to such tactics—decided to thwart his plans. each time the wedding guests gathered in the veldt, Rain would release a sudden shower, causing everyone to scatter and duck for cover. as soon as the congregation was broken up, Sun would once again shine bright and warm.

this constant exchange between the two elements took place again and again, long enough for Wolf to wiggle loose from his restraints and rush to the venue so he could expose Jackal’s corruption and reclaim his bride.

also in South Africa, in isiZulu the saying is umshado wezinkawu, which translates as the monkey’s wedding.

but, as it turns out, this is by no means an isolated bit of weather folklore! looking through the Wikipedia ‘directory’^{3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshower#Names} (which, itself, is criminally incomplete^{4 a much more robust list can be found here, including also Aramaic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Georgian7 one of my favourites! ‘the sun is washing its face’ 🌞🧼 , Greek, Hindi, and Hungarian folkloric expressions, among many others} !), I’d group these regional (sometimes historical) examples into three broad, overlapping themes:

1. life events and social rituals

   1. marriage & weddings: animal weddings: foxes, jackals, tigers (South Africa, Japan, South Korea, India, Sri Lanka, Spain, Portugal); human weddings: widows, elders (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Portugal); supernatural marriages: devils, spirits (Philippines, Germany)

   2. birth & baptism: animal childbirth: does, elephants, lions (Mexico, Nigeria); conception and baptism; illegitimate births (Germany, Finland)

2. celebrations, relationships, & everyday absurdities (devils, witches, spirits, and mythological figures behaving badly or at least weirdly)

   1. supernatural celebrations: devil’s fairs (Belgium, Netherlands, Germany); feasts in hell (Germany); witches dancing (Germany); mythological festivities (Germany)

   2. conflict, punishment, & affection: domestic violence (United States, France, Germany, Austria); supernatural punishment (Germany); kissing (United States)

   3. domestic tasks & social absurdities: pancake-making (France, Germany); baking, bleaching, butter-making (Germany); social satire and improbable situations (Germany, Argentina)

3. nature and weather imagery: animal illness and bodily functions (Germany); mushroom growth and blind rain 🍄🌧️ (Russia); liquid sunshine (United States)

I found it fascinating that (other than German-speaking entries apparently having an explanation for every possible sunshower 😆), foxes and jackals getting married keep cropping up across the examples—Robert Blust examined this association^{5 Blust, Robert. “The Fox’s Wedding.” Anthropos 94, no. 4/6 (1999): 487–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40465016.} (TL;DR no neat answer, but sunshowers are often associated with spiritual danger, and foxes with trickery and shapeshifting—so, don’t go meeting one in the night 🦊🤷‍♀️).

fun fact: kitsune no yomeiri means ‘the fox’s wedding’ and can refer both to sunshowers and to mysterious lights interpreted as a fox wedding procession—the Japanese do love their (supernatural) foxes^{6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune; you’ll already be familiar with this via the nine-tailed demon fox Kurama, if you read the manga/watched the anime series, Naruto} !

thanks to the sunshower earlier for inspo-sponsoring today’s post 😆