This Is Hardcore

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1.

Unreliable sources will tell you that the French word for “fox” is renard. But this is in truth only a recent imposition (over the past 800 years or so). The correct French word is goupil, while renard, though written today in lowercase, is really a proper name, of Germanic origin. Reinhard or Reinhardt in turn has sometimes been glossed in popular etymology as “Pure of Heart”, though the truth is you just can’t get hardt from Herz, and the real meaning is something more like “strong in counsel”. It is however difficult not to read the name from the point of view of modern German, as a pairing of two attributes, rein and hart: “pure-hard”, or perhaps “so hardcore”. And curiously, given that the English core derives ultimately from the Latin cor, we seem to have arrived back where we started.

The fox anyhow is supposed to be, in medieval Europe as in Indigenous North America and elsewhere, the consummate trickster. While this is a character profile that we may naturally associate with hard-heartedness, it is much more difficult to link it with pure-heartedness, unless perhaps we draw inspiration from Kierkegaard and conceive such purity as belonging to any being who wills only one thing. Renart, the protagonist of Europe’s greatest animal epic —the medieval template for Tom and Jerry and Itchy and Scratchy and basically everything else in that venerable mode of imagining, through anthropomorphism, a comic and ultraviolent fun-house-mirror world parallel to our own— is plainly pure-hearted in at least this sense. He wills, namely, nothing but harm to those around him (perhaps with the exception of his dear wife and friend, the vixen Hermeline), and nothing but ill-gotten gains for himself.

This might be Kierkegaard’s fox but it is not Tolstoy’s or Isaiah Berlin’s: Renart does not waste his time sniffing around, now at this, now at that, but thoroughly digs in, like Tolstoy’s hedgehog, to the one thing that matters to him: pure malice.

Just how malicious is Renart? His