The Tale of the Eaten Heart

The Eaten Heart and Heart Burials

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It is the dawn of the first Crusade. Two lovers are separated by a jealous husband. One, a young knight, pledges his everlasting love to her before leaving to fight in a far away land. The husband’s wife pines for her lover to return, but alas he is slain by a mortal wound, but he has one last request: to have his squire cut out his heart so it may be returned to his one true love. The squire does as he is told and takes this morbid keepsake and travels back to Europe, but as fate would have it, he is intercepted by the jealous husband who tricks him into giving him the heart to present to her. He prepares for her a final meal, which she ate and left no crumbs. Once finished, the husband reveals that the dish was made of the braised heart of her lover. Mortified, she vows to never eat again and does so, slowly withering away until her death….

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First I hate to break it to you, but the story does not seem to be true or at least not with those specific details. In fact if you try to trace the origins of it, you are going to have a pretty tough time. Variations started popping up in written records in the mid 1100s around Europe with the most popular medieval retelling being in Boccaccio’s Decameron. In these variations sometimes they are lovers, sometimes the wife remains pure, sometimes it is a father instead of a husband. Sometimes the wife joins a convent, or jumps from a window. The male lover is sometimes a knight slain in battle or sometimes he is slain by the jealous husband, but either way in all stories the maiden is tricked into eating the heart of the man she loves. The reason it is so difficult to determine the original source for the story is that it seems like it was a common folktale across Europe by the time it made it into writing. There have been several theories over the years about its origin with some postulating that it came from a Germanic or Celtic source, but if you look online it is fairly common to see it being attributed to an Indian origin spread through Punjabi folklore about the adventures of Raja Rasalu which date the events of the story all the way back to the first century, which was a theory proposed in the late 1800s.

I looked into this because I wanted to make sure I had some hard evidence before I claimed that the Punjabi version of the story was clearly the origin, but from what I found it sounds like there is little to no hard evidence to back this up. The Punjabi story is set hundreds of years earlier, but the earliest documentation of those versions only date back to the 1800s when European writers started recording various Punjabi oral traditions for publication. The scholars who evaluated the story tried to use context clues and similarities between all the versions to try to date which ones were the earliest and how each one was related and then using that to determine chronology. Now there are several problems with attempting to do this: First almost all of the published versions of the story all came from what appear to be local oral traditions or from traveling troubadours and even the publications seem to vary quite a bit in terms of the exact details of each story and sometimes there are some significant differences within the versions in the same region or even within different publications of the same story. Second, just because the characters in the story date back further in the Indian retelling, that has no bearing on when this version was actually created. That’s like saying the lego movie has Abraham Lincoln in it, therefore the lego movie must date its story back to the 1800s… It doesn’t work that way. Also trying to use context clues and other similarities in a story is a very weak form of evidence in terms of trying to determine how that story relates to others in its chronology. Just because they have shared details, that doesn’t prove that one came earlier than the other or that they were even contemporaneous. If two different versions both have a jealous father instead of husband, the best you can conclude is that those two versions are a bit more likely to be related to one another, but you still can’t tell which one came first or that they were even closely related in time. Even the link between two similarities barely holds much evidence because nothing says that a version can’t change one detail and a later version happens to change it back to the original only by chance. That may not seem very likely, but if we look at the example of possible antagonists in the story, you can tell that there really aren’t many options to choose from. You need someone who has a vested love interest in the woman and a reason for jealousy. This really only leaves fathers and husbands as options, because you can’t just make some random neighbor kid be the antagonist unless you change a whole lot of other details to make the narrative make sense. Also, the fact that there are no earlier recorded versions of these Punjabi stories makes it very difficult to prove that they predate any of the medieval versions, so I am just going to leave things at “who knows, maybe it originated in India, maybe in Europe, maybe somewhere else, but either way it seems like many similar stories were being spread orally with many regional variations and that it is unlikely that there will be any definitive proof one way or another.

Now why do many versions include the removal of the lover's heart after dying far away and returning it to his beloved? Doesn’t that seem like a really strange thing to ask someone to do while you are dying. Like hey bro I know this is gonna be a weird ask, but can you totally cut out my heart after I die and fedex it to this chick I’ve been DM’ing all summer on instagram? thanks fam! Seems a bit weird right, like that shouldn’t be a thing…. Well weirdly enough it was more common of a request than you would believe.

The process of removing someone’s heart so it can lay at rest in a separate location from the body is called “heart burial” and it started gaining popularity in Europe around the same time as this story, especially among societal elites. You see, let's say you die in a foreign country and need to be shipped home, guess what you are going to be pretty rank by the time you get there. Thus embalming of corpses became pretty common and during that process the internal organs were removed. This practice opened up the opportunity for people to be memorialized in more than one location as you could keep your body in one place after you died, but then send your heart or other organs off to somewhere else. But generally when this was done it was for memorialization purposes and I couldn’t find much evidence of it being done as a symbolic gesture of love, but for literary purposes at least, that kind of request wouldn’t seem too farfetched.

An interesting example of this practice was with Robert the Bruce, King of Scots. The story goes that he wished for his heart to travel to Jerusalem after his death so that it could go on one last crusade and either visit or be kept at the Holy Sepulchre. This job was entrusted to Sir James Douglas, a knight who carried Robert’s heart in a metal casket that hung around his neck as he went on this journey. The only problem was that nobody was really crusading to Jerusalem at that time, so instead he went to Spain to fight in the war against the Moors which was the closest religious fighting happening in the region. Douglas made it to Spain, but was killed and his men boiled his body, which was the style at the time, and his bones were carried along with Robert the Bruce’s heart back to Scotland where it was interred in Melrose Abbey.

Other notable examples of heart burial include Richard the Lionheart, King Louis the 17th, Thomas Hardy and even my favorite pianist Frederick Chopin whose physician cut out his heart and placed in a vase full of alcohol, possibly brandy and then it was smuggled out of the country and laid to rest at the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.

So although the story may not be based on a true event, being tricked into eating a loved one seems to be a trope that leaves people hungry for more…. I’m Frank Cioppettini with Servetty Software and I will see you in the next one. Servetty helps services run better. For a demo or free trial email Frank@Servetty.com or leave a comment.