Three Hares

This page is a four-hundred-year-old joke that draws everyone looking at it into the picture. If you’ve counted the hares, you’re the fourth one.

Beneath the hares is a single line in old German: “Vnser sindt vier”, meaning “We are four”. Yet there are only three hares in the picture. The fourth is the person looking at the page.

This was one of Europe’s most popular jokes around 1600. Artists would draw two jesters teasing each other and write “We are three” beneath them; the third fool was the person looking at the picture. The joke was also known in London: In Shakespeare’s play ‘Twelfth Night’, the fool, upon entering the room where two knights are drinking at midnight, asks, “Did you never see the picture of ‘We Three’?” One of the knights greets him with, “Welcome, ass!”

The number could vary, but the caption usually counted one more than the figures in the picture. In a print made around 1630-40, three donkeys share a single head, three jesters sit on their backs, and the title reads “We are seven” (See image 2). There are six figures in the picture; the seventh is, once again, the viewer.

The hares themselves are another riddle. There are only three ears in the illustration, but each hare appears to have two ears: each ear belongs to two hares at once. The most famous example of this arrangement in Germany is the stone window at Paderborn Cathedral (See image 3). In Paderborn, the window is described with a riddle: “There are three hares and only three ears, and yet each hare has two”.

But the earliest known examples of this motif are not in Europe, but in China: they were painted on the ceilings of Buddhist cave temples in the 6th and 7th centuries. According to researchers, it likely spread westward from there via the Silk Road: it was carved into church ceilings in England (See image 4) and painted on the ceilings of synagogues in Europe (See image 5).

No contemporary text explaining their meaning is known. A Chinese researcher (Zhao Yanlin) who studied the caves sees the hares as symbols of fertility and good luck.

In Europe, however, a clue lies in an ancient belief: the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, citing an even older source, notes that hares can reproduce without a mate. British researchers tracing the origins of the motif suggest that, because of this belief, the three hares in churches may have evoked the Virgin Mary - that is, the virgin birth. In a different interpretation, the three hares symbolize the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. According to the same researchers, this interpretation appears to have emerged long after the first hares were made for churches.

The page in the album, however, combines the ear riddle with the counting joke. If you count the ears, you find three, but each hare has two ears. If you count the hares, you also find three, but the text says there are four.

So what was this album?

In those days, students and young nobles carried small notebooks with them, asking the people they met to leave a word, a signature, or sometimes a drawing. The ‘We are three’ joke also found its way into these friendship albums - the precursors to today’s autograph books - in the form of colorful illustrations.

This album belonged to a child: Frederick IV, Elector Palatine. The album was started in 1582, when he was eight years old. A year later, his father died, and the boy became one of the seven princes who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. His uncle raised him not as a scholar, but as a horseman and hunter. In the notebook of a prince learning to hunt, the person counting the hares became a hare.

The small notebook passed from hand to hand for twenty-three years and collected 378 signatures. The faint “1583” in the illustration does not belong to the hares: a countess wrote her name on the back of the page that year, and the ink bled through to this side (See image 6).

One of the signers of the album was the young Duke Maximilian of Bavaria in 1595 (See image 7). Years later, he would determine the album’s fate. During the Thirty Years' War, Prince Frederick’s son rebelled against the emperor; Duke Maximilian’s army, fighting on the emperor’s side, captured the family’s capital, Heidelberg, in 1622. The duke donated the city’s famous library to the Pope. Prince Frederick’s album also went to the Vatican along with the books and did not return to Heidelberg until 1816.

Today, it is housed at the Heidelberg University Library (@ubheidelberg), and its pages are available to everyone online.

The joke still works: if you’ve counted the hares, you’re the fourth one.

Three ears · image 1