Grimalkin

For other uses, see Grimalkin (disambiguation).

A grimalkin (also called a greymalkin) is an old or evil-looking female cat. The term stems from "grey" (the color) plus "malkin", an archaic term for a cat, derived from a hypocoristic form of the female name Maud. Scottish legend makes reference to the grimalkin as a faery cat which dwells in the highlands.

The term/name may first come from Beware the Cat (published 1570) by William Baldwin,. The novel is a story of talking cats, and part of it relates the story of the Grimalkin's death. According to its editors, the story, and thus the name, originates with Baldwin in terms of being the earliest example known in print. It is also spelled Grimmalkin or Grimolochin.

During the early modern period, the name grimalkin - and cats in general - became associated with the devil and witchcraft. Women tried as witches in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were often accused of having a familiar, frequently a grimalkin.^{[citation needed]}

Notable examples

• "Gray-Malkin" was the witches' cat in the Shakespeare play Macbeth

• In Tom Jones, Henry Fielding relates a story from a 17th-century collection of fables in which Grimalkin is a cat whose owner falls passionately in love with her. He prays to Venus, who changes the cat into a woman. Lying in bed, however, she spots a mouse and leaps up after it, "Puss, even when she's a Madam, will be a mouser still."

• In an 1818 pantomime the famous clown Grimaldi played the "Fairy Grimalkin, or Puss in Boots".

• In Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Mr. Lockwood shares a set of two benches in the back kitchen of Healthcliff's manor with a Grimalkin described as a "brindled, grey cat, which crept from the ashes, and saluted me with a querulous mew."

• A grimalkin is mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in which talking cats play a key role.

See also

• Malkin
• Robene and Makyne

References

• Baldwin, William (1570). Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, edited by William A. Ringler, Jr. and Michael Flachmann, Huntington Library Press, ISBN 0-87328-087-3 hardcover (1988), ISBN 0-87328-154-3 softcover (1995).
• OED. Oxford English Dictionary.
• Shakespeare. Macbeth (c.1603-1606), first folio appearance 1623.
• Stall, Sam (2007). 100 Cats Who Changed Civilization: History's Most Influential Felines, Quirk Books, ISBN 1-59474-163-8 hardcover.