Sunday, July 27, 2008

Horses Hooves on Statues

At one of the locations we visited today some of the other tourist were asking about whether the way the horse was standing meant anything. Ms. Edwards and I decided to do a little research on this matter.

According to the site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue

"There is an urban legend concerning a code for mounted statues, whereby the horse's hooves are supposed to indicate how the rider met his end. One hoof off the floor would indicate the rider died of wounds received in battle, or perhaps was just wounded in battle; two hooves off the floor would indicate the rider was killed in battle. An examination of the equestrian statues in most major European cities shows this is not true. If it ever was true, the practice appears to have died out in the 19th century. "

How disappointing. It would have been fun to have taken pictures of the different statues and created a blog about the people in the statues and prove that the myth was true. Unfortuntely it isn't. There is a statue at Manassas with General "Stonewall" Jackson with the horse having all four hooves on the ground. Jackson was killed during the Civil War.

ooo
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1 comment:

Mike said...

Thanks for debunking this myth. One of my coworkers from long ago told me about it and I never checked on it. I learned something today. Thanks!