The false teeth of Saint Mungo, patron saint of salmon and founder of Glasgow, have recently been rediscovered in a fishmongers in Auchtermuchty. The saintly dentures were found by the fishmonger, a Mr. Robert McGlengarry, in the gut of a salmon. Local clergy have cited this as a further miracle of the blessed choppers as they are far larger than either of the fish’s main orifices.
“Tis like finding a snow globe in a gerbil,” said Father Trevor Nunn (no relation) of St. Tracy of the Blessed Log’s Catholic Church, “there’s no way of inserting it without causing major structural damage to the gerbil.”
Sceptics have highlighted the unlikelihood of 6th century Celts having access to acrylic resin to produce the false teeth, but this has not deterred the faithful.
The gnashers have had a remarkable history and have been associated with many major Scottish events throughout time. The first reliable account of them appearing anywhere post St. Mungo’s mouth was at the Battle of Bannockburn when Robert the Bruce wielded them, inspiring his troops to victory by threatening to use them to chomp off their particulars if they didn’t fight valiantly, or at least look like they were making an effort.
This account is famously the focus of Robert Burns’ lyrics for ‘Scots Wha Hae’ (1793):
Scots, wha hae wi Mungo’s teeth,
Scots, wham Bruce bite beneath,
Tae charge tae win upon the heath,
Or tae eunochrie.
Now’s the day, an now’s the time:
To put yon gonads upon the line,
For if not Edward’s wicked mind –
Will be filled wi glee.
Wha will feel a Saint’s firm bite?
Wha will feel their carriage light?
Wha will sae a dreadful sight?
Beneath oor Willie.
Wha from Scotland’s king should run,
Saintdom’s jaw will strongly stun,
For teeth will cleft balls not bum,
And leave thee nadger-free.
By Castration’s woes and pains,
Upon the field ya goolies remain!
Then cooked wi’ gristle and wi’ veins,
We’ll have haggis for tea.
Lay the proud phallus low,
Testis fall into the snow,
Bitten off by St. Mungo! –
Fa’ Scotland’s great victorie!
The historical accuracy of this account has been called into question by many scholars, but still remains gospel in the eyes of most Scottish patriots, and in fact is the basis for the motto emblazoned on all of Nicola Sturgeon’s headed notepaper: ‘Mhà Mungo bìdeadh fo do sporran’ (‘May Mungo bite beneath your sporran’).
After the battle, the next historical record we have of the teeth is when James IV of Scotland gifted them to his brother-in-law Henry VIII as a wedding present when he got hitched to Catherine of Aragon, and the blessed dentures became a Tudor family heirloom.
They were used as castanets in a flamenco dance performed by Mary Tudor on her wedding night in honour of her new husband Phillip II of Spain. Reportedly, Phillip felt it was cultural appropriation and refused to talk to her until the following Whitsuntide.
Being seen as a hangover from the ‘idolatry’ of Catholicism, Oliver Cromwell tried to smash them thrice with a hammer but the holy false teeth failed to shatter, nay not even a slight dent or scratch was made. This was seen as symbolic of Scotland’s eventual return to independence, and the Holy False Teeth of St Mungo were raised by the Roman Catholic Church from their status as a second class relic (being the possession of a Saint) to a first class relic (being classed as an actual part of the Saint’s body – for surely only part of Mungo’s flesh and bones could resist the Puritan’s hammer thrice!). They were cast aside by the New Model Army into a brook near Warwick Castle where they were rescued later that night by an angler with Royalist sympathies.
St. Mungo’s false teeth reappeared in many contemporary accounts of the Great Fire of London where they were the only item to survive the burning down of the old St. Paul’s Cathedral. Seen as a ‘lucky charm’, the highly superstitious and paranoid King Charles II took to wearing the teeth on a chain as a necklace to ward off evil spirits and his enemies within Parliament. He later gifted them to one of his many mistresses, the actress Nell Gwyn, who insisted on wearing them as part of her costume when she played the character of Alimahide in John Dryden’s ‘The Conquest of Granada’. This was much to Dryden’s irritation who exclaimed ‘They kept clacking during intimate moments like horny cockroaches’ – a view echoed by the diarist Samuel Pepys who noted: “I spent the entire production wondering why on Earth a dead man’s teeth was dangling from the neck of pretty, witty Nell. At no point was their presence illuminated in the dialogue, and if anything the sight of them clapping against Kynaston’s mush during the romance scenes detracted from the serious tone of the rest of the play.” (‘Diary of Samuel Pepys’).
Eventually, the blessed teeth made their way up north, across the border and reappeared as a major influence in David Hume’s philosophy and his comments on reason and passion, when he accidentally sat on them one midsummer morning causing him to leap two feet in the air and leaving a crimping pattern in his right buttock. Consequently, he wrote:
“Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions. A passion is an original existence. I sat on the dentures and my passion was that of pain and surprise, and consequently reason now dictates that I look before I sit down anywhere. The former passion has governed the latter reason. I really fancy a biscuit.” (‘A Treatise of Human Nature’ – 1739)
Being of atheistic leanings, Hume refused to accept the Divine’s hand in placing the dentures on the chair, but rather thought it might have been the neighbour’s child getting revenge for him calling him a ‘poltroon’ in front of the tanner’s daughter.
In the early nineteenth century, the great Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, was inspired by seeing St. Mungo’s teeth on display at the Lanarkshire Aquarium, their home at the time, and as a result included them as a pivotal plot point in his novel ‘The Fortunes of Nigel’ (1822). As the lead character of Nigel Olifaunt travels down to London in a desperate attempt to restore the family’s fortune and reputation (which had been tarnished by his father’s opium addiction), by currying favour with the recently crowned James I of England and VI of Scotland, the only collateral it turns out he has is the sacred dentures whose significance he personally is ignorant of, and had merely brought them along in his pocket as his Auntie Morag had told him it was a way of fending off overly amorous cockneys. Being a King, James immediately recognises the spiritual significance of the blessed substitute teeth, and despite a myriad of complex plot twists such as a bevvy of long-lost cousins turning up claiming Pembrokeshire as their own, the King admits Nigel to the royal court and restores his father’s reputation by making him Bishop of Arbroath.
The teeth remained in Scotland for the rest of the nineteenth century, and was the focal point for many a pilgrimage and holy apparition – the most noted of which was when Mary Magdalene appeared next to them in 1879, popped them at the end of a sock with googly eyes and did, what was regarded by the visiting clergy from Auxerre as, a very poor ventriloquist act.
The next significant act in the life of St. Mungo’s false teeth was when President Woodrow Wilson stole them from a display cabinet in Carlisle Castle when on a Presidential visit in December of 1918. They had been loaned to the Castle as part of their popular ‘Dentures through the Ages’ exhibit, which also contained an upper set of Catherine the Great, and some exciting bridgework found in the mouth of Karl Marx – though the rumour has it that these were merely borrowed from Engels when Marx was on his uppers in London. Wilson was a kleptomaniac since his youth in Virginia, when he used to steal dimes from the pockets of affluent women, and replace them with a long tailed weasel – a habit he claimed at the time to be his ‘calling card’ – a phrase, under police caution, he later admitted didn’t know the meaning of. It also proved financially unviable as the cost of capturing weasels, feeding them and developing a system in which they can be inserted into the pockets of women without them noticing was far more costly than the dime he procured in the theft. Wilson famously stole Georges Clemenceau’s trousers at the Paris Peace Conference – an act recorded in Clemenceau’s own words in his autobiography ‘Plus que L’Homme à la Moustache de Morse’ (1927) – translated here by Edith Piaf:
‘I could not believe it. I woke up on the Saturday morning to find my favourite pair of purple slacks had gone and in their place, clipped to the hanger, were two extremely irate pine martens. Of course, by the time I came down to the meeting, I was in a furious mood and this probably led to me taking such an aggressive stance on reparations.’
Wilson couldn’t help but purloin the holy dentures – using the ol’ ‘look over there, isn’t that Rudyard Kipling’ trick to distract his entourage whilst he slipped the gnashers into his long coat. The live ferret he replaced the teeth with was blamed for the theft and found guilty by a jury of its peers.
Wilson wasn’t uncovered as the real thief until almost sixty years after his death, in 1983 when a Mr Clinton Schaffenheck, the grandson of Woodrow Wilson’s fence, Mr Thomas Schaffenheck of Newark, New Jersey, claimed he witnessed his grandfather paying Wilson fifteen dollars for the teeth before selling them on to a collector from Anaheim. This news story, when it broke internationally, became the inspiration for the Proclaimers’ hit ‘Letter from America’ which originally had the lyrics: “When you go will send back the Holy False Teeth of the Blessed Saint Mungo which were stolen from Carlisle Castle by the late American President Woodrow Wilson” but they could never get them to scan properly and the more asinine version we know and love today was used instead by the Brothers Reid.
It is well known that Archie Gemmill claimed to have seen them behind Dutch keeper Jan Jongbloed when he scored that goal. He firmly believed that he witnessed a vision of them poking out of a cameraman’s sock and was convinced that they mouthed the phrase ‘chip yon keeper’. It’s why his celebrations are so muted, as he claimed later in an interview with Match Magazine (Aug ’92):
“I run off and shake my fist a bit, and then the reality of the vision kind of kicked in, and I just sort of jogged back up the pitch in a stunned stupor as the lads tried leaping on me. It’s the only time I’ve ever had a celestial visitation. Well, apart from that time at Forest when St. Peter appeared above Brian Clough away at Leeds and suggested we switch to 4-3-3. Cloughie of course said that he knew better. We lost one-nil.”
The teeth’s miraculous appearance in the gut of a salmon is just the latest in its inspirational existence and gives me pause for thought. Little would St. Mungo have known that when he first received the teeth they would go on to inspire and transform the lives of literally millions of people! I wonder which pieces of our own anatomies – false or otherwise – could go on and live centuries beyond our own mortal spheres of influence. I must floss less regularly.
Treatises of Gloria 