Mushroom picking in Pan Tadeusz

In the table of contents of the third book of Pan Tadeusz, among the headings, stands a line that on first reading looks like a mistake: "Gatunki grzybów.", the species of mushrooms. It is not a mistake. Mickiewicz gave over a passage of the Polish national epic to what we would now call a field guide, and set it inside a scene that on the surface is about something else entirely.

The book is titled Umizgi — courtship. The mushroom expedition works in it as a social pretext, an occasion for the whole household to walk out into the forest together, scatter among the trees, and talk out of earshot. Picking mushrooms performs here exactly the function that a turn about the garden performs in an English novel: it makes being alone together respectable.

The scene opens with a line any Polish picker would recognise as the description of a good day: mushrooms were plentiful, and the boys take the red-faced chanterelles so often praised in Lithuanian songs. The chanterelle enters the text not as a species but as the heroine of a song. That is the key to the whole passage.

Because what follows is something one would not expect from Romantic poetry at all: an ordered review of species. The text names in turn the chanterelles, the cep, the saffron milk cap, the fly agarics, the brittlegills, the birch bolete, the funnel caps, the milk-white ones and the puffball, and beside them mushrooms called wolf mushrooms and hare mushrooms. This is not ornament. It is a list, and a list arranged by value: first the ones you bend down for, then the ones you walk past.

The hierarchy is more complicated than the earlier interpretation suggested. The cep and saffron milk cap are prized, but the text explicitly says that Wojski gathers fly agarics. Only the mushrooms called “wolf” and “hare” are left untouched. The puffball is compared to a pepper pot; the scene does not describe it as a toy for bursting. The poem documents language and custom, but it does not supply a modern edibility classification.

The names "wolf" and "hare" stand apart. They are not species in any mycological sense but a folk category: a mushroom people do not eat is assigned to an animal. That way of naming survives in Polish to this day in expressions such as psi grzyb, a dog mushroom, and it says more about picking culture than any atlas. It means the countryside divided fungi not into edible and poisonous but into ours and not ours.

For the history of picking in Poland the scene is a first-class document for one reason: it shows mushroom gathering as a social activity of an entire household rather than as work for the poor. In the same century, in England, a wild mushroom was regarded with suspicion and counted as food of last resort. In Mickiewicz the young women, the estate officials and the guests all go out together, properly dressed and in full company, and the scene receives the same attention to detail the poet gives to the hunt and to music.

Painting followed the same path. Grzybobranie by Franciszek Kostrzewski, from 1860, shows precisely such a collective scene in a wood and belongs to the same line of images, in which picking mushrooms stands for community rather than for want.

There is one further reason the passage deserves an entry of its own. The poem was written in exile, in Paris, and its entire topography is reconstructed from memory. The list of mushrooms is therefore a remembered list, not one written down in the field. That it nonetheless agrees with practice, and with a hierarchy of value that has held to the present day, says something about the durability of a picker's knowledge: passed on by mouth and rehearsed every year, it proved more resistant to exile than a good many written records.

It has to be said honestly that not every name in the passage maps cleanly onto a species today. The chanterelle and the cep raise no doubt, and neither does the saffron milk cap. But several of the others are folk names that covered different fungi in different districts, and some of them point at a group of similar-looking fruit bodies rather than at a single taxon. Folk nomenclature is not a defective version of the scientific kind. It is a different system, built around what one does with a mushroom rather than around how it is related — which is why translating this list into modern names always leaves a remainder.

The way editors treated the passage is worth noting separately. In the 1921 edition the species of mushrooms appear in the summary of the book as a heading of their own, alongside the turns of the plot. The editors therefore counted a catalogue of fungi as a self-contained unit of content, equal in standing to a courtship scene or a quarrel over a castle. It is a small editorial detail, but it says plainly that readers of that period did not treat the passage as a digression.

And a last observation, perhaps the most practical for a reader of MykoRadar. The species named in the poem are not historical. The cep, the saffron milk cap, the chanterelle and the brittlegills grow in the same forests today, in the same season and in the same order. The scene from Book Three is therefore not only a document of manners but a description of terrain that still checks out — which is a good deal rarer than it sounds for a text two centuries old.

Read the text before identifying the species

Book III assigns the foragers’ roles precisely: boys take “lisice,” girls pursue boletes, everyone seeks saffron milk caps, “but Wojski gathered fly agarics.” The catalogue then names russulas, a bolete, funnels, “bielaki” and a puffball. Only mushrooms called “wolf” and “hare” mushrooms are left untouched; the narrator criticises people who, after mistaking them for something desirable, break or kick them. This corrects two easy embellishments: the fly agaric is not the specimen nobody touches, and the puffball is compared to a pepper pot, not described as a toy to be kicked. The poem is a literary source for custom, social hierarchy and imagery, not an edibility guide. Folk names in this edition cannot safely be mapped one-to-one onto modern taxa, and the passage should never be used as identification advice.