Origins and setting
“The King of Cats” is a compact, uncanny tale from the British and Irish storytelling tradition—often told at the hearth on winter nights. It belongs to that family of “fireside wonders” in which the everyday world suddenly reveals a secret order: animals hold courts, kings sit in chimney-corners, and a casual message carries the weight of a coronation. The dramatis personae are simple and constant across versions: a traveller (sometimes a sexton, sometimes a farmer), his sceptical spouse, and the domestic tom—usually called Old Tom, Tom Tildrum, or Ould Tom—who is far more than he seems. The tale’s hallmark is its messenger-formula, the cats’ solemn proclamation: “Tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum is dead.” What follows is a brisk unmasking, a leap into the otherworld, and a stunned silence by the fire.
The tale
The night was rough over moor and lane, with wind like a bellows and the hedges hissing. John, the sexton, had been late at the church—“Only to put the shutters to,” he told his wife later, “and set the latch as it should be”—and now he trudged home with his cloak pulled up about his ears. The village lay quiet ahead, window-lights blinked like tired eyes, and the thought of his own hearth kept his feet moving.
Halfway by the yew-stand he heard it first: a thin sound like small silver spoons tapping. Then, round the bend, he saw lights—dozens, bobbing and steady—candles, he thought, but small as thimbles. They ringed a little black coffin borne on four shouldered poles; and around the coffin walked cats—rank on rank of cats—tall as men in their bearing though not in their size, each with a taper fixed upon its tail that burned without singeing a hair.
John stood rooted in the ditch. The procession came on, solemn as a bishop’s Sunday, and at its head paced a great black cat with a white star on its breast. It turned its green eyes on the sexton and spoke in a clear, thin voice:
“Who shall tell the King? Who shall go and tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum is dead?”
No one answered. The cats padded by, soft-footed; the coffin passed close enough that John saw the tiny wreath upon it, all woven of mouse-tail and moonshine. Again the leader spoke:
“Who shall tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum is dead?”
John’s mouth worked before his wits did. “I—I will,” he stammered.
The cat dipped its head, and the train slid by and was gone, lights dwindling into the hedge-shadow as if the night swallowed them bone and whisker.
John did not stop to puzzle it out on the road. He ran, and the wind ran with him, and he burst through his own door like the tempest.
By the hearth, his wife, Nan, was stirring the pot; and Old Tom, their smoke-coloured housecat, lay stretched upon the stool, tail tucked, eyes half-lidded with the comfort of all cats everywhere. The room was ordinary as bread—the tick of the clock, the hiss of the kettle—and John stood a moment wondering whether he had dreamed.
“Well then,” said Nan, not turning, “you look as if you had a ghost at your heels.”
“Nan,” he said, and swallowed. “Nan, you’ll not credit what I’ve seen.”
“Try me,” she said, calm as you please. “If it’s the vicar with no hat again, I have heard it.”
“It’s no vicar,” said John. “It’s—” He dropped into his chair. “It’s a funeral. A cat’s funeral, if you can grasp such a thing—candles and pall-bearers and all, and a great black one with a white star to lead them.”
Old Tom’s ear flicked. Nan snorted. “Go on with you.”
“I tell no lies,” John pressed on, words tumbling now in the telling. “They had a coffin, neat as you like, and the leader spoke—aye, spoke, plain as I speak to you—and cried, ‘Who shall tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum is dead?’ Twice he said it. And I—he looked at me, mind—and I said I would.”
At this the spoon slipped in Nan’s hand and clacked against the pot. Old Tom’s eyes opened all at once, full gold, as if a lamp had been lit behind them.
John, emboldened and a little vexed at Nan’s half-smile, repeated it, slower and louder, each word striking like a knell: “Tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum is dead.”
Old Tom came off the stool in one spring. His fur stood, his tail fluffed to a bottle-brush, and he planted himself on the hearth-stone as if to make a speech. When he spoke, it was in a voice that was not the purr and yowl of an ordinary cat but something clear and thin as a silver wire.
“What’s that you say? Tim Toldrum is dead? Then—then I am King of the Cats!”
With that, before John could cross himself or Nan could drop the ladle, Old Tom sprang for the chimney, claws scraping a brief rain of soot, and shot up into the dark like a spark from the grate.
They heard a skitter of nails on brick, a faint scrabble, and then nothing—only the familiar crackle of the fire and the kettles’s soft quarrel. The stool sat empty, warm to the touch. A black smudge marked the lintel.
Nan set down the spoon very carefully. “Well,” she said at last, “there’s the porridge spoiled for want of minding.”
John sat with his mouth open a good full minute longer, then shut it, then opened it again. “Nan,” he said feebly, “Nan, did the cat speak?”
“He did,” said Nan. “And a fine king he’ll make, if he keeps his temper. Pass me the basin.”
They ate what they could save, though neither tasted much of it for thinking of crowns and coffins. That night, when the house had long gone quiet and the embers sank into a red eye, a sound came down the chimney like the rustle of silk—perhaps only the wind; perhaps a tail’s tip twitching in royal impatience. Come morning, the stool was still empty, and it stayed so from that day to this.
People who heard the tale added what they fancied: that Tom came back once with a collar like a chain of stars; that he sent sleek messengers to demand certain taxes of cream; that he kept a court where the mill-bridge shadows are thickest and judged all cat-kind by the ancient laws of whisker and claw. But in John’s own house it stood simply thus: he had met a funeral that was none of his business, he had carried a message as he promised, and Old Tom had answered it as kings do—without asking leave of common folk.
Iconic lines and moments
- “Who shall tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum is dead?” — the cats’ messenger-formula, spoken by the black cat with the white star.
- “What’s that you say? Tim Toldrum is dead? Then I am King of the Cats!” — Old Tom’s revelation and proclamation.
- The leap up the chimney — the sudden passage from hearthside ordinary to otherworldly court, marked by a scatter of soot and silence.
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