soil-wader

 MULLVAD, Talpa europa⁀e'a

I've been reading Kai Curry-Lindahl's Djuren i färg (Stockholm, 1955, 4th Edition 1965). (The Animals in Colour). 

The subtitle is Däggdjur -- Kräldjur -- Groddjur (Mammals -- Reptiles -- Amphibians)

The first entry is on the Mole. Here's the illustration:

European Mole and Common Shrew (illustrations by Karl Aage Tinggaard)

Amid much else the description says:

Hanarna kämpar med varandra, varvid den besegrade brukar bli uppäten.  (p. 76)

The males fight with each other, with the defeated usually being eaten. 

It seems possible; I've seen other reports that male moles ("boars") often fight to the death. And food is very important to moles: they have to eat a lot every day or they starve. Their preferred food is earthworms, but also insects )e.g. grubs), millipedes, snails, mice and shrews, in fact anything that appears in their tunnels. They hoard earthworms in a living state, with the burrowing heads bitten off. 

I've also read that moles avoid each other, understandably. Yet it seems that some underground passageways are communal. Don't meet in the passage!

Are there eyewitness accounts of mole fighting and cannibalism? Are these fights supposed to take place underground, or on the surface during their occasional forays out? So many questions. 

I'm not sure I've ever seen a living mole. I saw a dead one when I was a child, among the mole-heaps on the school playing fields. (Probably after poisonings by grounds staff.) Not a lot of contact in 63 years!

It makes me wish, momentarily, that I'd developed an interest in animals rather than plants. Well, it's not too late. 

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Mullvad .... 

According to SAOB, the first element mull means soil or friable substance or humus. (In English the word "mull" is a humus type forming under cultivation or grass vegetation.) The Swedish word is often used in liturgical contexts (e.g. burials) and perhaps it's cognate with "mould" or "mold" (in the old-fashioned sense of earth). 

The second element vad is related to the verb vada, to wade. 

So the Swedish name is literally "soil-wader", which I think quite poetically evokes the mole's powerful burrowing with its forefeet. 

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The alternative name mullvarp is literally "soil-thrower". In English literature this has a shadowy existence as the "Mouldwarp", a bad king predicted in the "Prophecy of Merlin" or "Prophecy of the Six Kings" (1312) and subsequently adopted as a political term of abuse against any king you don't like. 

Article by Martyn Hudson:
https://www.invisibleworks.co.uk/the-mouldwarp-king/

Strictly speaking, the prophecy said that the Mouldwarp would be the sixth king after John. Well, that takes us to Henry IV. In Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One Owen Glendower has evidently been going on about it:

MORTIMER

Fie, cousin Percy! how you cross my father!

HOTSPUR

I cannot choose: sometime he angers me

With telling me of the mouldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And of a dragon and a finless fish,

A clip-wing'd griffin and a moulten raven,

A couching lion and a ramping cat,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.