Christopher: There's a creature that has stumped Aristotle, frustrated Sigmund Freud, and is now at the center of a global conservation crisis. It's not a mythical beast; it's the European eel. And for centuries, humanity's greatest minds couldn't even figure out how it was born. Lucas: Wait, Freud? The psychoanalysis guy was hunting for eels? What is going on? That sounds like a setup for a very strange joke. Christopher: Exactly. It's a completely wild and true story, and it's all in The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson. What’s fascinating is that Svensson isn't a marine biologist; he's a Swedish journalist and a respected academic in digital humanities. Lucas: Digital humanities? So, not exactly a guy you'd expect to be wading in a stream at midnight. Christopher: Not at all. He wrote this incredibly personal book, which won Sweden's most prestigious literary award, the August Prize, as a way to process his relationship with his father. Their entire bond was filtered through the lens of this one mysterious fish. Lucas: Wow. Okay, so this is much more than just a nature documentary in book form. It's personal. Christopher: It's deeply personal. The book argues that the "eel question" is really the "human question." It’s about where we come from, where we’re going, and what we do with the mysteries we can't solve. Lucas: Okay, so where do we even start with a mystery that big? What was Aristotle's deal with it? I thought he had everything figured out.

Christopher: You'd think so! For Aristotle, the father of biology, the eel was a complete anomaly. He was a man who believed all knowledge comes from experience and observation. He dissected hundreds of animals, categorized them, and built the foundations of biology. But he could never find an eel with eggs or milt. He never saw them mate. Lucas: So what was his conclusion? Christopher: He observed that after a rainstorm, ponds that were previously dry and muddy would suddenly be teeming with eels. So, based on that direct observation, he came to the only logical conclusion he could: they spontaneously generated from the "entrails of the earth." They were literally born of mud. Lucas: Come on. He actually believed they just… poofed into existence from mud? Christopher: He did. And because Aristotle was Aristotle, that theory held for nearly two thousand years. It became the accepted truth. People just assumed eels were a kind of magical, earth-born creature. Lucas: That's amazing. So for hundreds of years, everyone just went with 'mud eels'? That's a testament to the power of a good brand. Christopher: It absolutely is. And this mystery of their reproduction, the "eel question," became a kind of scientific cold case that obsessed people for centuries. Which brings us back to Sigmund Freud. Lucas: Yes, please explain the Freud connection. I'm dying to know why the father of psychoanalysis was mucking about with eels. Christopher: In 1876, before he was the Sigmund Freud, he was a 19-year-old medical student, brilliant and ambitious. His professor sent him to a research station in Trieste with a single, daunting mission: find the testicles of the male eel. A Polish scientist had recently claimed to have found them, and the scientific community was buzzing. Lucas: So this was his big break? His chance to solve a 2,000-year-old mystery? Christopher: It was supposed to be. He spent weeks in a lab, dissecting over 400 eels. He wrote letters to his friend complaining about the stench, the frustration, the endless, slimy bodies. He was meticulously searching for this tiny, elusive organ that would prove eels reproduce sexually like other animals. Lucas: And did he find them? Christopher: He did not. It was his first great scientific endeavor, and it ended in total failure. He couldn't confirm or deny the other scientist's claim. He had to admit defeat. The eel had outsmarted him. And some biographers think this early, humbling encounter with a truth that was hidden, that couldn't be neatly dissected and labeled, profoundly influenced his later work. He spent the rest of his career hunting for the hidden, elusive parts of the human psyche. Lucas: Wow. So the eel’s mysterious anatomy might have nudged him toward exploring the unconscious mind. That’s a heck of a legacy for a fish. But someone must have figured it out eventually, right? Christopher: Someone did, or at least, they got us most of the way there. And that story is even more epic. It belongs to a Danish marine biologist named Johannes Schmidt. In the early 20th century, he dedicated his life to solving the eel question. Lucas: How do you even begin to tackle that? The ocean is huge. Christopher: With unbelievable patience. Schmidt hypothesized that if he could find the eel's tiniest larvae, he could trace them back to their birthplace. So he started a massive project, getting Danish commercial ships to collect samples for him all across the Atlantic. For nearly two decades, he sailed back and forth, meticulously measuring the larvae. Lucas: He spent 18 years on a boat just to find where they're born? The dedication is mind-boggling. Christopher: It's almost unimaginable. And he slowly created a map. The larvae were bigger near Europe's coasts and got progressively smaller the further west he went. Finally, after being interrupted by World War I, he pinpointed the origin to a single, strange place in the middle of the Atlantic: the Sargasso Sea. Lucas: The Sargasso Sea! I've heard of that. It's that weird, calm patch of ocean full of seaweed, right? Christopher: Exactly. A sea without shores. And Schmidt declared it the breeding ground for all European eels. They live their lives in our rivers for decades, then, driven by some unknown instinct, they all swim thousands of miles back to this one spot to spawn and die. Lucas: That is an incredible journey. But has anyone actually seen them do it? Have we ever filmed them mating in the Sargasso Sea? Christopher: And that’s the final, maddening twist. No. To this day, no one has ever witnessed an adult eel in the Sargasso Sea. We've never seen them mate; we've never seen them die. Schmidt's theory is based entirely on the circumstantial evidence of the larvae. The eel’s final, most intimate act remains a complete mystery. It keeps its secrets.

Lucas: That scientific obsession is fascinating, but you said the author’s story was deeply personal. How does this global mystery connect to a father and son in a small Swedish town? Christopher: That's the beautiful, central theme of the book. For Patrik Svensson, this deep, personal obsession with the eel wasn't about solving a scientific puzzle. It was the foundation of his relationship with his father. His dad was a road paver, a man of few words, a working-class guy. Their connection wasn't built on long talks; it was built on the silent, shared ritual of fishing for eels by the stream near their home. Lucas: I can picture that. The quiet, the waiting, the shared task. Christopher: Exactly. Svensson writes about it with such love and clarity. The specific way his father baited the hooks, the feel of the muddy bank under their boots, the quiet anticipation as dusk fell. These trips were a tradition, a language all their own. For the author, the eel became synonymous with his father. Lucas: That's the heart of the book, isn't it? It's not really about the fishing. It's about finding a way to be with someone you love, especially when words are hard to come by. The eel is just the vessel for that connection. Christopher: It is. And the book explores how that connection changes. As a boy, it's a pure, shared adventure. As a teenager, he and his friends start disrespecting the tradition, which angers his father. Then, as the author goes off to university and enters a completely different world—an intellectual world his father isn't part of—the fishing trips become a way to come home, to reconnect with his roots. Lucas: It’s a bridge between their two very different lives. Christopher: A bridge, exactly. There’s this one incredible story about a bizarre, old fishing method they tried called 'klumma.' It involves threading hundreds of worms onto a string to create a big, writhing ball of bait. You lower it into the water, and the eels, for some reason, bite down and just don't let go. You can just lift them right out of the water. Lucas: No hook? They just hang on? Christopher: They just hang on. And they were incredibly successful with it. They caught dozens of eels. But Svensson writes that it felt wrong. It was too easy. It didn't fit the image they had of the eel as a cunning, worthy adversary. The eel wasn't supposed to be that foolish. The experience was so unsettling that they never did it again. Lucas: Wow. So even their success felt like a failure because it broke the narrative, it broke the respect they had for the creature. Christopher: Precisely. It showed that the ritual was more important than the result. The struggle, the mystery, the shared effort—that was the point. Not just hauling fish out of the water. The eel had to remain a worthy mystery, both in the river and in their relationship.

Lucas: But the eel itself is so... weird. It’s slimy, it looks like a snake. The book calls it 'uncanny.' What does that mean in this context? Christopher: The uncanny is a Freudian concept, fittingly enough. It’s the feeling of unease we get when something is simultaneously familiar and strange. An eel is a fish, which is familiar. But it can slither over land, it has no visible scales, it looks like a serpent. It breaks our categories. It’s a creature of the in-between, and that makes us uncomfortable. Lucas: It’s a monster from the id, slithering out of a horse’s head. Christopher: You’re referencing the scene from Günter Grass's The Tin Drum! Yes, the book brings that up. It’s one of the most horrifying images in literature, and it uses eels to represent death, decay, and pure revulsion. The eel often carries this dark, symbolic weight because it represents what’s hidden, what’s deep, what’s primal. Lucas: So we're fascinated by its mystery, but also repulsed by it. And now, this creature is critically endangered. Christopher: Critically. The population of glass eels arriving in Europe is down by about 95% since the 1980s. We are witnessing its potential extinction, caused by a combination of factors all linked to us: overfishing, pollution, and especially the dams and hydroelectric plants that block their migration routes. Lucas: And this is where the book presents a really challenging paradox, right? I read that some conservationists argue that to save the eel, we have to keep a cultural interest in it alive. Christopher: Yes, and that's the most difficult part. The argument, particularly from traditional eel-fishing communities in Sweden, is that if we ban fishing entirely, the eel will disappear from our culture. The stories will stop, the traditions will die, and it will become just another forgotten fish. They argue that to keep people invested in saving it, we have to continue the tradition of hunting, killing, and eating it. Lucas: That sounds completely insane. To save it, we have to kill it? How does that make any sense? Christopher: It’s a deeply uncomfortable thought, but it speaks to the complex relationship we have with nature. We protect what we care about, and we often care about what is part of our story, our culture, our food. The book doesn't give an easy answer, but it forces you to confront that messy reality. Lucas: And this all comes full circle for the author when his father gets sick. Christopher: It does. His father is dying, and the author is grappling with the ultimate mystery: death. What happens when we disappear? Is there anything left? He reflects on faith, on the human need to believe in something beyond what science can prove. He compares it to the eel's journey—this blind, instinctual faith that it will find its way back to the Sargasso Sea, a place it has never seen as an adult. Lucas: A journey home. Christopher: A journey home. And in the book's final, beautiful scene, after his father has passed away, the author is fishing alone at their family cabin. For years, they had tried and failed to catch an eel in that lake. But on this day, he gets a powerful tug on his line. He fights it, and looking down into the dark water, he sees a huge, ancient-looking eel looking right back at him. Lucas: Oh, wow. Christopher: And in that moment, he doesn't try to land it. He doesn't try to possess it or understand it. He just lets the line go slack, and the eel disappears back into the depths. The mystery remains, but he has had his final encounter. It’s a moment of acceptance.

Lucas: So in the end, the 'eel question' isn't just about biology at all. It's a metaphor for everything we can't pin down. Christopher: Exactly. That's the profound insight of the book. The eel teaches us that some things might remain fundamentally unknowable, and that's not a failure of science, but an invitation. An invitation to have faith, whether it's in a god, in nature's resilience, or just in the strength of a memory. It’s about finding meaning in the quest itself, not just the answer. Lucas: It’s about being comfortable with the mystery. The eel is a creature that exists beyond our full comprehension, and maybe that’s its greatest gift to us. It forces us to be humble. Christopher: And to cherish the connections we forge while we're here. The book is a beautiful tribute to a father, a meditation on mortality, and a powerful call to pay attention to the strange, wonderful, and rapidly disappearing world around us. It starts with a simple fish and ends with the biggest questions of existence. Lucas: It makes you wonder, what's the 'eel' in our own lives? The mystery we keep returning to, that connects us to our past and to something bigger than ourselves? Christopher: That's the question the book leaves you with. And it’s a beautiful one to ponder. Lucas: A truly fascinating book. I might never look at a river the same way again. Christopher: This is Aibrary, signing off.