The title basically says it all – this shape is nearly universally recognized as ‘coffin’; in fact, when you just saw that picture, you’ll likely have thought ‘coffin’ before thinking ‘tacky piece of jewellery’, it’s just – at least in my perception – that ubiquitous a shape.
But where does it actually come from? Coffins today – again, at least as far as I know – are a much more rectangular affair, and most of the depictions of coffins of yesteryear I can recall also showed simple boxes, and when the ‘coffin shape’ is used, it’s mostly in a humorous context.
So, was this coffin shape ever actually used for coffins? How did it become such an immediately recognizable form?
I can’t answer where it came from but, I’ve seen many coffins made in that shape. Mostly hand made ones in the developoing world. My WAG is that it’s pretty to make such a coffin with a few planks.
I would think they come from the fact that your shoulders are wider then your feet. Also, from what I’ve learned from friends in the industry, there are coffins and caskets, one is the shape you are referring to, the othe is rectangular, but I never remember which is which. I also remember being told that in other countries they tend to use the shape you pictured in the OP. (I only heard that becuase my friend was talking about the difficulty she was having trying to get a body shipped from Australia and something about they only have coffin carriers for the airplane, but they needed a casket carrier or vice versa.)
I’ve actually seen them here in New England during a burial relocation. They dated to c. 1900. The coffins were pretty much gone, but you could clearly see the toe-pincher outline when the ground was scraped.
Googling “coffins” turns quite a lot of images of traditionnally-shaped coffins.
(It also led me to a website whose author argues that New-Zealand was originally populated by Europeans of Celtic culture, hunted down to extinction by the Maoris)
From at least the 1350s until the end of the 16th c. the normal type of coffin was a narrow shallow box no more than about 18" wide and tapering towards the foot. It was slightly shallower than the corpse’s head, necessitating a gabled lid (or pitched roof, if you prefer). From around 1575 the ‘pinched in at the shoulders’ shape began to appear. Flat lids appeared in the 1590s and became popular in the 1670s.
A coffin was a status symbol - only rich people could afford to be buried in one. Poor people were buried in shrouds. Most parishes owned a reusable parish coffin in which the corpse was taken to the grave and then lifted out, and some of these parish coffins still survive. Coffins were made by the local carpenter or joiner - undertaker as a profession didn’t appear until the second half of the 17th c.
(See J Huggett, The Shaking of the Sheets; Death 1350-1660 ISBN 1 8504 109 0)
My father was buried in a coffin-shaped coffin. I seem to recall when my cousin was lying -in-state it was in a casket, because my cousins were always posher than us (though I may be misremembering, it was nearly 30 years ago).
I suspect part of the reason was that you’d need fewer long boards to make the archetypal shape. If you were making a straight-rectangular coffin, you’d either need longer boards to stretch from end to end, or vertical bracing where you joined the shorter boards together.
My grandfather built the traditional toe pincher coffins for the military during World War I. (He was a GI himself and when his arches fell they assigned him to a carpentry division.) He said it was because of the “one size fits all” shape- the wider top allows the arms to be crossed, and if the person was fat at the midsection or if the body should swell due to gases, it allowed for it. A straight box could have problems, especially if the body was moved around at all.
For the military they made two sizes- regular (men up to about 6’0) and a far lesser number of XLs (which would accomodate somebody up to about 6 1/2 feet tall). In civilian usage there were about 5 sizes from infant to XL.
In Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun, this question was brought up. The reason for the shape was so that once the coffin was closed, you could tell which way up the body was.
There’s also an efficiency of material because each of the four corners of the rectangle are clipped.
My quick math says that a coffin-shaped coffin 72" long and 30" wide, with the “head” and “foot” ends 12" narrower than at the “shoulder” and the “shoulder” 12" from the “head” end will have a perimeter of a little under 147.5" whereas a rectangle 72" by 30" would have a perimter of 204". That’s a difference of over 4 and a half feet.
The less need for long boards and the knowing which way the body was pointed make sense. I might also suggest that the more traditional coffin shape comes from the general outline of a sarcophagus? Also you might want a “singular use” box, to make the whole funeral ceremony more special, you would want a loved one to be buried publicly in a container that was clearly made only for that purpose, you would not use a coffin shaped box to ship widgets in.
I doubt it, because it would have required some sort of continued tradition for a very long time. And sarcophagus from, for instance, the Merovingian era were often simply rectangular stone “boxes”.
