Minimus

Minimus is named in Chapter V, at the point where the Sunday-morning meetings on Animal Farm have stopped being meetings. The debates have been abolished, the animals now file past the skull of Old Major before going into the barn, and they no longer sit all together. Napoleon, the boar who has taken charge of the farm, sits on the front of the raised platform with Squealer, who does his explaining for him, and with a third pig: "another pig named Minimus, who had a remarkable gift for composing songs and poems". The nine dogs form a semicircle round the three of them and the other pigs sit behind.

That sentence is all the description he gets. George Orwell never says how big Minimus is, what colour he is, how old he is or what he sounds like. What the book gives him instead is two pieces of work.

The first is the replacement anthem. On the evening of the executions the animals sing "Beasts of England" three times over, slowly and mournfully, and Squealer comes out with two dogs to announce that Napoleon has abolished it: the song expressed a longing for a better society, that society has now been established, and the song therefore has no purpose. In its place Minimus writes one that begins "Animal Farm, Animal Farm, / Never through me shalt thou come to harm!" It is sung every Sunday morning after the hoisting of the flag. Orwell gives the animals' verdict on it in a single clause: neither the words nor the tune ever seemed to them to come up to the song it replaced.

The second is the ode "Comrade Napoleon", written at the height of the titles and the tears, when the pigs have taken to calling Napoleon Father of All Animals and Protector of the Sheep-fold. It runs to three stanzas and ends with a piglet whose first squeak should be the leader's name. Napoleon approved of it and had it inscribed on the wall of the big barn, at the opposite end from the Seven Commandments, under a portrait of himself in profile executed by Squealer in white paint.