It’s a long weekend for a holiday I don’t really celebrate, so I’m once again spending my free time on the ideal activity: looking at sea monsters. This time they’re from the non-standard art style variant of Der naturen bloeme (British Library Add MS 11390). The fish section starts at f.49v & I highly recommend checking it out! It’s a cornucopia of delights and no post could possibly do it justice since there are perfect images on literally every page. That being said, here are some personal highlights:
💪 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2 kinds of dolphins, both equally valid (ocean & river for people who aren’t familiar with platanista or are struggling with the script)
naut...il..us?
polyp
tragically blurry sea-deer
orca with just the wiggliest mouth
& ziphius
I haven’t been referencing the standard illustrations, but it’s vital everyone know that in the original the ziphius looks like this
From the people who brought you the winged crocodile comes another blockbuster effort at putting bird parts where bird parts absolutely should not be: the beaked hippopotamus
[Bibliothèque municipale de Valenciennes, Ms 0320, fol. 116r]
[If you’re the kind of person who follows this blog, you’ve probably already seen @draconym‘s Beaft Maker, but it’s a lot of fun so there’s the link again just in case]
I’ve been reading the Cambridge translation of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies for comparison purposes and it’s providing some great quotes about birds.
General Wisdom
“No one can discover how many kinds of birds there are.”
On Owls
“This bird is not found on the island of Crete, and if it should come there from somewhere else, it immediately dies.”
“a wild bird, loaded with feathers, but always constrained by heavy sluggishness; it is active among tombs day and night, and always lingers in caves […] when it has been seen in a city, they say that it signifies desolation.”
A Problem Specific to Roosters, I Guess
“The rooster’s limbs, some people say, are consumed if they are mixed with molten gold.”
The Bravest Bird
“The hawk (accipiter) is a bird armed more with spirit than with talons.”
How Woodpeckers can Ruin a Construction Project
“People say this bird has a certain supernatural quality because of this sign: a nail, or anything else, pounded into whatever tree the woodpecker has nested in, cannot stay there long, but immediately falls out.”
Cursed Hoopoe Life Hacks
“Anyone who anoints himself with the blood of this bird and then goes to sleep will see demons suffocating him.”
& Key Issues in Theology
“It is a great sin to believe that God would entrust his counsels to crows.”
Are you tired of not having an answer when people ask about your favourite 12th century image of a basilisk? Because boy do I have a solution for that specific problem:
[Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Typ 101, fol. 14v]
As far as I'm aware, the association between scorpions and crabs comes from straightforward physical similarities (pincers, exoskeletons, etc.). Though when Ovid gives a list of animals that grow from decay in Book 15 of the Metamorphoses he says scorpions come specifically from crabs that have been buried without their claws, which is the opposite of what I'd expect.
[from the 1567 Golding translation, which gets overhyped as one of Shakespeare's influences, but was still an important text in the English Renaissance. also cleas=claws & writhen=twisted]
The association with basil is more complicated. The short version is that the first confirmed Greek mention of basil comes from a physician called Chrysippus (~4th c. BCE). His works were lost, but enough survives in later texts to know that he thought basil was extremely dangerous and unfit for human consumption, but doesn't seem to have mentioned scorpions.
Africa and Asia have a much longer history with basil, and when it does start to get linked with scorpions in classical texts there’s often an accompanying reference to “African” practices. Which isn’t enough to establish cross-cultural influence, but for the purposes of this blog I think it’s okay to speculate that a preexisting link between basil and scorpions + the Greek & Roman medical practice of treating scorpion stings with a mixture of basil, wine and vinegar + the fact that scorpions are frequently found in the kinds of places where basil grows + a cultural belief in the spontaneous generation of small animals made the idea of scorpions growing from basil seem pretty reasonable.
That’s a lot of words without a primary source, so here’s internet favourite Pliny the Elder providing an example of what I’m talking about:
Brief digression, but the highlight of Pliny’s basil facts actually has nothing to do with scorpions. It’s this Totally Normal Gardening Tip:
Obviously it’s fun to imagine a world where this caught on and HGTV stands for Hostile Gardening Television, but it might be even more fun to imagine someone at a fair asking a prizewinning vegetable grower what their secret is and being told “ancient wisdom: swear at yer zucchini.” /end digression
This is already a pretty long post, but while I’m on the subject I can’t not talk about the ‘sniffing too much basil will give you brain scorpions’ urban legend popularized in the 16th-17th centuries. To start with, here are two 17th c. summaries that also give a pretty good idea of the Basil Discourse ™ at the time:
Each volume contains a one (1) sentence summary saying that an Italian man grew a scorpion in his brain and then died as a result of smelling too much basil
That’s it
The Gesner example comes from a treatise on scorpions published posthumously as part of Vol. 5 of his Historiae animalium (1587)
It also doesn’t provide any information beyond “an apothecary told me about a French girl who died after smelling basil and turned out to have a brain full of scorpions”
Obviously the real reason for the vagueness is because these are, at absolute best, examples of the false cause fallacy, but I still have a pressing need to know how patients’ basil-sniffing habits entered the medical record
Like, where would you even get that information?
Catch me learning necromancy so I can ask 16th c. physicians some pointed questions about brain scorpion diagnostic criteria, I guess
After all that, it seems fitting to conclude this post with someone who has no problem describing exact methodology: the scientist and mystic Jan Baptist van Helmont, who provides a recipe for growing scorpions from basil in his Oriatrike, or Physick Refined (1664)
I mean, what can you say to that except
He also has a recipe for growing mice by leaving a dirty shirt in a container of wheat:
There are a lot of things to love about these 14th c. Italian birds (in order: hawk, ostrich & crane), but my absolute favourite is the total disregard for formatting:
the manuscript (BnF Latin 6823) also contains some stunned looking pigeons:
an example of how easy it is to start drawing a swallow and accidentally end up with a fish:
and the real reason I’m making this post, the pinnacle of scientific illustration, an image that stopped me dead in my tracks:
Usually when I encounter unidentifiable animals it’s either because of physical damage to the manuscript or because something generically animal-shaped has been drawn in a location where the text doesn’t provide any clues for a more specific identification. But sometimes a genuine mystery turns up, like this 13th c. french miniature:
Key points:
five heads
but not where you’d expect
two of them are birds
confidently placed in a chapter about whales
definitely not a a whale
who is she
[BnF, Nouvelle acquisition française 13521, fol. 27]
Slightly more scholarly update: the text here is the short version of Pierre de Beauvais’ Bestiaire & the other chapters have normal illustrations, so this may in fact be a whale (????)
Also, I just looked it up in McCulloch’s Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries & she said this:
so apparently this is an instance of individual creativity that has baffled scholars for almost 60 years
Usually when I encounter unidentifiable animals it’s either because of physical damage to the manuscript or because something generically animal-shaped has been drawn in a location where the text doesn’t provide any clues for a more specific identification. But sometimes a genuine mystery turns up, like this 13th c. french miniature:
Key points:
five heads
but not where you’d expect
two of them are birds
confidently placed in a chapter about whales
definitely not a a whale
who is she
[BnF, Nouvelle acquisition française 13521, fol. 27]
hey! i know you're super busy right now and this isn't urgent at all, but i'm designing a tattoo sleeve for myself completely of medieval animal drawings and was wondering if you have some helpful sources for that?
I know you said this isn't urgent, but it's been long enough I feel like I should apologize for the delay!
If you're still looking for sources, I’d recommend the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s database of illuminated manuscripts, which is great as long as you have either a rudimentary knowledge of French or a willingness to look up animal names etc. in a translation dictionary. Its most useful feature is the ability to search by caption/légende, so if you have a specific animal in mind you can pretty easily find every image of it in the collection. If you aren’t at that stage in the planning, you can also just search for a common bestiary animal, like a lion, and browse until you find a manuscript with an art style you like.
For a more general overview, searching for bestiaries in the Digital Bodleian collection will get you a good range, including some big names like the Ashmole Bestiary.
I personally find the British Library collection kind of unwieldy for casual browsing, so here’s a list of the animal-related manuscripts I can think of off the top of my head:
There are a ton of other sources out there, but I don’t want this list to get too overwhelming, so I’ll just link three more of the big ones & hope something here helps!
The award for Best Symbolic Sea Monster Riding on a 16th Century Map still goes to Fernado Bertelli’s 1565 Universale descrittione di tutta la terra conosciuta fin qui, which features Bold Fortune windsurfing on the back of a truly indescribable fish & is singlehandedly responsible for changing my understanding of her role to ‘Goddess of Extreme Sports’
I got my second shot & I’m taking it easy for a day or two, which means it’s time for the ultimate relaxation reading: 16th century maps! In this case, Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, usually described as the first modern atlas. It was originally published in Antwerp in 1570, but I’m using the 1571 edition from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek collection (also available at Wikimedia Commons).
Probably no one will be surprised to hear that when I say “looking at maps” I mostly mean “looking at decorative sea monsters that happen to be located on maps,” but before we get to the fishy friends here’s the world map that opens the book, just because it’s kind of cool to see what has and hasn’t changed over the last 450 years.
Now that that’s out of the way, choose your fighter:
a) fringed sea-gnome
b) a letter opener
c) duck horse, or dorse
d) absolute unit
A key feature of this edition is that all the fish have easily some of the faces I’ve seen:
This one gets its own section because when I first saw it I thought the tail was a second head, and I can’t get over this duck-billed affront to nature serving not one but two of the most disgusted expressions I’ve even had the honour of beholding:
On one hand, the custom of depicting monarchs and powerful figures as Neptune was meant to symbolize dominion over the waves and is directly tied to imperialism
On the other hand, *gestures to entire sea monster*
On the third hand I had installed specifically for hypotheticals, this is so much funnier than any current trends that I think we should bring it back as a way of depicting celebrities and cultural icons? As long as you remove the trident/laurels/emblems there’s no reason being transported by sea monsters couldn’t have completely un-imperial symbolism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One of my many ideas that no one else appreciates is a band composed entirely of the weirdest musical grotesques from historical documents. Would they be holograms? animatronics? a cross between Medieval Times and Chuck E. Cheese? an avant garde boyband concept? I don’t know, but I do know I dream of a world where this guy goes platinum:
I’m still too swamped by Seasonal Busyness ™ to really be around on tumblr, but I saw this visionary depiction & couldn’t resist another round of Who’s That Pokemon Beaft, so if you have any guesses what animal this is meant to be please reblog & put them in the tags :)
I’m still too swamped by Seasonal Busyness ™ to really be around on tumblr, but I saw this visionary depiction & couldn’t resist another round of Who’s That Pokemon Beaft, so if you have any guesses what animal this is meant to be please reblog & put them in the tags :)
If I wanted to, theoretically, do a D&D campaign in a quasi-medieval setting with monsters inspired by beafts, which would you suggest as potential enemies for the heroes to encounter?
What a fun question! An actual answer would vary depending on where the campaign falls on the nonsense-to-serious gameplay spectrum, but here are 5 Potential Creatures to Encounter on a Historical Fantasy Adventure (+ 1 Sea Knight)
1. A Selection of Strange Snakes
[The Morgan Library & Museum, MS. M.81, fol. 85v]
Pictured are the scitalis, a snake covered in markings so beautiful anyone who sees it falls into a trance, and the amphisbaena, a two-headed snake with glowing eyes and the ability to move both backwards and forwards (which is admittedly more impressive when it’s drawn as an actual snake). But there are so many superpowered medieval snakes that you could populate an entire world with them, if that’s what your heart desires. My personal favourites are the chersydros, a snake which leaves a trail of smoke on the ground but can only move in straight lines because of the horrible noise it makes whenever it turns, the jaculus, a flying snake which springs from trees onto unsuspecting victims, and the salpuga, a snake which is invisible.
2. Whale
[Merton College, MS 249, fol. 8]
No one will be surprised to hear I’m a big advocate of whales in every adventure. They can be transportation, environmental obstacles or just background flavour instead of enemies, but I do think it’s a waste not to include at least one. Not near a large body of water? There’s always teleportation, dream sequences, hallucinations, dirt whales, turning your players into whales... The possibilities are endless. Whale abilities are also almost endless, but the important ones in a medieval setting are Island Imitation, Sweet Breath (For Attracting Fish), Weaponized Waterspouts & Paws.
3. Salamander
[Det Kongelige Bibliotek, GKS 1633 4º, fol. 55v]
Salamanders: the most deadly creatures an adventurer could ever be unlucky enough to encounter. I’ll let Bartholomaeus Anglicus take this one:
“[L]ike to the Ewt in shape, & never seene but in great raine, & fayleth in faire wether, and his song is crieng: and he quencheth the fire that hee toucheth, as Ise doth, & water frore: and out of his mouth commeth white matter, & if that matter touch a mans body, the haire shall fall, & what it toucheth, is corrupt and infected, and tourneth into foule coulour. Also Salamandra is a manner kind of an Ewt or of a Lisard, and is a pestilent beast, most venimous. For as Plinius sayeth, libro. 29. cap. 4. Salamandra infecteth fruit of Trees, and corrupteth water, so that he that eateth or drinketh thereof, is slayne anone. And if his spittle touch the foot, it infecteth and corrupteth all the mans body.”
Also, a fun worldbuilding note is that the French bestiary writer Pierre de Beauvais claims that salamanders produce a substance that is not wool, silk, or linen, but is used to create clothing for the most important and fashionable people. This clothing is cleaned by throwing it in a fire.
4. Ostrich
[BnF, Latin 11207, fol. 21v]
This is by far the most ridiculous item on the list! But medieval ostriches were infamous for eating metal & I think it would be fun for a low-level party to be hired by a local blacksmith to track down missing supplies and instead have to wrangle an extremely large bird. And I do mean extremely large, because according to Pliny the Elder ostriches are both taller and faster than a man on horseback. They also use their feet to throw rocks at pursuers and “have the marvelous property of being able to digest every substance without distinction, but their stupidity is no less remarkable; for although the rest of their body is so large, they imagine, when they have thrust their head and neck into a bush, that the whole of the body is concealed.” Perfect setup for screwball comedy.
5. Hyena
[BnF, Français 14970, fol. 14]
Despite the fact the picture I’ve chosen resembles a goth rabbit, medieval hyenas are genuinely spooky. Hobbies include hanging out in tombs, lurking outside people’s homes in the middle of the night calling their names in a perfect imitation of a human voice, cursing any animal they walk around 3 times with total immobility, magically silencing creatures who touch their shadow, and just generally being incredibly powerful eldritch abominations. Fortunately they come with a built in weakness, since their spines are fused, making it impossible for them to turn their head without also turning their whole body. They also come with a built in loot drop, since every hyena contains a hyena stone, which allows a person to see the future when held in the mouth, like a psychic gobstopper.
+ 1. Sea Knight
I was today years old when I learned most people are more familiar with sea knights as a type of helicopter, but this is a monster from the Ortus Sanitatis with a great design and an even better set of worldbuilding options. Here are some potential explanations for its existence:
underwater metallurgy?
cultural exchange between merpeople and landfolk? (follow up question: why armour of all things?)
What about some of the weirder and underappreciated sea monsters?
I’m going to level with you, this took forever because whenever I see the words “underappreciated sea monsters” a part of my brain statics out & starts chanting ALL👏 OF👏 THEM
but since I can’t figure out how to turn a beam of concentrated enthusiasm for every sea monster ever to exist into a tumblr post, here’s an attempt to cover some greatest hits:
Serra/Sawfish
Underappreciated really only applies in modern times, since the sawfish had a wildly successful career as a medieval ocean menace & is one of the few marine creatures to regularly appear in bestiaries
Isidore of Seville describes it as having a serrated back that it uses to cut through the bottom of boats (clearly based on Pliny the Elder’s account of swordfish stabbing passing vessels)
But in its most popular iteration the sawfish is more irritating than lethal. Standard operating procedure is to force any ship it sees into a race, only to get bored and tired partway through and plunge back into the depths out of frustration
This is supposed to teach a moral lesson about persistence, but it mostly seems like a fun random encounter
The real delight is that, because no description other than “serration” and occasionally “wings” is really offered, artists were free to draw whatever they thought a commitment-phobic sea nuisance should look like
Is it a bird? A dog? A fish? Unimportant! It’s here to cause problems
[Bibliothèque nationale de France , Latin 10448, fol. 119v]
[The Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.81, fol. 69r]
[British Library, Sloane MS 278, fol. 51r]
[British Library, Sloane MS 3544, fol. 42v]
[Det Kongelige Bibliotek, GKS 3466 8º, fol. 44]
Flying Turtle
This implausible little guy’s first recorded appearance is on a 1558 edition of a map of Northern Europe by Dutch mapmaker Cornelis Anthonisz
It was quickly copied by many of the biggest names in 16th c. cartography, including Abraham Ortelius & Gerard Mercator (of Mercator projection fame/infamy)
In Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps Chet Van Duzer suggests that, since Anthonisz’ publisher printed under the sign of the turtle, it’s possible this was a piece of branded content that got mistaken for a real creature
That’s both great marketing and a great origin for a cryptid. Modern publishing houses take note
“According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a turtle should be able to fly...”
Blatant favouritism because this is both my icon and the only thing on this list I’ve written about semi-seriously, but it’s forbidden pet time!
In 1537 a pamphlet was printed in Rome briefly describing a monster found in the North Sea and much less briefly explaining how it was a sign of moral decline
Sample interpretations: extra eyes to signify lust & gluttony, a moon on the back of the head to signify turning away from truth, four dragon feet to signify malice from all four corners of the earth
*slaps the roof of sea pig* this bad boy can fit so many allegories for sin in it
Was this propaganda related to growing tensions between Catholics and Protestants? Probably! Was it also cutting edge marine biology? Yup, and it was a breakout hit, making its way into the works of Olaus Magnus, who calls it “ominous in every feature,” and Conrad Gesner, who reclassifies it as a kind of hyena
[The 1537 pamphlet, Monstrum in oceano Germanico a piscatoribus nuper captum & eius partium omnium subtilis ac theologica interpretatio, available in a bad scan from google books here]
It shows up off the coast of Sardinia in the 1584 Mercator edition of Ptolemy's Geographia & the monsters in that are mostly derivative, but I can’t think of any source with this much hair, so here are some other possibilities:
Only appears in two sources that I know of, for which I’m eternally grateful
Those sources are 16th c. world maps by Giacomo Gastaldi and Urbano Monte, men who owe everyone an apology for what they’ve unleashed upon the world
Here’s Chet Van Duzer’s translation of Monte’s description: “ …in the ocean here there often appear some fish in human form of such strangeness, that raising themselves above the water they surpass the highest masts of ships, so that, screaming horribly and making some valleys in the water, they move themselves with their arms which they have in the shape of great tree trunks twenty-five palms long, and there is no boatswain’s mate so brave that he would not be terrified by their monstrosity.”
Don’t care for thatat all
Joking dislike aside, this resembles a water spirit of the kind more commonly found in bogs, fens, marshes, ponds or streams, and it upsets my sense of order to see it out of its natural habitat& in the open ocean
[Again, you can find Monte’s fully-assembled 60 sheet map at the David Rumsey Map Collection, and it truly is a work of art despite containing this man]
