Fantastic Beasts: Natural history c. 12th century AD in T. H. White’s Book of Beasts

Fantastic Beasts: Natural history c. 12th century AD in T. H. White’s Book of Beasts

In the blurb of T. H. White’s translation of this twelfth century Latin bestiary we are reminded that ‘a bestiary is a serious work of natural history’, and later, in White’s appendix, that bestiaries are ‘the bases upon which our own knowledge of biology is founded, however much we may have advanced since it was written’.

If these statements read something like disclaimers it is perhaps because the writers and illuminators of manuscripts such as those White was working from drew their knowledge about the more exotic beasts in their pages from ancient documents of the Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilizations, from accounts of early church Fathers, from mythology and, predominantly, from the oral tradition. Accounts and illustrations of animals thus often range from the mildly amusing the mind-bendingly bizarre. Mythical creatures sit alongside the more mundane denizens of the animal kingdom and many are said to be representative of moral values consistent with Christian teachings. Stags, for example, are said to enjoy feasting on snakes and, after a hearty meal, ‘they shed their coats and all their old ages with them’. Good Christians are encouraged to emulate the stag, casting off sin as the stag casts off his old coat after having eaten the devil-snake of vice.

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The noble stag, famous scourge of snakes

White’s translation, we are told, ‘reproduces without “period quaintness” what was soberly related in the manuscript and as soberly received by contemporary readers’. While the extent to which medieval perusers of bestiaries were convinced by accounts of animals such as the bonnacon (‘…when he turns to run away he emits a fart with the contents of his large intestine which covers three acres’) or the fact that the ‘unicorn…is also called Rhinoceros by the greeks’, the accounts, illustrations and commentary by White are so alternately charming and baffling, that, like almost all animal content, they deserve to be shared on the internet.

Well-known crocodile fact: ‘Its dung provides an ointment with which old and wrinkled whores anoint their figures and are made beautiful, until the flowing sweat of their efforts washes it away.’

Well-known crocodile fact: ‘Its dung provides an ointment with which old and wrinkled whores anoint their figures and are made beautiful, until the flowing sweat of their efforts washes it away.’

Some pretty hurtful aspersions about the elephant’s sex life being cast here.

Some hurtful aspersions about the elephant’s sex life being cast here.

The passage which describes elephant courtship and copulation (when it does, apparently infrequently, occur) is too beautiful a love story not to share in its entirety:

If one of them wants to have a baby, he goes eastward toward Paradise, and there is a tree there called Mandragora, and he goes with his wife. She first takes of the tree and then gives some to her spouse. When they munch it up, it seduces them, and she immediately conceives in her womb. When the proper time for being delivered arrives, she walks out into a lake, and the water comes up to the mother’s udders. Meanwhile the father-elephant guards her while she is in labour, because there is a certain dragon which is inimical to elephants.

White adds his own delightful comments on previously-held beliefs about elephant reproduction:

It was supposed that, being modest, they preferred to look the other way while they were about it. Albertus Magnus held that they copulated like other quadrupeds, but that, owing to the great weight of the husband, he either had to dig a pit for his wife to stand in or else he had to float himself over her in a lake, where his gravity would naturally be less. In fact, they copulate in the ordinary way and, according to Lieut.-Colonel C. H. Williams, more gracefully than most.

Bear parenthood subject to similar interpretative approach.

Bear parenthood subject to similar interpretative approach.

The inane grin of savagery.

The inane grin of savagery.

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Our medieval naturalist also has plenty to say on the subject of beaver testicles, which apparently make ‘a capital medicine’:

…when he notices that he is being pursued by the hunter,  removes his own testicles with a bite and casts them before the sportsman, and thus escapes by flight. What is more, if he should again happen to be chased by a second hunter, he lifts himself up and shows his member to him. And the latter, when he perceives the testicles to be missing, leaves the beaver alone

Illuminating stuff.