Amazing Medieval Creatures of the World

This camel, like many medieval illustrations of animals, looks as if it has just committed an embarrassing social faux-pas.

Thanks to the difficulties of communication and travel in the past, most people didn’t have a very good understanding of what the rest of the world was like.

Imagine a world where everyone travels by foot, horse/donkey or boat, and the majority of people would only be able to afford to travel by foot as horses and boats were super expensive. Most people would live most of their lives in the same farming community, village, town or city.

If you lived in, let’s say, the 12-13th Century, even if you were unusual and actually literate (obviously most people would not be), and you somehow managed to find a source about world geography and animals, these sources would often not be first-hand accounts, and images would be drawn from descriptions given by sailors and traders. If you were not literate you would be working off rumours alone, and images which might be found in public places such as church murals.

This means people weren’t sure what was going on in the rest of the world. Some creatures are utterly fictitious, and some are misunderstandings or inaccurate images of real creatures. And people really believed in them.

Here are a selection of favourites, all pulling amazing medieval expressions:

This AMAZING Turtle

Amazing Medieval Turtle

This Turtle does not have much to explain. It is easy to imagine how a vague description could have ended up like this. It is clearly barely suppressing its rage.

The Bonnacon

This bonnacon hates itself.

How embarrassing it is to be a Bonnacon. Their horns are apparently too curly to be used as weapons, so it’s only weapon is that it can spray dung long distance, and that it’s dung will burn whatever it comes into contact with.

The Manticore

Manticores always have amazing facial expressions

Manticores have the head or face of a man, body of a lion and tail of a scorpion! Sometimes they shoot spikes from it. They are are red, and eat human flesh. Yum!

Nom nom nom human legs.

And on the subject of eating human flesh:

The Crocodile

A forlorn crocodile eating a man

Crocodiles (or Cockodrills) eat men, and weep whilst swallowing him:”ever after it laments him as long as it lives” (Guillaume le Clerc). Sometimes they look like dragons, sometimes they even look like chickens, cows or boars.

Crocodile finishing eating a man

The Crocodile, however, does not eat men and weep in peace, for it has an ENEMY!

The Hydrus

The Hydrus is SO embarrassed.

The Hydrus lives in the Nile (not to be confused with the Hydra) is the enemy of the dragon. “When it sees a crocodile sleeping with its mouth open, the hydrus first rolls in mud to make itself slippery, then enters the crocodile’s mouth and is swallowed. It then eats its way out of the crocodile’s belly, killing it.” 1. Some consider it to be an allegory of Christ and the forces of Hell.

A hydrus killing a crocodile. Yes. That is a crocodile. And he is really regretting everything right now.

This crocodile looks like a plucked chicken….

The Panther

The panther’s breath brings all the boys to the yard

The Panther is a beautiful, gentle, multicoloured animal, and when it roars it really sweet beautiful smelling breath attracts all the other animals to it, except for the dragon.

If you have breath that makes dragons hide in caves, it’s time to make changes.

The Dragon is the only animal who runs away from the roaring panther. When a dragon smells the panther’s breath, it is frightened. Although in the picture above it also looks like the panther might be REALLY boring.

The Elephant

Elephants used in war, and elephants in the wild

Elephants live for three hundred years and have no knees, so if you want to catch one just wait until it falls asleep leaning on a tree, and cut the tree down. Voila: helpless elephant yours for the taking.

Elephants are ALSO enemies of the dragon. In terms of the balance of humours in these animals, elephants are cold and wet, and dragons are hot and dry. Dragons can drink elephant blood to cool their intestines.

A very depressed-looking elephant trampling a dragon

There are millions of other animals I could go on to share with you, but hopefully this has given you an idea of both the silly faces they have, and the interesting nature of seeing the world through the eyes of our ancestors. I will probably do another post on some of the more human animals, or maybe just one of them specifically at another point.

If you want to look at more animals from Medieval illustrations, I would recommend The Medieval Bestiary which is where I found most of the images for this post.

If you enjoy thinking about funny ways we refer to animals, you may enjoy this little stream of thoughts from David Mitchell on the Camelopard (i.e. Giraffe). I love David Mitchell.

Thanks for reading!