Originals and Analogues (article)

Originals and Analogues of the Exeter Book Riddles
By Frederick Tupper Jr., for Modern Language Notes (1903)

Just a quick note:
This article discusses the Exeter Book Riddles, including all sorts of weird and wonderful information. One of the answers proposed for a certain riddle is our very own... “Barnacle Goose”!

This riddle “opens the gates to a world of strange beliefs and superstitious fancies” (100). Just how I like my riddles. Tupper notes the earliest literary account of the barnacle goose – Giraldus Cambrensis, in his twelfth century work Topographia Hiberniae.

This indicates, if nothing else, the small niche occupied by zoophytic hybrids in the English imagination, starting before the twelfth century and expanding into the early modern era. Why? Couldn’t tell you. But here’s yet another piece of evidence that this odd fascination exists.

Chaucer and Mandeville's Travels (article)

Chaucer and Mandeville’s Travels
By Josephine Waters Bennett, for Modern Language Notes (1953)

This article attempts to make links between Chaucer and Mandeville, and speaks in tentative tones that are later assured by Moseley’s article, I suppose (discussed in the previous post).

Essentially, Bennett argues for a borrowing from the Travels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. This is on the basis that (1) Chaucer’s “as tellen knyghtes olde” could be construed as a reference to Sir John Mandeville, the only popular author writing of the east who happened to be a knight, (2) the likely date for the writing of the Travels would have made the author a contemporary of Chaucer’s grandfather, therefore fitting the descriptor “olde” in the above-quoted line, (3) the wittiness of Mandeville in certain points of the Travels is akin to Chaucer’s, likely making the latter more disposed to think well enough of the former to borrow his work, and (4) the immense popularity of the Travels makes it a worthy cultural reference to make for Chaucer’s audience’s benefit.

However, as Moseley made clear in his article, at the time Chaucer was writing, the Travels was not yet popular in England. Would the merit of popularity on the continent make it a worthy cultural reference? Perhaps.

In any event, nothing to do with plants.

Some Notable Life-Histories in Zoological Folklore (article)

Some Notable Life-Histories in Zoological Folklore (Frank G. Speck and John Witthoft, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 60 / No. 238, 1947).

I seem to be attacking a lot of old articles lately. I actually like them better than modern scholarship. There seems to be less preening, and less attention paid to the cutthroat attempts to overcite experts and undermine colleagues. Plus, the slightly-archaic language is refreshing for some reason.

(Side note: I was recently reading C. J. Guiguet's 1953 paper "An Ecological Study of Goose Island", which documents his surveys on the outer coast of Heiltsuk territory in 1948. He concludes the introduction with the following statement, which I found to be totally delightful and to represent a collegial spirit that seems to be totally missing from modern academia:

"I am especially grateful to Mr. P. W. Martin whose intimate and practical knowledge of the British Columbia coast and its fauna, whose skill at navigation and seamanship, and whose affable good fellowship, combined to make the Goose Island expedition both profitable and pleasant."

How is that not the loveliest thing you've read? And in an academic/scientific paper, no less!)

So, this article suggests that a number of apparently metamorphic animals that are or were believed to exist around the world are actually reflections of transformation stories in indigenous folklore.

A number of examples are cited, which point to species commonly understood to be biologically linked due to the intrusion of mythological beliefs into scientific thinking. These examples are meant to stand as "a demonstration of the existence in both the old and new world of a specific type of folk tale, a transformation motif explanatory of certain coincidences in natural history".

That is, species with notable life histories become ingrained in indigenous folklore due to things like confusion of similar species or species that share notable characteristics; extrapolation from conincident behavioral and life history similarities; and lost connections between two species held, for unknown reasons, to be mythologically linked.

Almost all of the examples cited are from the tribal Americas or relatively "untamed" parts of the world, and all of them involve the mythological transformation of one animal species into another animal species. With one exception.

That exception is the barnacle goose, which is also the only example from Europe to be included in the article. The barnacle goose is an "explanation by metamorphosis for the sudden appearance of large migratory flocks of geese". The barnacle goose is also interesting to me as the counter-example given by Mandeville when he's presented with the oddity of the vegetable lamb. In what basically amounts to a cross-cultural pissing contest of "my home has weirer things than your home", the barnacle goose allows Mandeville to coolly say "hey man, that lamb-sprouting tree is pretty sweet, but I'm unfazed - after all, I've seen birds grow on trees".

But the barnacle goose and the vegetable lamb share something else in common: they both represent a halted transformation from plant-to-animal or animal-to-plant, a cross-kingdom hybrid of fantastical weirdness. Unlike all of the other examples cited in the article, and all the fantastical creatures that punctuate Mandeville's Travels, these two funny beasts link completely different worlds.

So how do you understand them? Are they plants, or are they animals? Are they some third thing that I can't name because it no longer exists in my psyche or my science or my culture? Who knows?

Well, Gerard, author of a 1597 herbal, might know. He writes in his herbal:

"There are in the north parts of Scotland certain Trees, whereon do grow Shellfishes, etc., etc., which falling into Water, become Fowls, whom we call Barnakles; in the North of England Brant Geese; and in Lancashire Tree Geese, etc."

Trees sprout shellfish that produce birds, and the resulting anomaly is deemed appropriate fodder for an herbal.

I'm not so good at drawing categories, but neither am I able to wantonly mismatch a whole zoo/herbarium full of species in order to produce a creature worthy of comment.

More on barnacle geese later when I (re)read the chapter from "Before Disenchantment"!

Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival (article)

Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival: A Hypothesis concerning Relationships
By C. W. R. D. Moseley, for Modern Philology (1974)

This article makes some links between Mandeville and Chaucer and the poets of the Alliterative revival respectively. It attempts to explain why the early career of the Travels was limited in England to such an odd group of people, and how those writers may have used the Travels in their own writing.

In particular, Moseley names Chaucer, the Pearl poet and the poet of the alliterative Morte as borrowing from the Travels, though he comments that even in sections of their work that would make overlap and borrowing logical and easy, Mandeville is soundly ignored by Gower, Hoccleve, Langland, Usk and others. (Usk was a chump anyway.)

Useful points: a picture of the early importance of the Travels in English literary culture, including the suggestion that Mandeville’s images of the False Garden and the road to Earthly Paradise may have informed some elements of the visionary landscape of Pearl (184).

Plant Folk Medicines (article)

Plant Folk Medicines among the Nicobarese of Katchal Island, India
By H. S. Dagar and J. C. Dagar, for Economic Botany (1991)

First, I am kind of offended by the idiotic point of view that one can stay with an indigenous community for “several days” (115) and in doing so “create confidence in them to reveal” (115) their ancient sacred practices.

That aside, this article details the folk medicinal use of plants naturally occurring on Katchal Island, India, by an indigenous group “living in complete geographical isolation” (115) with an unbroken history of interactions with local plants that date to time before memory.

For information on local use of plants encountered by Mandeville in India, I might refer to the significant list of plant species and usage summaries provided in the article. Given that the article only cites scientific names and I haven’t memorized the Latin for the plants Mandeville encounters, I probably won’t go ahead and do that for the hell of it, but for the record: note to self, this might be a helpful resource.

Tree-Wool (article)

Tree-Wool (Mary Johnston, The Classical Weekly, Vol. 24 / No. 8, 1930).

This is a cute little document. The section about "tree-wool" only runs for about half a page, it is sufficient to briefly introduce the two most popular explanations for the origin of the vegetable lamb myth:

"As the western mind associated wool with sheep and lambs, from the idea of 'wool from trees' [cotton] grew the tale of the vegetable lamb, a la,b which grew as a plant".

And, in a note appended to the article, a reference to "the shaggy rhizome of the fern Dickonsia Barometz, which when inverted and suitably trimmed somewhat resembled a small lamb".

Since both ideas are discussed in more detail elsewhere, I'll leave it to my reflections on those articles.

Johnson, however, also points to a couple of places where the veggie lamb pops up in art and literature: first, in the Erasmus Darwin poem "The Botanic Garden", and on the cover of a 1656 gardening book (Parkinson's Paradisi in Solis).

What a funny little creature, no?

I feel an odd kinship with it, particularly in the image I've attached to this blog of the lambs bursting out of fruits on a tree. Of all the curious hybrids I've encountered, this is the one that most strikes me on some strange level. Part plant and part animal, each category rooted and powerful in its own right, this awkward marriage of two very different worlds might by all rights be considered a freak accident of nature, should it exist, or at best a weird symbol that highlights the dangers of mingling things meant to be segregated.

But somehow, it's an enduring figure, an emblem for god-knows-what that pops up in art as a christological symbol, a marvel and a high curiosity that sparks the inquisitive minds of centuries of people.

Maybe it's because I feel like I'm the awkward marriage of two distinct worlds, but for me, the vegetable lamb is the champion of unlike likeness and a refusal (rather than an inability) to transform.

So, there you go. I'm sympathetic toward the little guy. I don't know where I belong either, and no one's categorizations leave me feeling well-represented.

Oh, god, does this mean I'm just a myth as well?

The Barometz, or Tartarian Lamb (article)

The Barometz, or Tartarian Lamb
By M., for The Irish Penny Journal (1841)

This short column from the Irish Penny Journal sets out to disprove the myth of the vegetable lamb and indulge in the “innocent amusement” (316) it provides. The writer claims to have found a description of the vegetable lamb “in an account of Struy’s Travels through Russia, Tartary, &c.” (316) – dating to the seventeenth century – and summarizes the phenomenon as follows:

“The object of wonder was in this case the Scythian or Tartarian lamb, a creature which, it was stated, sprang from the ground like a plant, and, restrained to the spot on which it was produced, devoured every vegetable production within its reach, and was itself in turn eaten by the wolves of the country” (316).

The writer sensibly attributes the origin of this misunderstanding to the manipulated tree fern and lamb-shaped folk-art, concluding that these “ornamental additions [are] introduced to suit the taste of the narrator, and to pander to that love of the marvellous which prevailed in the age in which he lived” (316).

This little column, while hardly astonishing, marks the shift in imagination around the idea of the vegetable lamb that marked the end of its stand as a wonder of the world and its decline into a point of gentle foolishness that allowed the “modern” thinkers to poke fun at the preceding eras of cultural history.

Was Odoric of Pordenone Ever in Tibet? (article)

Was Odoric of Pordenone Ever in Tibet?
by Berthold Laufer for T’oung Pao

Who was it that told me that if the title of your article can be answered with a “yes” or a “no”, you shouldn’t bother writing it?

Spoiler alert!!! The answer is NO.

Okay, really, I liked this article. I think Laufer is one helluva smart cookie. Here, he basically tackles two questions: was Odoric ever in Tibet (he is credited with being the first European traveler there), and is the information he presents eyewitness or simply hearsay?

Now, it is easy for me to get distracted by shiny side-paths of small scholarly questions that have nothing whatever to do with Mandeville and his plants. This is one of those things. For some reason, I find Odoric and the map of his travels to be totally fascinating. But let me try to be a little focused here, yes?

For my purposes, it’s really interesting to witness Laufer’s method of examining Odoric’s writing in order to determine the authenticity of his words. Looking at his specific language in terms of his concept of self in place, and how specific details of his work compare to the writing of his contemporaries – holding Odoric against now more or less universally-acknowledged ethnographic and anthropological truths – assessing the author’s style and character to measure his powers of observation and clarity of writing – Laufer’s got a lot of tricks up his sleeve.

Even though he ultimately robs Odoric of his reputation for being the first European to traverse Tibet, he does so with such grace and tact that Odoric himself probably would have shook his hand and thanked him for the corrective measure. What a class act.

A German Manuscript of Mandeville's Travels (article)

A German Manuscript of Mandeville’s “Travels” Dated 1433
by Malcolm Letts, for The Modern Language Review

Okay, so I’ve read other pieces of scholarship by Malcolm Letts and found them both edifying and enjoyable. So what happened here? Maybe I just don’t care enough about my German manuscripts. For shame.

This article is a brief discussion of the scribal and manuscript history of a particular German translation of Mandeville. As my German is abysmal and I am not working with this translation at all, the article is not a great boon to me, but if you like discussions of “spirited woodcuts” and all the wonder that is Michel Velser, hoo boy are you in for a treat!

(Sorry Malcolm.)

A Discovery in John de Mandevilles (article)

A Discovery in John de Mandevilles
by Kenneth Walter Cameron for Speculum

This is another fairly old article, dating from 1936. I wonder if anyone ever followed up on it.

More or less, what Cameron presents is a call for a more vigorous study of British historical records in order to establish the real identity of Mandeville. He includes a modest list of individuals bearing the name which exist in readily accessible records, and gives a brief synopsis of their archival presence.

As I’m not particularly interested in Mandeville’s identity (o, my masked man of mystery!) this article is not really heaps of help, but it is interesting nonetheless. Someone should update his list with the cheesy modern recording artist John Mandeville, and the John Mandeville who wrote a travel guide to Turkey.

Who was SJM? A fresh clue. (article)

Who was Sir John Mandeville? A fresh clue.
by Isaac Jackson, Miscellaneous Notes

This is a short article and mostly irrelevant to my interests. It simply stakes the claim that Sir John Mandeville was a kin-murderer who fled England to escape justice, and that the specific construction of his identity within the Travels is meant, among other things, to construct an alibi.

I am not particularly interested in solving the mystery of Mandeville’s “real” identity. Maybe I am just not a responsible scholar, but for my purposes, the only “identity” that matters is the one he creates for himself in his narrative. The Travels are interesting to me because of the way they speak to the “home” culture as much as the “encountered” culture. Of course Mandeville can hardly be considered an unimpeachable ethnographic record of real encountered cultures – but he does represent within his work a popular and celebrated account of a European man’s reaction to otherness, and that, to me, speaks louder and clearer than any straightforward self-analysis or direct cultural commentary.

Still, as far as these things go, if there has to be some sort of enigma to resolve around Mandeville’s identity, props to Jackson for turning it into a British murder mystery. I hope that when they shoot the BBC miniseries, they have a vegetable lamb growing in the garden where the murdered man inevitably gets done in.

The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Mandeville (article)

The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Mandeville
by A. W. Stiffe for The Geographical Journal

Given that this article dates to 1899, I feel like I have to be forgiving about how blatantly opinionated it is. There’s little sound basis given for most of the arguments, which are mostly comprised of a petty defense against scholars (particularly Yule, editor of Cathay and the Way Thither) who decry Mandeville’s character. It is an earnest attempt to rehabilitate Mandeville’s good name, but largely on Stiffe’s word that it is so.

The most (only) interesting part of the article to my mind is Stiffe’s compelling argument for admiring Mandeville as a “scientific geographer” first and foremost – someone with keen power of observation when it comes to nature, the world, the universe and man’s particular place therein. For all that is fantastical in Mandeville, and all that is commonplace – two necessary extremes – I am struck by that unique middle ground where he seems so ahead of his time in his scientific and philosophical thinking. For all those readers who can’t get past the question of his identity and originality, there’s a much greater question to be asked about Mandeville’s astute observations and keen, analytic thinking.

The Royal Society and the Tartar Lamb (article)

The Royal Society and the Tartar Lamb
by John H. Appleby for Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London

This article is mostly a discussion of the Royal Society’s reception of the vegetable lamb, first as a scientific idea and specimen, then as a misunderstanding of other natural phenomena, then in connection with the Pinna. I find it relevant as it shows the persistence of the vegetable lamb in European culture well after Mandeville’s time, providing useful evidence for what a captivating idea it represented.

The discussion opens with the idea of the “Joseph’s Coat”, a gift out of Russia that came to be in the newly-created Bodleian Library (1609). It is said to be made from the skin of the Tartar lamb, presented then as a real species that is known and used in remote parts of the world. At the same time that visitors to the Library are commenting in wonder at “Joseph’s Coat”, Francis Bacon refutes the idea of the marvelous vegetable lamb. The article goes on to describe the reactions of Engelbert Kaempfler, John Bell, Thomas Dimsdale and others to the idea of the lamb.

Next, the article discusses the “toy lamb” theory, presented in other articles I’ve already discussed in this blog, namely that the rhizome of a certain tree fern is altered, in some types of regional folk art, to look like a lamb. The dried vegetation is said to have lead to the misapprehension that the object represents a plant-animal hybrid. The article points out that no one who encounters the idea of the vegetable lamb in their travels ever asserts that they saw one growing, evidence that a misunderstood art object might actually be the root of the myth.

The article mentions a Jesuit missionary discovering a similar species in Canada in 1716, but not much detail is given. Cool.

Lastly, the article discusses a link between the vegetable lamb and the Pinna, or sea silkworms. However, the article is a bit weak and unclear on this point, and I’ll save discussion of the crossover for my reflections on Laufer’s article Pinna and the Syrian Lamb. This article provides a much clearer treatment of what is really, in spite of Appleby’s watered-down discussion, a pretty interesting connection.

Both Mandeville and Odoric are mentioned at the article’s closing, but only in passing, and only to say that their inclusion of the vegetable lamb in their writings served to solidify its place in the medieval “scientific” imagination.

Three and a half stars. This one was so dry I thought it was one of my ancient articles; imagine my surprise when I realized it was published in 1997.