Some Fabulous Beasts (article)

Some Fabulous Beasts
By Margaret Robinson, for Folklore (1965)

In this article, Robinson examines the folkloric origins of some of the fantastical beasts that stand as examples of the medieval imagination. These origins she divides into categories:

“…we find that as far as written sources go we can divide them into roughly three categories: myths and legends, perpetuated in poetry and allegory; chronicles and travellers’ tales; and scientific works in natural history, botany and medicine” (275)

The interesting thing to my mind is that all three of these categories are present, to some extent, in Mandeville’s Travels. Because Mandeville adopts stray bits of whimsy, fact and invention from a diverse assemblage of sources, there are threads of science, history and literature woven into his narrative. You could call this troubling (it might, for example, make it hard to clearly discuss specific examples within the Mandeville text). However, I think it’s perfect. What appeals to me about the Travels is not the information they contain, per se. It’s how they speak to the imagination and storytelling impulses of the cultural moment they capture.

Some of Robinson’s passages seem to speak very clearly to author-personas like Mandeville, for example when she writes (of a specific kind of author)

“These writers are putting down what they believe to be true; what they have heard or read is true; or sometimes what they have heard or read but cannot quite believe to be true: there are of course a few exceptions who have crossed over the lines between credulity, wishful thinking, and downright fabrication” (277).

In other passages, there is no mystery, and she mentions Mandeville by name, for example as the final sample in a historical sequence of texts that speak of griffins and a certain type of giant ant:

“Mandeville’s ‘Travels’ collates all the evidence and concludes that it is in summer that the heat drives them underground, so that men can come and pick up the gold, but that in winter they are on the prowl in the daytime, so that the trick of the empty containers must be used. Mandeville puts this story in Taprobane, or Ceylon: his griffins are in Bachary, and can carry off to their nests a horse and its rider, or two oxen yoked together” (283).

Robinson also mentions both the barnacle goose (279) and the Tartary lamb (286) at different points in her article. Unfortunately, I did not find (as I’d hoped and expected) that she carried her thoughts to any interesting conclusions about what, in European culture, made a zoophytic hybrid like the barnacle goose or vegetable lamb seem plausible. But I suppose that every piece of scholarship I find that ignores this question deepens and widens a void that will make my discussion of it more compelling!