Gone Medieval - Fantastic Beasts of the Middle Ages

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

In the Middle Ages, animals were often the means for survival and the source of great wealth. No wonder then that in the medieval imagination, animals are not just animals. Animals were thought to have traits and characteristics that meant that they could be sorted into moral categories - good and bad, righteous and evil - that dominate the Christian imagination. Ants could be monsters and panthers could be your friend, dog-headed men were as real as elephants and whales were as sneaky as wolves. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Hana Videen, author of The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary to discuss animals, language, and how - when it comes to thinking about the animal kingdom - we actually have a lot in common with our Medieval ancestors. This episode was edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Joseph Knight.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. When you think of ants, do you think of their gold gathering capabilities? Well, for those speaking Old English, that idea was par for the course. The Old English Wonders of the East claims that in a place called Cappy, ants are produced as big as hounds. They have feet like a grasshopper. They are red and black in appearance. Those who are daring enough to take the gold should bring female,

camels with them, along with their calves and the males. Begin your gold-gathering quest after the fifth hour of the fifth day when the ants have finished digging up gold and have taken refuge from the heat. First, tie up a baby camel on dry land. Second, cross the river with your female camels and male camel. Third, load the gold onto the female camels and lead them back across the river, leaving your male camel behind. This little wheeze will mean that the male camel will theoretically keep the ants busy, allowing you and your female camels to escape with the gold. Job done. This might seem fantastical enough to be just a sort of one-off story. But it's not just ants who are thought to have incredible capabilities in the medieval period. After all, animals were

often the means for medieval people to survive, and also the source of great wealth. Perhaps then it's of little wonder that in the medieval imagination, animals are not just animals. Beyond their material usefulness, they were thought to have traits and characteristics that meant that they could be sorted into moral categories. Good and bad, righteous and evil. Animals were taking part in the battle of good and evil that dominates the Christian imagination. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga,

and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm joined by Hana Videen, medievalist, and author of the wonderful book The Deer Horde to discuss animals, language, and how, when it comes to thinking about the animal kingdom, we actually have a lot in common with our medieval ancestors. Hannah, thank you so much for coming on con medieval because I'm really delighted by this book, and I can't wait to share it with our listeners.

Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. So I guess the best place for us to start for our listeners is to set out the historical context in general. You know, sweeping statement here, it's just over a thousand years of history or so. What do medieval people believe about animals writ large? Because they have a different way of relating to them, don't they? Yeah, in some ways, I think that their way of relating to animals isn't completely foreign to ours, because we do think about animals a lot in ways that are not the strictly biological, sciencey ways of thinking about them. Animals play a huge part in our storytelling, in our fables, in our folklore, stuff like that. One of the examples I use in my book is ordinary animals have these human qualities like I live in Toronto.

we have raccoons here. People sort of attribute human-like behaviors and motivations to these raccoons. So in some ways, there's a little bit of overlap. But in medieval texts that talk about animals, it's generally about giving these animals certain traits to illustrate stories about how humans are, sort of what their motivations are, what their desires are. And because Christianity is so central to a lot of these narratives, often animals, will be illustrating some aspect of that.

So being aligned with Satan or Christ or something like that. This is a bit that I find really fun about the book because you're able to dig into the roles that animals play in these kind of legendary capacities. And they crop up all the time. Over here in Europe, if you go to a church, for example, you are confronted with pelicans a lot of the time. And because I'm a medievalist, I go, oh, yes, well, this is a reference to Christ. But ordinary people nowadays don't necessarily understand that.

But actually, medieval people have a sort of walking visual lexicon for a lot of animals, right? Yeah, and some of these images that you see, some of them make sense in a way to us as modern viewers. So you might see a lion standing amidst, you know, other animals and looking very kingly. And that's something we can relate to. A lions are still sort of seen as kings of beasts and whatnot. But then you have other ones that are very strange, like the pelican you're saying, usually pecking its heart out, or, you know, beavers chewing its testicles off, or various other weird images that we don't understand upon first seeing.

And you also have these legendary animals that crop up. Not that the pelican ripping out its own heart isn't legendary, but dragons or basilics or unicorns. are often a big part of the way that medieval people relate to the world. Yeah, and something that I really love about dragons, for instance, is they have such an ancient history. It goes back so far to cultures outside of Europe, a lot further back in China,

but they're still a central mythical creature in our society today. They're still really popular in stories and movies and films and books. So, yeah, it's fascinating to me. me to see how the image of the dragon changes over all that time, what characteristics are attributed to it. Before I lead us down the garden path and make us talk about dragons forever, it's also important to talk about domestic animals and how medieval people really live cheek by jowl with a lot of animals in ways that we in the modern world don't. I think it would be fair to say that domestic animals are really important to existence more generally in the medieval period than they are for us now, right?

Yeah, one of the things I talk about in the book is the term fail. It means cattle, but it can just refer to any sort of livestock, usually a four-legged livestock, but most often cattle. And the word fail is where we get our word fee from, like a bank fee, F-E-E. And that's because fail also means wealth or riches in old English. And I think that really illustrates well how central and valuable these creatures. were to daily life that you would have the same term for both things. Cows crop up a whole lot. In old English, you get worse. Something I talked about a bit in my first book, the word hoard is cooerm, which is a lovely word to describe milk that is right out of the cow. So straight out of the utter milk is cooam or cow warm. And that's a word we no longer have.

And I don't think most people would know, unless they're farmers, what temperature that would be exactly. We're more familiar with fridge cold milk or something. We know what that temperature is. We can relate to that, but not cool wear. So that's just one example of how cows are so important and part of everyday life that they would end up in a temperature reference in a medical book. That's so true.

And also cows are, okay, well, oxen, more specifically. They're pretty much the equivalent of your car, right? Because peasants, for example, they're not necessarily going to have a horse. I mean, especially before the later Middle Ages when you invent the horse collar and you can suddenly begin plowing with them. Like, oxen are the things that help you till your fields, and they're the way that you move goods. And so you would just understand transport in this completely different way that is specifically linked to these animals. When we're talking about cows in particular, there is such a form of wealth in especially the early medieval period in England. In kingdoms like Northumbria, for example, it's cows.

That's the whole thing they do. It's like, oh, yeah, well, we trade leather goods and we have good milk and we eat beef a lot. And everyone's eating beef up there. But this is this kind of form of extravagant wealth that people understand on a real visceral level. And we're pretty removed from that. When we think about beef now, we're like, oh, yeah, that comes from the grocery store, you know. It's not something that comes from like the animals, cows, right? Yeah, and something that's easy to acquire now for the most part.

You get a lot of your milk from sheep back in the early medieval period. And even the material for making books, like the manuscripts, are often coming from sheepskins or goat skins, because that's less expensive than getting a cow skin. It takes a lot fewer resources to feed a sheep than it does a cow. So it's another way in that cows are up in the hierarchy of wealth a bit more than your standard sheep or goat. Okay, so we have the society that is thinking about animals a lot.

I think it's fair to say that they're thinking about animals, they're living with animals. And this is something then that finds its expression in one of my favorite types of book, which your book covers hugely, which are bestiaries, right? So can you just start us off by explaining what a bestiary is? Yeah. So bestiaries were a kind of medieval bestseller. They were very, very popular in the Middle Ages. And they were books that were collections of stories about animals.

and they often had illustrations. Some of them are very elaborate and luxurious illustrations, but they didn't have to be. And they include stories of around, generally around 100 animals or so in these. And they derive from the physiologist, which is an older text from Northern Africa, which was written in Greek.

And that text is also about animals. But bestiaries build on that original text. They add in a lot of material, other animals. They're influenced by scholars of the day and become bigger and more elaborate. So by the time you get to the Middle Ages, you've got these amazing books about animals. And they not only describe the animal's attributes and behavior, but they often apply some sort of allegory or moral to these behaviors, so particularly within a Christian context.

So what this kind of behavior means or what we can learn from this animal? which you see a lot in those. How prevalent were they in the Middle Ages? You say that they're a bestseller, which they, I think that's really fair to say, and they crop up a lot of times in libraries now. This is one of those medieval things that survives, but do they survive to us because of the rich designs that you see in them? Or do they survive because everybody loves the best dairy

and you got to get your hands on one of these guys? Well, I think part of their survival is probably due to the fact that they were luxury items, to some extent. Like the people who could afford these had to put forth a pretty substantial amount of resources for these. If you get illuminated ones, there's all kinds of expensive pigments and inks and gold leaf and things like that that might be involved. And they, of course, took many, many human hours of working to produce. So I guess in that way, they would be more likely to survive than some of the more practical everyday documents. that maybe would not be seen as something worth keeping, but I don't know if that answers your

question or not. No, it does. It absolutely does. I just think it's difficult with sources because I think that also part of the reason it survives is because the bestiaries are just delightful. Even to us for the same reason that medieval people were like, I've got a little extra cash, I'm getting a bestiary. When people are deciding what they're going to burn from an old library, they're like,

oh, keep this one. I like that. Yeah. I think the stories about animals, you know? It's true. I think the material really, I mean, even if you don't understand every aspect of every story when you're looking at it, they're just so intriguing that I think even if you aren't aware of all the stories behind each animal, even if you can't read whatever language it's in, they really inspire your imagination and would make you want to copy it and share it with other people. So I suppose, do you have a way of considering what the purpose of these are? There's the entertainment aspect. and to surprise and delight your other wealthy friends and say,

ooh, look at my very cool bestiary. But you have all these stories about animals, I suppose. Do they have a real purpose for being? Yeah. So in old English, the word sheoft is a word for creation. There's not really an old English word for creature, and there's not really a word for nature, as in trees, plants, animals, what we think of as nature.

It's not a word for that. There's just cha'oft. And Shayoft is everything that was created. by God. So it includes animals and plants. It includes rocks and the sun and human beings and even mythical creatures like dragons and phoenixes and whatnot. So all of everything is Shiaft and people in the early medieval period would sort of look to Sheaft to understand themselves more deeply because they're all a part of it. And I think that that is also the purpose of these best series in a way is we can learn more about ourselves by understanding these different stories,

looking at how these different qualities play out, seeing how people fit into the world by looking at the animal world, if that makes sense. Yeah, so your place within creation is much like that of the animals, and we all have this kind of part to play as creations of God, I suppose. All right, well, so having said that, are there any kind of very specifically popular animals that you're just going to be guaranteed to find in the bestiaries? Is there like you know that you're absolutely going to have a dragon, you know that you're going to have a pelican? Are there animals that you expect to see if you pop open a bestiary? Yeah, well, I'd say that for sure lions show up quite a bit.

They're usually the first animal that appears because they're considered the king of beasts. And they're often aligned with Christ in some way. Some things haven't changed. We still have Aslan, for instance. So you'd expect to see something like that. There's other animals like the eagle is considered the king of the birds. Often that animal would appear as well. I've seen so many vestry whales, which are amazing.

And they repeat their illustrations quite a lot. Like they have the same story retold in these illustrations, which for the whale is quite a fun one. And I think elephants, elephants are also appearing all the time. And particularly the elephant and castle image appears a lot where you have an elephant with a little tower on top with soldiers in it. So, you know, are fighting from a top of an elephant. Generally, they don't fit very well in the picture because it's hard to draw an elephant. and a tower on top and then people on top and then fit that into your little space in the manuscript. So this can be quite fun to look at.

All right. Well, I have to stop you now and ask you what the whale story is then. Yeah. Yeah. So the whale. The whale is a creature that is aligned with the devil. So the whale pretends to be an island. This maybe even has trees and plants growing on it.

If it's been just at the surface for a long enough period of time, it's starting to look more like the seashore or something. And sailors will see this thing that they think is an island and park their boats there, get out, build a campfire, settle down to rest. And then at that point, the whale dives down beneath the waves and they all drown. So this story is meant to make you think about not being deceived by Satan. seeing this promising, tempting-looking thing and then going towards it and then that resulting in being brought down to hell. So there's a lot of images and best theories of these sailors camped out on top of a whale with a campfire. And it's just amazing to see how that image is copied again and again and again. Another story about the whale that isn't illustrated quite as much

is the island one, is that the whale has a kind of breath that comes from its mouth and tempts the fish into it because it smells so wonderful and so tempting. So all the little fish go into the mouth and, of course, meet their doom. And that is, again, a warning to not be deceived by the devil's words and, you know, go to your doom. You've presaged what I was going to ask you because one of the big things that we get to in bestiaries is that the animals a lot of time are they're all here to give us a moral lesson right they have personality characteristics and there are these ways of thinking about them that have obviously really died out because I think the number one way we would think about whales now as in they're good and they're gentle and

orcas and yachts notwithstanding but you know we tend to think of whales as these really wonderful gentle giants right but like one of the ones I was really struck by as you refer in the book to being long-sided like the industrious ant, which I really love. Ants are still industrious and they're hardworking. You know, like we have the fable of the grasshopper and the ant and that kind of a thing. But I suppose what are some of the more surprising animal traits that medieval people give that are kind of striking in comparison to our own ideas about animals? Yeah. Well, I think the panther is quite surprising. That's one that is actually very closely related to the whale, weirdly. In old English, there's the panther poem and the

whale poem appear side by side in the same manuscript. So clearly the scriber, whoever was compiling it, thought these two animals go together quite nicely. And the panther in pagan times was seen and sort of negative in the same way that the whale was in that the panther had sort of this charismatic charm that drew animals to it who had then become its prey. But with Christianity, it caught a bit of a makeover where suddenly, oh, no, the panther's actually representative of Christ, not of the devil. So Christ is also charismatic and draws faithful to him. So you can see how that story would work maybe. And the panther also has amazing breath and a very attractive of roar, which makes animals come to him. So he's the friendliest of animals. In best

here, as you see, the panther surrounded by all the other types of animals, except for one, which is the dragon, or sometimes it's a serpent, which is clearly representative of the devil. And that animal is the only one that's afraid of the panther. So I think that one is a particularly interesting one because you can see how pretty much the same traits exist for these two animals, but they're interpreted in very different ways. But that's interesting because it's a morality lesson in and of itself, right? Because it's not necessarily the being able to attract people in. That is the problem.

It's what you do with it afterwards. So, you know, a bit of a warning to us all, I suppose. Yeah. Do you bring everyone together in harmony or do you take them down to the bottom of the ocean where they die? We extrapolate about medieval morality in general from this. Is this just kind of another expression of their desire to tell morality stories because they're really into it? Or is this kind of a way of, I don't know, maybe trying to reach out to less literate audiences

because here's a pretty picture of an animal and they already sort of have the idea in their head that a whale is bad and a panther is good? Yeah, I think that definitely visuals that you find in a bestiary are really a great way. to reach out to people who are not necessarily literate as well. These stories are entertaining in a way that maybe a straightforward homily would not be, hearing these stories told. And also you find the imagery of these animals in churches in the forms of perhaps carving on a pew or in the stone or something like that. You might see an animal and think, oh, right, there's a story about that animal.

And that's another visual cue to think about the animals. So I think the tales about morality are, I think they're made more appealing in the fact that they come with animal stories. I suppose that it is a quite friendly way to get people in. I think, you know, if I said to an average person on the street, hey, do you want to read a medieval morality book? And it's just some sermons. They're probably going to be like, no. And if I was like, there's animals. Oh, suddenly, you know, everyone's really interested in them.

There's this kind of universal desire, I think, to get involved with the cute little guys, you know? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we've talked so far about some animals that are very straightforward in being good or evil. But it's important to remember that not all the animals in vesteries are like that. They're not all like either good or bad. And even though the serpent is so often associated with the devil and deceit and stuff like that. It's also a very wise creature. It's described as the wisest of creatures in Old English. And it can also be seen as a repentant sinner. So because the serpent can go through a little crack in the rock, it squeezes through the crack and it sheds its skin, that's seen as repenting, getting rid of your past sins and going through the gate to faith and Christ.

So it's interesting that you get a creature that seems like it's pretty evil, but can also represent a positive thing. You get that with other creatures as well, where they sort of have good and bad sides or even neutral sides as well. What's an example of a neutral animal? You know, because we've gone in on good, we've got it on that,

but who's just kind of the true neutral of the animal world? I'm trying to think. I guess it's not necessarily neutral, but it can be seen in so many different ways. Like the eagle, for instance, can be seen as representative of Christ in that the eagle goes all the way up to the sun,

is very close to the sun, to God, and then plunges down, down, down into the water, which is sometimes looked at as being the harrowing of hell, which in the Middle Ages is more familiar, a story in the medieval period than it is to Christians now, but it's when Christ went down to hell and released of the people there that had the misfortune to be born before Christianity was a thing,

and released the good people. So you have that, but you could interpret the same fall of the eagle as the fall of Adam and Eve and sort of mankind. And so it's not neutral so much, but it could be interpreted both good and bad. So it's hard to say what category that animal would go into. I guess that's really useful, though. It just depends on it. Wait, quick, which moral lesson am I trying to give today? And then you can just be like, ah, yes.

and this is a lot like the eagle. And, you know, I can really see extrapolating from that, you know, as a useful thing for people who are trying to write sermons and they want to bring in something that is going to get the crowd excited. Or if you're a really wealthy person and you have a best area and you're trying to give your child a talking to, you can bring the eagle up and it's just, and you're ready to go. You know, it doesn't matter, which I guess. Yeah. The elephant is kind of neutral in a way because the elephant generally represents just humanity. in a way. It's brought down by the serpent. That's one of the ways of which it's destroyed as the serpent wraps itself around its legs. So even though it's big and powerful, it can be brought down by

the devil. But it's not really seen as being particularly good or bad. It's just as powerful animal that can be affected by other aspects of the world. So it's kind of a real every man, kind of animal. Yeah, every man, every elephant. Yeah. Well, we've already touched on a few of the animals that are in bestiaries that aren't real, right? So, you know, dragons spring to mind. And, you know, obviously medieval people have a real fascination with what we would call fantasy. But they also have a lot of kinds of fantastical creatures that you and I are less familiar with now. You know, like if we say dragon, everyone says, yep, dragon, I've got that. But what are some examples of the more rare medieval fantastical beasts that show up?

Yeah. Well, my area of interest is specifically Old English. So Old English animals is the early medieval period. And some of those creatures are not necessarily in best theories later on. But one that I like to talk about is the NICOR. We don't really know what the NICOR is. It appears in a couple different old English poems, including Beowulf, most famous Old English poem. And it's always just described as being this kind of scary thing that lives in the water that you want to stay away from.

But there's not really any descriptive features about it. There aren't very many illustrations in Old English manuscripts compared to some of like the later medieval stuff anyway, but it's not even described in words, really, what this thing looks like. And we have some creatures that pop up in folklore later on in Britain, like the knucker. There are knucker holes in Sussex, which are sort of maybe related to this NICOR creature. There's the Nucleavy, which is another thing. There's a Nekker that lives apparently in Dutford Creek in London. So, yeah.

Well, I was really struck by the NICOR in particular. because for me, as a modern person, this absence of a description actually makes it quite frightening. It's quite scary, this idea of the thing in the water. And well, what does that mean? It's really kind of nightmare fuel for us and now because it allows your imagination to go anywhere. But I also think it's so interesting because when we think about the English language, and we do have so many holdovers from Old English as you brilliantly show both in this in your first book as well. but there'll be these things that are just lost to us.

And I'm like, but I want to know about it. That's really scary. Please. Please. I'm begging you to creep me out. Yeah. Yeah, no. The NICOR is definitely one of those things where I want to know more, but it does

seem scarier that we don't know. It's like in horror movies when you're watching something. And before you actually see what the scary thing is, it's a lot scarier when you finally see the CG monster or something come on screen. Then you're like, oh, well, now that isn't quite as scary as I thought it was going to be. But yeah, there's something about not knowing, just seeing the sort of aftermath of its attack, blood in the water, which is terrifying. It's really scary. I got to hand it to these guys more than a thousand years later and they're still freaking me out. Yeah, I'm quite interested always in medieval best areas in general.

You know, you get a lot of these fantastical beasts that live far away. So, you know, we have the elephant who everyone's like, oh, yes, elephants. You know, that's a guy who exists. But then there's also the nicor. They're like, you know, another guy. Or the way that they'll talk about how there are fantastic monsters in Asia or in Africa. And, you know, in the same way that they'll say, oh, yeah, there's elephants and they live in Africa. They'll be like, and there's unicorns and they live in Africa.

That's like a really common refrain that we get. So does this express something about the way that medieval Europeans sometimes feel about the fantastic possibilities of the world beyond Europe? Yeah, it's always a question of like, did. people really believe that these things existed? I don't know. Or was it more that they were telling the story and they thought something like it might have existed, but maybe not exactly. But certainly, yeah, there's all these tales about things that are in India or Ethiopia usually. And often the two places are equated. Like, they're the same thing. And mysterious creatures that live there. One of the things I find really interesting, actually, is when you have mysterious creatures like the NICOR that sort of just live nearby, they aren't far away.

And Beowulf, they live essentially in a sort of Sweden area that's not that far off. And you also get things like the Hale hundings. Is it kindosephalos or sanocephalus? I always forget how it's pronounced. The dog-headed men. Yeah, synocephalus is what I would say. Because I think of like canis lupus, so yeah, synocephalus is what I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. Those are seen as being in far off places like Africa, but also there's sort of evidence that people were thinking of them living in northern Europe as well, which I talk about a little bit in my book.

And so even some of the weirder ones are not necessarily far away. Well, yeah, I was kind of struck by that. You know, it was one of the things that is happening like with the Nicor or with the whale is that in a way water. is almost the stand-in for the far away where it's like, well, I don't know what's going on down there, man. Yeah. And it's still kind of true today. If you're thinking of places on the globe that are still unknown to people, it's the really deep down parts of the ocean that we can't access. So it makes sense that that would be a lot where some of these creatures would hang out would be in those places. And I guess that's something that strikes me. So I'm frightened of the, you know, sidebar about my personal life. I'm frightened of those anglerfish that live down in deep water. And I'm

frightened of those anglerfish in the first place because I don't like their ways. I just don't like them generally. But they're also huge. It's like, someone was like, oh, by the way, do you know how big they are? And I was like, why have you told me this? And I like ascribe a kind of morality to them in the same way that medieval people are like, oh, yes, the whale. Oh, that dastardly angler fish with its little light. Like, I'm, okay, I'm scared it's going to come bite me. So it's funny because on the one hand, you can be like, oh, why are medieval people like this in ways that they are about animals? But I'm doing it like right now. I'm scared of that guy in the water and I think he's up to no good. And I feel it's really important to tell people about this.

Yeah. No, definitely. And people are afraid of things like fighters, even though most fighters that you encounter, at least in the UK or North America, are not going to kill you. They're probably going to be all right. But people are still afraid of them and they think about them as being tricksy and deceitful in that way that they leave their webs to catch their prey and all that. And again, they're just being spiders. There's spiders being spiders. And we just feel drawn to characterize that with some sort of human motivation. Like, oh, yes, they're trying to trick these innocent flies to their doom and whatnot. One of the things that I really like about looking at Bastieri's and what I've really enjoyed about your books,

and I also love about looking at, for example, Map of Mundis, is the fun little pictures of animals that you get in these things. Like the elephants that have horns and giant trunks shaped like warhorns or things like the huge stale that's hanging out in the margin of a manuscript, stuff like this. So I just wanted to note, do you have a kind of favorite animal illustration of your own? I don't know.

I mean, I think the blemys are quite fun. They're these creatures that don't have heads. They have faces on their chests. And I always think those are interesting. And the skypods as well, the ones that have the feet that sort of goes up over their head like an umbrella. There's some really interesting ones that you see on maps and stuff like that. Yeah, I always go looking for the blemae and the skia pods on Map of Mondes. I'm like, where are they at?

I know they're in here. But I think that's a really kind of fun thing because there is this direct connection, I think, about the joy of those kind of of like little animal doodles that you see from medieval people as much as us, you know. And I'm an inveterate doodler of snails. Like the thing I doodle is I draw snails. So whenever, you know, I see them in medieval manuscripts. I'm like, ha ha, they're just like me. Do you think that this is kind of down to just a human and innate interest in animals?

Like, you know, I think bestiaries are this really incredible and unique medieval thing because they're like, oh, well, we're going to collect all the ways that we feel about animals and we're going to give them morals and we're going to share this with the world. But there seems to be this sort of universalism at the same time that we can really kind of feel ourselves connected to. Yeah. I mean, in so many ways, they're similar to fairy tales, which granted that fairy tales aren't always about animals, but a lot of them involve animals in some way and fables. You get it a lot in children's stories, but it also continues. It is an interest in how animals would act and behave and what that might signify even when you're an adult. It shows up. Shows up in news articles about, you know, foxes in London that have somehow gotten by living in the shard for months or, you know, I don't know, are mugging pedestrians or things like that.

And again, it's just foxes dealing with their urban environment that they're living in now. but we'd like to tell stories about them that make them seem more human in a way. Well, do you think that this has, just to kind of bring us to the end, do you think that this is part of what motivated you to write the deer horde? Is there inside you a calling to tell the stories of the little guys? Was this like a logical next place for you to go? Or was it just something where you were like, hey, this is for me. I'm going to tell the animal story this time. Oh, yeah. I had the idea for this book sort of before I was writing the word hoard as well. It's been something that's interesting to me for a while, basically, when I first came across images from bestiaries as a graduate student, I thought these are amazing. I've always been an animal lover. So seeing these animal illustrations and medieval texts was just so exciting. And then I was kind of disappointed when I realized that there weren't any bestiaries that were from my period of study specifically. And so that made me think, well, there are definitely animals in old English text. So what stories can we tell about them? And how do they relate to the stories

that came before and after? So yeah, I was very keen to write this book and to learn more about these animals in their backgrounds. Well, I guess I'm going to ask you one last question, because I think as an animal lover, it would be absolutely remissive me not to ask you, do you have a favorite animal? medieval, actual. I'll let you have anything here. Well, my favorite best deery animal is probably the whale. I just find that story of the fake island really fascinating. I really love it. But yeah, I love cats the most. I have a cat. I love cats. The word in old English for cat is just cat, which is not that exciting. In old English, there isn't a lot written about cats at all. so they don't feature in my book.

But there are some really interesting big cats like the lion and the panther. So you have that at least. Well, I cannot recommend strongly enough that everyone go out and get your hands on a copy of the deer hoard. I learned a lot about Old English, which is a subject that I always need brushing up on. But also, it's just such a delight, as has been talking to you today, Hana. So thank you so much for coming along. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much once again to Hana for joining me, and thank you all for listening.

This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit, and if you like what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. My co-host Matt Lewis will retake the Gone Medieval Throne on Friday, and as always, I'll see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.