Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going âwhat the fuck⊠what the fuckâŠâ
Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelersâ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).
So unicorns are real
behold⊠a unicorn
I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASEDÂ to find out this is, in fact, the case.
Questing Beast
- Neck of a snake
- body of a leopard
- haunches of a lion
- feet off a hart (deer)
So is it
OrâŠ.
donât forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other peopleâs mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?
these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, yâknow, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.
In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant whoâs knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?
And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs⊠so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and arenât hairy, you canât fool us, pranksters!
Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, Iâm pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or anotherÂ
It canât explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if thereâs a lot of interesting informations in it.
And itâs not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!
By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?
Well-
- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).
Hereâs a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, itâs called ŰŽÛ۱ۯۧÙâ (shirdal, âlion eagleâ). Now, itâs been the subject of some debate and itâs not confirmed, but thereâs a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as âa lion with an eagleâs headâ:
Check the âoriginâ part of the wikipedia page for âgriffinâ if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, itâs just a theory, but I think itâs super cool.
This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went âoh fuck whatâs that? some bigâŠ. lizardy thing?â and then created dragons.
Also many deagon legends are simply exaggerations of well-known living reptiles like snakes and crocodilians.a
