Medieval Bestiary | Hacker News Reader

Medieval Bestiary

bestiary.ca

76 pointsrougka20 comments

https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastsource422.htm

Sailors talk some complete twaddle at the best of times (I live close to HMS Heron) but blaming a six inch fish for delays in deployment or delivery takes some neck!

I love this resource. I'll be hunting down a beast that delays IT systems deployment. Some sort of insect is indicated ...

The funny thing is small marine growths and attachments do actually have a massive impact on ship speed and efficiency.

That'll be barnacles and lack of maint. Seawater is a fluid with a mass of more than 1 Kg per 10cm^3. I have customers that worry about hull shapes etc. Increase the coeff. of friction a small amount has a massive effect. Can't remember exactly now but I think friction is proportional to the square of ... something.

The difference here is that these little beasties magically make a ship run slowly. I would bet real money that their invention was to cover up late delivery or whatever. Basically, an excuse that no land lubber of the time could possibly refute.

Two Medieval Monks were also very interested in this topic:

https://the-toast.net/2015/04/01/two-medieval-monks-invent-b...

Elephants often have interesting shapes in medieval art. In some (most?) cases it seems like the artist was likely drawing from someone else's description of the animal since they had never seen one themselves (e.g. #14, #22, #34 and more in the gallery below).

https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastgallery77.htm

I am sure some of them never saw an Elephant, but Elephants did exist in Europe. Charlemagne was famously given one. Louis IX gave Henry III one for the Tower of London which they managed to kill by feeding it too much wine.

But that a few kings in Europe were given an elephant means that very likely a live elephant was like the most precious (and rare) gift in the world.

Here is the list of beasts in case you struggle to find it like I did because the splash image just takes you to an about page: https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastalphashort.htm

You know you should rethink your site's navigation when you have to add a "Help Using This Site" page https://bestiary.ca/help.htm

I was really into this during my teenage years, inspired by early role playing games. It was super hard to find information living in a small town with a small library before the internet existed. For some beasts I never found out if the beasts were based on myths, taken from fantasy fiction or simply invented by the authors.

Can east asian beasts be included? If so, I would suggest Qilin (Chinese) or Kirin (Japanese) (yes, the one on the beer label).

I own a first edition Monster Manual (and DMG and PH).

"It does not include beasts from non-European sources unless those beasts are the basis of Bestiary, Physiologus, or other Western beast legends."

That's a shame because there is a bit of an overlap throughout history of beasties finding a new home - far away from where they originated, thanks to an enterprising traveller spreading stories in passing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qilin and keep on reading and clicking to lose a few hours!

Lynne Kelly in her book "Memory Craft" shares that the medieval bestiaries were used as a mnemonic to aid in memorizing the religious texts.

I really like how they thought that hedgehogs picked up grapes etc. with their spines to carry to their hoglets.

There's a cool little animation based on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57BTS-W_2QI

Medieval Bestiary would be a good name for a band...

I dunno man, I came to check out the comments first because I wasn't sure if it was safe to click

Bestiary, not bestiality.

The weird style - was it on purpose or were they really bad at drawing stuff?

This page displays very poorly on my iPhone (12 Pro Max). I can’t zoom out to the full width of the page, which makes it immediately very frustrating to try to browse. It looks like a very cool site! Sadly not very useful to browse on mobile for me.

It also displays very poorly on my Tablet. Which is not an electronic device but a traditional stone tablet.

Same here.

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