Lions & Tigers & Bears. Oh my!

Last week the girls were away on trips with their school and while I didn’t have the trouble filling my time in their absence Rhianna would have found gratifying, I did organise some spring-cleaning. So (some of) our book cases are now neat, clean, orderly, dusted. Sorting bookcases is a job I enjoy, but it has its downside, taking three times as long as it should because you always find some long-lost gem you just have to curl up with right there and then on the carpet, and one chapter leads to another, which leads to a quick cup of coffee to enjoy it all the more and so it goes on until the children ring the doorbell and hand you their dirty washing.

As I’ve already done a top ten reading list this week, I’ll save my spring-clean procrastination list for another day and share a behind-the-bookcase art find instead.

I found a stash of art postcards, and one particularly intrigued me. The description on the back reads:

“A huntsman stealing a tiger cub by throwing a glass ball at the tigress, which sees her reflection and mistakes it for her cub, from a Bestiary. England, probably Lincolnshire c. 1200.”

I wanted to know why a huntsman would think this apparently fanciful method a worthwhile strategy for outwitting such a ferocious prey, and we all know exactly how fierce a mother is in defence of her young. I didn’t exactly find out the answer, but here is where I got to.

A Mediaeval Bestiary is a beautifully illustrated – illuminated – catalogue of animals.

It’s through the writings of St. Ambrose that the story of the tigress and the glass ball found its way into the bestiaries of the time. Provoked by the theft of all her cubs, the tigress chases the huntsman at lightning speed. The wily hunter throws down a glass ball, and seeing herself reflected in miniature, the tigress is fooled for a crucial few seconds into thinking the ball is her cub. Disappointed, she resumes the chase, only to be fooled repeatedly by more glass balls, until the hunter reaches safety or the poor mother is exhausted. In some versions of the story, the hunter might also distract the mother by throwing down the runt of the litter, while holding fast to at least one other prize cub.

Bestiaries were not put together by the C12th equivalent of David Attenborough or Steve Irwin; the point about bestiaries was that while they collected what was known about animals at the time, the information was a mix of the fanciful and hearsay taken on trust with no reference to the actual observed behaviour of the creatures themselves. As the authors and illustrators were monks and churchmen, their main purpose was to use the apparent behaviour to exemplify a Christian trait or literally, illuminate a point of doctrine. Lions and pelicans for example, were just two of the animals whose behaviour was seen to symbolise aspects of the teachings or incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The real creatures described ranged from the everyday, such as dogs, to the more exotic like elephants, crocodiles & tigers. As their descriptions were not based on close observation, so the line between the actual creatures and the purely imaginary was blurred. Dogs and lions are described alongside stories and pictures of fabulous fish representing the Devil; the pure and innocent unicorn was identified with Christ.

Bestiaries were extremely popular reading matter in their day, with their compelling and highly coloured illustrations of dragons, griffins and hippogriffs. So it turns out, that while the scholars of the Middle Ages themselves eventually rejected the bestiaries as inadequate and misleading descriptions of the natural world they were increasingly eager to understand, the bestiary itself has actually survived and is thriving in the 21^st Century. Down the ages artists have drawn and painted their own menageries of the real and imagined eccentricities of the animal kingdom. Now, modern gamers create and inhabit their own fantasy worlds populated with beasts straight from C12th illustrated manuscripts; and J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books has brought the basilisk, the hippogriff and the enchanting song of the phoenix alive for a whole new generation of children.

(The illustrations here are from the British Museum and from the Aberdeen Bestiary.)