The beauty of medieval bestiaries

How to hunt an elephant. Find a tree and saw most of the way through it without felling it. Sooner or later an unwary elephant is bound to lean up against it. Down comes the tree and down comes the elephant, which, since it has no joints in its legs, will be unable to get up again. Dispatch your elephant with, um, dispatch, lest the herd arrives in answer to its plangent call. In that case, the youngest of them, being lower to the ground, will be able to lift their fallen comrade back on its feet.

In her second foray into the Old English lexicon and mindset (The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English came out two years ago), Hana Videen sets out to explore a world where animals hold sway. (A ‘deor’ is the Old English word for any animal and, opening this volume, you are as likely to be confronted by a spider, a dragon, a dog-headed man or a tusked woman as by anything so  commonplace as a ‘deer’.) These living, breathing sources of knowledge, enchantment and instruction provided the feedstock for countless bestiaries, which flooded the medieval book market for a good 300 years. No earlier Old English bestiary survives. Still, there’s lore enough in ‘tales, poems and medical texts, riddles and travel logs, sermons and saints’ lives’ to justify Videen’s putting a synthetic one together from the available material.

Though it helps to know a bit of German, Old English is a captivating tongue. What’s not to love about a language that collides nouns in kennings like gange-wæfre (walker-weaver) and wæfer-gange (weaver-walker) to name a spider? (At least we’ve retained the gærs-hoppa (grasshopper). Where it becomes arduous is in its religious texts, which cannot leave anything alone but must constantly be making things act as metaphors for other things.