Guess that Medieval Beast 6

         For those of you who are just joining us, feel free to get caught up with prior episodes of everyone’s favorite game: Guess that Medieval Beast 1; 2; 3; 4; and 5.

        Now here’s number 6, another adorable medieval illustration for you to identify.  This one comes from a martyrology made in France between 1250-1290.  You can see that the illuminator was a skilled artist who put excellent craftsmanship into the work: detailed border, intricate background, smatterings of gold leaf, and the fine details depicting our mystery beast itself.  It’s furry, from the charming tuft on its head, down its hairy spinal crest, to the feathery tip of its delightfully long, sinuous tail.  It’s got large expressive eyes, cute yoda-like ears, and six legs.  It’s also blue.  It’s hard to tell how big it’s meant to be since it appears to dwarf the trees between which it lies.  So, what furry, blue, six-legged, long-tailed, tree-sized creatures do you know of?  Make your guess as to what this thing could be!

        Scorpion!  Yes, this is a scorpion, even though the artist doesn’t seem to have gotten a single thing right about it.  In fact, scorpions are another of those creatures that is depicted in astonishing variety by medieval artists.  Of course there are no scorpions in northern Europe, including France, so the artists had probably never actually seen a scorpion, but still...  Scorpions appear in bestiaries, but they are also quite common in Books of Hours because of Scorpio’s role in the zodiac.  So quite a few medieval artists found themselves having to make a picture of this creature they’d never seen.

        In these sample scorpions I’ve chosen for you today we have everything from 4 to vaguely unnumbered legs, tails that are long or super short and stubby, ears more often than not…  Unlike many bestiary creatures that have a common iconography even when they aren’t very accurate, with these scorpions there’s quite a lot of variety in which aspects artists have managed to depict.  The second picture gets at the piercing sting on the tail, the third has the tail arched up in a somewhat scorpion-like 

way, and the fourth has properly pincerlike claws.

        However, only the final picture is really on the right track with 8 legs plus claws, a curved tail with a stinger at the tip, a suggestion of segmentation down the tail, and not a trace of ears, fur, or other mammalian traits.  This one comes from a coat of arms recorded in a sixteenth century book of heraldry, and I wonder whether the arms belonged to a knight who had been on crusade or otherwise encountered actual scorpions at some point, who therefore knew what he wanted his charge to look like.  Personally, however, I find the less realistic scorpions positively charming, especially the first and third.  They might even make delightful pets.

[Pictures: Scorpio, illumination from Martyrologe-Obituaire de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1250-1290 (Image from Bibliotheque nationale de France);

Scorpion, illumination from bestiary, 1226-1250 (Image from Bodleian Libraries);

Scorpions, illustration from bestiary, 1236-1250 (Image from British Library);

Scorpio, illustration from Mirabilia Mundi, after 1277 (Image from The J. Paul Getty Museum);

Scorpion, coat of arms from Wappenbuch by Conrad Grünenberg, 1483 (Image from Bayerische StaatsBibliothek).]