Guess that Medieval Beast 7

         This is a beast that is not featured in the true bestiaries, but does regularly show up in the various encyclopedias of natural history that are closely related.  This particular depiction comes from the hand of an artist we’ve seen before in Medieval Beast Number 2.  It’s a copy made around 1450-1500 of Der Naturen Bloeme, which was originally written about two centuries earlier, and it has an attractive blending of color and rich gold background.  This creature clearly lives in the water, where it has the tusks and trunk of an elephant, the tail of, perhaps, a lizard, dorsal and pelvic fins of a fish, and hind feet with cloven hoofs like a goat.  Like many of this artist’s subjects, it looks fairly friendly and I find it charming…  But what do you suppose it could possibly be?

        Hippopotamus!  Our word hippopotamus is simply the Greek word for “river horse,” so it’s obviously the same thing as what the medieval writers call equs fluvius (or various spelling variations), which is “river horse” in Latin.  However, the medieval natural historians also list a separate beast which they call the yphotamus (or various spelling variations), which is obviously derived from the Greek word hippopotamus.  I’m not sure in what way these two beasts are differentiated, and unfortunately I have neither the time nor the Latin to figure it out, but for our purposes of looking at how medieval artists depicted animals, I’m counting them both as hippos.

        The depictions of hippos take three primary directions.  First is the one with which we opened, which combines fish, elephant, and perhaps a cow.  You can sympathize with where each of those elements might have come from as someone tried to describe an animal almost as big as an elephant, with tusks, too, that lives in the water like a fish…  The second standard version is used most often for the “river horse”, and that’s a very literal-minded horse-like beast standing in the water.  The second illustration today comes from the same work as the first, but the first is the yphotamus, while the second is the equus fluvius.  I’ve also included a water horse from an Arabic bestiary that’s almost purely equine.

        The third direction some artists go is more wildly imaginative.  Our fourth illustration has a body that’s really not bad, and the tusks aren’t unreasonable, either.  But then why on earth does it have a beak?  The clue may be in the next illustration, which, although it is an ypotamus, is clearly very horse-inspired.  It, too, has a beak, however, and I wonder whether the artist might have been influenced by the hippogriff.  The name is similar enough to suggest that the beasts might be related, and the hippogriff has a beak from its griffin half.  As for my final illustration today, it’s just plain nuts.  Clearly the thing this artist was most inspired by was the fact that hippos sometimes attack and overturn boats, so this fish-tailed monster is attacking a boat with its long, clawed monster arms and a gleefully vindictive grin.

        It really is fun to imagine how we might visualize creatures we’d never seen if we had only these sorts of descriptions to guide us.

[Pictures: Iphotamus, illumination from Der Naturen Bloeme (The Flower of Nature) by Jacob van Maerlant, c 1450-1500;

Equus fluminis, illumination from Der Naturen Bloeme by Maerlant, c 1450-1500 (Images from Koninklijke Bibliotheek);

Faras al-Ma (Water Horse), illumination from Manafi’ al-hayawan by Ibn Bakhtishu, 1300-1330 (Image from Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art);

Ypothamus, illumination from Liber de natura rerum, 1280 (Image from Bibliotheque municipale de Valenciennes);

Ypotamus, illustration printed by Johan Prüss in Ortis sanitatus, 1499 (Image from Boston Public Library);

Equs fluvius, illustration from Der naturen bloeme, 1300-1325 (Image from British Library).]