Oswald von Wolkenstein's Animals and Animal Symbolism

Abstract

As Heinrich Heine once remarked in his Harzreise, asses are here to serve as comparisons for people. Although this was an astute observation in the nineteenth century, it had been common knowledge in the Middle Ages that all God's furred and feathered creatures had fulfilled this very purpose.1 Such had been even before the dawn of our era; for edifying little animals had migrated from India to the West, in literature at least, not only to entertain but also to instruct and improve those people who listened to the fables told about them. These fables, attributed mostly to the slave Aesop, survived throughout the Middle Ages.2 However, since they championed the weak against the strong, they were not popular at the courts, where literature catered more to a Herrenmoral; and it was only during the period of humanism and Reformation that the fables came into their own.3 Of far greater importance for the medieval mentality than the somewhat personified but otherwise natural animals of the fables were the fabulous creatures that either prefigured the birth and life of Christ or else illustrated the sins and foibles of mankind. These beasts, best described during the second century in Alexandria by a certain Physiologus, furnished subject matter for the bestiaries and dominated zoological thinking throughout the Middle Ages.4 In addition to fabulous creatures such as the phoenix and unicorn, these bestiaries contained actual but exotic animals such as the lion, leopard, and crocodile, which became in public fancy, even though few Europeans had ever seen one. Some of them, such as the lion and leopard, were mentioned in the Bible and also appeared in heraldry. One might say of the fabulous creatures in the bestiaries what Arnold Schirokauer said of the animals in the fables, namely, that they were true or real only in so far as they symbolized an eternal truth.5