Some Fabulous Beasts

Abstract

MOST people have heard of dragons, mermaids, phoenixes and unicorns, and probably of griffins and basilisks. What is surprising is the number of other imaginary animals that have been written about, and largely believed in, in Europe since the Dark Ages. I have a list, by no means exhaustive compiled mainly from English references and entirely omitting immediate sources outside Europe which contains about 140 names of animals, birds, reptiles and fishes which do not exist in nature, from abath to zitiron and from avanc to ypotryll. I say names, because the number of imagined beasts is only exceeded by the multiplicity of the names that have been applied to them. Frequently one finds several names for what is apparently the same creature, and nearly as often there is doubt about whether a different name denotes a slightly different idea. A monoceros, for instance, may clearly be exactly the same as a unicorn, the two words being the Greek and Latin for 'one-horned'; and a centaur is apparently very similar to a sagittary; but on the other hand all centaurs or onocentaurs are not alike: some have four legs as well as two arms whereas others, according to illustrations, have only four limbs altogether two arms and two hind legs and very much off-balance they look. The names themselves in their English forms often sound outlandish, and of course their derivations may lead one back a good part of the way towards the origins of the animals. To take one of the most familiar of all the dragon: there was a Greek word 'dracon', meaning 'a large snake', which was adopted through Latin into English and used in bestiaries and similar works in the sense of 'snake' from the thirteenth century onwards. Meanwhile the Greek and Latin words had been used, in the Septuagint and the Vulgate, to translate a Hebrew word which may have denoted, apparently, either a desert mammal such as the jackal or a large water-creature such as a whale, shark or crocodile. Perhaps this s 273