Figure 5.6
Poseidon, standing on a shell chariot, being drawn through the sea by hippocamps.
Hippocamps existed almost exclusively in art, where they often were depicted as steeds for mythological beings associated with the sea (figure 5.6). They appeared as an artistic motif at around the same time as the emergence of artwork that featured a similar-looking real-world fish: the spiral-tailed, horse-headed sea horse.36 Indeed, these real and mythological creatures reflect each other so well that sea horses are classified as members of the genus Hippocampus, giving these delicate little fish the unlikely designation “horse sea monster.” Recursively, the fantastical hippocamps may have been inspired by the fish—although the origin of the monster is unclear. Archaeologist Katharine Shepard reflected that interpreting the significance of the hippocamp is a “difficult problem, since he plays no part in any mythological tale”:
Some have thought that the horse was symbolic of the waves of the sea. Poseidon riding a hippocamp or Poseidon in a chariot drawn by hippocamps would then represent Poseidon borne by the waves. Another idea is that the monster is intended as a likeness of a real sea-horse, but our knowledge of sea-horses does not justify this theory. Probably the hippocamp is a purely fantastic monster, which served sometimes as a symbol of the sea. Often the animal seems merely to be used for decorative purposes.37
How did a decorative creature break free from the realm of art to take a central place in cryptozoology? Let’s trace that strange transformation.
The Hippocamp Spreads Across Europe
The hippocamp motif was adopted by the Romans and eventually diffused across Europe. The Romans themselves may have carried it to England and Scotland (figure 5.7). They invaded Britain in 43 C.E. and ruled much of the island for almost four centuries. The cultural legacy of the Roman presence in Britain persisted long after the end of Roman rule. This influence is a plausible source of hippocamps found (for example) in Aberlemno, Scotland, where they add a decorative flourish to ninth-century Pictish relief sculpture.38
Figure 5.7 A section of the mosaic floor from the Roman Baths in Bath, England, ca. fourth century C.E. (Photograph by Andrew Dunn, via Wikimedia Commons. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)
The enduring popularity of classical literature helped carry the concept of the hippocamp into the Middle Ages and beyond. For example, the Roman poet Virgil wrote that the mythological Proteus
… rides o’er
The sea, drawn by strange creatures, horse before
And fish behind.39
Virgil was read everywhere in Christian Europe. (Likewise, the mosaics, paintings, and sculptures of antiquity were widely admired and copied long after the fall of the Roman Empire.)
An immensely popular Greek text called the Physiologus was instrumental in transmitting the concept of the hippocamp. Composed in Alexandria, Egypt, between the second and fourth centuries,40 the Physiologus is a collection of legends about interesting and exotic animals from the fox to the unicorn—but it is not a work of natural history. The unknown compiler intended the Physiologus to be read for moral instruction. Drawing material from the legends and natural history of classical antiquity, the Physiologus reconceived each creature in the service of overt Christian allegory.41 Appearing alongside such old favorites as the centaur, siren, and phoenix, the hippocamp (Hydrippus) became a symbol for Moses:
There is also a beast called the Hydrippus. The front part of his body resembles a horse, but from the haunch backwards he has the shape of a fish. He swims in the sea, and is the leader of all fishes. But in the Eastern parts of the earth there is a gold-coloured fish whose body is all bright and burnished, and it never leaves its home. When the fish of the sea have met together and gathered themselves into flocks, they go in search of the Hydrippus; and, when they have found him, he turns himself towards the East, and they all follow him … and they draw near to the golden fish, the Hydrippus leading them. And, when the Hydrippus and all the fish are arrived, they greet the golden fish as their King…. The Hydrippus signifies Moses, the first of the prophets.42
The Greek Physiologus was soon translated into Ethiopian, Armenian, Syrian, Arabic, and Latin. From there, the evolution of the book got more complicated. (Translator Michael Curley dryly understates, “The influence of Physiologus on the literature and art of the later Middle Ages is too long a story to be fully recounted here.”)43 For our purposes, it’s enough to note that a rich and varied ecosystem of versions and adaptations emerged, with hand-drawn manuscripts in many languages spreading throughout Europe.
Figure 5.8 A hippocamp depicted in the Ashmole Bestiary, ca. 1225–1250. (MS. Bodl. 764, fol. 106r; reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford)
“A major watershed in the later history of Physiologus,” Curley continues, “is its incorporation into the encyclopedias and natural-historical compendia of the late Middle Ages.” In particular, the influential Etymologies (ca. 623) of the archbishop and scholar Isidore of Seville drew heavily on the legends collected in the Physiologus, while dropping most of the Christian allegorical content. In Isidore’s treatment, the hippocamp is rendered down from a Moses figure to an ordinary sea creature. Smack dab between whales and dolphins is the entry for “Sea-horses (equus marinus), because they are horses (equus) in their front part and then turn into fish.”44 This demythologized version brought the fantastical hippocamp a step closer to its modern reinvention as a cryptid.
The tradition of compiling animal legends continued in a genre of twelfth- and thirteenth-century books referred to generically as the “bestiary” (book of beasts). Larger collections than the Physiologus, they contain three times the content of the earlier books. Bestiaries include exotic monsters, but the central passages feature ordinary creatures made to serve Christian allegory. “For what is the good of a lesson that can only be taught by hearsay,” asks translator Richard Barber, “relating to a beast that no one has ever seen in the flesh? The longest sermons are devoted to topics drawn from everyday life: the ant and the bee display the virtues of humility, obedience and industry, the viper warns against the sin of adultery.”45
Bestiaries were hand-copied (and creatively improvised) from previous bestiaries, and they varied enormously. Some describe the hippocamp; in others, the hippocamp appears as an illustration. The lavishly gold-leafed Ashmole Bestiary, for example, features an illustration of the hippocamp in its general discussion of fishes (figure 5.8).
The Hippocamp in Nordic Culture
The modern sea serpent legend was born out of Nordic culture, with its origin in medieval Iceland and its florescence in Enlightenment Norway.
THE ICELANDIC HROSSHVALR By the twelfth century, the Norse society of Iceland had adopted a belief in a creature called the hrosshvalr (horse whale), which was depicted as an unmistakable hippocamp. We will see that this innovation—the Nordic reimagining of the Greek hippocamp as a maned, horse-headed “real” marine monster—is a key to solving the modern mystery of the Great Sea Serpent.
As a maritime culture, the Norse naturally told tales of a great many sea monsters—including a huge, kraken-like creature called the hafgufa—but even among these teeming monstrosities, the hrosshvalr was considered especially savage. It was described in a twelfth-century text called The King’s Mirror (Konungs Skuggsjá), which was almost certainly intended to instruct the son of a Norwegian king.46 Along with lessons in statesmanship and trade, The King’s Mirror taught the unknown prince about useful species of whales and warned him of the dangerous monsters of the sea:
There are certain varieties that are fierce and savage towards men and are constantly seeking to destroy them at every chance. One of these is called hrosshvalr, and another raudkembingr. They are very voracious and malicious and never grow tired of slaying men. They roam about in all the seas looking for ships, and when they find one they leap up, for in that way they are able to sink and destroy it the more quickly. Th
ese fishes are unfit for human food; being the natural enemies of mankind, they are, in fact, loathsome.
Scholars have tended to identify these creatures as walruses or sea lions, although The King’s Mirror specifies that the hrosshvalr and raudkembingr grow to “thirty or forty ells in length,” or about 67 to 90 feet. It’s probable that the words hrosshvalr (horse + whale) and “walrus” (whale + horse) are etymologically related. (J. R. R. Tolkien, a philologist and the author of The Lord of the Rings, struggled with the etymology of the term “walrus” for the Oxford English Dictionary during his tenure with the dictionary in 1919 and 1920.)47 It is possible that hrosshvalr started out as a word for “walrus” and was later applied to a fanciful monster. Nonetheless, whatever the original meaning of “horse-whale,” the hrosshvalr took on a familiar form, a form that it keeps to this day: when Flemish mapmaker Abraham Ortelius depicted the hrosshvalr, he drew the creature as a classical hippocamp (figure 5.9).
Figure 5.9 The hrosshvalr depicted by Abraham Ortelius on his map of Iceland, published in 1585.
Figure 5.10
A life-like interpretation of a hrosshvalr on an Icelandic stamp issued in March 2009. (Illustration by Jón Baldur Hlíðberg; image courtesy of Iceland Post)
Ortelius made historic contributions to cartography, creating the first modern atlas in 1570 (and later, incidentally, proposing continental drift). His depiction of the hippocamp as a living monster also marked a critical milestone in the formulation of the sea serpent. Ortelius lavishly populated his maps with monsters, many borrowed from the work of Olaus Magnus or harkening back to the curly-tailed ketos. The map of Iceland that Ortelius published in 1585 teems with ferocious beasts, including our friend the hrosshvalr. He described it as “sea horse, with manes hanging down from its neck like a horse. It often causes great scare to fishermen.” In his illustration, the hippocamp has long webbed toes and a finny frill on the back of its horse-like forelimbs—a form that it often takes in heraldry. (In other heraldic uses, the hippocamp may have front flippers instead of webbed feet.) The hrosshvalr still has essentially this shape, although now filtered through the sensibilities of modern fantasy art. It is depicted, for example, as a maned, flippered, hippocamp-like animal on a stamp issued by the Icelandic government in 2009 (figure 5.10).
THE MIDGARD SERPENT The hippocamp-inspired hrosshvalr of medieval Iceland is not the only relevant source for the Great Sea Serpent. We must also consider a vast entity from Norse mythology called Jörmungandr: the World Serpent or Midgard Serpent. Jörmungandr was a child of the Norse god Loki. Cast down into the watery abyss by Odin, the ruler of the gods, Jörmungandr grew into a serpent so large that his body stretched around Earth. According to an older story recorded in the medieval Norse Prose Edda, the god Thor successfully fished for Jörmungandr using a huge hook and an ox’s head for bait (figure 5.11).
Figure 5.11
Jörmungandr, the World Serpent or Midgard Serpent, takes the ox’s head bait dangled by the Norse thunder god, Thor. (Redrawn from a seventeenth-century Icelandic manuscript)
When the modern sea serpent legend eventually made its way into academic debates (starting in the 1750s with a treatment written by Bishop Erich Pontoppidan of Norway), scholars were quick to suggest that it could be the Jörmungandr myth repackaged for a scientific age. Discussing the tale of Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent, Bishop Thomas Percy noted in 1770, “We see plainly in the … fable the origin of those vulgar opinions entertained in the north, and which Pontoppidan has recorded concerning the craken and that monstrous serpent described in his History of Norway.”48 A century later, this view was still invoked as an explanation for the sea serpent. In 1869, The New American Cyclopedia held:
It is important to observe that the idea of a sea serpent certainly originated in northern Europe, and was clearly mythological in its first conception. The Midgard serpent, offspring of Loki, which girds the world in its folds and inhabits the deep ocean till the “twilight of the gods,” when it and Thor will kill each other, plays a conspicuous part in the Edda; and the gradual degradation of the idea from mythology to natural history in its native seats may be traced in Olaus Magnus and the later sagas, till the Latin of Pontoppidan gave it currency in Europe with the natural additions of popular fancy.49
Is this view correct? Is the modern sea serpent descended from Jörmungandr? It is probably not a coincidence that a culture with a stupendously large mythological sea serpent later invented a stupendously large cryptozoological sea serpent, but the exact relationship is not entirely clear. (As early as 1822, attempts were made to turn the argument on its head: perhaps a species of serpentine cryptid gave rise to the Norse myth, rather than the other way around.50 As A. C. Oudemans elaborated, “All fables have their foundation in facts, or in objects of nature, and it is plausible that the Norwegians had met with the sea-serpent before the fable of Thor’s great Serpent was inserted into their Eddas.”)51
It is certainly plausible, even likely, that the Jörmungandr myth could be among the roots of the Norwegian sea serpent legend. In turn, the Midgard Serpent can be plausibly interpreted as a regional iteration of primordial dragon myths, such as the Babylonian Tiamat and the biblical Leviathan. It’s worth noting that our sources for the Midgard Serpent and other Norse myths date from well into the Christianization of the Nordic countries. Written by a Christian, The Prose Edda begins with the words, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth and all those things which are in them; and last of all, two of human kind, Adam and Eve, from whom the races are descended.”52
Albertus Magnus
Whatever the true source and impact of the Jörmungandr myth, belief in the hippocamp continued to spread and develop. Some of Europe’s greatest intellectual lights took up the topic of the mer-horse, including the natural philosopher Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great).
Born at the dawn of the thirteenth century, Albertus worked in a twilit age of both deep superstition and remarkable advances (such as windmills, ship rudders, and, at the end of his life, papermaking in Italy). Albertus started off slowly. “For the first thirty years of his life he appeared remarkably dull and stupid,” according to Charles Mackay.53 He became a Dominican friar and eventually a bishop—and, along the way, one of the medieval world’s most celebrated scholars, remembered today as a towering prescientific thinker.54 (The famed Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas was a student of Albertus Magnus.)
Albertus Magnus is best known for his encyclopedic De animalibus, which built on the work of Aristotle (with material from other authorities, including insights from Albertus himself). Among the menagerie of real aquatic animals and mythical marine monsters is our old friend the hippocamp, described as a predator, “alive” and well at the cutting edge of scholarship that would one day give rise to zoology and cryptozoology: “equus maris (Sea horse) is a marine animal whose foreportion takes the form of a horse and rear parts terminate like a fish. It is a pugnacious creature, inimical to many marine species, and its diet consists of fish. It has an abject fear of man; outside the water it is utterly helpless and dies soon after being removed from its native element.”55
Olaus Magnus
The now-familiar modern sea serpent had no existence as a cryptid during the Middle Ages. Medieval witnesses saw many other menacing monsters of the deep, including hippocamps, but not the Great Sea Serpent. On the contrary, the Great Sea Serpent turns out to be a fish story of relatively recent composition. An important milestone in its development came with the scholarship of Olaus Magnus, the archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden. For many commentators, Olaus is considered the original sea serpent author, although we’ll see that the honor does not belong only to him.
Around the time that Nicolaus Copernicus proposed his heliocentric model of the solar system, Olaus Magnus created an advanced map of the Scandinavian countries and wrote a lengthy book about the people, customs, and animals of those lands. Known in English as A Description of the Northern Peoples (1555), the book bec
ame the standard reference on Scandinavia. It also provided the final stage set for the modern sea serpent (although the curtain would not fully open for a further 200 years). By then, the Scandinavian reimagining of the Greek hippocamp as a “real” sea monster was itself a centuries-old tradition. Like Albertus Magnus before him, Olaus Magnus described this Equus marinus as a genuine, living animal: “The sea-horse may be observed fairly often between Britain and Norway. It has a horse’s head, utters a neighing sound, has cloven hoofs like a cow, and seeks its pasture as much in the sea as on land. It is seldom caught, even though it reaches the size of an ox. Lastly, its tail is bifurcated like a fish’s.”56
Olaus also presented a menagerie of other exotic sea monsters, including a “monstrous Hog” with “four feet like a Dragons, two eyes on both sides in his Loyns, and a third in his belly, inclining toward his navel.” Another seemingly unlikely creature was “a Worm of blew and gray colour, that is above 40 cubits [60 feet] long, yet is hardly so thick as the arm of a child.” Oddly enough, this worm (which he claimed to have regularly seen himself) appears to be a real animal: the thin nemertean bootlace worm (Lineus longissimus), which can grow longer than 100 feet.57
But it is to another Olaus Magnus monster that we must turn—a land-based Norwegian serpent that, Olaus said, sometimes entered the water to hunt. This has become one of the most-quoted passages in the vast sea monster literature:
Those who do their work aboard ship off the shores of Norway, either in trading or fishing, give unanimous testimony to something utterly astounding: a serpent of gigantic bulk, at least two hundred feet long, and twenty feet thick, frequents the cliffs and hollows of the seacoast near Bergen. It leaves its caves in order to devour calves, sheep, and pigs, though only during the bright summer nights, or swims through the sea to batten on octopus, lobsters and other crustaceans. It has hairs eighteen inches long hanging from its neck, sharp, black scales, and flaming-red eyes. It assaults ships, rearing itself on high like a pillar, seizes men, and devours them. It never appears without denoting some unnatural phenomenon and threatening change within the state; the deaths of princes will ensue, or they will be hounded into exile, or violent war will instantly break out.58
Abominable Science Page 23