by C. S. Lewis
CHAPTER 7
EARTH AND HER INHABITANTS
In tenui labor.
VIRGIL
A. THE EARTH
We have already seen that all below the Moon is mutable and contingent. We have also seen that each of the celestial spheres is guided by an Intelligence. Since Earth does not move and therefore needs no guidance, it was not generally felt that an Intelligence need be assigned to her. It was left, so far as I know, for Dante to make the brilliant suggestion that she has one after all and, that this terrestrial Intelligence is none other than Fortune. Fortune, to be sure, does not steer the Earth through an orbit; she fulfils the office of an Intelligence in the mode proper to a stationary globe. God, says Dante, who gave the heavens their guides ‘so that every part communicates splendour to every other, equitably distributing light, likewise ordained a general minister and guide to worldly splendours; one who should from time to time transfer these deceptive benefits from one nation or stock to another in a fashion which no human wisdom can prevent. That is why one people rules while another grows weak.’ For this she is much abused by mortal tongues, ‘but she is blessed and never hears them. Happy among the other primal creatures, she turns her sphere and rejoices in her bliss.’1 Ordinarily Fortune has a wheel; by making it a sphere Dante emphasises the new rank he has given her.
This is the ripe fruit of the Boethian doctrine. That contingency should reign in the fallen world below the Moon is not itself a contingent fact. Since worldly splendours are deceptive, it is fit that they should circulate. The pond must be continually stirred or it will become pestilential. The angel who stirs it rejoices in this action as the heavenly spheres rejoice in theirs.
The conception that the rise and fall of empires depends not on desert, nor on any ‘trend’ in the total evolution of humanity, but simply on the irresistible rough justice of Fortune, giving all their turns, did not pass away with the Middle Ages. ‘All cannot be happy at once,’ says Thomas Browne, ‘for, because the glory of one state depends upon the ruins of another, there is a revolution and vicissitude of their greatness.’2 We shall have to return to this point when we come to the medieval view of history.
Physically considered, the Earth is a globe; all the authors of the high Middle Ages are agreed on this. In the earlier ‘Dark’ Ages, as indeed in the nineteenth century, we can find Flat-earthers. Lecky,3 whose purpose demanded some denigration of the past, has gleefully dug out of the sixth century Cosmas Indicopleustes who believed the Earth to be a flat parallelogram. But on Lecky’s own showing Cosmas wrote partly to refute, in the supposed interests of religion, a prevalent, contrary view which believed in the Antipodes. Isidore gives Earth the shape of a wheel (XIV, ii, 1). And Snorre Sturlason thinks of it as the ‘world-disc’ or heimskringla—the first word, and hence the title, of his great saga. But Snorre writes from within the Norse enclave which was almost a separate culture, rich in native genius but half cut off from the Mediterranean legacy which the rest of Europe enjoyed.
The implications of a spherical Earth were fully grasped. What we call gravitation—for the medievals ‘kindly enclyning’—was a matter of common knowledge. Vincent of Beauvais expounds it by asking what would happen if there were a hole bored through the globe of Earth so that there was a free passage from the one sky to the other, and someone dropped a stone down it. He answers that it would come to rest at the centre.4 Temperature and momentum, I understand, would lead to a different result in fact, but Vincent is clearly right in principle. Mandeville in his Voiage and Travaile teaches the same truth more ingenuously: ‘from what part of the earth that men dwell, either above or beneath, it seemeth always to them that dwell that they go more right than any other folk. And right as it seemeth to us that they be under us, right so it seemeth to them that we be under them’ (XX). The most vivid presentation is by Dante, in a passage which shows that intense realising power which in the medieval imagination oddly co-exists with its feebleness in matters of scale. In Inferno, XXXIV, the two travellers find the shaggy and gigantic Lucifer at the absolute centre of the Earth, embedded up to his waist in ice. The only way they can continue their journey is by climbing down his sides—there is plenty of hair to hold on by—and squeezing through the hole in the ice and so coming to his feet. But they find that though it is down to his waist, it is up to his feet. As Virgil tells Dante, they have passed the point towards which all heavy objects move (70–111). It is the first ‘science-fiction effect’ in literature.
The erroneous notion that the medievals were Flat-earthers was common enough till recently. It might have two sources. One is that medieval maps, such as the great thirteenth-century mappemounde in Hereford cathedral, represent the Earth as a circle, which is what men would do if they believed it to be a disc. But what would men do if, knowing it was a globe and wishing to represent it in two dimensions, they had not yet mastered the late and difficult art of projection? Fortunately we need not answer this question. There is no reason to suppose that the mappemounde represents the whole surface of the Earth. The theory of the Four Zones5 taught that the equatorial region was too hot for life. The other hemisphere of the Earth was to us wholly inaccessible. You could write science-fiction about it, but not geography. There could be no question of including it in a map. The mappemounde depicts the hemisphere we live in.
The second reason for the error might be that we find in medieval literature references to the world’s end. Often these are as vague as similar references in our own time. But they may be more precise, as when, in a geographical passage, Gower says
Fro that into the worldes ende
Estward, Asie it is.
(VII, 568–9.)
But the same explanation might cover both this and the Hereford map. The ‘world’ of man, the only world that can ever concern us, may end where our hemisphere ends.
A glance at the Hereford mappemounde suggests that thirteenth-century Englishmen were almost totally ignorant of geography. But they cannot have been anything like so ignorant as the cartographer appears to be. For one thing the British Isles themselves are one of the most ludicrously erroneous parts of his map. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of those who looked at it when it was new, must at least have known that Scotland and England were not separate islands; the blue bonnets had come over the border too often to permit any such illusion. And secondly, medieval man was by no means a static animal. Kings, armies, prelates, diplomats, merchants, and wandering scholars were continually on the move. Thanks to the popularity of pilgrimages even women, and women of the middle class, went far afield; witness the Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe. A practical knowledge of geography must have been pretty widely diffused. But it did not, I suspect, exist in the form of maps or even of map-like visual images. It would be an affair of winds to be waited for, landmarks to be picked up, capes to be doubled, this or that road to be taken at a fork. I doubt whether the maker of the mappemounde would have been at all disquieted to learn that many an illiterate sea-captain knew enough to refute his map in a dozen places. I doubt whether the sea-captain would have attempted to use his superior knowledge for any such purpose. A map of the whole hemisphere on so small a scale could never have been intended to have any practical use. The cartographer wished to make a rich jewel embodying the noble art of cosmography, with the Earthly Paradise marked as an island at the extreme Eastern edge (the East is at the top in this as in other medieval maps) and Jerusalem appropriately in the centre. Sailors themselves may have looked at it with admiration and delight. They were not going to steer by it.
A great deal of medieval geography is, none the less, merely romantic. Mandeville is an extreme example; but soberer authors are also concerned to fix the site of Paradise. The tradition which places it in the remote East seems to go back to a Jewish romance about Alexander, written before 500, and Latinised in the twelfth century as the Iter ad Paradisum.6 This may underlie the mappemounde, and Gower (VII, 570), and also Mandeville who puts it beyond Prester John’s country, be
yond Taprobane (Ceylon), beyond the Dark Country (xxxiii). A later view puts it in Abyssinia; as Richard Eden says ‘in the East side of Afrike beneath the red sea dwelleth the great and mighty Emperour and Christian King Prester John . . . in this province are many exceeding high mountains upon the which is said to be the earthly paradise’.7 Sometimes the rumour of a secret and delectable place on those mountains takes another form. Peter Heylin in his Cosmography (1652) says ‘the hill of Amara is a day’s journey high, on the top whereof are thirty-four palaces in which the younger sons of the Emperour are continually enclosed’. Milton, whose imagination absorbed like a sponge, combined both traditions in his ‘Mount Amara’ ‘where Abassin kings their issue guard . . . by some suppos’d True Paradise’ (P.L. IV, 280 sq.). Amara is used by Johnson for the Happy Valley in Rasselas. If it also suggested, as I suspect it did, Coleridge’s ‘Mount Abora’, this remote mountain has deserved strangely well of English readers.
Side by side with these stories, however, the geographical knowledge of the medievals extended further East than we always remember. The Crusades, mercantile voyages, and pilgrimages—at some periods a highly organised industry—had opened the Levant. Franciscan missionaries had visited the Great Khan in 1246 and in 1254, when the meeting was at Karakorum. Nicolo and Maffeo Polo came to Kublai’s court at Pekin in 1266; their more famous nephew Marco long resided there, returning in 1291. But the foundation of the Ming dynasty in 1368 largely put an end to such intercourse.
Marco Polo’s great Travels (1295) is easily accessible and should be on everyone’s shelves. At one point it has an interesting connection with our literature. Marco describes the Gobi desert as a place so haunted by evil spirits that travellers who lag behind ‘until the caravan is no longer in sight’ will be called to by their names and in some well-known voice. But if they follow the call they will be lost and perish (I, xxxvi). This also passes into Milton and becomes those
airy tongues that syllable men’s names
On Sands and Shores and desert wildernesses.
(Comus, 208–9.)
An interesting attempt has recently been made8 to show that some real knowledge of the Atlantic islands and even of America lies behind the legend of St Brendan. But we need not discuss the case for this theory since, even if such knowledge existed, it has no general influence on the medieval mind. Explorers sailed west to find rich Cathay. If they had known that a huge, uncivilised continent lay between, they would probably not have sailed at all.
B. BEASTS
Compared with medieval Theology, philosophy, astronomy, or architecture, medieval zoology strikes us as childish; such zoology, at least, as they most often put into books. For, as there was a practical geography which had nothing to do with the mappemounde, so there was a practical zoology which had nothing to do with the Bestiaries. The percentage of the population who knew a great deal about certain animals must have been far larger in medieval than in modern England. It could not have been otherwise in a society where everyone who could be was a horseman, hunter, and hawker, and everyone else a trapper, fisher, cowman, shepherd, swineherd, goose-girl, henwife, or beekeeper. A good medievalist (A. J. Carlyle) once said in my hearing, ‘The typical Knight of the Middle Ages was far more interested in pigs than in tournaments’. But all this first-hand knowledge appears very seldom in the texts. When it does—when, for example, the poet of Gawain assumes in his audience a familiarity with the anatomy of the deer (1325 sq.)—the laugh turns not against the Middle Ages but against ourselves. Such passages, however, are rare. The written zoology of their period is mainly a mass of cock-and-bull stories about creatures the authors had never seen, and often about creatures that never existed.
The merit of having invented, or the disgrace of having first believed, these fancies does not belong to the medievals. They are usually handing on what they received from the ancients. Aristotle, indeed, had laid the foundations of a genuinely scientific zoology; if he had been known first and followed exclusively we might have had no Bestiaries. But this was not what happened. From Herodotus down, the classics are full of travellers’ tales about strange beasts and birds; tales too intriguing to be easily rejected. Aelian (second century B.C.) and the elder Pliny are storehouses of such matters. The medieval failure to distinguish between writers of wholly different kinds was also at work. Phaedrus (first century A.D.) was, in intention, merely writing Aesopic fables. But his dragon (IV, xx)—a creature born under evil stars, dis iratis natus, and doomed to guard against others the treasure it cannot use itself—would seem to be the ancestor of all those dragons whom we think so Germanic when we meet them in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. The image proved so potent an archetype that it engendered belief, and, even when belief faded, men were unwilling to let it go. In two thousand years western humanity has neither got tired of it nor improved it. Beowulf’s dragon and Wagner’s dragon are unmistakably the dragon of Phaedrus. (The Chinese dragon, I understand, is different.)
Many conductors, no doubt, not all of them now discoverable, helped to transmit such lore to the Middle Ages. Isidore is one of the most easily accessible. In him, moreover, we can see actually at work the process by which the pseudo-zoology grew up. His sections on the Horse are particularly instructive.
‘Horses can scent battle; they are incited to war by the sound of the trumpet’ (XII, i, 43). A highly lyrical passage from Job (xxxix. 19–25) is here being turned into a proposition in natural history. But we may not be quite out of touch with observation. Experienced cavalry chargers, especially stallions, probably do behave in some such way. We reach a further stage when Isidore tells us that the adder (aspis), to protect herself against snake-charmers, lies down and presses one ear to the ground and curls her tail round to stop up the other (XII, iv, 12)—patently a prosaic conversion into pseudo-science of the metaphor about the adder who ‘stoppeth her ear’ in Ps. lviii. 4–5.
‘Horses shed tears on the death of their masters’ (XII, i, 43). I take it the ultimate source is Iliad, XVII, 426 sq., filtered to Isidore through Aeneid, XI, 90.
‘Hence’ (i.e. from this human trait in horses) ‘in Centaurs the nature of horse and man is mixed’ (ibid.). Here we have a timid attempt at rationalisation.
Then, in XII, i, 44–60, we plunge into matter of a very different sort. This long passage is all about the marks of a good horse, both in build and colour, and about breeds and breeding, and the like. This sounds to me as if some of it were really learned in the stable, as if grooms and dealers here replaced the literary auctores.
When auctores come into play, Isidore makes no kind of differentiation between them. The Bible, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Martial, Pliny, Juvenal, and Lucan (the latter chiefly on snakes) all have for him exactly the same sort of authority. Yet his credulity has limits. He denies that weasels conceive by the mouth and bear by the ear (XII, iii, 3), and rejects the many-headed hydra as fabulosus (ibid. iv, 23).
One of the most remarkable things about Isidore is that he draws no morals from his beasts and gives them no allegorical interpretations. He says the Pelican revives its young by its own blood (XII, vii, 26) but draws no such parallel between this and the life-giving death of Christ as was later to produced the tremendous Pie Pelicane. He tells us, from unnamed ‘writers on the nature of animals’ (XII, ii, 13) that the unicorn is a beast too strong for any hunter to take; but if you set a virgin before him he loses all his ferocity, lays down his head in her lap, and sleeps. Then we can kill him. It is hard to believe that any Christian can think for long about this exquisite myth without seeing in it an allegory of the Incarnation and Crucifixion. Yet Isidore makes no such suggestion.
The sort of interpretation which Isidore omits became the chief interest of pseudo-zoologists in the Middle Ages. The best remembered specimen is the author whom Chaucer calls Physiologus in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (B 4459); really Theobald who was Abbot of Monte Cassino from 1022 to 1035 and wrote Physiologus de Naturis XII Animalium. But he was not the first, and certainly n
ot the best, of his kind. The animal poems in the Exeter Book are older. The Phoenix in its earlier parts is paraphrased from Lactantius; the moralitas which the Anglo-Saxon poet added to this is thought to be based on St Ambrose and Bede; the Panther and Whale, on an older Physiologus in Latin.9 As literature they are very much better than Theobald’s work. Thus both the Anglo-Saxon and Theobald make the whale a type of the Devil. Sailors, says Theobald, mistake him for a promontory, land on him, and light a fire. Excusably, he dives and they are drowned. In the Anglo-Saxon they mistake him, more plausibly, for an island and he dives, not because he can feel the fire but through malice. The relief of the storm-tossed men on landing is vividly imagined: ‘when the brute, skilled in ruses, perceives that the voyagers are fully settled and have pitched their tent, glad of fair weather, then of a sudden at all adventure down he goes into the salt flood’ (19–27).
It is rather surprising to find the Siren, wrongly identified with the Mermaid, among Theobald’s beasts. This way of classifying creatures that might otherwise claim to be Longaevi was not, I think, common in the Middle Ages. I have found it much later in Athanasius Kircher, who holds that such quasi- or semi-human forms are merely brutes (rationis expertia) whose resemblance to man is no more significant than that of the Mandrake. ‘Or’, he adds in happy ignorance of later biology, ‘that of the monkey.’10
It is even odder that Theobald should ignore the two creatures which we should have supposed the most fitted for his purpose: the Pelican and the Phoenix. But it is of a piece with the whole quality of his work. Either he had no imagination or an imagination whose wavelength evades us. I cannot face the weariness of going through his items one by one.11 Whatever he has to say is said better in the vernacular Bestiaries.