I just had possibly the most important realization of my entire medievalist career.
Why did I never notice before today that Arnim Zola is a Blemmyae?
Check it out:
One of them is a former-Nazi biochemist and the occasional foe of Captain America. The other is a representative of a fictional race of headless monsters thought in the Middle Ages to cluster at the edges of the world (and possibly Sudan). One of these images comes from a comic book, the other is [similar to the one which hails] from Cotton Vitellius A.XV,* the famed Beowulf manuscript. And yet I find it virtually impossible to say which is which!!
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*Yeah, I jumped the gun on the ID there. It’s easy to forget that all the art in Cotton Vitellius looks like it was drawn by someone who had their eyes closed. My bad. That one looks like this:
