As a part of my April Fool’s Day post, I introduced the non-medievalist blogosphere to St. Rimbert, later the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, and his routine expedition to convert the Scandinavians that sparked a theological question: are dog-headed men able of receiving salvation?* Because I’m an inattentive bloggist, I didn’t discover until today that another blogger, Aunt B. of Tiny Cat Pants, had been intrigued enough to speculate about the origin and nature of said dog-headed dudes. Sorry to bubble-burst, but these aren’t berserkers.

Jennifer Lynn Jordan of Per Omnia Saecula has already covered the subject,** but you wouldn’t know that, unless you also knew that the Latin word that I’ve been translating as “dog-headed men” is cynocephali (cyno –> canine, cephalus –> head, like in an electro-encephalogram or “head scanny thing”). For a more scholarly take with a full dog-headed bibliography, head to In the Middle for a post by Karl Steel. So, what more can I add?

Not much. Karl Steel even has another post on this very subject,*** Ratramnus’s Epistola de Cynocephalis, or “Letter about them there Dog-Headed Guys,” the response to our intrepid missionary’s question that I’ve been talking about. In short, according to Ratramnus, the Cynocephali do deserve salvation, because, even though they cannot talk, they 1) wear clothes (and thus feel shame), 2) domesticate animals, 3) grow crops, and 4) live together in accordance with law.

Nonetheless, this still leaves the question of just who or what Rimbert encountered that caused him to think he’d met people with dog’s heads. The best answer I’ve found is, sadly, that regardless of how Ratramnus’s letter makes it seem, Rimbert was probably writing his letter in anticipation of meeting dog-headed men, rather than from actual experience.

Overzealous missionaries 1, Cryptozoologists 0.

Why did Rimbert think he was going to encounter cynocephali? According to Rimbert-scholar James Palmer, the men of Rimbert’s age considered Scandinavia to be, literally, the edge of the Earth; it marked the end of the known world. Consequently, once the Scandinavians were converted, Christianity would finally cover the world entire, and undoubtedly, the end times would soon follow, as promised in the Bible.***** And, as everyone with access to a good medieval mappa mundi knew, the edges of the earth were where the various nonhuman tribes crowded and thronged. Rimbert, in effect, was dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s by being prepared for anything he might find at world’s end. I can’t blame him. I’d hate to have to explain to the rest of the world that the apocalypse had been delayed because I forgot to preach to the dog-headed men over the next hill.

Here’s a closeup of the edge of the Hereford Map (a 13th century mappa mundi that happens to be very pretty), shamelessly stolen borrowed in full accordance of the principles of fair use, from of of Special Agent Steel’s posts:

(These much later dog-men probably do not deserve salvation, since they are naked and don’t seem ashamed at all.)

—

*I’ve corrected a few errors in the original post. Rimbert’s letter did not go to the pope, as I had said, but rather to Ratramnus of Corbie. The original letter is lost, but Ratramnus’s reply is recorded (and discussed above). For those of you who want more context (and read Latin and have a copy of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica handy, see Epistolae variorum, no. 12, MGH Epp., vi. 155–7.
**I don’t want JLJ to think that I’m horning in on her territory, so let me send some readers her way. Her blog runs two recurring features: Weird Medieval Animal Monday, and Weird Medieval Tribe Tuesday. Go, read of the barnacle goose, the sea-pig, the big-ear people, and more!
***Karl Steel is a secret agent who poses (unsuccessfully) as a medievalist. Nice try, Mr. “Steel.” Say hello to Rex Dart and Max Power next time you’re hanging out at the old double-o-water cooler.****
****An earlier version of this post attributed the dog-headed-post linked above to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who is nonetheless the go-to medievalist for weird monsters and another blogger at the same site. Maybe if In the Middle would put the names of the authors of posts up at the top of the blog by the title where bylines belong, I wouldn’t make these mistakes. (Man, blogging was easier back when only my dad read this thing.)
*****Matthew 24:14, “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”

File this under W for “Wow, celebrities are nuts.” In a recent Letterman appearance, Demi Moore revealed she’s “getting medieval” by attaching leeches to her skin–apparently, in order to fight off the effects of aging. And here, I thought she had a Dorian Gray picture buried in the closet behind Ashton’s old trucker hats.

I found out about Demi’s creative anachronism from the description here, at Austrailia’s The Daily. According to their transcript, Moore had this to say on Dave:

I was in Austria doing a cleanse and part of the treatment was leech therapy.

These aren’t just swamp leeches though – we are talking about highly trained medical leeches. These are not some low level scavengers – we’re talking high level blood suckers.

I have no charitable interpretation of what she means by “high level bloodsuckers.”

—

UPDATE: I learned recently that O’Reilly scooped me on this one by a week. Here are his thoughts, from his March 25th broadcast:

O’REILLY: On the pinhead front, actress Demi Moore is into health and healing.

(VIDEO CLIP PLAYS)

O’REILLY: High-class leaches. Well, for taking us back to Medieval times, Ms. Moore is a pinhead. Do not try that at home.

It’s April Fool’s Day, and that means I’m supposed to come up with some outlandishly hilarious story about the Middle Ages and try to pass it off as real. But since everyone knows that that’s what happens today, any post dated April 1st is almost guaranteed to be false, possibly spawning inadvertent liar’s paradoxes all across the time-space continuum of the blagosphere. Just to be safe, I’d like to start a new tradition for April Fool’s Day, in honor of Jonathan Frakes–you know, that guy who played Lt. Cmdr. Belly on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Ten or so years ago, Frakes hosted a show on Fox called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, which was so successful that it spun off a short-lived* series, Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction? Each installment featured a handful of unlikely stories dramatized by actors and charged the audience with deciding which of the stories were fact and which were fiction.

So allow me to introduce Beyond Belief: Middle Ages Edition: Fact or Fiction? (Now with 100% more colons!). Below, I offer you five tales of the Middle Ages. Some of these are true, others are not. Some of them are factual, and others not factual; some bear the mark of truth, and still others of falsity. Some, you could file under “I,” and the others under “I” as well, providing your first file was labelled “Indubitable” and the second “Inaccurate.” Read on, dear reader, read on, if you dare… [cue spooky music and maybe a crow cawing or something]:

Case 1: The Unlikely Insemination — In the 9th century, Lothar II of Lotharingia wished to divorce his wife, Theutberga. Chief among his reasons was that Theutberga had been unfaithful, and not just unfaithful, but incestuously unfaithful, with her own brother, Hubert. As if this was not enough, the couple had compounded their crime by engaging solely in anal intercourse. Still more egregious, their sodomy produced a child, which Theutberga caused to be aborted in order to avoid their affair becoming known.

Case 2: The Knight with “Gender Issues” — In order to prove his love to his foxy lady friend, Sir Ulrich von Liechtenstein, the famous 13th-century knight errant, traveled around Europe in drag, complete with a blond wig, claiming to be Venus, challenging all comers to joust. Knights who he beat were sent back to his ladylove to do homage, while those who bested him got a golden ring for their trouble. He ended his en femme jousting career with 347 wins and 271 losses.

Case 3: Banking Holinesss — In the Middle Ages, it was always important to have somebody nearby being extra holy, as a sort of holiness overdraft protection for the rest of the village. So, from time to time, churches would find a particularly holy woman and brick her up inside the walls of the church, in a small vault. These women had to be warned about becoming gossips and cautioned not to let the newfound celebrity that their confinement brought upon them go to their heads.

Case 4: The Importance of Having a Human Head — In the 9th century, the Church met with a strange problem while trying to arrange the conversion of the Scandinavians. Rimbert, one of the men sent on the mission, wrote back to the pope Ratramanus of Corbie for advice. During his mission, he said, he had encountered some men who had dog heads, and he needed to know if they were a part of his task. Do dog-headed men count as humans or as monsters? Did they have souls that needed saving?

Case 5: The Little Monkey That Could — You’ve heard of the medieval fascination with monkeys at a reputable blog, no? Well, for one medieval noble family, the fascination had a special significance. The Earl of Kildare in the 14th century, John FitzThomas, almost didn’t grow up to be heir. When he was a child, a fire broke out at the family’s castle in Woodstock and by the time the family got to his bedroom, it was nothing but char. When all looked darkest, the family heard a chattering coming from one of the high towers of the castle: there, on the battlements, stood their pet monkey, holding the child in his arms. When Lil’ John grew up, he put the monkey on his family’s heraldic coat of arms to commemorate the favor.

—

*Further research reveals that the show lasted for five years! Thank you, Wikipedia, for this, and for the further revelation that the show is still very popular in Germany, where it runs in nonstop syndication as X-Factor: Das Unfassbare–further proof of the Hasselhoff Relativity Theorem, which is the theory that holds that the popularity of American syndicated television stars grows exponentially as they near the German border.

—

ANSWERS: Turn the blog upside down to read them! (Reverse text courtesy of Flip.)

Never subscribe to The New Yorker.

No one alive has ever managed to read an issue through before the next one arrived, and consequently all New Yorker subscribers have a secret cache 300 old New Yorker‘s stuffed in a closet that they really intend to get around to reading, surely one day, but not today, and oh crap, is that a new New Yorker already? I guess it’s a cache of 301.

Nonetheless, I discovered in the New Yorker today that Jane Austen, at the tender age of 16, wrote a parody of the stuffy old windbag school of history titled, The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st. Since my wife–and every other person I know with two X chromosomes and a DVD player–is addicted to the BBC adaptation of Ms. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, I thought I’d check it out.

Because she starts fairly late, only a few of her portraits fit with this blog’s theme. Here are two:

HENRY THE 4TH

Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin & predecessor Richard the 2nd to resign it to him, & to retire for the rest of his Life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered. It is to be supposed that Henry was married, since he had certainly four sons, but it is not in my power to inform the Reader who was his wife. Be this as it may, he did not live for ever, but falling ill, his son the Prince of Wales came and took away the crown; whereupon the King made a long speech, for which I must refer the Reader to Shakespear’s Plays, & the Prince made a still longer. Things being thus settled between them the King died, & was succeeded by his son Henry who had previously beat Sir William Gascoigne.

HENRY THE 5TH

This Prince after he succeeded to the throne grew quite reformed and amiable, forsaking all his dissipated Companions, & never thrashing Sir William again. During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for. His Majesty then turned his thoughts to France, where he went & fought the famous Battle of Agincourt. He afterwards married the King’s daughter Catherine, a very agreable Woman by Shakespear’s account. Inspite of all this however, he died, and was succeeded by his son Henry.

The rest are available in a 1993 printing with a foreword by A.S. Byatt.

I have to deliver a paper at a conference on Thursday, so naturally today (Tuesday) I am working on it in earnest–and by working in earnest, I mean, of course, procrastinating on my blog. The paper I’m giving is about the 1949 musical version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the one that starred Bing Crosby. The movie was based on an earlier stage musical by Rogers and Hart.

I bring this up, because in my previous post on possible topics of interest to BoingBoing readers, I lamented the lack of hobos in the medieval era. I should have remembered that this very subject is raised in the Rogers and Hart musical, when Arthur and the Connecticut Yankee are traveling incognito, they sing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which segues into this exchange:

ARTHUR

‘TIS A JOLLY SONG IN TRUTH.

MARTIN

I LEARNED IN MY YOUTH
IN QUITE ANOTHER MUNDUS
FROM THE GENUS VAGABUNDUS.

ARTHUR

MEANEST THOU HOBOES?

I have to summarize the plot of this musical in my paper, because my paper is meant to trace the development of the story between these two modern adaptations. Because it is a musical, I keep having to use the phrase “for some reason,” to describe the plot developments in Rogers and Hart, such as:

• During Hank Martin’s bachelor party, we discover that the suit of armor belonging to Sir Lancelot of the Lake is being stored in a broom closet on a Navy ship, for some reason.
• When told that the date is June 21st, 543, the Yankee, for some reason, recognizes the date immediately as the occasion of a total eclipse of the sun.
• When the Yankee awakens from his dream, he finds his friends have married him to Alice in a ceremony that was legally binding for some reason, even though he was unconscious during it.
• Crashing their jeep forces Arthur and Martin to dress like peasants, for some reason.
• When we arrive at Morgan le Fay’s castle, there is a long musical digression called, “The Camelot Samba,” for some reason.

Since there’s no good excuse for me to quote the Camelot Samba in my paper, I’ll indulge myself by quoting it here.

ENSEMBLE

HAST THOU HEARD ABOUT YE DANCE CREATION

4 GIRLS

SAMBA!

ENSEMBLE

THAT KEEPETH GETTING IN KING ARTHUR’S HAIR?

4 GIRLS

PRITHEEE AÏEE!

ENSEMBLE

ALL THE KNIGHTS JOUST TO ITS SYNCOPATION

4 GIRLS

SAMBA!

ENSEMBLE

YE OLD ROUND TABLE’S NOT SO SQUARE

4 GIRLS

‘Tis hep!

MERLIN

HOW I TRIED, BY MAGIC INCANTATION,

4 GIRLS

TO STOP THE DANCE!

MERLIN

TO DISCOURAGE THIS BRAZILIAN THRILL.

4 GIRLS

HE FAILED PERCHANCE.

MERLIN

NOW THE SAMBA SWEEPS ACROSS THE NATION.

Prithee aïee! indeed.

Got Medieval got linked by BoingBoing!* One of my longheld dreams has finally been fulfilled.

Now, how to parlay this sudden exposure into fame and fortune? How can I keep all these new eyeballs from coming, glancing at my post on fanfic, and then scurrying off to the rest of teh intertubes or the blagosphere** never to return? What can I offer them to bring them back?

Let’s see. They’ve already seen the Medieval Safe Sex Flowchart, and there’s nothing medieval I can make out of a used Altoids tin or a NES controller. To make matters worse, among geeks, medieval-style fantasy is slowly losing market share to steampunk, so posting about Tolkien is flat out. And as far as I’m aware, the European Middle Ages’ reserves of hobos, robots, ninjas, and zombies were critically low. That leaves me with only two BoingBoing baits: pirates and monkeys. Since I’ve already done some groundbreaking research on the phenomenon of monkeys and their butt-trumpets (and their love of urinalysis) I think this line of attack is the most promising.

Fortunately, the Middle Ages was obsessed with monkeys. Nothing spices up the margins of your boring old psalter like a picture of a cute monkey doing something really odd, like riding a stork who has a demon’s head for a butt:


As I’ve said before, Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, was a very medieval show. Medieval artists and audiences were quite fond of the old sight gag of having a monkey do something typically human, like roasting chickens…

or riding around like a knight…

or fighting each other while on stilts…

or being disciplined by the head monkey at monkey school…

or serving as disapproving art critics…

Sometimes marginal monkeys got jealous, started resenting their position in the marginalia, and even launched attacks against the simple farm folk in nearby historiated initials:

As with most things medieval, there’s a bit of theology and a bit of etymology behind all this love of monkey business. As I mentioned long, long ago when I blogged about the medieval beaver, the etymology of an animal’s name was thought to capture something essential about its nature. In the case of the beaver (Latin: castor) , this was its ability to hurl its own testicles (castoreum) at wouldbe hunters. Thus, a typical bestiary entry for the monkey*** reads,

Apes are called Simia in Latin [c.f. modern “simian”], because they are thought to be so similar (similius) in reasoning to humans.

Because of its closeness to its human brethren, the ape/monkey becomes something of an important test-case for defining the boundaries of medieval “humanity.” Metaphorically, monkeys are the animals that dance along the border between human and not-human; spatially, they inhabit the borders of manuscripts, where they play at being human.****

The Devil himself is often depicted as an ape, because he is near to man, and because of an even more obscure feature of medieval monkeykind. Here, again from the Aberdeen bestiary:

When a mother ape bears twins, she loves one and despises the other. If it ever happens that she is pursued by hunters, she carries the one she loves before her in her arms and the one she detests on her shoulders. But when she is tired of going upright, she deliberately drops the one she loves and reluctantly carries the one she hates.

This favoritism is evidenced at least as far back to at least Aesop, but medieval theologians never met a beast fable they couldn’t allegorize. Phillipe de Thaon’s bestiary (which I learned about at this other awesome bestiary entry) notes that the ape represents the Devil, because the Devil mocks sinners, carrying them before him to Hell, while the righteous are kept on his back (and presumably, left behind when he shows his true animal nature and drops to all fours).

So, there you go, BoingBoing–a handful of medieval monkeys in thanks for sextupling my bloghits today.

—

*Non-geek blog-reading medievalists (if such a creature exists) may be puzzled. BoingBoing and Slashdot, while catering to different subsets of geekery, are essentially the two sites of record for geek culture on the web. Getting linked by them is like being published by Speculum, Exemplaria, or JMEMS, which I’ve just learned form the holy trinity of medievalist publications. Geeks only have the two.
**See, BoingBoingers, I’m hep to your slang! 23-Skidoo and gadzooks, or something, squares.
***Alert pedants will protest, “Hey, monkeys and apes aren’t the same thing!” To them I say, according to medieval bestiaries, they were. There were thought to be five to seven (depending on the bestiary) major types of apes, of which monkeys were one type, those that had long tails. Strangely enough, satyrs were another type, and sphinxes yet another.
****For more on this, see the opening pages of chapter one of James R. Simpson’s Animal Body, Literary Corpus: The Old French Roman de Renart.

Here’s the official translation of the Latin at the end of SSBB. The localization team that worked for the game take a lot of liberties when translating from Latin to English (with verbs in particular).

For those of you at home, please write this down in your workbook in the space provided.

Congrats to She Who Reads–no relation to The Ghost Who Walks–for getting the literal sense better than the translators. But don’t be too hard on the localization team; they’re translating into English something that was translated into Latin from Japanese. Or, I suppose they could be translating an Japanese ur-version directly into English and forgoing the Latin entirely.

I wonder if a Japanese original accounts for the imperatives that the official translation renders
as first person statements. Anyone out there know enough Japanese to speculate? Is there a special form of the declarative that’s rendered as an imperative in Japanese?

Still, we’ve come a long way since the original days of Nintendo’s NES localization teams’ inadvertent hilariosity.

For extra credit, you may now translate the following Nintendisms into Latin:*

Eyes of skull has a secret. –Old Man, Legend of Zelda
[Update from Vampire Brad Pitt: Oculi calvae arcanum habet.]

Uh oh, the truck have started to move! –Solid Snake, Metal Gear
[Update from She Who Reads: Heu, autocarrum movere inceperunt.]

The vest isn’t 100% against heat. –A duck that runs a store for some reason, Milon’s Secret Castle

The president has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president? — The head of the Secret Service, Bad Dudes

Fight, MegaMan! For Everlasting Peace! — Narrator, Mega Man
[Update from Fort Lesley J. McNair: Pugnate, MagnumHominem! Per pacem semper durando!]

—

*Extra extra credit for translations that preserve the bad grammar of the original.

I just finished the solo campaign in Nintendo’s just-released nostalgia orgy, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and–to my surprise–when the credits roll, the game treats you to a Latin lesson, revealing the Latin text of the game’s main theme along with an English translation. While playing, I had assumed that the incomprehensible operatic lyrics were Japanese.

For the curious:

Audi famam illius. Solus in hostes ruit et patriam servavit.
Audi famam illius. Cucurrit quaeque tetigit destruens.
Audi famam illius. Spes omnibus, mihi quoque. Terror omnibus, mihi quoque.
Ille iuxta me. Socii sunt mihi qui olim viri fortes rivalesque erant.
Saeve certando pugnandoque splendor crescit.

Those of you who are taking Got Medieval for course credit will want to submit your own translation by the end of the week, or points will be deducted from your final grade. I’ll post the official translation eventually.*

—

*And by eventually, I mean when I get tired of smashing brothers. I may be some time.

Memento homo, quod cinis es, et in cinerem reverteris.

Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, died today. Appropriately, his death was announced first to the world in a post on a rinky-dink Internet forum for Troll Lord Games. Those in mourning should probably visit the Slashdot post where fellow grieving geeks are congregating to leave their regards.

Just a couple of days ago, I copped to D&D’s importance to my formative years, and I often wonder what percentage of working medievalists aged 25-45 cut their teeth on D&D’s polyhedral dice. I suspect it’s rather substantial.

In memoriam, here’s a clip from YouTube that medievalists might enjoy. It’s from a D&D documentary, and in it, Mr. Gygax explains the etymology of his name. It’s Swedish, he says, for giant, and his family lore holds that he is descended from Goliath. Truly, he looms like a giant over my teenage years.

If the news has left you in need of cheering up, visit this article detailing some of the more bizarre creatures that Gygax’s D&D inspired.

[UPDATE] Penny Arcade’s tribute deserves a link.