I Think Venus Flytraps Should Be Intelligent And Ambulatory. I Think They Should Get Into The Cupboards.

I think venus flytraps should be intelligent and ambulatory. I think they should get into the cupboards. I think they should purr when you pet them.

I stole this from someone who definitely stole it from someone else so I don’t know the source but it seriously cracked me up.

Deep Sea Animal Paperclips, by Colorata.

The lustrous Hratgrog

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge, from @maniculum

A bit of a big experiment this week; painted with a brush pen using Derwent inktense paint, with no underlying sketch for reference, because I wanted to challenge myself and try something different! The white markings on the veins of the wings are Vallejo model colour white paint, since I don't have a white in my Derwent paint set.

Thought process under the cut…

"[The following are largely disconnected sentences plucked out of a multi-page sermon making this animal into a complicated spiritual metaphor.]

It is my intention to paint a picture of the Hratgrog, whose wings are sheathed in silver and whose tail has the pale colour of gold.

The Hratgrog, the subject of this account, is said to have red feet.

The surface of the wings is suffused with the colour of sapphire, because the soul of a contemplative man takes on the appearance of heaven. But the sapphire colour of the wings is marked by traces of shining white, as the white of snow is tinged with sapphire. The mixture of snow-white and sapphire in the wings signifies purity of the flesh and the love of contemplation.

The Hratgrog, therefore, has saffron-coloured eyes.

The rest of the Hratgrog’s body matches the colour of a wild sea.

The first characteristic of the Hratgrog is that instead of song it brings forth a lament. The second, is that it lacks bile; the third, it likes to kiss; the fourth, it flies in groups; the fifth, it does not live by theft; the sixth, it gathers better-quality grain; the seventh, it does not feed on corpses; the eighth, it nests in holes in rocks; the ninth, it rests on flowing water so that if it catches sight of the shadow of a hawk, it can more swiftly avoid its approach; the tenth, it rears twin young."

I was at a bit of a loss as to where to start with this one, we know it has wings, feet, eyes, and it rests on water. The rest is all notes about the colours, so we don't really have any hints about what kind of creature this is, even…

My default for 'beast with wings' is to assume it's a bird, but I kept coming back to the wings being 'sheathed in silver', particularly given we are later told that the wings are actually blue and white… This led me to assume that it has to be an insect with a silver elytra (wing cases); while some true bugs have a coloured, harder section to their forewings, the only two types of insect to possess elytra are beetles and earwigs, and since beetles are much more likely to actually fly, a beetle it is!

Wings are the colour of sapphire (blue), with black veins highlighted in white. As an aside, I learned a lot about how beetle wings work and fold away!

It has long, thin legs with red feet, the better for resting on the surface of water like a pond skater, as well as the red eyes and yellow/golden tail mentioned in the description. Given it eats grain (I assume that since it is so holy, people leave out food for it, since it doesn't steal its food), I made it a weevil (like the grain weevil, which probably does steal its food), partially because the idea of them rubbing their snouts together as if kissing is super cute!

today i overheard a girl say "no, f*ck that. i will be lovely to everyone. maybe some people will remember they have a heart."

So, what you're telling me here, is 'basilisk' is the latin term for Short King, right...? ;)

This was another interesting one... As you note, when I think of Basilisks, I always think of something much closer to this;

...which always reads very scorpion-like to me (the multip legs, beak that could easily be translated as claws, and long tail), though minus the legs I can also see it being a reference to a cobra.

It's also amusing to me that in Pliny's account, the weasel/hreksong kills the basilisk due to its own smell...

This also feels doubly relevant to me after finding out about 'rooster's eggs' having listened to the @maniculum podcast episode about the Tournament of Tottenham (again, more relevant for the cockatrice, but as you say, these two beasts seem hopelessly entangled...)

Bestiaryposting Results: Gaersnae

This one seems to be flying under the radar, identification-wise, much more than I expected, which is a pleasant surprise. I don't have anything else to add at the beginning of this post. The entry people are working from is here:

And if you don't know what this "bestiaryposting" business is, you can find an explanation and all previous posts at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting.

Now, art in roughly chronological order:

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has made the entirely logical decision that the "king of crawling things" should be whichever creature has the most legs, and drawn us a millipede large enough to fight a weasel. I think this is a good and sensible direction, and that's a quality depiction of a millipede/weasel fight right there.

@sweetlyfez (link to post here) has gone in a more rodent-y direction, with the interesting detail that, as a result of living in caves, its legs are gradually becoming vestigial. I think this is also quite clever, and the rat is pretty cute.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) decided that the "king of crawling things" should have no legs, as maximum crawling happens when one is flat on one's belly. Hence our crowned snake -- complete with a bird going down in flames near the top of the drawing, and a weasel/Hreksong invading the burrows near the bottom. I think the "crown" works really well, and it's always nice to see a callback to previous beasts. As usual, CheapSweets has provided an interesting and informative explanation of their design in the linked post -- I particularly liked the phrase "pelvic spur for extra rizz".

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) is running with the idea of a creature that kills with its scent (and has white stripes), so we have this amazing picture of a skunk zapping an owl out of the sky. The medieval skunk is excellent -- I think if they had skunks in medieval Europe, that's probably how they would have drawn them -- and the scribbly owl is just delightful. Check the linked post for additional observations and a link to a short but informative source about medieval owls.

@pomrania (link to post here) also has some skunk inspiration going on here, though their version has some extra legs and a kind of boar-like face. A very informative series of drawings about how this thing can kill you -- I particularly like the one with the little scroll reading "deadly!!"

@strixcattus (link to post here) has contributed an invertebrate, which I think makes this one of the only entries that's gotten more than one of those. And that's a solid drawing of an arthropod -- I also like the lettering at the bottom right there. As usual, I implore you to read the write-up in the linked post, where the animal is re-imagined from the perspective of a modern naturalist.

Okay, Aberdeen Bestiary:

So this is actually a case of the artist's preconceptions making them mess it up a bit. You may notice that it does not fit the description. It also sticks out a bit in the context of the bestiary, because it's in the "snake" section of the manuscript.

What's happened here is that this is the entry for the basilisk, but the artist has drawn a cockatrice. This is not actually unusual, as the two mythical beasts are hopelessly entangled in the tradition; I looked into it a bit, and it seems like there's actually some confusion about where the cockatrice even comes from. Probably the reason the two creatures have similar powers attributed to them is because the cockatrice kind of inherited that aspect from the basilisk.

(See, e.g., Breiner, Laurence A. "The Career of the Cockatrice." Isis, vol. 70, no. 1, 1979, pp. 30–47.)

Anyway, the basilisk is so called because it is the king of snakes -- basileus is Greek for "king", and -iskos is a diminutive. Little king.

(The translation provided by the University of Aberdeen, "king of crawling things," is unusual -- the Latin reads "rex serpentium". It's possible this translation choice is because of the flexibility of the term "serpent".)

This is a creature originally described by classical authors and then passed along through medieval European sources. It has white stripes, often some sort of "crown" on its head, is venomous, and is sometimes said to distinguish itself from other snakes by holding the front part of its body regally upright... yeah, it's obviously a cobra that's been telephoned and exaggerated into being ludicrously deadly. Just swap out "weasel" for "mongoose" -- I think that's pretty clearly a case of some author who distantly predated scientific taxonomy just going, "looks like a weasel to me".

Also, this entry ends with:

The creature called sibilus is the same as the regulus, or basilisk; for it kills with its hiss before it bites or burns.

I am not aware of any creature called sibilus.