The Book of Fabulous Beasts by Joseph Nigg
February 14th 2007 08:15
I was suffering from a huge writer's block last week and also a huge reader's block. Couldn't make myself read anything, much less write anything. Since, it's been almost a week since I wrote anything, I made myself get up and searched the local library for something interesting. I stumbled on Joseph Nigg's Fablous Beasts: A Treasury of Writings From Ancients to the Present.
Nigg's book is not just any bestiary which catelogues mythical beasts and their fantastic features. Such bestiaries are a legion and are to be found even on internet. This book is a compendium of the ancient sources themselves. As it quotes the most relevant authors whose works have had a hand in the the life of the fantastic creatures, from Homer to Carl Jung, you can track the vicissitudes in the fortunes of these beasts and the men who believed or refuse to believe in them.
Mr.Nigg's book is divided into four sections: Ancient Creatures, Beasts of God, Strange and Dubious Creatures and Recurring Images.
In Ancient Creatures, Nigg provides the excerpts from classical authors from Greece and Rome who discussed these fantastic beasts. The Arabian Phoenix and the cinnamon bird, the Indian manticore, griffin and unicorn and other beasts from Ethiopia, Scythia and Egypt are the ones which seem to have fascinated the ancients the most. The ancients were also concerned about Armaspes, a race of one-eyed humans who were supposed to live in Scythia just below the Hyperboreans and somehow I feel that Rowling's nifflers are based on giant gold-digging ants described here.
These fabulous creatures lost their vitality once the classical world ended but were soon revived under the Church, where they now served the added purpose of edification of the doctrine. The second section probes the extensive use made by fabulous beasts by the Church. The phoenix, the unicorn and the griffin still hold the pride of the place.
The third section continues the voyage through the Renaissance times. Their use was disrupted in seventeenth century when people declared they were fictitious but they were back in vogue in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not the least in speculative fiction.
Nigg introduces these excerpts with competent prefacing. By the end of the book, you are actually taken through thousands of years, man spent in search of the elusive animals which plagued his consciousness by straying onto the periphery but never to the front.
I knew most of these animals and stories told here but the book was still a great discovery for me. I had read Herodotus and Ctesias before but it was great reading obscure authors like Aelian and Solinus.
All in all a great anthology. A book that will rouse you out of any slumbe by invokinng your sense of wonder and merriment.
Nigg's book is not just any bestiary which catelogues mythical beasts and their fantastic features. Such bestiaries are a legion and are to be found even on internet. This book is a compendium of the ancient sources themselves. As it quotes the most relevant authors whose works have had a hand in the the life of the fantastic creatures, from Homer to Carl Jung, you can track the vicissitudes in the fortunes of these beasts and the men who believed or refuse to believe in them.
Mr.Nigg's book is divided into four sections: Ancient Creatures, Beasts of God, Strange and Dubious Creatures and Recurring Images.
In Ancient Creatures, Nigg provides the excerpts from classical authors from Greece and Rome who discussed these fantastic beasts. The Arabian Phoenix and the cinnamon bird, the Indian manticore, griffin and unicorn and other beasts from Ethiopia, Scythia and Egypt are the ones which seem to have fascinated the ancients the most. The ancients were also concerned about Armaspes, a race of one-eyed humans who were supposed to live in Scythia just below the Hyperboreans and somehow I feel that Rowling's nifflers are based on giant gold-digging ants described here.
These fabulous creatures lost their vitality once the classical world ended but were soon revived under the Church, where they now served the added purpose of edification of the doctrine. The second section probes the extensive use made by fabulous beasts by the Church. The phoenix, the unicorn and the griffin still hold the pride of the place.
The third section continues the voyage through the Renaissance times. Their use was disrupted in seventeenth century when people declared they were fictitious but they were back in vogue in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not the least in speculative fiction.
Nigg introduces these excerpts with competent prefacing. By the end of the book, you are actually taken through thousands of years, man spent in search of the elusive animals which plagued his consciousness by straying onto the periphery but never to the front.
I knew most of these animals and stories told here but the book was still a great discovery for me. I had read Herodotus and Ctesias before but it was great reading obscure authors like Aelian and Solinus.
All in all a great anthology. A book that will rouse you out of any slumbe by invokinng your sense of wonder and merriment.
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