Quote:
Originally posted by Variol (Farseer) Elmwood:
Where'd you get that crazy picture from?
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For shame! Someone here really needs to brush up on his 12th/13th century history.
But basically, it's an illustration (or actually a woodcut) that accompanied a 1481 reprint of "The Travels of Jan van Mandeville", depicting the "eye-witness reports" of European travellers who went to Asia and Africa and returned with all kinds of crazy stories of monsters they claimed to have seen; some of them the result of simply not being able to comprehend what they saw with their 12th century mindset (they likened Asians to dog-faced people, for instance), some of them based on rumours, wide imaginations, or just a bad case of trying to look more interesting than they were. Others simply made up entire travel-stories from beginning to end, probably because the gullible medieval mindset was not capable of telling the difference between fact and fiction in all this; especially considering the fact they would never go over to Africa or Asia themselves to check on these stories anyway.
I'd say it's a perfect example of the gullible nature of man, and how the unknown has always been scary, fascinating, magical, and/or potentially dangerous and the Promised Land at the same time - which didn't only result in things like xenophobia and religion, but to (sometimes retrospectively) hilarious mass-hysteria like the above, countless UFO reportings/abduction mumbo jumbo, or even petty soccer mom outrages in recent decades over microwaves and rock & roll music.
Still a pity I had to explain it, though. Basically, it was a more subtle way of saying "Yarr, there be monsters in Europe", which was my somewhat mocking response to your silly "it's-so-far-from-my-home-it-just-has-to-be-true" assertion that organ stealing is somehow a well known practice in Europe. Like Bungleau said, it's an urban legend.
[ 01-04-2005, 07:52 AM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]