The Wonders of Nature: Imaginary and Imagined Animals in the Fictional Universe of the First Crusade

The crusades exposed Western crusaders to a strange and unfamiliar natural world; the sense of the unfamiliar and the fantastic plays out in the depiction of animals in the accounts of the First Crusade. The Latin chronicles depicting the Crusade contain some isolated instances of striking anecdotes about animals, for example, an attack on Godfrey by a bear. However, it is in the poetic texts about the Crusade that we find a plethora of fanciful descriptions of animals as well as natural prodigies showing links with the Roman d’Alexandre and going back ultimately to Isidore of Seville and Pliny. The chapter explores the ways in which these contribute to the construction of the fictional universe of the Crusade. At the most basic level these animals, real or fantastic, are linked to the descriptions of Saracen exoticism in which the texts abound: they become a marker of the fantastic and of otherness. They also play a metaphorical role, and a more symbolic role which is taken to its logical extreme in the Chanson des Chétifs at the heart of the central Crusade trilogy. Here the entirely fantastic plot is driven almost entirely by equally fantastic animals spanning a range of fantasy zoological types: white stags representing saints, wild animals gifted with semi-human intelligence, and a combat with a dragon (and in some variants the dragon’s mother) which is arguably the symbolic heart of the text. The whole of Nature thus becomes part of the divine plan which leads to the taking of Jerusalem and by implication the need to retake it after the defeat at Hattin. The liminality between animal and human provides a way of exploring a central theme of these texts: how far did God’s salvation extend? The portrayal of animals thus serves as a lens through which to examine the early and increasingly pronounced move towards the fictionalisation of the events of the Crusade.