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by giraffe_lady
784 days ago
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I went down a related rabbit hole recently after realizing based on a passage in don quixote that all of the characters (and the reader!) were assumed to be familiar with the size and general appearance of an ostrich. DQ was written in like 1600 but based on chivalric romances from 200-400 years earlier, where it turns out ostriches also come up from time to time, even in heraldry of some characters. Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures including asia minor and northern africa where ostriches were present. And these seafaring cultural and trade spheres also extended into nothern europe and the british isles. So ultimately I don't think they were going off the bible for it. It's no more unusual than someone from that area being aware of lions or crocodiles and their general appearance. It would probably be very unusual to have seen one, but they would appear in puppet shows and travelers tales for sure. Literate people may have seen them in manuscript illuminations as well. |
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There were people in England in Anglo-Saxon times. who had been as far away as Alexandria, or Constantinople.
Icelandic sagas in the late 1000s, wrote about William the Conqueror in England, and noted that many of the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Byzantium. So, even in Iceland they knew about Constantinople, and probably ostriches too, and that these were real things and places, which you might travel and see, even if they were basically at the other end of the known world. At the other end of the world, Byzantine records mention Anglo-Saxon warriors being recruited at that time.
People got around even back then.