Season 5 Episode 4: Water Dwellers - Whales and Dolphins in Medieval Poetry and Bestiaries

Episode 4 is ‘Water Dwellers’. For this season we are diving into the medieval bestiaries to discover the strange and familiar creatures that lie within its pages. For this episode, I’m focusing on the whale and taking a brief look at its cousin the dolphin and an even briefer look at fish. As always I am using the MS Bodley 764 Bestiary, a 13th century manuscript, translated by Richard Barber as my main reference.

There are some dark folkloric characters explored across the seasons in this podcast and so, as always, I would recommend that you should listen through first before listening with younger members of your household.

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References:

Barber, Richard (1993) Bestiary MS Bodley 764, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

The Old English Physiologus - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14529/14529-h/14529-h.htm

The Old English Poetry Project - https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-panther/

Videen, Hana (2021) The Deor Hord: An Old English Bestiary, Profile Books

Music

Midnight Tale by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Medieval Knieval, by Nutmeg, via Free Music Archive, online.

Sound Effects via www.orangefreesounds.com

Endangered Animals Listed In This Episode:

Blue Whale, Gray Whale, North Atlantic Right Whale, North Pacific Right Whale, Fin Whale, Sei Whale, Beluga Whale, Vaquita, Dugong, Hector’s Dolphin, Yangtze Finless Porpoise, Ganges River Dolphin, Indus River Dolphin, Irawaddy Dolphin, Atlantic Humpback Dolphin, Franciscana, Chilean Dolphin, South Asian River Dolphin, Indian Ocean Humpback Dolphin, Indo-Pacific Humpback Dolphin.

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