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Episode 108: Debris (ad-free)
🕑 Added 2019-02-18 10:46:00 +0000 UTCOur oceans are some of the most remote regions on the planet. Because of that, people have filled that darkness and space with stories that reflect our common fears and deepest suspicious. Unfortunately, the pages of history offer less reason than we might hope for, leaving us to wonder exactly what might be out there, lurking beneath the waves.
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Further Reading
- Laurence Marcellus Larsoxx (Ed.) The King's Mirror: Speculum Regalae - Konungs Skuggsjá (Twayne Publishers and the American Scandinavian Foundation, 1917), pp. 125-126.
- Gary J. Galbreath, “The 1848 ‘Enormous Serpent’ of the Daedalus Identified,” Skeptical Inquirer Volume 39.5 (September/October 2015).
- Henry Lee, Sea Monsters Unmasked (Clowes, 1883).
- Juliette Wood, Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore: From Medieval Times to the Present Day (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), pp. 86-89.
- Sir Arthur Henry Rostron, Home from the Sea (Macmillan, 1931).
- “Arthur Henry Rostron,” Encyclopedia Titanica, 2018.
- “Rostron’s Monster,” Encyclopedia Titanica, 2018.
Comments
Aaron Mahnke
Thanks for this! Yes, we always find more than we can fit into the episode's narrative flow and focus, but I love learning from listeners!
Tallulah Innes
This probably came up in the research phase but also I wanted to mention Jasconius out of love, he's another island-like fish that appears in the Nauigatio Sancti Brendani (as well as the vernacular Irish version of the story I think?), and they end up returning to him every Easter to take communion, so he's almost a friendly figure in the story. I think there's another Irish-Latin example in Adamnan's Life of St. Columba where Columba has to cross Loch Ness and finds a bunch of Picts (if I remember rightly) burying a man who was killed by a sea monster. Columba then sends one of his own men swimming across the loch, and when the monster rises up to eat him, Columba repels him by invoking Jesus. I thought it was interesting that in the latter narrative the sea monster is very much a creature of the devil, but almost all the sea monsters reported in more recent times seem pretty docile. (Very sorry about the info dump, I happen to have recently written a dissertation on sea monsters in medieval literature and got slightly over-excited).
