TIL that a bunch of medieval manuscripts featured illustrations of knights fighting giant snails, and no one knows why
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231221-the-mystery-of-the-medieval-fighting-snailsOpen linkView original on sh.itjust.works587
Comments115
Monks did most of the writing and artwork.
Monks main diet was brassicas.
They grew their own food.
Do the math, it's wish fulfillment
Brassica, it is ALWAY brassica.
Always
Mate, when a full monastery is blowing the covers off every night to the sound of foghorns i care little for correct plurality
I read their response not as "The correct plural is brassica", but as "Friggin' everything is a brassica cultivar".
If you didn't know: cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, brussels sprouts, collard greens and cauliflower are all selectively bred cultivars of the same species.
No, not everything is brassica.
But everything that isn't brassica is cucurbita.
Yo mama's so something something biologists something something brassica cultivar.
Yo mama's so widespread they renamed brassica after her
You are correct. Not sure why he felt so attacked.
I think you're really on to something here, if you don't work in history or something, you should run this by a historian or scholar and see what they think
Explains the rabbits as well! You come up with this on your own?!
Monty Python makes so much more sense now
This makes so much sense, is there any evidence? I don't want to spread the rumor as a fun fact unless there's something behind it. Very fun idea!
That’s my guess too. Snail plague there heart to be evidence of it somewhere. Also when did escargot become popular?
The ones with the rabbits are pretty messed up as well!
Ahhh...this explains the rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
That movie is shockingly historically accurate.
That's the kind of thing I doodle in my notepad when I'm bored during a call.
I'm concerned.
I'm aroused.
I'm concerned again.
Stop. I can only get so erect.
Imagine getting beaten with a stick by a rabbit as his friend robs you, while your friend draws it for historical archive.
He's not robbing the guy, he's peeling the skin off his foot(!)
To which he has no ownership of, so he is still robbing him, just not for material objects.
Oh that's much better.
Hmm, any connection to the "lucky rabbit's foot" thing, or is tgat a modern invention ?
Ooh, that's a good point!
Origins apparently go back to 600 BC:
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/12/rabbits-foot-considered-lucky/
“Did you get a good look at the suspects?”
“Not really. But fortunately my manuscript illustrator was there.”
So they fuck the rabbits and fight the snails?
The exact same thing will happen hundreds of years from now with amogus memes and
:.|:;Is there a god damn font character for loss??
Took me a bit to work it out but it's :.|:; with a strike through. Bloody genius haha
Is this loss
Yes, this is loss
Omg, I instantly knew what it meant and assumed the poster said it was loss even though he didn't.
Omg, I instantly knew what it meant and assumed the poster said it was loss even though he didn't. I translate loss references into the word "loss' like it's a fucking hieroglyph. I bet it would be the same with amogus drawings.
...Is loss a Unicode character now??
:.|:;~~:.|:;~~
Cool! I never thought of that!
I saw this years ago and I still think it was primitive office humor. Snails ate delicious plants and there were probably monks waging a war against them. The incredulity of fighting so hard against an enemy so weak was funny.
This seems like a plausible explanation, but I'd maybe expect to see a few giant slugs and caterpillars - these are at least as damaging to crops as snails.
Im betting they got all done up in their armor and went to fight in muddy battlefields, and when they were not fighting the enemy they were dealing with snails crawling inside the armor and being all slimy and disgusting crawling between the knights legs and the armor.
First boss of Shadow of the Erdtree
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Stormlight Archives vibes.
I won't be like the others.
Our DNA never forgets. That's why to this day, every human has an innate and irrepressible fear of snails. It's true.
Well, in France people eat them... It could still be related though...
Most things are actually delicious when cooked well. Alligator? Stingray? Guinea pig? Cow tongue? The heart of nearly any creature? All of them are better than chicken
We eat things not because they're delicious, but because they're convenient and reasonably delicious. Snail used to be a delicacy... They don't eat it in France much anymore because they're not convenient anyone
Like children.
Also a French delicacy
IIRC snail was originally a survival food. I guess over time people kept refining the preparation process and accompaniments until it became a delicacy (indeed, probably because it's very far from being a convenient dish to make).
Source : am french. I ate snails yesterday for Christmas Eve's dinner, actually.
We still do eat them. Well at least I assume some people do as I can't stand it. But you still find frozen snails in pretty much every supermarket around where I live.
Honestly I like snails, they look kinda cute. I get excited whenever I happen to find one
A few hundred years from now, historians are going to be equally confused by the horse-sized duck images ...
And why there are so many pictures of bananas next to things.
"We hypothesize that the bananas of the 21st century were a different type, one that grew in a wider range of climates. We're not certain why this breed seem to have randomly fallen from the trees so often, but perhaps it helps explain all these other drawings of inattentive humans slipping on random banana peels as well. ... "
... Actually the lore behind banana peel gags is more interesting than you think. They were a super cheap snack in Victorian London and the bananas they had were the gros Michel cultivar which had really thick slippery peels and a lack of general cuture of actually throwing garbage in the bin meant that a lot of them rotted on the street so early comedy stage acts started using them as a gag because slipping on them was a common sometimes life threatening hazard.
But because art borrows from art the banana peel gag outlasted the cultural problem that sparked it by over a century.
I had no idea about the Gros Michel peels - that's fascinating!! Thank you for sharing that!
I read once on reddit that a dominos pizza guy claims people still occasionally demand the pizza for free since it took more than 30 minutes to arrive.
A promotion that ran for a few months 33 years ago.
But immortalized in stuff like the Ninja Turtles movie and various other tv shows. Exactly same principle!
Good lord, that really stuck in our culture.
Never forget
There was this thing going around my work where people would caption a nuke explosion with a mention of a certain guy using the microwave again. There was an incident with a break room microwave. Now imagine if that survives and a thousand years passes.
There going to have to sift through so much porn.
Porn will train the next-gen AIs and, since AI cannot tell the difference, in the future 90% (-99%?) of all language will be based on porn, just as (looking back with 20/20 hindsight) the proportion of the current internet would imply must have been true of today's culture.
"Yes spank me harder daddy" will come to mean "I would like a promotion in my place of employment, so that I can take on exciting new challenges in this fast-paced, team environment":-)
Ofc, "help me stepbro, I am stuck" will still mean the same thing as it always has.
::: spoiler spoiler
the joke here is that the change in meaning has already occurred
:::
Future generations are going to be so confused... :-P So exactly as we are now, I guess? :-D
What about the cat pictures? Will they think they're our gods?
Wait, they aren't?
Source: the cat pictures from every single culture in history.
Well Dodo's were big ass duck like birds, though not as near as big as a horse. Weird thing, they haven't been extinct that long.
Shoebills are a little closer in size, and they're still around.
Not friends of the gentle racing snails? How sad...
Ye olde memes.
Imagine future civilization digging out some of today's memes...
Well, do you see any giant snails around? No? Then thank those knights
Sounds like an ecological disaster to me, so no thanks to them.
"Lisa... I'm going to buy your knight"
Honestly, it would be amazing if the answer was that large mollusks actually existed and were poorly documented.
And just like... Disintegrated instead of fossilizing
I'm not an expert by ANY means, but I think there needs to be strict conditions to make fossils. I think most bones just eventually turn to dust
That's true although I would also hypothesize that giant mollusks would likely fall into a biome that has these conditions.
That said, I could see body of a slug not really getting fossilized. The shell probably would be, but maybe not depending on circumstances.
The bodies yes, the shells I imagine were fashioned into exceptional armor locked in ancient vaults.
Because they probably had a great sense of humour, comedy clubs and memes back then too, but hey let's ignore that for just a moment to imagine how hardcore a knight you would have to be to fight off Cthulhu snails
This dude got payed to post this Ai article on christmas eve
Did they also take that challenge with the immortal snail?
Plot twist: its actually the same person making the snail memes today, yet to be caught and looking for new ways to stay one step ahead of the snail
I dare say it shouldn't be very hard to stay one step ahead of a snail.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/immortal-snail
Oh, it's easy to run away from a snail. You get away, and for weeks, even months, you stay vigilant. But one day, when your vigilance fades, you find yourself surrounded
I think we know the real answer.
Humanity was ruled by giant snails and their hyper intelligent queen, and it was only through the bravery of these fine knights were our shackles cast off and the mollusk menace thrown down.
And, in great effort to hide our collective shame, all knowledge about this was intentionally purged, Save for a few manuscripts who managed to be overlooked or were kept in hiding, so hints of humanities true history would be known.
And now we listen to the snails in our ears.
Was this event also when we as a species managed to free ourselves of our Slurm™ addiction?
God, is this what the American education system has come to?
Slurm was made by worms that had a physical appearance akin to slugs.
Neither of which are snails!
learn your history! and biology!
i mean, you joke, but the rest of us are pretty sure that Futurama is the american education system at this point
Can't be. To many smart people and woke liberal agendas like strong women and the existence of brown people.
Hail Mollusca! Slime will prevail!
Oh dear. I read that as ‘fisting’ at first.
I picked the wrong day to give up sniffing glue.
Japan is attacked by sea creatures.
England is besieged by Snailfist and his legion of slime.
"And if you join our ranks today, they never will!"
-Me, while extending my hand out in invitation for YOU READING THIS to join the...
Associated
Society of
Snail
Hunters and
Ancient
Truth
Seekers
...yes, I know. Yes, we're technically the "A.S.S.H.A.T.S."... Yes very funny, okay, have your moment... It's a secret society okay, so it doesn't actually even come up, nobody will know, it's fine.... IT'S FINE.
It's fun to draw. Mine were cowboys fighting snails.
Gardeners... Nuff said
Garden warfare!
I mean, I would guess dragons were a thing because of dinosaur skulls being found a long time ago. There were also giant dinosaur mollusk shells, so maybe this is the equivalent?
Its easy to forget that yeolden times were also capable of satire.
Nuh-uh, according to game of thrones they only scowled at dragons
He links to this great Reynard the fox poem about fighting a snail: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/3050276900
Ever heard of the Voynich manuscript? Imo human expression finds a way, church or not, technology or not.
Is that writing in the pictures old English? I can't make any of it out.
I can only recognize a couple of words, but this (and similar texts) are going to be in Latin.
Looks like Latin to me.
Go fighting flail snails
I hate long articles with lots of theories and the ending is "we don't know".